Chapter 7: Chapter 7: Seventh, leave the nest

I’m not going to leave immediately, of course. There’s quite a few things I need to do first, after all.

I know what Lessened Bleed does already, and I’m not terribly interested in it at the moment. It might be relevant if I come up against more blood manipulators, but somehow I doubt that every single potential source of XP is going to be a blood mage. The fragments of other experiments that I picked up through extensive perusal of this facility’s files certainly point to a wider world of classes.

The other skills, though, could be useful. Lesser Vampirism allows me to recover a small fraction of health when I deal damage to others, but the level of recovery it offers is honestly pitiful. Venomous Blood is new and a logical extension of my Venomous Bite—it fills my veins with poison, essentially, which could be potent combined with Shape Blood.

The last two interest me the most.

Temporary Shape Self (Rare)

Tier: Bronze

Level: 1

You wield control over yourself, guided by your power over blood. Use this skill to rapidly change your body. Changes last for 1 hour max. Can be used up to 1 time per day.

This one is a tier rarer than Shape Self, which is interesting. The system appears to value the sudden transformation aspect of it more? Maybe it’s more dynamic than Shape Self. Either way, this one’s a strong contender for one of my two free skill slots. I think back to my fight with EV11. Could I have used a skill like this to grow another arm so that the final sequence was a little less treacherous for me? It sure seems like it.

I’ll take it. It’s too valuable not to.

Woundshape (Uncommon)

Tier: Bronze

Level: 1

Furthers your ability to maximize damage. Once per hour, when you inflict a wound onto another living being, you can mirror the wound onto another part of their body or change the location of the wound.

That one’s also super valuable. It’s not limited to blood wounds, I’m pretty sure. It’s like a sidegrade to Enhance Bleed, and the two of them working in tandem could increase my low damage output by a lot.

I don’t take a second skill for the time being. The free slot could come in handy if I get into another situation where I need to quickly adapt.

After my adventures with Knifefighting and Stealth, I think it’s reasonable to assume that I can obtain skills just by working really hard at it. I don’t know how I’d get body-morphing magic, but I’m sure it’s possible. Just not easy. Woundshape is probably similarly hard to receive, but it’s probably out there.

In essence, the skills I’m getting as I level up are free skills that I don’t actually need to work towards. That makes them valuable, and I’m not sacrificing a slot right now if I don’t need to. I can try to earn the other skills myself, though I imagine that I can’t do them here. There’s not exactly a copy of Introductory Guide to Blood Magic or whatever just lying around in the lab, after all.

There are things I can do, though. For instance, while I’ve eaten the juicy parts of EV11’s corpse, there’s still blood running everywhere.

And I’ve still got a while left on my hourly allocation of Shape Blood.

While I walk around the lab, looking for anything relevant to my current situation, I use it to its fullest extent, raising three gallons of blood from the Bleedling I killed.

Practice makes these skills level up, right? That means I need to use it in ways that strain me. I try something other than the simple spike-creation that we all tried. Instead, I manipulate the viscous blood on a detailed level, spreading my focus over every drop. With the gallons I have, I make a swirling lotus flower out of blood. It’s imperfect, but I’ve never seen a real lotus flower so I can’t tell what I’m missing.

I try other things. I create an impromptu dress out of it, coating myself with blood that I control before shifting it off, turning it into a perfect cube and then a perfect sphere—as perfect as I can manage, at least. Before I realize it, ten minutes pass, and I find my control over the blood weakening.

Shape Blood advanced to level 4!

You can now control 4 gallons of blood, and your time increases to twenty-four minutes per hour.

I grin, and I keep at it. With the level-up, shaping becomes marginally easier, and I’m able to devote more attention to looking around the lab.

Unfortunately, this place isn’t exceptionally intact thanks to the efforts of the eleven of us demon-babies. More of the tiled floor is covered by broken glass than not, tables have been overturned and torn to pieces, and a thin congealing layer of blood settles over most everything.

Still, it’s not too hard to find what I’m looking for. There’s a few cabinets that somehow managed to stay intact through everything, and there’s papers within.

My hopes of finding a real answer to why and how I’m here are a little shot when I see that the first few pamphlets I find aren’t written in Common. They have Common titles, but their content may as well be unparseable.

Even the titles give me som valuable information, though, and I store them in a new backpack—the one I used was torn to shreds by EV11—reading them one by one as I do.

Underground Site 17: Replicating Demonic Bioweapons

Gestalt Soulmerge Experiment Log

Failures of Previous US-17 DBs on the Alyen Front

They give me pause, because even the titles say a lot with very few words. Putting together the pieces isn’t too hard. I’m a bioweapon of some kind, most likely, and a demonic one. Demonic Heritage makes that much obvious.

Still, I don’t think of myself as a demon. I’ve been working towards a more humanoid form this entire time, and I when I think ‘human’, I think of an us, not a them. The second title might lend some clues to that, though. I don’t know what a gestalt soulmerge is, but at a guess, it sounds like there might be more than one soul merged into one inside me? It would explain the knowledge.

There’s too many unknowns, and each new pamphlet I take opens up another question about the facility I’m in. Once I get out of here, I swear that I’m going to learn the languages needed to parse these pamphlets. I get the idea that this is a secret installation, not one that the general public is supposed to have access to, but I want to learn why it’s here, what happened to it to make everyone leave, and whether I should serve its purposes.

Okay, that last part’s a lie. I serve one person in this life, and that’s myself.

But I do want to figure out where it wanted to deploy me. The third pamphlet I get clearly indicates that I’m one in a line of many bioweapons, presumably used as part of a war effort? Maybe something else.

I’m not going to find out the full truth until I learn those languages, though, so I stow the thought for the time being.

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The last pamphlet I find is actually immediately useful. Instead of a long, complicated title about presumably dangerous research experiments, it simply reads Map.

It’s thicker than I would’ve assumed a map would be. Three full pages. The first page displays a map of the outdoors, symbols thrown across the sheet, but it means nothing to me while I’m down here.

The second page is more relevant—it depicts the entirety of Underground Site 17. This one’s less formal than the first. There’s standard designations for every room, of course—I’m in Main Lab 1 right now, the largest one—but there’s handwriting scrawled over it in different fonts. Over this lab, someone’s written the word “HELL” in all caps with a smiley face after it. Over another, I see “extended lunch breaks here.” Dozens of scribbles mark the map. It’s been well-used.

The third page is full of pictures. Twenty-four faces, each of them smiling vacantly with their names written under them.

The researchers that put us here. At least, that’s who I think these are. Twenty-two human men and women and two elves of indeterminate gender, their characteristic overly-large eyes and jagged fangs giving them away.

I frown. Another piece of information I shouldn’t have. It shouldn’t surprise me at this point, but I’ve never seen an elf before now, I’m sure of it, and yet I can still recognize what they are.

I commit all twenty-four faces to memory. Assuming they’re alive outside, I may be able to track them down for answers.

My eyes gravitate towards a single face. Marie Jade. A woman. Her eyes are sharp where the others are hollow, intense as the rest of her pale face.

I like her appearance. Once Shape Self comes off cooldown, I think I’ll steal it. As far as I know, my face isn’t much more than a jaw of sharp teeth and a pair of eyes—burning red, if the other demon-babies are anything to go off of—and I’d like something a little more compatible with dealing the outside world.

I set off as soon as I’m sure that I’ve looted this room for everything it’s worth. Most everything that looks like it might’ve once held something valuable is broken or gone, presumably eaten or destroyed by the others. Still, I find intact tubes of liquids of different colors, and I take them all. Waste not, want not.

With the map in my hands, it’s much easier to navigate the complex. As it turns out, this is the lower of two floors, but it’s truly expansive. Nearly a mile from one end to the other, just full of abandoned corridors and empty rooms. It’s a bit eerie, walking through them as dim lights threaten to go out for the last time, but it doesn’t bother me too much. Instead, I practice my Stealth skill. Though it doesn't level up, using it makes me feel more comfortable in my steps.

I try Temporary Shape Self as well, using it to create a third bladed arm stretching from under my current ones, mimicking EV11’s Bleedling limbs.

It works even better than expected, giving me full control over the limb. It exhausts me to hold onto it, though, so I retract it back into my body soon enough. There’s a hidden limitation—it exhausts my magic resources to use. Even if it has a true limit of an hour, its practical limit is far lower when it drains me like that. I use one of my three stat points on Magic (Regen), and the load lessens.

Every stat point matters. I’m not going to invest everything on regeneration right now, especially when I don’t know what I want to focus on.

Still, this new skill is a useful tool. Hopefully it’ll become even more powerful as I level both the skill and my self.

There’s a few points that I want to visit before I leave, and there’s nobody in the halls to stop me. I visit a location marked Armory on the map, glad to find that this location is larger than the broom closet I found my first weapons in. I trade dented daggers in for a half dozen new knives, packing the extra ones into my bag, and I find a half-sized rifle that I might actually be able to use at my current sub-five-foot height.

I try taking a shot with it, and the explosive scream as the magical mechanism activates is almost enough to deafen me. The rifle jumps out of my hands, clattering to the floor, and I feel the jar of it all over my arms.

Alright. I store it in my bag along with An Idiot’s Guide to Handling a R-Class Firearm. I’m unable to use it right now, but I might be able to do more later on when I’m more human.

I also find a library, but the vast majority of the books there look to be research-heavy ones that I can’t read. I store a few interesting-looking ones, but my pack is getting rather full already.

One more stop before I make my way to the exit.

I find myself in front of a warehouse entrance four times my size, an imposing doorway labeled with the term Experimental Errors above it.

I stay on my guard as I inch in past the open gates, and I redouble it when I hear the wailing.

I’m not the only living thing in here.

When I see what this room contains, however, I relax a little. Unlike the lab where I was created, the tubes in here aren’t glass. They’re steel. I can’t see through any of them, and a quick Appraise doesn’t reveal anyone.

The wailing continues, a high keening screech that pierces even the steel containers, and I look around. Each of these tubes has a separate label attached to it. Once again, I curse my lack of languages besides Common, because most of the descriptions are in another language. There’s names on some of them, but they’re equally as incomprehensible as a name like EV3.

The tube that the screaming is coming from is labeled as containing RI1. There’s actually a bit of Common text explaining the full name—Resistance Infusion 1, apparently—but it doesn’t reveal anything further.

I look around the room for a while, but I find nothing else of value. There are no pamphlets here, I can’t read the labels, and I can’t operate any of the machinery even after I try for a few minutes.

The wailing continues, and I walk away.

I consider trying harder to open some of the containment tubes and trying to Devour whatever’s within, but I don’t bother. If these are all errors, I doubt there’s anything I can actually use.

The rest of the trip is uneventful. There’s staircases at multiple points in the building to get to the level above, but the first path I attempt has caved in on itself. For a moment, I fear they’re all like that, but the second staircase is clear. The building is less intact on the second floor, with more sections of the roof fallen in, revealing the stone above, but it’s still walkable.

I find the central staircase quickly enough. According to this map, there’s a magical teleportation platform that people are supposed to use in order to return the surface, but with the general state of disrepair and abandonment in this lab, I highly doubt that that’s still functional.

Instead, I use the backup staircase. There’s a long way to the top—nearly a mile, apparently—but I’ll have to manage.

For the entirety of my short life, I’ve been inside this lab complex. I’ve learned and leveled up, but I’ve killed everything I can. There might be more left here, but I want more.

I take one last look at the sterile halls and start making my way up the stairs.

Above me lies opportunities for skills. For languages, which I can use to discover what my true origins are. For magic, which I’ll never have enough of. For levels.

There’s an entire world of XP out there.

I can’t wait to devour it.

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