Primordial Awakening: I Breathe Skill Points!-Chapter 79: The Stumble In Darkness

The phosphorescent glow from the stair edges provided just enough light to reveal their immediate surroundings as they began their descent—barely enough to see the outline of each step, just sufficient to avoid tumbling headfirst into the abyss below. The Shadow Path wasn’t a continuation of the stairs—it transitioned after perhaps twenty steps into a narrow tunnel that stretched ahead into darkness the faint glow couldn’t penetrate, like the throat of some cosmic beast extending into infinite depths.

The phosphorescence faded as they moved deeper into the tunnel, the glow diminishing with each step until it was practically useless, providing nothing more than a vague suggestion of where floor met wall. The darkness closed in around them like water filling a sinking ship, absolute and suffocating.

"We need better light," Tank said, his voice coming out oddly muffled despite being only a meter ahead of Zeph, the words arriving distorted and delayed as if traveling through water. "I cant even see my own boots, let alone where we’re—"

Tank’s words cut off abruptly with a startled grunt.

There was a stumbling sound, the scrape of armor against stone, a metallic clatter as his shield struck the wall. Tank’s massive frame lurched forward, arms windmilling for balance, boots scraping against something on the floor that shifted and rolled under his weight with a sound like dry branches snapping.

"Fuck!" Tank’s curse echoed in the confined space, his usually steady voice pitched high with surprise and disgust. "I stepped on something! Something that definitely shouldn’t be—"

He caught himself against the wall before falling completely, but the damage was done. Whatever he’d stepped on had made a sound that set every nerve in Zeph’s body screaming warnings—brittle things breaking, hollow things cracking, organic matter compressed under heavy boots.

"What was it?" Kael’s voice came from somewhere in the darkness, tight with fear that he was trying and failing to suppress. "What did you step on?"

"I don’t know," Tank said, and for the first time since entering the ruins, he sounded genuinely unsettled. His breathing was heavier now, audible in the oppressive silence. "But it felt like... it crunched. And it’s cold. Very cold. Not metal cold. Something else."

"Something else?" Seris’s voice cracked slightly. "What do you mean something else? Tank, what did you step on?"

"I said I don’t know!" Tank snapped, then caught himself, forcing his voice back to something resembling calm. "Sorry. I just... whatever it is, I don’t want to know what it is while standing in complete darkness. Can someone please get some light before my imagination makes this worse than it probably is?"

The darkness pressed in heavier now, more oppressive, as if whatever Tank had disturbed had awakened something in the shadows. The breathing of the ruins seemed to pause for a moment, like lungs holding breath in anticipation, like the entire structure was waiting to see what would happen next.

"Light!" Kael’s voice was sharp with panic barely controlled. "Someone get light NOW before I completely lose my shit!"

"I’m trying!" Seris’s voice came back, frustrated and afraid. "My pack strap is caught on something and I can’t—just give me a second!"

"We might not have a second," Whisper said quietly, which was exactly the wrong thing to say for group morale.

The sound of hands fumbling through packs became frantic, weapons scraping against armor in the dark with sounds that set teeth on edge. Someone—probably Kael—muttered a continuous stream of profanity under his breath, words running together in a litany of fear. Metal clinked against metal. Fabric rustled. Breathing grew more labored as panic started to override training.

"Got it!" Seris announced triumphantly.

Then a soft glow bloomed like a flower opening in fast-forward— Seris had activated a glow crystal first, a fist-sized chunk of treated quartz that produced steady illumination through alchemical processes. The light was pale blue-white, harsh and clinical, casting stark shadows that made everyone’s faces look skeletal and corpse-like.

The light revealed what Tank had stepped on.

A body.

Or what was left of one.

"Oh fuck," Kael breathed, his voice going high and thin. "Oh fuck, oh fuck, that’s a person. That’s a dead person. Tank stepped on a dead person."

The corpse was old—ancient, perhaps, though it was impossible to tell exactly how long it had been dead. The flesh had long since decayed to the consistency of leather, shrunken tight against bones that showed through in places where the skin had torn or rotted away completely. The face was a nightmare of preserved horror—eye sockets empty and dark, jaw hanging open in a silent scream that had probably been the last sound the person made before death claimed them. Scraps of cloth clung to the withered frame, suggesting this had once been an expedition member, someone who’d descended into these ruins seeking fortune or knowledge and found only death in the breathing darkness.

The body was positioned awkwardly, twisted in a way that suggested it had died while trying to crawl, trying to escape something. One skeletal hand was extended forward, fingers curled as if grasping for salvation that never came. The other arm was bent at an impossible angle, broken in multiple places, bone fragments visible through rotted tissue. The corpse’s spine was curved unnaturally, suggesting whatever had killed this person had done so violently, breaking them before they died.

"Oh god," Kael whispered, his voice cracking as his eyes fixed on the corpse with horrible fascination. "Oh god, oh god, is that—"

"It’s a corpse," Whisper confirmed with the kind of clinical detachment that suggested they’d seen plenty of dead bodies before and had long since stopped being bothered by them. "Old one. Looks like they’ve been here a while. Decades, maybe. Hard to tell with the preservation conditions in these ruins."

"Preservation?" Seris’s voice went up an octave, threatening to slide into hysteria. "You’re saying the ruins preserved the body? Why would it—" She cut herself off, seemed to realize the implications of what she was saying. "Oh fuck. Oh fuck, it’s keeping them. It’s collecting them like trophies."

The realization hit the group like a physical blow, like ice water thrown in faces already numb with fear. The ruins weren’t just killing intruders—it was keeping the bodies, preserving them, adding them to some macabre collection in the darkness. This person had died alone in the Shadow Path, and their corpse had remained here, twisted and broken, a warning that no one would ever see until the next group of idiots descended into the same death trap.

Tank had stepped directly on the corpse’s ribcage, which had collapsed under his weight with that sickening crunch they’d all heard. Pieces of bone protruded from his boot treads, fragments of someone who’d probably had hopes and dreams and people waiting for them to return home. Someone who’d probably stood in a chamber just like they had, volunteering or being chosen, descending into darkness thinking they were brave or strong or lucky enough to survive.

"I stepped on someone’s chest," Tank said, his voice hollow with horror, all his usual confidence stripped away by the reality of crushed bones stuck to his boots. "I crushed their ribs. I crushed a dead person’s ribs like they were dried leaves."

"To be fair," Whisper said with spectacularly inappropriate timing and a complete lack of social awareness, "they probably weren’t using them anymore. The ribs, I mean. Being dead and all."

The attempt at humor fell so flat it might as well have been crushed by Tank’s boot alongside the ribcage. No one laughed. No one even acknowledged the comment. They were all staring at the corpse with varying expressions of horror and dread, processing the visual confirmation that yes, the Shadow Path killed people, and yes, those people stayed dead and un-recovered in the breathing darkness forever.

"Not helping," Kael said weakly, his face gone pale in the blue-white glow. "Really, really not helping right now."

"I’ve got two more of these," Seris said mechanically, holding up the glow crystal with a hand that trembled visibly, her voice operating on autopilot while her mind was clearly elsewhere. Her voice sounded strangely distant despite being only a few meters away. The acoustic properties of this place were fundamentally wrong, as if the air itself was interfering with sound transmission or absorbing certain frequencies. "They’ll last maybe six hours each before the alchemical charge depletes completely. So we have... eighteen hours of light total if we’re careful about it."

"Eighteen hours," Kael repeated numbly. "To get through whatever killed—" he gestured at the corpse, "—that person. And probably a lot more people we haven’t found yet."

"Don’t," Tank said sharply, his command voice returning as he forced himself back into leader mode despite having just crushed a corpse’s ribcage. "Don’t go down that road. We knew this was dangerous. We knew people had died here. Seeing the evidence doesn’t change our situation—it just confirms what we already knew."

It was a good attempt at maintaining morale and keeping the group focused on survival rather than spiraling into panic, but his voice shook slightly on the word "evidence," betraying that he was just as freaked out as everyone else. The mask of confidence was cracking.

Kael produced another glow crystal with fumbling hands that nearly dropped it twice before getting it activated, his fingers trembling so badly he almost lost his grip entirely. This one emitted warmer orange-yellow light that was somehow less harsh on the eyes than Seris’s clinical blue-white. The two light sources combined created a bubble of visibility perhaps ten meters in diameter, maybe twelve if you squinted and pretended the shadows weren’t writhing at the edges like living things. Beyond that radius, the darkness pressed in like a physical wall, like something solid and alive that resented the intrusion of illumination into its domain and was just waiting for the crystals to burn out so it could reclaim its territory and add five more bodies to its collection.

The combined light revealed more details about their surroundings and about the corpse, details Zeph wished had stayed hidden in darkness where imagination could make them less concrete, less real.

The body wasn’t alone.

Now that they had proper illumination, Zeph could see other shapes in the shadows at the edge of the light’s reach. More bodies. More corpses in various states of decay, positioned along the walls like some sick gallery display, like the ruins was curating a museum of its victims. Some were fresher than others—one looked like it might have been dead only weeks, still wearing recognizable expedition gear that hadn’t fully rotted yet. Another was nothing but bones held together by scraps of dried tendon, arranged in a sitting position against the wall as if resting, as if it had simply decided to take a break and never gotten back up.

"There are more," Kael said, his voice barely above a whisper, as if speaking too loudly might wake the dead or attract whatever had killed them in the first place. "Oh gods, there are so many more. This isn’t just one person who got unlucky. This is... this is a graveyard."

"A graveyard implies someone buried them with respect," Whisper observed with their usual unhelpful precision. "This is more like a dumping ground. Or a larder. Hard to say which is worse."

"Definitely not helping!" Kael’s voice went up another notch. "Why are you like this? Who talks like this?"

"Someone who’s seen enough death to stop pretending it’s dignified," Whisper replied evenly. "Death is messy and random and these people died badly. Pretending otherwise is just lying to ourselves to feel better."

"I would very much like to lie to myself right now!" Kael shot back. "I would love to engage in some comforting delusions instead of staring at a hallway full of corpses!"

"Both of you, stop," Tank ordered, his voice carrying authority again even as his eyes kept darting to the bone fragments stuck to his boots. "Fighting each other doesn’t help. Whisper, maybe dial back the morbid commentary. Kael, try to breathe. Seris, how are you holding up?"

Seris laughed, but it was the kind of laugh that was one step away from screaming. "How am I holding up? I’m standing in a tunnel full of dead people that the ruins preserved like sick souvenirs, we have eighteen hours of light to get through unknown dangers, and we have no idea if the Light Path group is doing better or worse than us. How do you think I’m holding up?"

"Fair point," Tank conceded. "Stupid question. Let me rephrase: are you going to fall apart right now, or can you keep moving?"

"I can keep moving," Seris said, and her voice steadied slightly with the concrete question, with having a task to focus on instead of existential dread. "I’m terrified, but I can keep moving. Ask me again in an hour."

"That’s all I can ask for," Tank said. He looked down at his boots, at the bone fragments, and grimaced. "I’m going to scrape this off before we move. Just... everyone look away for a minute."

The sound of Tank scraping bone fragments off his boots against the wall was somehow worse than looking at the corpses. The grinding, scratching sound seemed to echo forever in the muffled acoustics of the tunnel.

Whisper didn’t produce light of their own. Instead, they seemed to fade slightly at the edge of the combined glow, becoming somehow less visible despite being fully illuminated. A skill activating, Zeph realized—something that made them naturally hard to perceive, difficult to focus on, easy to overlook even when staring directly at them. Probably very useful for a rogue, and deeply unsettling to watch in a passage full of corpses where anything could be lurking in the shadows pretending to be just another body until it moved.

Zeph kept his own light sources stored for now. Better to conserve personal resources and let others burn through their supplies first. His enhanced perception worked reasonably well in the available light, good enough to spot immediate threats if they emerged from the surrounding darkness. Good enough to count the corpses lining the passage—he stopped counting at fifteen, decided that knowing the exact number wouldn’t improve the situation or their odds of survival.

"Can we please," Kael said with impressive restraint given the circumstances, his voice shaking but controlled, "get the fuck away from the corpse pile before something decides we should join them? I really, really don’t want to become a permanent fixture in the Shadow Path’s death gallery."

It was the most sensible thing anyone had said since entering the Shadow Path.

"Agreed," Tank said, finished with his grim task of corpse-removal from his boots.Agreed," Tank said, finished with his grim task of corpse-removal from his boots. "Formation time. And we’re doing this properly now because I am not stepping on another dead person. Whisper, you’re on point. Your perception is better than mine and you clearly have no emotional reaction to corpses, which is disturbing but currently useful. I’ll stay right behind you with shield ready. Kael, you’re third. Seris, fourth. Zeph, rear guard."

"Why am I rear guard?" Zeph asked, though he didn’t actually object. Rear guard was the position he wanted.

"Because," Tank said with the patience of someone explaining obvious tactical decisions to a child, "your AGI is highest, which means you can react fastest to threats from behind. Also, and I mean this with respect, you’re the one I trust least to warn the group before doing something that benefits you personally."

It was a fair assessment. Zeph couldn’t even argue with it.

"Besides," Whisper added, somehow appearing right next to Zeph despite having been several meters away a moment ago, "rear guard gets to run away first if everything goes catastrophically wrong. Best position for a survivor."

"That’s not comforting," Kael muttered.

"It wasn’t meant to be," Whisper replied. "It was meant to be true."

And then Zeph noticed something that made his enhanced perception snap to full alert.

One of the corpses near the edge of the light—the one positioned sitting against the wall, the one that was mostly skeletal—had moved.

Not much. Just slightly. A subtle shift of position, a slight turn of the skull, as if whatever remained inside that hollow bone cage was tracking their movement.

Watching them.

Deciding if they were prey.

"Tank," Zeph said quietly, his voice cutting through the group’s nervous chatter. "We need to move. Now."

"What? Why—"

"Because," Zeph interrupted, his eyes never leaving the sitting corpse that was definitely, absolutely, impossibly shifting in the shadows, "I don’t think all of these bodies are actually dead"​​​​​​​​​​​​​​