Being dragged back up the stone stairs was an agonizing blur of pain and bone-grinding friction.
Marcus didn’t waste his breath groaning.
His heels left thin streaks of fresh crimson along the wet steps as the executioners hauled him upward, his wrists bound tightly behind his back in cold iron.
Beside them, the high-ranking cultist walked with measured, effortless strides, his bare palm still emitting a faint, swirling hiss of pressurized air.
‘That wind…
it wasn’t a physical trick,’
Marcus analyzed coldly.
‘It was energy rendered tangible.
An unseen vector of force.’
In his past life, modern warfare was dictated by ballistics, kinetic energy, and structural physics.
But this world operated on an entirely different set of natural laws.
The air wielder proved that these fanatics possessed combat capabilities that bypassed standard human conditioning.
He was severely injured, malnourished, and stripped of weapons, but for the first time since waking up in this living tomb, Marcus wasn’t completely blind.
He now had his first glimpse of what he was dealing with.
Knowledge, even in microscopic quantities, was the first prerequisite for asymmetrical warfare.
The heavy oak doors groaned open, and Marcus was thrown roughly onto the cold, blood-stained stone of the central chamber.
The Altar stood before him, bathed in the sickly green illumination of burning braziers.
Without a word, the executioners hauled his limp frame onto the elevated stone slab.
Heavy iron chains were slammed over his collarbones, his wrists, and his shattered right ankle, pinning him securely against the cold runes etched into the rock.
The High Priest stepped out from the shadows of the vaulted ceiling, his staff tapping heavily against the altar base.
Behind his polished porcelain mask, his hollow eyes burned with fanatical, unholy ecstasy.
“Look at you, broken vessel,” the High Priest rasped, his voice echoing through the vast chamber like dry leaves scraping against stone.
“You bled.
You crawled.
You even dared to sink a stone into the throat of my servant.
Yet here you lie, exactly where destiny demanded you be.”
Marcus lay flat on his back, his chest heaving in shallow, violent gasps.
He stared straight up at the towering priest, his dark eyes hollow, unreadable, and completely void of fear.
The High Priest leaned over the altar, his skeletal fingers tracing the edge of the stone near Marcus’s head.
“Did you truly believe the elixir forced down your throat was merely a poison intended to break your flesh?
How pathetically narrow.
The black draught is not meant to kill you—it is a solvent.
It strips away the protective mantle of the human mind.
It dissolves the iron walls of your sanity, turning your soul into an open, empty vessel ready to receive the Master.”
A cold realization crystallized inside Marcus’s mind.
‘The nightmare…
the torture…
the elixir…’
Every horrifying event since his arrival hadn’t been random cruelty.
It was a calculated, multi-stage process.
The starvation was meant to drain his physical stamina; the physical torture was designed to break his body and resistance; the elixir was meant to alter his very spirit. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping dot com.
They were systematically dismantling his human identity layer by layer, preparing the empty shell to house their Master
“The alignment is complete,” the High Priest declared, raising his staff toward the ceiling.
“The storm outside rages in response to His awakening.
The dawn has arrived, and with it, the Final Binding!”
The priest slammed the butt of his staff against the floor tiles.
BOOM!
A violent surge of dark, crimson energy erupted from the staff, flooding down the steps and bleeding straight into the runes etched across the altar.
The cold stone beneath Marcus’s back instantly ignited with a dark, suffocating heat.
Then, it hit him.
It didn’t attack his flesh.
It struck directly at the core of his consciousness.
A wave of unimaginable mental pressure flooded Marcus’s mind.
It was as if a reservoir of long-buried, rotting human emotion had been unsealed deep within his soul.
For forty years in his past life as a Supreme Commander, Marcus had been a fortress of absolute, unyielding logic.
He had buried his grief when his men perished in radioactive trenches.
He had strangled his fear when leading hopeless counter-offensives.
He had locked away his loneliness, his childhood trauma, and his regret behind thick walls of military discipline.
Now, under the influence of the elixir and the altar’s dark magic, those walls completely shattered.
Sorrow.
The overwhelming, suffocating weight of every life lost under his command slammed into his chest, making him gasp for air.
Fear.
The primal, instinctual terror of dying helpless in the dark, chained like cattle to a slab of rock.
Regret.
The bitter realization of a life spent entirely on battlefields, ending in a world he didn’t understand.
Rage.
A blinding, roaring inferno of absolute hatred for the cult, the priest, and the cruel entity trying to claim his mind.
The emotional onslaught was violent enough to shatter an ordinary man’s sanity in seconds.
Marcus’s body convulsed on the altar, his teeth clenched as his body convulsed on the altar.
‘Suppress it!’ his instincts screamed.
‘Lock it down!’
No.
Marcus caught himself instantly.
Suppressing a tidal wave was impossible.
In military strategy, when an incoming force possessed overwhelming kinetic momentum, attempting to build a wall against it only ensured total destruction.
You didn’t stop the wave you redirected its flow.
Marcus stopped fighting the emotions.
He opened the floodgates of his mind and allowed the agony to wash over him.
He began analyzing the violent mental storm as if evaluating troop movements on a tactical map.
He isolated the sorrow and mapped its depth.
He turned the surge of fear into heightened sensory awareness. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
He channeled the sheer, unadulterated rage and locked it into a single, razor-sharp point of cold, lethal focus.
He was not losing his mind to the emotion.
He was weaponizing it.
The High Priest stepped closer, extending his hands over Marcus’s chest.
Crimson light surged from his palms, forcing the dark energy deeper into Marcus’s body to crack his resisting soul.
“Yield, broken child!
Surrender your identity to the Master!”
Marcus screamed through gritted teeth, but his eyes remained sharp, tracking every movement of the glowing energy.
He felt the dark magic forcing its way into his chest, flooding through his body…
but then he noticed something critical.
The energy wasn’t staying inside him.
The dark power flowed into his body, circulated through his chest, and then immediately drained out through his spine, sinking straight down into the ancient stone of the altar below.
‘It’s a circuit,’ Marcus realized, his mind working at terrifying speed through the blinding pain.
‘I’m not just a vessel…
I’m the conduit!’
The altar was not just a stone table for sacrifice.
It was the heart of the entire ritual.
The cultists were using his soul as a living bridge, channeling the dark ritual energy through his body and into the ancient foundations beneath the altar.
THUD-THUD-THUD!
Outside, the storm outside reached its peak.
A terrifying bolt of lightning struck the peak of the temple roof directly above the altar chamber.
BOOM!
The entire stone hall violently shuddered.
Dust and heavy stone blocks rained down from the ancient ceiling.
Massive cracks split across the vaulted arches, exposing the swirling, dark sky outside.
The High Priest threw his head back, laughing hysterically through his porcelain mask as dust covered his robes.
“Yes!
Listen to the heavens tremble!
The Master responds to the vessel!
The binding is almost complete!”
Marcus, pinned beneath the heavy iron chains, looked up through the falling debris at the crazed priest, a cold, brutal realization settling in his mind.
The priest was wrong.
The storm wasn’t answering the ritual.
The ocean was tearing this crumbling fortress apart, and the altar beneath him was the anchor holding it all together.
Marcus tightened his left fist against the stone, his eyes burning with a dark, predatory light.
‘Keep pouring the energy in, butcher,’
Marcus thought, his mind locked onto the flowing current beneath his back.
‘Because the moment this circuit breaks…
I’m pulling this whole temple down on your heads.’