Inside The Morgue

Achilles made the rat move to a blind spot that the camera wouldn't be able to detect it.

After the coast was cleared, he commanded the rat to run upstairs to find the room where they stored the bodies.

A few hours before this operation, he had eavesdropped on the news that a cohort was about to return from their expedition.

This meant that there would be a bunch of fresh bodies for him to go on a whole day-long of shopping spree.

...Coincidentally, the time they come back would be tomorrow, Achilles' final chance to save himself.

Although he didn't like the idea that someone...or something, may set him up in this whole deal, he had no choice but to follow if he wanted to avoid becoming a pile of dirt worms.

'I'll deal with that later.'

Achilles shook his head to chase away the thought, he needed to focus on his current objective first.

The zombie rat swiftly and agilely moved up the stairs. It ran past the second floor which was the patients' floor.

The third floor was where the morgue stored most of its medicines and chemicals.

Finally, it reached the fourth floor, which was where they stored the dead bodies.

Even though this place only had four floors, each one was incredibly high and wide, so there was no problem with the space.

This was one of the reasons it took Achilles until noon to make the rat reach the fourth floor.

The zombie rat turned its head left and right in a careful manner before it slowly walked towards the huge metal door that stood in front of it.

'...As expected, it's locked.'

Achilles was hoping that the door wasn't locked so he could go inside and tried his luck to search for a body that was recently dead in there.

But with the door tightly locked, he had to wait until the cohort returned tomorrow morning, provided that they would be able to come back at all.

...To be honest, he wasn't sure if he could handle the corruption until then.

His face darkened a little at the thought.

He held his chin slightly while contemplating for 2 seconds, then he controlled the rat to hide at somewhere hidden from plain sight.

Achilles started concentrating to enter the Mindscape, he wanted to check on his soul's current condition.

After a moment, he slowly opened his eyes and saw the familiar desert and the ebony castle from before.

Everything seemed to look normal, but there was a slight change in the atmosphere of the place.

It was colder, more wicked, and full of viciousness.

Achilles naturally noticed this and couldn't help but tensed up:

'It's beginning, I'll probably have a few hours before my conscious mind starts to be affected by the corruption.'

He didn't linger on this any longer but swiftly moved through the desert and entered the castle.

He reached the door to the throne room shortly after and pushed open the door with both his hands.

The blood-red torches on both sides lit up simultaneously, revealing the interior of the room.

Achilles directed his gaze onto the throne at the other end of the room and his face contorted into an unpleasant frown.

The white orb with a red center was no longer the same as it was a few hours ago. Before it was a size of a large sphere, now it was only similar to a basketball.

The white light around the orb had also been tainted with a few yellow stains, it was like an unwashable mud stain on a white shirt.

Achilles rushed to the orb and touched it gently, after a while his frown turned even uglier than before.

'Son of a bitch...'

He quickly closed his eyes in an attempt to stabilize his subconscious to help buy him some time.

His soul responded to him as it started to grow a bit bigger and the mud stain on its white light started to recede a little.

Achilles opened his eyes calmly and let out a sigh of relief:

'I should have a tiny bit more time.'

After confirming that things would be fine for the time being, he quickly exited the Mindscape and returned to his spiritual self.

Achilles lifted his eyelids up and started looking left and right, when he was sure that there was no problem surrounding him, he re-established the connection with the zombie rat from earlier.

He was glad that no one managed to spot the rat and nothing happened to it.

Originally Achilles was a little worried because he feared that the zombie rat may leak the smells of a rotten corpse.

But after a little testing, he realized the creatures he controlled had no strange smells whatsoever.

It was also one of the reasons he was confident in letting the rat infiltrate the morgue and hid it away without any worry that someone might discover the smells.

Achilles was planning to let the rat run around and gather intel but he realized his essences was running low on gas. Thus he had to control the rat to hide somewhere more hidden and cut his connection with it.

Essences were the energy created by the souls combined with the assistance of the remnants. It could be used to use abilities, increase physical stats, and strengthen weapons.

Once the essences ran out, the body would enter extreme exhaustion that would make one greatly vulnerable.

The lost essences would be recovered over time, the speed of the recovery and the amount of essences depended on the rank of the being.

It was the reason why Achilles didn't want to use up all his essences since he was the lowest rank there was.

There might be emergencies that could occur and he absolutely did not want to be completely defenseless when that happened.

After making sure the rat was in a safe spot, Achilles silently closed his eyes and started meditating to adjust his mental state.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Night time, somewhere outside the wall, in a lush forest filled with trees that were hundred meters tall.

With the occasional breeze of wind and the starry night sky, it created a feeling of serenity for those who looked at it.

Although this was only a facade to hide the true horrors that resided deep in the forest.

On the perimeter of the forest, a bonfire was producing smoke flying up to the sky.

There were a few people gather around the bonfire, each one of them with their back faced the bonfire, looking out into the darkness while maintaining a grim expression on their faces.

One of them, who was a bulky man wearing tattered armor spoke, his voice was full of anxiety:

"Are you sure we should make a bonfire like this?"

"Most low-rank Corrupted creatures still have the instincts that make them afraid of fire, so it should chase them off." A woman who seemed to be in her mid-twenties spoke with a calm expression.

But after a while, she added in a heavy tone:

"As for high-rank ones, we can only pray that they wouldn't notice this place."

The bulky man and the rest heard this and couldn't help but felt nervous.

They were the cohort that the government sent out 2 months ago for material gathering and also the very cohort that Achilles was waiting for to have his dead bodies delivered.

The cohort had just suffered heavy casualties from a gruesome battle with a Lesser Fallen creature this afternoon, one of the highest rank ones that humanity had come into contact with until this day.

If they weren't one of the high-rank cohorts that were both high rankers and had fought with each other through life and death multiple times, they would have died under the monster's hand.

Of course, this didn't mean that they managed to kill the beast, it had fled after receiving a heavy injury from a member of the cohort.

Now the team was exhausted both mentally and physically, they could only pray that no high-rank creature would discover their locations since most of them lived deep within the forest.