The forest’s leaves seemed to bend towards Venli, inching closer towards her skin. The hairs on her spine began to tilt upwards, and so did her head, as she lifted it to view this... thing. The spectres eyes seemed burned out, as if somebody had scraped them out with a scalpel. Its ethereal sleeves hung low from its eldritch extremities, and they swept across the ground as it moved towards Venli. She stood there, frozen with terror, as the ghost edged ever closer. First, she felt it’s cloak meld into her skin, disappearing within her. She felt the pain of a thousand searing knives, and collapsed, falling unconscious. And yet, the spirit descended upon her. It sank into her body, until there was no spectre to see, only Venli’s cold, dead body. Slowly, however, Venli began to rise again. The plants she stood upon withered and died, and her skin was cold. The colour faded until it began to grey, and it became tighter, stretching across her skin. When she began to move back to where she came, the skin ripped across her joins, and yet no blood came out, for the inside was necrotic, and reeked of stinking flesh. Parts of it dropped out as she walked, leaving her body behind, until she was an amalgamation of ethereal substance and decayed major organs. However, despite her missing flesh, despite the lack of blood or the bronchi for breathing, her heart still pumped, her lungs still pulsed. Only her brain seemed to have stopped doing anything.

“No!” He thought. They could not do this! If only they knew his capabilities. Though his body had decayed, his mind had remained true, and so Michael had cultivated it, grown it within himself. Years of theorising and thought experiments can make even the dullest of people become erudite savants. And so he devised his own way to heal himself. It worked. His fingers had already begun to twitch, aching to feel once more. His propriocognition told him that, anyway. His eyesight was still gone. But he had recovered his hearing, fixed the auditory nerve. But what he heard shocked him. He heard voices. He didn’t recognise them. They were muffled, and he could only hear the occasional word. But still, he could hear them. “He is in a vegetative state. I am sorry, Ma’am, but there is no treatment we can offer him. It is too expensive to keep him of life support. Please, just think about it. No! If only they knew the things he could do. Thousands of new inventions, diagrams and laws of physics. They cannot do this to him!