Jake became aware of the mirror by accident.

  He'd been searching the second floor for anything useful. Books on advanced necromancy. Alchemical supplies. Something, anything that might explain why this body was failing. Why the hunger had returned despite regular feeding on the regenerated thoughtless brain matter.

  The mirror hung in a room near the library. Full-length, ornate frame, probably expensive. Jonas had been vain. It made all kinds of sense that he'd keep a huge mirror around.

  Jake stumbled past it initially, focused on the bookshelves. Then caught his reflection in peripheral vision and stopped.

  Turned.

  Looked.

  Oh.

  The thing in the mirror was a corpse. Not quite dead, but not quite alive either. Skin pulled tight over bones, gray and papery. Cheekbones jutting like knife edges. Eye sockets hollow, dark circles making the eyes look sunken, desperate. Lips cracked and bleeding. Hair lank and lifeless.

  He looked like the zombies in the basement.

  The two that were left from Jonas’s kept experiments. The ones that shambled and moaned and existed in some horrific space between death and animation. Walking meat powered by necromancy instead of life.

  Jake was becoming one of them.

  The realization hit like a physical blow. He'd thought he had it figured out. Thought he'd found a way to live as human again. A real body, real sensations, real intelligence. Everything he'd been craving since waking up as a parasite.

  But the body was dying. Had been dying for days now, maybe longer. Time had gotten strange. And Jake hadn't noticed until it was catastrophic.

  No. No, I can fix this. I can figure this out.

  He turned away from the mirror, couldn't look anymore. Think. What did Jonas know that Jake didn't? The necromancer had kept corpses animated for years. Two of them in the basement right now, sustained somehow beyond death.

  Maybe that was the answer. Study them. Understand the mechanism.

  Jake made his way to the stairs leading down. His legs felt weak but functional. Still time. Still capable of solving this if he could just figure out what he was missing.

  The basement was cold. Always cold. Stone walls weeping moisture, the smell of preservation chemicals and something worse underneath. The examination table was exactly as he'd left them when he'd first arrived with Forge. He had disposed the guy with his guts hanging out at some point, and the woman.

  What was her name? It didn’t matter.

  Two unliving specimens were still standing in the cage. One skeletal. One somewhere in between.

  Jake approached the freshest one.

  How?

  Jake examined ‘it’ with his Life affinity, feeling for the magic that sustained the corpse. There was something there, definitely. Threads of necromantic energy woven through dead tissue, maintaining structure, preventing further decay. But it wasn't Life magic. It was Void over the Life magic. Something inverted.

  Some essence keeping true death at bay. The irony would have been funny if Jake wasn't currently dying himself.

  He checked the other. Same pattern. Necromantic energy replacing cellular function. No heartbeat. No breath. No metabolism. Just preservation through magic.

  Then he saw something else. A tiny thread. It wasn’t visible through the naked eye, but only when perceived with Void. It was connected directly to himself! Well, to Jonas’s self. Not actually his self. But the part that it connected to, the part of Jonas that evidently held sway over the actions of these creatures was blank. Just regenerated tissue from the mulch that Jake had made from it.

  “I guess that’s why you guys aren’t really doing anything, huh?” Jake stated flatly. “This is what happens when you have a blank slate trying to send commands to a blank slate.”

  He could see where he could just sever the connection and he knew that if he did, then the zombies would just be corpses again. But they weren’t really pulling any life from him, that connection had already been established and it worked on its own at this point.

  This wasn't going to help him. Jonas's body was alive, not dead. Different mechanisms entirely. If he could figure out the issue with himself then he will have plenty of time to look further into this zombie thing.

  Jake climbed back upstairs, frustrated. The effort left him winded. The weakness was spreading faster now. How long had he been like this? Days merged together. He'd been studying, practicing magic, consuming tofu-brain. Thought everything was fine until suddenly it wasn't.

  Maybe he could use Life magic directly. Force the body to stabilize through magical intervention.

  Jake focused, drawing on his Life affinity. Pushed it into Jonas's cells, commanding them to function properly, to stop deteriorating. The magic flowed outward and this time it WORKED. The cells responded. Accepted the energy. Stabilized.

  Relief flooded through him. This was the answer. Just maintain Life magic constantly, keep the body running through magical support.

  Except.

  Except it took concentration. Real, sustained effort. Jake had to actively maintain the flow. Guide it. Direct it to the systems that were failing. Heartbeat regulation. Cellular respiration. Nutrient distribution. All the automatic processes that should just HAPPEN but weren't.

  And it was exhausting.

  Not physically. Mentally. Each second of maintaining the magic was like holding a complex thought in his head. Like solving a math problem that never ended. The effort built incrementally, wearing him down.

  But it worked. Jonas's body stabilized. The deterioration slowed. Stopped, even. As long as Jake kept feeding Life magic into it, the body would function.

  Okay. I can do this. Just maintain it until I figure out the actual problem.

  Jake settled against the wall, focusing on the magic. Keeping it steady. Keeping Jonas alive through pure magical will.

  Hours passed. Or maybe minutes. Time was already getting strange.

  The exhaustion wasn't physical. It was cognitive. Like his brain was overheating. Like running too many programs simultaneously and feeling the processor slow down.

  Jake's thoughts began fragmenting. Simple observations becoming harder to hold. Complex reasoning slipping away. The mental effort of maintaining Life magic was consuming his capacity for anything else.

  Need to... need to figure out... what's wrong...

  But he couldn't stop the magic. The moment he did, Jonas's body started failing again. Immediately. The deterioration would resume and accelerate. He'd already tested it. Already confirmed that without magical support, this body was dying.

  So he maintained it. Kept pumping Life magic into failing systems. Kept Jonas alive through sheer will.

  And felt his mind slowly disintegrating under the strain.

  What am I missing? What don't I understand?

  The questions came slower now. Took longer to form. His mental acuity draining away as fast as he could generate it, all his cognitive resources devoted to the endless task of keeping this body functional.

  Every attempt to think clearly cost him. Every moment of problem-solving meant less energy for the Life magic. And less Life magic meant the body failed faster, which meant more panic, which meant less clear thinking.

  A vicious cycle.

  Jake slumped against the wall, sliding down to sit on the floor. The Life magic continued. Had to continue. He couldn't stop it. Couldn't risk Jonas's body dying before he figured this out.

  But figuring it out required thinking. And thinking was becoming impossible.

  His vision blurred slightly. Then cleared. Then blurred again. The magic wavered with his concentration. Jonas's heartbeat stuttered, then steadied as Jake forced focus back.

  Not good. Not good at all.

  He was buying time at the cost of his ability to use that time productively.

  Back in Jonas's bedroom, Jake collapsed onto the bed. The climb up the stairs had taken everything. His legs were shaking. His hands trembled when he tried to grip the bedpost.

  This was worse than he'd thought. Much worse.

  He lay there, staring at the ceiling, trying to think through the problem logically. But his thoughts kept fragmenting, scattering like startled birds.

  Then something else surfaced. A feeling that wasn't quite his.

  Fire needs foundation. Heat builds on heat. Start cold and you get nothing.

  Jake blinked. That wasn't a thought exactly. More like... instinct. Knowledge that felt right without understanding why. Like muscle memory but for magic.

  Not his muscle memory.

  "That's not my thought," Jake said aloud to the empty room.

  Another one came, unbidden: They'd follow. They'd serve. Power draws loyalty. Dead things don't question.

  Jake sat up slowly. That one had weight behind it. Desire. Ambition. A vision of commanding, of ruling, of being IMPORTANT.

  Dread Lord Jake. Master of the unliving. Feared and respected.

  Except... that wasn't his style. Jake had never wanted to rule anything. Power, sure. Advantage, absolutely. But commanding zombie armies? Building a dark empire?

  That was Jonas's dream, not his.

  Wait. That wasn't my thought at all.

  The realization hit cold and certain. These weren't Jake's desires surfacing. These were someone else's. Something else's.

  Jonas.

  But Jonas was gone. Brain consumed. Personality destroyed. Jake had been meticulous about that. Complete destruction to prevent contamination.

  So where were these thoughts coming from?

  Pressure follows density. Don't force the air. Convince it to move.

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

  Useful. That was the answer to his air experiments. The principle he'd been missing.

  Bodies bend best when joints are compromised. Specific fracture points allow for... creative positioning.

  Jake recoiled. "What the fuck?"

  That image. That thought. That INTEREST in how broken bones could make corpses more... useful.

  "Jonas, you sick fuck," Jake muttered.

  But Jonas wasn't here. Wasn't thinking. Wasn't broadcasting his expertise and his perversions into Jake's consciousness.

  Except he clearly was.

  Jake focused inward, trying to identify the source. These weren't memories surfacing. Weren't fragments of Jonas's past playing back. These were active. Present. Ongoing.

  Instincts. Gut feelings. Knowledge encoded somewhere that hadn't been destroyed.

  He could feel them now that he was paying attention. Not specific locations. Just... presence. Neural activity that shouldn't exist. Thoughts that weren't his emerging from somewhere in the body.

  Take the fragments. Consume them. Become complete. Become POWERFUL.

  That felt like Jonas too. The hunger for power. The willingness to do anything for it.

  A harem of unliving servants. Beautiful once. Useful now. Bones strategically broken for flexibility. For...

  "STOP," Jake said sharply. "I don't want to know. I really, really don't want to know."

  But the thoughts kept coming. Not constantly. Just occasionally. Rising up from wherever they lived. Gut instincts about magic mixed with Jonas's darkest impulses. Useful knowledge contaminated by twisted desires.

  Jake didn't understand HOW. Didn't understand WHERE in the body these fragments existed. Just knew they were there. Active. Influencing.

  And he could consume them.

  Could hunt them down. Destroy them. Take their knowledge and make it his own.

  But.

  But that's how it always worked. Consumption meant integration. Every host he'd absorbed became part of him. Their instincts, their nature, their fundamental patterns woven into his consciousness.

  Jonas's fragments would be no different.

  If Jake consumed them, he wouldn't just gain the magical instincts. He'd gain the REST. The ambition. The cruelty. The casual disregard for human dignity. The... creative interest in broken corpses.

  That would become part of Jake. Permanently.

  Could rule this region. Dead army. Living subjects. POWER.

  "That's not what I want," Jake said to the empty room.

  Isn't it? You're a parasite. A consumer. Why not consume everything? Why not TAKE?

  "Because I'm not YOU."

  Not yet.

  "Where the fuck is Forge with that pig?" Jake muttered.

  He needed that pig. Needed to practice extraction without integration. Figure out how to take abilities without taking personality. That was the whole point of the experiment.

  But Forge wasn't here. The pig wasn't here. And Jake was dying.

  He tried to stand but crashed into the bookshelf next to the bed. Books tumbled down around him, heavy volumes hitting the floor with solid thumps. One caught him on the shoulder. Another on his head.

  "Ow. Fuck." He pushed himself up using the shelf. His hands wouldn't grip properly. Kept slipping on the wood.

  More Jonas knowledge surfaced: Muscle control requires adequate glucose. Neural firing patterns degrade without proper substrate.

  "Oh good," Jake muttered. "My inner corpse has opinions."

  He finally got upright, stumbled toward the door. Made it three steps before his vision went strange. Colors too bright, edges too sharp, everything burning with intensity. He blinked and it shifted. Now everything was dim, washed out, gray.

  His perception was failing along with everything else.

  The door seemed much farther away than it should be. Jake walked toward it. Took forever. Or took seconds. Time was doing weird things. Each step felt like it lasted hours. Then suddenly he was at the door and didn't remember the walking part.

  He made it halfway before his legs betrayed him again. Went down hard, caught himself on a table edge. Alchemical equipment rattled. Something glass fell and shattered. The sound was too loud. Impossibly loud. Echoing in his skull like thunder.

  Then quiet. Too quiet. Like his hearing had just stopped working.

  Then normal again. Maybe. Hard to tell.

  Jake pulled himself upright using the table, breathing hard. What had he been trying to do? Get something from the kitchen? But what?

  Except... he'd already been feeding. Constantly. The regenerating tissue inside Jonas's skull was right there. Always available. He'd been consuming it regularly, letting it regenerate, consuming it again. Sustainable forever.

  Jake focused inward, feeling his parasitic form nestled in Jonas's brain cavity. The regenerating tissue was there, fresh and available. He could feed right now.

  So he did.

  Consumed a portion of the bland, flavorless neural matter. Felt it sustain his microscopic biology. Adequate. Functional. Exactly what his parasitic form needed.

  The hunger didn't change.

  That deep, gnawing wrongness. That emptiness that screamed something was missing. It persisted. Unchanged. Unaffected by the feeding.

  What the hell?

  Jake fed again. Took another portion of regenerating tissue. More this time. Enough to fully satisfy his parasitic needs.

  The wrongness intensified.

  That made no sense. He was feeding. His body was getting sustenance. The tissue was regenerating properly, providing infinite food. Everything should be fine.

  But it wasn't fine. The hunger was getting WORSE. And it felt wrong. Felt different from his normal parasitic hunger. This was deeper. Duller. A constant ache that had nothing to do with neural consumption.

  Am I sick? Is the regeneration corrupted somehow?

  Jake examined the tissue carefully through his parasitic senses. It was fine. Perfect, actually. Regenerating at full speed, full quality. No contamination. No degradation. Just pure, sustainable biological matter.

  So why was he still hungry?

  Why did Jonas's body feel like it was screaming for something Jake couldn't provide?

  Another Jonas thought surfaced: Biological systems require varied nutrient input. Singular substrate leads to deficiency cascade regardless of quantity consumed.

  "What does that even mean?" Jake muttered. His voice sounded strange. Distant and hollow.

  He tried to think through it. Varied nutrient input. Different nutrients. Not just neural tissue but... something else?

  But what else was there? He was a parasite. Neural tissue was his food. That's what he ate. That's what sustained him.

  Except the body was dying anyway.

  Jake slumped against the table, confusion and frustration warring with the growing weakness. He was doing everything right. Feeding regularly. Using Life magic to support basic functions. Maintaining the neural connections.

  And Jonas's body kept deteriorating.

  I'm missing something. Something obvious. Something Jonas would have known.

  But Jonas was gone. His knowledge scattered in fragments that Jake couldn't safely consume. And Jake's own understanding wasn't enough.

  Was Jonas diseased? Did he have some kind of plague?

  But Jake was impervious to disease, he could eat a bubonic rat and laugh it off. The hunger pulsed. Relentless. Demanding something Jake didn't know how to provide.

  - - -

  Back in the bedroom again. Jake didn't remember the walk back. Time had skipped. Or he'd lost consciousness while moving. Either was possible at this point.

  He collapsed on the bed. The books he'd knocked down earlier were still scattered across the floor. Evidence of his declining coordination.

  The brazier in the corner was cold. Had been cold for a while now. Jake looked at it, trying to summon the will to practice magic. To do anything productive with the time he had left.

  Jonas's knowledge surfaced again: Temperature differential requires initial heat source. Cannot invert nothing. Void needs substrate.

  "Right," Jake muttered. "Because that's exactly the help I need right now."

  But he focused anyway. Drew on his Fire affinity. The small spark of understanding he'd gained from... somewhere. A salamander maybe. Some host he'd consumed months ago. The memory was fuzzy, distant, belonging to a different version of himself. But all the memories from that time were fuzzy. He would not go back to that. Not ever.

  Heat gathered in the brazier. Not much. Not the roaring flames Jonas could have created. But enough. A small fire springing to life, warming the cold room.

  Jake watched the flames. Felt the heat on his face. One of the few sensations still working properly.

  Then he reached for his Void affinity. The filter. The overlay that inverted concepts.

  Jonas: Apply Void evenly. Uneven distribution causes thermal fracture.

  Jake ignored the advice. Laid Void over the Fire his own way.

  The flames turned black. The heat inverted. Cold radiating from the brazier instead of warmth. Not just absence of heat but actual cold. Anti-fire. Concept corrupted into its opposite.

  It worked perfectly.

  "See?" Jake said to the empty room. "Don't need your help."

  Structure holds for 3.7 seconds before collapse. Inadequate.

  Jake let the magic drop. The flames returned to normal, then extinguished.

  He was right. Jonas was right. The inversion had been unstable. Would have failed on its own in moments.

  The worst part was how much the fragment knowledge helped. Every technical insight made Jake better at magic. More capable. More understanding. If he just consumed them fully, integrated them properly, he'd understand so much more.

  He could master fire manipulation. Pressure systems. Necromancy itself. All of Jonas's decades of expertise would be his.

  Female pelvis wider, shallower socket. Rotate femur outward forty-five degrees while applying downward pressure. Clean dislocation. Greater range of motion for positioning. More... aesthetically pleasing flexibility.

  But Jonas would be his too. The instincts. The nature. The casual cruelty. The god complex. The man who'd looked at Trace and seen an experiment instead of a person.

  "No," Jake said firmly. "I’d rather die."

  But even as he said it, the temptation gnawed. The hunger wasn't just physical anymore. It was existential. The body failing. The mind fragmenting. Everything shutting down piece by piece.

  He could fix it. Could consume the fragments right now. Find them. Eat them. Live.

  "Where is that damn pig?" Jake whispered.

  The pig was the answer. Practice extraction on something simple. Figure out how to take without integrating. Then he could handle the Jonas fragments safely. Remove them without contamination.

  But Forge wasn't here. The pig wasn't here. And Jake was running out of time.

  The small air pockets came next. Jake focused on the space above his hand, trying to distract himself from the temptation. Increased the pressure. Not creating wind, just forcing density differentials.

  Jonas: Gradient ratio must exceed 1.3 to achieve visible movement at this scale.

  The knowledge was accurate. Jake could feel it. Could sense how adjusting the pressure differential would improve the effect. Jonas's understanding filling gaps in Jake's own.

  He tried it. The air movement strengthened. Not much. Still barely a breeze. But better.

  "I could start a refrigeration company," Jake said to the ceiling. "Make millions. If I survive. If I figure out basic host maintenance. If I don't die like an idiot."

  Jonas: Foolish application. Void corruption has greater tactical potential. Temperature inversion is merely demonstration of principle. True application requires...

  "I didn't ask," Jake interrupted. "Nobody asked you. You're dead. Stay dead."

  But the fragment didn't stop. Couldn't stop. It was just neurons firing. Just knowledge existing. No consciousness to control it. No awareness to respect Jake's boundaries.

  Pressure manipulation extends to atmospheric control. Large-scale applications possible with sufficient affinity development. Weather modification. Altitude-based density gradients. Vacuum weaponization.

  Jake realized something. The fragments were making him better at magic. Significantly better. Each technical insight refined his understanding. Each correction improved his technique.

  If he consumed them. If he just accepted the contamination. He'd be so much more capable.

  And so much less himself.

  "The pig," Jake said again. "I need the pig."

  Time expenditure unwarranted. Consume now. Survive now. Refinement secondary to existence.

  "That's exactly what Jonas would say," Jake muttered. "Survival over ethics. Power over identity. Become something monstrous if it means living another day."

  Pragmatism.

  "Evil."

  Survival.

  "Same thing in your case, dead man."

  Jake let the magic fade. Lay back on the bed. His body was cold again. The brief heat from the brazier experiment had faded quickly.

  He should light it again. Should warm the room. But the effort seemed impossible. Everything seemed impossible.

  The cold was spreading. Not just environmental. Internal. His blood moving sluggishly. Heart struggling. Each breath taking more effort than the last.

  This was it. This was the endgame. Unless he consumed the fragments, he was going to die.

  Jake stared at the ceiling, feeling his consciousness fracture further. The magic to keep basic functions going was consuming him. His mind couldn't maintain both thought and Life magic simultaneously.

  His thoughts were losing.

  Just do it, the Jonas fragment suggested. Find the source. Consume. Live.

  "And become you?" Jake said. His voice was weak. Barely audible. "Pass."

  Better contaminated than dead.

  "Debatable."

  You'll die here. Alone. For nothing.

  "Yeah. Probably."

  But Jake didn't move. Didn't hunt for the fragments. Didn't give in to the temptation.

  He was a parasite. A monster. Had consumed dozens of hosts, killed them all, taken everything they were and made it fuel. But he'd never taken someone's worst parts intentionally. Never made evil a core component of who he was.

  Jonas had been necessary. His knowledge, his magic, his human mind. All essential.

  But his nature? His instincts? His casual cruelty?

  Jake would rather die.

  The room was getting darker. Or his vision was failing again. Hard to tell. Everything blurring together. Body and mind shutting down in tandem.

  Jonas: Consume and survive. Or maintain purity and die. Choose.

  "I choose to wait for Forge and the pig," Jake whispered.

  Time unavailable.

  "Then I choose to die clean."

  Foolish.

  "Probably."

  The fire in the brazier had gone out. Jake didn't have the strength to relight it. Let it stay cold. Let everything stay cold.

  His consciousness was dimming. Time becoming meaningless. Minutes or hours or days. Hard to tell. Just lying there, barely breathing, barely thinking, existing in some liminal space between life and death.

  The zombies downstairs probably felt like this. Trapped in failing meat. Aware enough to know they existed but not aware enough to do anything about it.

  Poetic justice. Becoming what Jonas had created.

  Hope would laugh.

  Hope. The concept made flesh. The force that had cursed him. Turned him into this. Made him honest about what he'd always been.

  This is what you wanted, isn't it? Parasite. Literal. Dying because I can't even figure out basic survival.

  But Hope wasn't there to answer. Wasn't watching. Probably didn't care. She'd broken when she cursed him, become retribution instead of aspiration.

  Jake was nothing. Had always been nothing. Now he was dying as nothing.

  The cold was almost comfortable now. Not painful anymore. Just there. Everything fading into it.

  Last chance, Jonas whispered from wherever fragments lived. Consume now or die.

  "Die then," Jake said. Or thought. Or dreamed. Hard to tell.

  Darkness.

  Cold.

  Silence.

  Then something.

  Sound. Distant. Muffled by failing senses and closed doors.

  Voices?

  Jake tried to focus. Couldn't. His mind too far gone. His body too weak.

  The sound again. Closer now. Footsteps on stairs?

  Or imagination. Or hallucination. Or death finally arriving.

  Help, Jake thought. Or tried to think. Or maybe said aloud. No way to know.

  The darkness was taking him. Not death. Not yet. Just unconsciousness. The last mercy his failing body could provide.

  The voices were closer now. Real or imagined. Coming up the stairs. Coming toward the bedroom.

  Too late. Jake was already gone. Already falling into nothing.

  His last coherent thought was simple: Forge better have that fucking pig.

  Then darkness.

  - - -

  End of Chapter 39