The chamber assistant's normally confident voice glitched—a rare stammer in its otherwise perfect speech pattern:
"…Ah… You… You are one of them."
Then steadied. A brief flicker in its form. A ripple of static. Then, it steadied, though something still trembled behind its tone.
"This is the Pillar of Flesh. Normally, it is shaped by will. By touch. By thought."
It paused. "But you… you are shaped by something else. Something that does not speak in flesh or logic."
"Your form will not be built with sliders or symmetry. It will be interpreted—in echoes, instincts, and contradictions."
"You will feel parts of your shape shift on their own. Limbs may ripple. Features may fracture and reform. This is not a glitch. It is your essence trying to anchor itself."
"Certain traits—twitching eyes, shifting tattoos, tentacles of memory, flickering shadows—will be available only to you."
The Assistant turned slowly, as if unsure Cora was still watching.
"You may adjust these things… or not. The Pillar accepts both action and silence."
"If you feel pain… or hear voices… this is normal. These are just resonant echoes—fragments of the form you left behind."
"Do not fight them. Let them pass through you. Let them become part of you."
The surface of the Pillar pulsed, and for a moment, Cora's reflection didn't match her movement. Then it realigned. Almost.
"This is not shaping. This is emergence."
"Let the Pillar show you what lies beneath your borrowed skin."
"And when it is done… the world will no longer see you as possible."
The Assistant faded into the background—not gone, but watching from a safe distance.
"Well that was a long and odd explanation on how this thing worked."
As Cora's foot touched the edge of the liquid essence, the pool didn't shimmer like it did for others. It shuddered.
The once-luminous silver surface rapidly dimmed, as if recoiling from the touch of something that shouldn't be. It shifted into a twilight hue—a deep, murky purple-black, like a starless void diluted with ink.
But then—color bloomed beneath the surface.
Violet tendrils spreaded outward like cracks in glass, glowing dimly.
Green energy slithered between them like electric veins, flickering unnaturally—not pulsing, but twitching.
These hues formed spirals, eyes, and sigils that constantly rearranged as if trying to make sense of her presence—and failing.
It didn't feel like she had stepped into a liquid.
It felt like she had stepped into something alive—and it just became aware of her.
Rather than a smooth ripple, the pool began to pulse in uneven intervals.
Like a heartbeat, but not Cora's own. Not even one of a living thing—more like something trying to mimic life.
It throbbed in slow, unnatural rhythms:
...pa-THUMP…
...THUMP...thump…THUMP…
The sound echoed in her ribcage, not her ears.
Cora felt it more than she heard it—inside her spine, her lungs, her skull.
Then the pulse synchronized… but not with Cora's heartbeat.
It synced with her thoughts—each dark, doubt-ridden, or fearful impulse, no matter how fleeting.
It fed off them. It grew calmer when her mind wavered.
The more discomfort she felt, the stronger the pool's glow became.
The Pillar of Flesh, built to interpret will and shape, now encountered a being with a fractured will, a nonlinear form, and a soul bent around unknowable truths.
This triggered hidden subroutines in the pool, never meant to activate under normal conditions.
The essence responded:
Symbols started forming on the surface—arcane runes, forgotten alphabets, diagrams of concepts that should not have been visual.
A cyclopean eye-shaped ripple briefly appeared under the surface before vanishing.
Tendrils of the liquid rose gently, brushing Cora's arms and shoulders, not touching skin but pressing into something beneath it—her identity.
As Cora's body submerged, she felt things peeling away—not clothes, not flesh, but the shell of what she used to be. Thought patterns dissolved. Identity fragments like stained glass under pressure.
Then the pain started.
It wasn't pain that came from burning or stabbing. But from her whole existence expanding.
Her bones felt like they were growing in every direction at once.
Her blood turned to ink, and that ink began writing—veins branched into sigils beneath her skin, reshaping Cora from the inside out.
A deep hum rumbled from beneath the pool.
It wasn't mechanical. Not natural.
It was curious. Hungry. Patient.
Her vision swam. Then stabilized.
She saw her reflection—and it felt wrong.
Eyes that shouldn't have been there. Limbs that phased and flickered. Tattoos that moved.
She tried to scream, but she realized:
It wasn't pain.
It's permission.
The essence began pushing her upward—or maybe she was sinking through the top.
Cora's new body pulled itself from the liquid, but it did not drip.
The residue crawled off her like it feared being left behind.
The stretch of new musculature, balanced between humanoid and unknowable.
Her skin—pale as moonlight filtered through the abyss, almost translucent—shimmered with a subtle violet-blue sheen. It's not smooth, but alive. Veins of obsidian black branch acrossed her shoulders and arms like thorned vines, as if the forest itself tried to claim her as its own.
But the thorns didn't pierce her.
They grew from her.
Her body was a garden of shadows, and something within it pulsed—alien, ancient, and beautiful.
Then her eyes opened. Twin lakes of luminous green, burned from the inside out.
They pierced, searing through the dark of the Nexus Chamber with predatory clarity. From them trailed veins of radiant poison, like tears weeping down her cheeks, etched into her flesh with emerald fire.
They flickered. Once. Twice. And then everything in the room leaned away—even the light.
Cora looked down at her new body.
"...Huh. Well, it definitely has an Eldritch vibe to it."
On her upper arm and back, black vines splitted just enough to reveal glowing runes—magenta spirals, embedded like gems beneath her skin, pulsing with soft, otherworldly energy. These symbols were not carved—they were grown, alive.
They pulsed with rhythm, as though listening for a name that has not yet been spoken.
Her hair spilled down her back like liquid starlight, white but not empty—streaked with shimmering strands of violet that moved when she didn't.
Crowning her head was not metal, not bone, but something in between—twisted, jagged branches, black as void, tipped with soft, bioluminescent thorns that emitted a faint pink glow. The crown didn't rest on her head.
It grew from her skull.
The space around her was slightly warped, like air over fire—reality bending, flickering. Leaves around her did not drift; they hung mid-air, stuck in silent hesitation, unsure if gravity still applied.
A faint whisper surrounded her. Not sound, but impression—as if something ancient was speaking just behind your ear, but always vanished when you tried to hear it.
Her legs were long, sculpted with an unnatural symmetry that shifted when not directly observed—never wrong, but never exactly right. The skin retained its soft, starlit glow, with veins of violet-black curling upward from her ankles like creeping ivy. They moved faintly beneath the surface, as though something within is always growing, always watching.
Where thighs and calves should have met bone and sinew, there was something more—a biomechanical elegance, smooth yet segmented like living armor.
Cora was amazed when she started walking around in place to stretch her new body. Every step she took seemed to echo with a quiet resonance, as if the earth itself registered her presence and adjusted to accommodate it.
Around her hips, the vines thickened, blooming with pulsing sigils—small, twitching spirals that pulsed with the same color as her markings above. These glyphs seemed to change position when not looked at directly, rearranging their meaning in secret.
A faint, translucent mist clung to her feet, trailing with each step—a result of the aura leaking from her body, distorting light and color in a subtle radius around her. As she walked, the Nexus Chamber floors cracked and reformed repeatedly.
Her movement was silent, fluid—not gliding, but not quite walking either. The animation engine bended slightly for her, as if her legs weren't fully tethered to traditional physics.
If she stood still long enough, her feet began to root, micro-tendrils slipping into the chamber floor like organic data seeking a connection. But she instinctively knew she could withdraw them instantly if she wanted—she was never trapped. Only anchored… when she chose to be.
---
The Assistant returned, its voice was hushed. No longer instructing. Merely witnessing.
"The Pillar has released you."
"You are not what it expected. Nor what it feared."
"…You are what it now remembers."
---
System Notification (Seen Only by You):
> Essence Recognized: ELDTRITCH BOUND
Form Stabilized. Classification: Anomaly Accepted.
Visual Trait Slots Unlocked:
Unstable Bioluminescence
Non-Euclidean Animation
Temporal Echo Overlay
Passive Buffs Gained:
Obscure Presence
Fragmented Mind (Status Effect Immunity)
Whispering Core (+Chance for Random Spell Surge)
---
She looked around—and the other pillars… they gave off a creepy feel now. Like they were watching her now. Not visibly. But she definitely felt it.
The Weave of Skills pulsed differently. The Forge of Origin's fire hissed in reverse. The Celestial Gate flickered—not in welcome, but in an odd anticipation.
"Hmm. Does this mean I don't need to start the Mirror of Souls thing?"