《Cult of the Necrophage - [Re;Virus , high fantasy, sensible and logical world]》 Prologue 0 - The big crunch My body was created by a seed from a mortal that has been dead for about 20 million years before the seed took shape. I was the private dimension of Paragon ketz. Most of my compatriots were also created in similar ways. Some are made from pocket dimensions that contain entire civilizations and some like me were created by individualistic mortals. But the natural method of our kind being birthed is from spontaneous existence or the splitting of destroyed dimensions. The difference between artificial and natural dimensions is night and day. How do I know this. I experienced this first hand. Just after becoming truly sentient. A true natural dimension in the hundreds of billions of magnitudes above my own, has attacked me. Only through abusing the power of leftover artifacts, was I able to create a soul and manage to sneak into The attacking dimension. When it has been assimilating what meager inhabitants that i had built up. I have traded a god like existence to a faulty soul creation to be able survive this experience. Then forced to pick over a virus existence to even further my humiliation. I doubt the attacking dimension was even aware that it has destroyed me. But I will never forgive it. There is one thing left to do. instill my presence into a vulnerable world and built up an army to make it out and recover whatever is left of my body. But i don''t hold out much hope. I would probably need to create an all new body. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit. The world I decided on was a small humanoid world, but very similar to one of my own terrestrial worlds. But I have seen records from dimension hoppers that chronicles that humanoid creatures have an unnatural likelihood of spawning off Convergent evolution in seemingly unrelated dimensions. It speaks on the fact that there might be a universe constant that affects all dimensions. But this is convenient for me at the moment. Because its something i am somewhat familiar with. At Least it will help me with developing weapons and technology that matches their bodies. As I made my way towards the planet. I have been greeted by a plethora of alien creatures of alien proportions and qualities. After stretching the soul coating thin from my searching. I was forced to quickly pick a body or else my soul form will start disintegrating. I randomly choose a sentient infant boy. They are born in the poorest continent in the smallest country and in the most impoverished village. The thought process behind this, is that he is perfect to experiment the viability of my infectious form. I wouldn''t want to be captured in my soul form. This is my last chance and death has suddenly become a real possibility for me. Also I might learn that becoming a virus is not that good of an idea, so i want to be able to change my mind. As I over take a complex structure virus inside the boy''s body. I suddenly feel an intense binding feeling and what was thought of as a small dip of my toes has become a full dive to becoming fully and singularly attuned to this life form. Chapter 1 - Plagued prophet. Pov Botiod - patient zero I was born with a birth defect that has left me incredibly sickly from childhood and stunted my growth. All my brothers are already 2 times my size, even when i am twice their age. Over the years, i have learnt to cope with my disabled body. But the struggles my family suffered to support me has left us devastated. We had to sell our possessions to make enough to eat and my mother had to sell her body. Or we would have all died in winter. My father has gone into heavy drinking as a consequence and he beat me and my mother in fits of drunken rage. Everyday i cursed my parents for birthing me and hoped that i would just die and end this miserable existence. But there is nothing you can do to change what is already done. My body is disfigured with boil scars and inhuman proportions. My prospects are to work on thread weaving for the rest of my life, hiding behind closed doors as my family drags food to my doorstep in secret. But I have started to recently hear whispers and visions in the middle of the night, the moments closest to my sleep. Just before fully submerging to unconsciousness. Speaking of a divine paradise named Ardone. A land of great harvest and wealth. Where fairies and children frolicked. A land of eternal and infinite beauty. I relished these moments of rapture. Anticipating the time before going to sleep. Everytime i listened, the visions became clearer and clearer. Until i heard the voice of god. "Spread me" A commandment. Directly from the heavens. Who was i but its humble servant. The only path to Ardone is through spreading my illness. Wait no. This is not an illness but a blessing. I was in fact chosen to carry out this divine mission to prove my worth. Otherwise, how can i be accepted to Ardone. How could this divine land accept anyone but the most deserving. This blessing must be given to others. They have no idea how precious this gift is. They will soon learn about the promised land. "Mother! You must hear this"
Pov Ardone I look over Botiod. My first host. He is kneeling over the corpse of his dead mother and father as he eats their flesh. He is sobbing and asking for forgiveness, but i continue to pump hormones and electrical signals in his brain to communicate and push him to follow my orders. This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. I have not realized this when i chose to pick the form of a virus. But a quirk of this dimension is that souls are held and limited to the capacity of their bodies. So by slightly placing my soul in this pathogen. My intellect fully dropped to nothing and was only able to have moments of extremely fuzzy consciousness when my virility was incredibly high in Botiod''s body and the bodies of the surrounding villagers. But their adult bodies protected them and beat my infection almost the same day of infection and constant and repeated infections rendered them hyperimmune. The only reason I was cognizant enough to order Botiod was that there was a recent birth and my infection passed into the baby directly after birth. I don''t have much time before even they beat me off and i will fall back to unconsciousness. So under this extreme time limit of a few hours maximum. I had to brainstorm with my severely diminished mind. With my addled consciousness, i was lucky to recollect that a good method to hypercharge my soul energy is to use a soul magic ritual that requires the crumbling soul of a recently deceased mortal to empower what little soul energy that my hosts can carry. Now that Botiod smashed his father''s head in with a pot and his mother with a knife. The emanating soul power sobered me up to think of a proper way to survive this situation. If i kept at current course then Botiod would have died in this remote village and i would have died with him with no proper human host. To enact the first part of my plan, Botiod would need bio energy and a lot of it. So as the souls are being consumed by me. Botiod started feasting on their flesh raw. I moved my viral components all over his body reconstructing it. Turning him into a superman like figure or atleast that is the goal. His height changed from pygmy to becoming a still somewhat tiny man. His atrophied limbs into somewhat acceptable thickness. His face and skin rapidly change from scarred and ugly to somewhat human levels. Of course such rapid changes are impossible to make in the time frame that the soul ritual gives me. So i turn my pathogen to do the work automatically and let him continue on with his life "What''s happening to me." The experience is less than pleasant, but he will be able to atleast leave this place and actually spread my viral agents across the world. With no fear of being ousted as the monster he is. With all that done, I am starting to feel drained from the efforts. Fully consuming all the meager energy that the ritual gave me. And the baby already seems to have started to feel better. As my consciousness slips, I close my metaphoric eyes and hope that Botiod manages to not die. Chapter 2 - Ritual of death. I was in a similar state as I always was. Drifting off from absolute unconsciousness and vague awareness. But this time I am surprised to feel mentally invigorated unlike before. Looking down I see the corpses of a family plastered all over a ritual circle. Inside it is a mother and father with their live baby bleeding to death with a knife through its gut. From first glance it seems to me that Botiod has figured out how to create this ritual from the time i used it on his parents or i managed to convey to him how to do it in my non-lucid state. No matter how it happened. I am happy to have finally been given this life line in the form of live human sacrifice. Allowing me to think of ways out of my trapped state. I give him a mental nudge and tell him to spill alot of his blood into the fatally wounded baby. It seems like it was his plan to include the baby in the sacrifice and then eat all their flesh. In the hopes of getting another body modification. Botiod was surprised but was ecstatic to have finally felt my presence in who knows how long since i last met him. He cuts a gigantic cut on his forearm and would have probably killed himself by bloodletting. If i wasn''t fast enough to rush to that spot with viral agents. They quickly kick start the body healing and strategically clot blood in exposed veins to close up. The blood that fell down and drench the quickly dying baby is tainted with my reproducer cells. Making it 10 times harder for the immune system to build up the defenses to build an immunity. And by that time. I should have fully replaced that internal mechanism and allowed my viral agents to fully replace its role. But the baby is currently in critical condition. I force stop the blood pumping from the heart by eating the nerves connecting to the brain. And then force blood clotting to act as an emergency cauterization. Stopping blood loss completely. With the fully plugged veins. I restart the heart with new pathways heavily dilated to allow maximum blood flow in veins that can''t normally handle it. The methods i used were good enough to stabilize the baby. Allowing me to take stock of their physical qualities. The baby is a human male, their body has some indications of birth defects that will lower the quality of their vision, their skin lacks normal elasticity and they have a malformed brain with locks and tangles that might cause aneurysm randomly throughout this infant''s life. I don¡¯t understand enough to fix it, maybe in the future when I supercharge my soul and my thought speed reaches levels high enough to allow learning everything and anything in seconds. But for now i can only keep watch on it and ease symptoms as they come up. But through my fits of unconsciousness. I doubt this infant will become fully viable for proper use, as they could just die when i am unavailable. But it''s still worth it to keep them alive to act as a backup host that would at least allow me to not die instantly. ¡°Raise this child to adolescence.¡± I tell Botiod. I also fixed his body up even further. Making his every breath easier and reversing some of the stunted growth and small imperfections. Making him associate the ritual with personal physical improvement. With so many changes so fast. I already feel the energy from the ritual already draining. Making me feel my thoughts becoming foggy. With a depressing lack of agency to my moments of clarity. I forcefully close my mind and store the soul energy. Falling unconscious instantly. But my body can''t contain this energy so it''s going to dissipate in a few hours anyway.
1 month later. ¡°Sir, we have captured the criminal.¡± Infront of a militarized police officer is a chained handsome large man with adonis-like features. He is chained with steel cuffs and being guided around with spiked man catchers. This novel''s true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. This is Botiod. After the initial success of the second ritual. He became heavily emboldened and maddened with the rush of sculpting his body. Initially I was automatically choosing to change his body. But after he started capturing and kidnapping children to infect with my viral agents. He would pick exactly what he wanted to change. Which eventually was the cause of his capture. It didn¡¯t take long before he massacred towns to consume their flesh and force feed their children his blood. With such a large variety of hosts. I finally gained consistent consciousness. Allowing me to order him more directly and plan his attacks for him. Because of all the things that I can improve. I still don''t understand enough of neurology to do anything but pinpoint which sections communicate with what. So he stayed as ignorant and stupid as he always was. But because he is the only adult and able bodied host i have currently, I am forced to use him to supply me with a consistent supply of fresh vital energy. And you might be wondering why I would still need fresh material. Well I have been trying to edit my own body. My viral form has vital flaws and all the extra soul energy allows my research to progress months of progress in minutes. But I spent this time mostly on researching my physical components and features. As most of my biological knowledge comes from old notes from Paragon ketz. He was a human and didn¡¯t have extensive information on virus biology. And because I wasn''t even a physical creature. I never bothered to learn much. It''s a shame that Botiod got captured. He was attacking his third target in a small trading town and as he was leaving with their infant, he was seen and the whole town was alerted. As a crowd gathered to stop him from running away with the baby, a whole squadron jumped out of the crowd and beat him with clubs and knives. I did minimal healing to keep him from bleeding out. But at this point I knew it was a lost cause. He was found out because he was walking around with his size. Because of how abnormal he was. Almost everyone that saw him remembered him and he was very easy to point out. The town folk that called him out knew he didn''t come with a baby and he was running out with a baby. And coupled with the news of the recent violent deaths with only babies missing from the scene. It wasn''t difficult to come to the correct conclusion. I sense the external presence of the police officers within Botiods body. His body is lacerated and the spikes are digging deep into his skin. Town folk joined in and beat him with sticks and threw rocks. A normal man would have died. But with his giant body, Botiod would have probably survived without my help healing. They drag him to a cell that''s too small for his giant frame. They keep him in this cell for two days. Giving him minimal food and no place to relieve himself. Forced to lay in his own excrement. I was sure to cover with viral agents to infect any future prisoner. And there were some competing infections that tried to take over. But with me acting as an intelligent immune system they lost instantly. Botiod grew delirious in this period. Constantly asking for my help and to be delivered to Ardone. As he grew useless for my purposes. I am tempted to start cannibalizing his body and converting as much of it to viral agents as possible. But this can also be seen as an opportunity. It seems his crimes have crossed a threshold and he is going to be sent to be judged in the capital for his crimes against humanity. I overheard this by listening with the infant''s ears. He was placed in the police office and is going to be sent to an orphanage. Normally murder, burglary and child kidnapping would get you sent straight to a labour camp to die working and slaving away for life. But because of how brutal and vicious his crimes are. He could be sentenced to death directly. But with a body like his. It''s not outside the realm of impossibility that he would manage to survive those bad conditions and act as a distant host. But because of the range of my soul splitting. I would have to choose to either stay attached to Botiod or to choose to stay with the orphaned children. And honestly the choice isn''t hard to make. Botiod is erratic and has been incarcerated. And i can always use the tethered nature of souls to their body and locate him or even take back control of the viral agents in him at any time. So during the time he was incarcerated. I whispered plans and secrets into his ear. Explaining that i won''t be there anymore and he will have to survive for years. Using the left soul energy from his last ritual to think up plans and schemes for him. That energy would have dissipated already, but the capacity of my body has greatly increased with the greater host amounts. So i am able to store it for longer. The cell door swung open and three men dragged him up and shoved him into a carriage with chains all over his body. It didn''t take long for the carriage to get out of my range and I lost connection to him. Good luck. You were my first host. I''ll at least remember that.