WELCOME HOME, MY VESSEL.
The voice thundered through my skull like an avalanche. Not just sound—presence. A consciousness so vast it made my ten thousand years feel like the blink of an eye.
I staggered.
Drake caught my arm.
"Wei? What's happening?"
"It's... talking to me." I pressed my palm against my temple. "Inside my head."
You hear me clearly now. Good. Your growth has been... adequate.
"Get out of my head."
You cannot command me, little vessel. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. The entity's amusement felt like grinding stones. But I did not bring you here to fight. I brought you here to remember.
Before I could respond, lights flickered on across the facility below.
And people emerged from the buildings.
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They were soldiers.
Fifty of them, maybe more. Armed with rifles and wearing tactical gear that looked military but lacked any insignia. They formed a line between us and the facility's main entrance—not aiming their weapons, but not welcoming us either.
A man stepped forward.
He was in his sixties, gray-haired, wearing a lab coat over civilian clothes. His face had the weathered look of someone who'd spent decades making difficult choices.
"Wei Chen," he said. "We've been waiting for you."
"You know my name."
"We've known everything about you since Day 1." He glanced at my zombie army, still holding position behind me. "We know what you can do. What you've been doing. And what you're becoming."
"And what am I becoming?"
The man smiled—a thin, tired expression.
"Why don't you come inside and find out?"
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The soldiers didn't try to disarm us.
They couldn't have disarmed me anyway—my power was part of my body now, not something that could be taken. But they also didn't try to stop Drake's fire or Sarah's presence. They just led us through the concrete corridors like we were guests, not prisoners.
Which made me more nervous than if they'd tried to fight.
"My name is Director Morgan," the gray-haired man said as we walked. "I've run Facility Seven-Alpha for the past thirty years."
"What is this place?"
"Originally? A research station. We were studying geological anomalies in the Olympic range. Unusual readings. Energy signatures that didn't match any known source." He paused at a reinforced door, entering a code. "Then we found the pit."
The door opened.
And we stepped onto a platform overlooking the abyss.
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It was worse up close.
The pit descended into darkness so absolute it seemed to consume light itself. The entity's form rose from that darkness—translucent flesh and impossible geometry, eyes that shouldn't exist and limbs that defied physics.
But it wasn't just the entity.
It was what surrounded it.
Cables. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Running from machines built into the pit's walls, disappearing into the entity's flesh. Monitoring equipment. Generators. Things I couldn't even identify.
"You've been studying it," I said.
"For thirty years." Morgan moved to stand beside me. "Trying to understand it. Trying to communicate with it. Trying to figure out what it wants."
"And what does it want?"
Morgan looked at me with those tired eyes.
"You."
------------------------------
The briefing room was sterile.
White walls. Metal furniture. Screens covering every surface. Morgan sat across from me while his people brought coffee none of us touched.
"What I'm about to tell you is classified at the highest level," he began. "The kind of secret that governments kill to protect. But given the circumstances..." He gestured at the screens, which now showed the entity's writhing form. "I don't think classification matters anymore."
"Just talk."
Morgan nodded.
"The entity has been in that pit for at least ten thousand years. Maybe longer. We've carbon-dated organic material from its outer layers—some of it predates human civilization. It was here before the first humans crossed the Bering Strait. Before the last ice age. It might be older than the mountains themselves."
True, the entity whispered in my head. I am older than your species. Older than most things that crawl upon this world.
"Twenty-three years ago, we managed to establish communication." Morgan's voice was flat—the tone of someone describing a trauma they'd relived too many times. "Limited. Fragmentary. But enough to understand what it is."
"And what is it?"
"The entity is... a traveler. It came from somewhere else. Somewhere beyond our understanding of space and time." Morgan pulled up images on the screens—ancient cave paintings, medieval manuscripts, stone carvings from civilizations I didn't recognize. "It's been worshipped as a god, feared as a demon, and forgotten in between. But it's always been here. Waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
Morgan met my eyes.
"For someone like you."
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He tells a partial truth, the entity said. But not the whole truth. Shall I fill in the gaps?
I ignored it. Focused on Morgan.
"Keep explaining."
"The entity can't fully manifest in our reality. Not on its own." Morgan gestured at the cables, the machines, the pit. "Its body—what you see in that hole—is just a fraction of its true self. A tendril reaching through from somewhere else. To truly enter our world, it needs a... conduit. A vessel. A body that exists in both realities at once."
"Me."
"You." Morgan leaned forward. "Three months ago, the entity told us something was coming. A vessel, it said. Someone born in this world but touched by the other. Someone who could commune with the dead, bridge the gap between life and death, and eventually serve as a living anchor for the entity's full manifestation."
My blood—what was left of it—ran cold.
"The virus. The apocalypse. That was to create me?"
"The virus was to create conditions for you. Awakened powers. Zombies for you to claim. An army for you to build." Morgan's voice broke slightly. "Twenty million people died in the first week. Billions will die before it's over. All so you could become what the entity needs."
------------------------------
I stood.
The chair crashed backwards.
"You KNEW? You knew this was coming and you did NOTHING?"
"We tried!" Morgan rose too, matching my fury with exhausted desperation. "We tried everything! We tried to kill it—it's indestructible. We tried to contain it—it laughed at us. We tried to warn the government—they said we were insane. What were we supposed to do? Go public? Tell the world that an elder god was about to wake up and eat them all?"
"You could have—"
"WHAT?" Morgan slammed his hands on the table. "What could we have done that wouldn't have caused mass panic, civil collapse, and nuclear war? At least this way, some people survive. At least this way, humanity has a chance to adapt."
"By sacrificing billions?"
"By buying time." Morgan's voice dropped. "The entity was going to wake eventually. Whether we helped or not. The virus accelerated its timeline, yes, but it also created something it didn't expect."
I froze.
"What do you mean?"
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Morgan sat back down slowly.
"The entity planned for you to be its vessel. A necromancer. Powerful. But ultimately controllable. A puppet that would serve its purpose and cease to exist."
Careful, the entity warned in my head. He approaches truths I have not permitted.
"But something went wrong." Morgan's eyes searched mine. "You're not what it expected. Your power is growing too fast. Too independently. The connection should be one-way—it controls you. Instead, you're developing your own strength. Your own will. Your own army."
"The pattern," I whispered. "Maya said I was feeding the pattern."
"You are. But you're also... corrupting it. Every zombie you claim, every power you develop, every choice you make—it should be making you more dependent on the entity. Instead, it's making you stronger."
ENOUGH.
The entity's voice was no longer amused. It was cold. Commanding. And for the first time, I felt something that might have been fear beneath its ancient presence.
You will not speak of this further, human.
Morgan's mouth opened. Closed. His face went pale, and he clutched his head.
"It's... in my thoughts..." he gasped. "Telling me to stop..."
I reached across the table and grabbed his arm.
"Keep talking. What went wrong? What am I?"
Morgan's eyes met mine—filled with pain and something that looked like hope.
"You're not its vessel," he managed. "Not anymore. You're—"
The wall exploded.
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The entity's servant—the one with empty eyes—burst through the concrete like it was paper.
Behind it came more. Dozens of them. Humans and animals and things that had been both, all corrupted by the entity's influence, all moving with that horrible synchronized purpose.
"The Master is displeased," the first servant said. "The Master does not permit defiance."
I raised my hand.
CLAIM.
Nothing happened.
The servants kept coming. The entity's power wrapped around them like armor, blocking my control.
"You can't claim what's already mine," the entity said—out loud this time, its voice booming from the pit. "These are my true children. My faithful. My hands in this world."
"Then I'll destroy them the old way."
Drake's fire roared to life.
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The battle was chaos.
Drake's flames carved through the servants, burning corrupted flesh and sending creatures screaming into the night. Sarah flickered in and out of visibility, stabbing with borrowed knives and vanishing before counterattacks could land.
My zombies poured into the facility, crashing against the entity's forces like waves against rocks.
Vanguard fought at my side—faster than any zombie should be, his Elite strength matching the servants blow for blow.
But we were losing.
For every servant we destroyed, two more emerged from the shadows. The entity had been preparing for this. Had been building its army for thirty years while we had hours.
"Wei!" Morgan appeared beside me, bleeding from a cut on his forehead. "There's something else you need to know! Something the entity doesn't want you to hear!"
A servant lunged for him.
I caught it by the throat and threw it aside.
"TALK!"
"The reason you're corrupting the pattern—the reason you're growing stronger instead of weaker—" Morgan ducked as fire roared overhead. "It's because you're not the first vessel. You're the second. The entity tried this once before, ten thousand years ago. And that vessel rejected it!"
Everything stopped.
Ten thousand years.
The exact length of my loops.
"What happened to the first vessel?"
Morgan seized my shoulders.
"He became the first Zombie King. Built an army of the dead. Fought the entity for a thousand years. And when he finally lost—when the entity was about to consume him—"
SILENCE!
The entity's rage hit us like a physical force. Morgan flew backwards, crashed into concrete. The servants surged forward.
But I'd heard enough.
The first Zombie King hadn't just fought the entity. He'd found a way to continue the fight across lifetimes. Across timelines. Across ten thousand years of death and rebirth.
He became me.
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The entity's presence pressed against my mind—no longer amused, no longer patient. Pure, ancient fury.
YOU WILL NOT REMEMBER. YOU WILL NOT RESIST. YOU WILL BECOME WHAT I REQUIRE.
I closed my eyes.
And for the first time, I reached back.