Chapter 87 - 83: The First Conduit
The descent felt like climbing down the throat of a buried god.
When the Faction finally reached the bottom of the abyss, their boots didn’t hit concrete or steel. They hit solid, petrified wood.
Will’s knees nearly buckled as his feet touched the floorboards. The air down here was a thick, suffocating soup. Every breath was a conscious, agonizing effort. His chest heaved rapidly, and his vision swam with a relentless pale blue static. In the corner of his eye, the system UI flashed relentlessly, marking the [Fungal Colonization] ticking deep into the seventies.
They were drowning in it.
"The Crucible Roots" wasn’t a laboratory. It was an ancient, subterranean temple formed by the sprawling, calcified roots of a tree that predated human history. But the sacred architecture had been grotesquely desecrated. Rusted Cold War-era server racks, buzzing transformers, and thick copper power cables were bolted directly into the ancient, petrified wood. It was a sickening collision of the prehistoric and the industrial. The heavy hum of 1950s machinery vibrated through the floor, holding back a localized pressure that made Will’s ears pop.
Elyas stumbled away from the vines, leaning heavily against a humming, rusted server rack. The rogue coughed, spitting a thick wad of blue-tinged phlegm onto the floorboards. "This isn’t a lab..." Elyas rasped, wiping his mouth with a trembling hand. "It’s a mausoleum wrapped in extension cords."
In the dead center of the cavern sat a sprawling throne. It was woven entirely from glowing fungal vines and rusted iron rebar.
Sitting on it was the man from the audio logs.
He wasn’t wearing a lab coat. The entity on the throne was a horrific fusion of mummified, ancient human flesh and thick black mycelium. Heavy, retro-futuristic life-support tubes were drilled directly into his exposed spine, pumping glowing blue fluid through his withered corpse to keep it tethered to the waking world.
Elizabeth stared in absolute, trembling horror at the bubbling tubes. She gripped her weapon, her knuckles white. "Who wires a corpse into a mainframe?"
"Welcome to the ground floor of human innovation," the mummified corpse hissed cheerfully.
The voice didn’t come from his mouth. It piped out of a rusted phonograph horn bolted directly into his collarbone, carrying that same crisp, 1950s radio-broadcaster static they had heard upstairs. The corpse smiled, the dry skin of his face pulling back to reveal a mouth full of blackened, wooden teeth.
Maddie wiped a stream of pale blue fluid from her watering eyes. She tightened her grip on the black-iron haft of the Santa Mon halberd, hacking deeply into her rag before she could speak. "Sixty years down here. No food, no sun. You should be dust, you crazy old bastard."
The scientist laughed. It was a terrifyingly visceral sound, starting as a crackle in the phonograph before shifting into something entirely different.
The 1950s transatlantic accent seamlessly melted away. The rusted horn went dead. When the entity spoke next, his true voice echoed from the cavern walls themselves—layered, impossibly deep, and vibrating with the crushing weight of millennia.
"Sixty years?" The voice rattled the petrified wood beneath their boots, dropping the ambient temperature to freezing. "My dear, I haven’t been ’normal’ since the ice pulled back from the continents. I was speaking to the dark while your ancestors were still learning how to strike flint."
The air in the cavern seemed to stagnate. Elizabeth took a slow, terrified step back. Her academic mind raced, trying to bridge the gap between the mid-century audio logs upstairs and the ancient monstrosity sitting before her.
"The World Wars," Elizabeth whispered, her voice cracking under the [Fungal Colonization] debuff. "The research camps. The timeline. You’re saying... millions died just so you could tune a radio to the occult?"
"The Ahnenerbe in Berlin. Unit 731 in Harbin. Project MKUltra. The atomic tests." The ancient corpse leaned forward on the throne, the heavy tubes in his spine bubbling fiercely. He seemed to savor the names, letting the horror of human history wash over his guests. "Brilliant, vicious, incredibly useful little men."
He looked down at them, a god explaining mathematics to insects.
"They thought they were harnessing my power for their empires," the Conduit continued, the cavern humming with his amusement. "They thought they were conducting ’science.’ They weren’t. I orchestrated them. I disguised mass blood-rituals as scientific progress because I needed the exact, global frequency of human agony to power my gate. You call it history. I call it an ignition sequence."
The silence that followed was suffocating. The sheer, incomprehensible scale of the atrocity paralyzed them. The modern world hadn’t been built on ingenuity; it had been farmed by a parasite.
The Conduit finally stopped looking at Maddie, Elyas, and Elizabeth. His hollow, mummified eyes locked dead onto Will.
Without warning, cable-thick fungal vines erupted from the floorboards. They lashed out like steel cords, wrapping around Will’s ankles. Before he could draw his empty blade, the vines whipped him forward, dragging him across the floorboards and slamming him face-first at the base of the petrified throne.
"Get off him!" Elyas roared. The rogue lunged forward, slashing his rusted blade at the thick roots holding Will down.
The vines didn’t even register the strike. A thick branch backhanded the rogue with crushing force, throwing Elyas through the air. He crashed hard into a copper transformer coil, slumping to the floor in a shower of sparks.
As Will fought the bindings, the System interface in his vision fractured. Corrupted red text bled across his retinas, obscuring his sight.
[Legacy Entity Encountered: The First Conduit.]
[Age Verification: Error. Entity predates Integration.]
[Threat Level: Calamity.]
The Conduit reached down with a withered, wooden hand. He grabbed Will by the wrist, pulling the boy’s arm up to the pale blue light. He stared intensely at the black mycelium ring embedded in Will’s forearm.
"Fascinating," the mummified god whispered, his wooden teeth inches from Will’s face. "The Sovereign Strain. The Black Rot... I spent millennia trying to graft this to my own nervous system. It turned my test subjects into screaming slurry. Yet here it sits, purring in the arm of a starving whelp."
The cavern walls hummed with immense pressure as the Conduit leaned back.
"Give me the arm, boy," the ancient voice commanded, echoing from the roots. "Let me sever it, and I will purge the rot from your lungs. You can walk out of my temple as my new apostles."
Will was on his knees, pinned against the throne. His mana was at absolute zero. His core was an empty, echoing void. He coughed, a wet, heavy sound, spitting a mouthful of blue-tinged blood onto the ancient roots at the Conduit’s feet.
The [Fungal Colonization] had progressed so far that it was actively altering his biology. His throat felt completely lined with moss. Every instinct screamed at him to take the deal, to let the Calamity take the cursed arm so he could just breathe again.
But he knew the arm was starving. And he knew what a starving parasite did when provoked.
Will grinned, his teeth stained pale blue. "I’ve seen your apostles." He hacked, his chest spasming as he fought for a single breath of air. "I’ll keep the arm. You want it? Come cut it off."
The Conduit’s eyes flared. A jagged, blade-like vine lunged directly for Will’s shoulder, aiming to cleanly sever the limb.
Will didn’t try to dodge. He simply let his absolute zero-mana state drop the barrier between his flesh and the curse.
Acting as an autonomous, hyper-aggressive immune response, the black mycelium tore through Will’s skin. It didn’t defend. It attacked. The Black Rot shot forward, sinking its jagged, pitch-black tendrils directly into the Conduit’s attacking vines.
It immediately began hungrily cannibalizing the ancient entity’s fungal network to feed itself.
Agonizing fire ripped through Will’s veins, accompanied by a brutally compressed flash of stolen memory. For a fraction of a second, Will didn’t see the cavern. He saw an endless sheet of glacial ice. He saw the blinding flash of an atomic test reflecting in mummified eyes. He tasted the copper of a million blood sacrifices.
The 100,000-year-old god tried to shriek, but the sound died in his throat. The Black Rot surged up his spine, instantly clogging the rusted phonograph horn with thick, dead ash. The Calamity didn’t roar; he just crumbled inward, his mummified eyes wide with absolute, pathetic terror as the parasite drank his ancient biomass.
A cascade of blue boxes exploded across Will’s glitching vision as the curse gorged itself.
[Sovereign Strain (Black Rot) is feeding...]
[Foreign Biomass Assimilated.]
[Parasitic Evolution Initiated.]
Will screamed through gritted teeth as the black tendrils thickened, anchoring him to the dying Calamity. "Don’t hit him!" he managed to choke out. "Hit the machines! Break the servers!"
Seeing the god distracted and actively being hollowed out by Will’s cursed arm, Maddie and Elizabeth didn’t waste their energy attacking an immortal. They turned their weapons on the room.
Maddie swung her heavy halberd in a devastating, sweeping arc, completely obliterating a 1950s rusted server rack. Elizabeth fired a point-blank concussive blast into the primary transformer, shattering the glass vacuum tubes. Elyas, hauling himself off the floorboards, jammed his acid-dripping arm directly into the thick copper power cables, melting the containment architecture into molten slag.
The destruction was absolute.
By smashing the servers, the Faction shattered the artificial containment of the occult gate. The localized pressure that had been held back for sixty years failed in a single, ear-splitting instant.
"Brace!" Will roared, ripping his black arm free from the crumbling Conduit as the room began to implode.
The air shredded around them as the 1950s technology collapsed. The sudden lack of containment created a crushing vacuum, turning the gaping elevator shaft above them into a literal blowgun. A geyser of pressurized occult energy vented upward from the shattered roots beneath the throne, seeking the only exit.
The shockwave caught the Faction, launching them upward like shrapnel from a cannon.
They were blasted up the dark shaft just as the petrified cavern entirely caved in, burying the ruined First Conduit beneath thousands of tons of earth, rusted iron, and his own collapsed gate.
As the crushing gravity of the abyss faded and they shot toward the surface, a blazing sequence of blue boxes exploded across Will’s vision:
[Hostile Domain Destroyed.]
[Status Effect: Fungal Colonization — PURGED.]
[Calamity Biomass Absorbed. Generating Mythic Skill: 1%...]