The first rule of living in Necropolis was simple: Never look up.
If you looked up, you wouldn't see stars or a sun. You would see them—the Ribs. Colossal, calcified arches of bone that spanned the heavens, white and jagged like the fingers of a dead god curling over the world. They blocked out the void, dripping thick, oily condensation that tasted faintly of iron and salt.
Zin didn't look up. He was busy looking down, staring into the open neck of a man who was arguably less intelligent than the table he lay on.
"Hold still," Zin murmured, his voice flat. "Unless you want your new vocal cords to fuse with your esophagus."
The patient, a heavy-set enforcer for the Blood-Vein Gang, whimpered. His throat was flayed open, clamped back by rusted retractors. Inside the wet redness, Zin was working with the precision of a machine. He held a pair of forceps, gripping a slimy, pulsating organ that looked like a lump of gray jelly.
It was a Howler Sac—harvested from a screaming swamp-toad found in the Liver District.
"I... I feel it itching," the thug gurgled through the anesthesia.
"That's not an itch. That's your white blood cells attacking the graft," Zin replied, not looking up. He reached for a syringe filled with a neon-green liquid—an immunosuppressant cocktail he had brewed himself. "This will confuse your immune system for twenty-four hours. It will trick your body into thinking this toad flesh is part of you. After that? It's up to your will."
Zin injected the serum directly into the exposed carotid artery. The thug convulsed once, his veins turning black for a split second before settling back to blue. The Howler Sac pulsed, turning pink. It had taken root.
"Done."
Zin peeled off his gloves, tossing them into the bio-waste incinerator in the corner. The fire flared green, smelling of burnt latex and old meat.
The thug sat up, touching his bandaged neck. He coughed, and the sound came out not as a human rasp, but as a low, subsonic vibration that rattled the glass jars on the shelves. He grinned, revealing yellow teeth.
"It works," the thug croaked, the sound vibrating in Zin's own chest. "The Boss will be pleased."
"The fee," Zin said, extending a slender hand. He didn't care about the Boss. He cared about survival.
The thug tossed a heavy pouch onto the metal table. It clinked with the sound of Enzymes—the currency of this world. Crystalline vials of pure biological energy harvested from the Corpse's fluids.
"You're good, Doc," the thug spat on the floor as he walked out. "Creepy eyes, but good hands."
When the heavy steel door slammed shut, silence returned to the small, underground clinic.
Zin let out a breath he didn't know he was holding. He walked to the mirror hanging above the sink. The glass was cracked, but it showed his face clearly enough. Pale skin, sharp features, and dark circles under his eyes from lack of sleep. But the thug was right—it was the eyes that unsettled people.
They were too analytical. When Zin looked at a person, he didn't see a face. He saw biological architecture. He saw stress fractures in the tibia, plaque buildup in the arteries, and inefficient oxygen exchange in the lungs.
He saw the code.
Suddenly, a wave of dizziness hit him. Zin gripped the sink. It was the Hunger. Not for food, but for data.
He closed his eyes.
[System Activation: The Sterile Lab]
In an instant, the smell of rot and rust vanished. The sound of dripping fluids ceased.
Zin opened his eyes. He was no longer in his dirty clinic. He was standing in an endless, blindingly white room. The floor was polished tile, the air smelled of ozone and absolute purity.
In the center of the room stood a vintage, behemoth computer terminal, connected to a suspended glass tank.
Inside the tank floated a single drop of blood—the blood he had secretly swiped from the thug's neck during the surgery.
Zin walked to the terminal. His fingers—now clean and dressed in a phantom white lab coat—danced over the keyboard.
> ANALYZING SAMPLE...
> SUBJECT: HUMAN (MUTATED)
> GRAFT COMPATIBILITY: 64%
> ESTIMATED LIFESPAN: 3 MONTHS.
Zin sighed. "Three months before the toad DNA rewrites his nervous system and turns him into a mindless beast. Another failure."
This was his secret. His curse. The Sterile Lab. A mental dimension where time stood still, allowing him to run thousands of simulations in the blink of an eye. While others guessed at biology, Zin could solve it mathematically.
He tapped a few more keys, archiving the genetic data. He was looking for something specific. The "Original Code." The DNA of the ancestors who arrived on this world before the mutations began. He believed that was the only way to escape this hell.
"End Simulation," he commanded.
The white room shattered like glass.
Zin gasped, back in his clinic, clutching the sink. The transition always left him nauseous.
He grabbed the pouch of Enzymes to stash it away, but his hand froze mid-air.
The water in the sink. It was vibrating.
Ripples formed in concentric circles.
Thump.
It wasn't a sound. It was a pressure wave. It hit Zin in the chest, heavy and deep, like a subwoofer turned to maximum volume inside his own ribs.
Thump.
The glass jars on the shelves rattled. Dust fell from the ceiling.
Zin ran to the window. Outside, the slums of the "Lower Intestine" district were in chaos. The fleshy, bio-luminescent moss that covered the buildings was flickering erratically. People were stumbling out of their homes, clutching their chests.
"An earthquake?" someone screamed in the street.
"No," Zin whispered, his pupils constricting to pinpoints.
He grabbed his scalpel and a portable microscope, his mind racing. An earthquake shakes the ground side to side. This was different. This was rhythmic.
Thump... (pause)... Thump.
It was a cycle.
Zin looked up—breaking the first rule of Necropolis.
Through the gaps in the towering bio-skyscrapers, he saw the Ribs in the sky. Those massive, white pillars that had been stationary for thousands of years... were moving.
They were expanding. Slowly. Just a fraction of an inch, but they were expanding.
The sky was rising.
Zin's scientific mind connected the dots in a second, and the horror nearly brought him to his knees.
The tremors weren't earthquakes. The expansion wasn't a shifting tectonic plate.
The Corpse was taking a breath.
The world was waking up.