The scene before him was nothing like what he had seen before.
A haze of green light floated through the air—soft, weightless, almost serene.
Dozens of translucent shapes drifted above the ground like jellyfish made of breath and moonlight. Their tendrils rippled gently, exhaling threads of silver mist that shimmered like underwater sunlight.
For a heartbeat, Damian just stared.
It was beautiful—too beautiful.
The kind of beauty that made the body tense before the mind understood why.
Then one brushed against his arm.
The touch was soft, almost human—
until it moved.
Something cold and wet slid across his skin.
It left a trail, thin as saliva, that wriggled.
A second later, the trail itself began to move—splitting into tiny translucent worms that crawled upward, squirming along the seam of his sleeve, searching for warmth.
Damian flinched back, slapping at his arm, but they were already everywhere.
The air around him rippled—hundreds of the floating shapes unfurling, their tendrils stretching, thinning, fracturing into swarms of glistening threads.
They fell on him like rain—
sticky, slow, alive.
Something slick coiled around his boot.
Another brushed the side of his neck, cool and trembling, then tightened like a pulse.
He felt a dozen more crawling over his chest, up his spine, beneath his collar, tracing the veins that led to his heart.
Each one drank—not blood, but something deeper.
Pain bloomed, hot and electric.
Every nerve screamed as if his strength was being pulled out through his pores.
His body convulsed; his muscles locked.
He could feel his heartbeat faltering—staggering under invisible hands.
With a guttural snarl, Damian grabbed one of the creatures and tore it off.
It burst in his palm, spraying luminous slime that hissed where it landed.
The droplets hit the wall—and the wall absorbed them, rippling like muscle under skin.
Then he realized the wall itself was moving.
The veins of light crawling across it weren't reflections—they were alive, pumping, twitching in rhythm.
Nerve fibers crisscrossed the surface like tangled roots, pulsing to some hidden heartbeat.
The floor beneath his boots flexed and exhaled a warm, rotten breath that smelled of copper and sugar.
He looked down.
What he thought was solid ground shivered.
A wet, elastic film stretched under his weight.
Through the thin layer, something beneath it—something massive—shifted.
The motion sent ripples through the floor, and the ripples weren't smooth. They came in waves—small, uneven, crawling.
Damian froze. Beneath the translucent membrane, thousands of hair-thin shapes writhed in slow, synchronized spasms. They weren't veins. They were bodies—pale, slick, finger-sized things pressing and twisting against the barrier, layer upon layer like worms trapped under glass.
The surface bulged. One of them pressed up so close he could see the ridged segments quivering, the faint black dot of a mouth opening and closing soundlessly. Then another. Then dozens.
A ripple passed under his boot. The ground breathed. The film flexed, then split with a wet sigh, and a slick, translucent coil slid free—thin as a vine, cold as meat fresh from ice.
It brushed against his ankle. Then another touched his calf. Then another.
Hundreds.
They were everywhere, weaving between his boots, winding up his legs, soft and wet and endless, moving with a purpose he could feel but not see.
They didn't bite. They tasted—probing, sampling, pulsing against his skin as if deciding whether to swallow him whole.
Damian staggered back, breath locking in his chest. The floor pulsed harder, the light deepening to a feverish green.
And then he understood.
This wasn't a corridor.
Meanwhile, on the other side—
Adrian Blake thought he had stepped into heaven.