Groaning, Asher massaged his calves and hissed through clenched teeth as he experienced the worst charley horse of his life. He’d never really had the time or the inclination to work out back on Earth, and he was paying dearly for that decision now. Straining his body in order to use Astral Dip after sprinting up so many stairs had clearly been too much for his poor muscles.

  If I get out of this blasted tower alive, I swear I’ll pick up jogging or something.

  After a few excruciatingly painful minutes of rocking back and forth in the darkness, the cramping in his legs finally went away, and Asher managed to stand up. His legs were shaking like a newborn fawn, but at least he could walk. Whatever key was hanging from the demon’s neck must not have been for this room, as despite the horrified look on the demon’s face when it realized Asher had somehow bypassed the door, it hadn’t followed him inside.

  Why was it so freaked out anyway?

  Asher tried to check out the room he’d stumbled into, but unlike the rest of the tower, there weren’t any torches lining these walls. Fumbling blindly into his recently acquired pack, he found the box of sticks that looked like homemade matches and tried to light one. Hopefully these were in fact matches and not medieval sticks of dynamite or the like.

  A small but bright fire ignited on the end of the stick, and Asher glanced around the room in the flickering light, surprised by what he found.

  The room was small, barely larger than the bathroom in his apartment back home. The only furnishing was a single stone pedestal placed directly in the center of the room, holding a strange assortment of old junk carefully placed in a ring-like formation. Each of the antiques were different, yet they all yielded a new message when he looked at them that he’d yet to see from his Identify ability.

  [Iron Locket] - ???

  [Child’s Toy] - ???

  [Wedding Ring] - ???

  There were fourteen objects sitting equidistant from one another, and every one of them gave him the distinct sensation that his Identify ability was too low level to work on them.

  I probably shouldn’t touch them in that case. I’m not sure why someone would go to all the effort of enchanting a child’s toy to such a degree, but I don’t want to find out.

  Scratching his head at the odd discovery, Asher realized there was one more object sitting on the pedestal he’d almost missed entirely in the dim, wavering light of the primitive match.

  Placed in the dead center of the ring, surrounded by the different antiques, was a tiny black marble. Asher almost hadn’t noticed it because ‘black’ was an understatement.

  The marble was a void. An unnatural hole that consumed the very light itself and refused to reflect even the slightest fragment coming from his match. Before he even knew what he was doing, Asher realized he’d been drawn to the marble like a moth to a flame. All of a sudden he was holding the tiny sphere between his thumb and forefinger, staring deep into the seemingly endless void within. Even the new floating text barely managed to pull his gaze from the marble’s draw.

  Element: Eternity – The Eternity Element. Embrace Eternity Itself.

  Would you like to absorb the Element: Eternity?

  Well that’s horrifyingly ominous.

  Unlike his Spatial or Knowledge elements, this new element didn’t have much in the way of an explanation. Though he had a whopping sample size of two, so that didn’t necessarily mean all that much. Turning the black void this way and that, Asher hesitated. There was a lot he didn’t know about this new world. What if certain Elements were banned. Or even harmful to the user? The last thing he needed was to escape the wizard’s tower only to get executed in the first town he found because he’d absorbed an evil Element he’d discovered behind a locked door in a walking corpse’s house.

  Yet despite all that, there was some mystical allure to the tiny element that he couldn’t understand. A strange sensation of security and safety that radiated off the miniature hole in reality he held between his fingers, promising him if he’d just accept the Element into his body everything would be okay.

  Asher managed to hold out for a few more seconds, his odd desire to consume the Element warring with his healthy fear of the unknown, before he remembered the monstrous demon waiting to turn him into paste the moment he left the tiny room he was standing in. What was the point in worrying about the future when he probably wouldn’t even have one without consuming the new Element?

  Praying he wasn’t making a huge mistake, Asher accepted the floating prompt, watching for the same crack that had appeared on the Knowledge element when he’d accepted it into himself. But to his surprise, no crack appeared to mar the edge of the unsettling void. Twisting the sphere around in his fingers, he looked at it, puzzled.

  Wait… is it getting larger?

  Sure enough, the small sphere that had been the size of a coin was suddenly large enough to fit comfortably in the palm of his hand. A few seconds later, and it was like he was holding the world’s darkest baseball. Asher didn’t even get the chance to scream as the sphere’s rate of expansion exploded, enveloping him in the blink of an eye and returning him to darkness once more.

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  Eternal Regeneration (passive) – Lvl 1 – As long as you live, you will heal.

  At first, Asher freaked out, thinking that the tiny void had eaten him whole. It took him a few seconds to realize he’d just dropped his match in his panic, and he was once again without a source of light. Chuckling at his own nerves, he read over his new ability, barely believing his own eyes.

  “Eternal Regeneration,” he muttered, staring at the floating words. The description made it pretty clear that he could still die if he wasn’t careful, but he suddenly felt a lot better about his odds of getting out of this tower alive. While rereading his ability, he felt a strange tingling sensation spreading throughout his legs. To his shock and delight, he realized the regeneration he’d just gained was healing his sore muscles from his mad dash up the tower.

  It took about fifteen seconds, but before he knew it his legs felt better than ever. Bouncing on the balls of his feet, Asher grinned.

  Alright, survival is looking less bleak! Now I just have to avoid getting decapitated by anything, and I can run away and heal.

  So how do I get past the roided out demon that looks like it could snap me in half?

  Despite how excited he was for his new power, Asher didn’t think it would help much with the demon waiting in the stairwell. None of his fancy magical powers did anything for his durability, and as a mortician’s apprentice, he knew better than anyone how fragile the human body really was. A simple knock to the back of the head could kill him if he was unlucky, let alone an eight-foot-tall demon.

  Rubbing his chin, Asher thought about his options.

  Option one. Use Astral Dip to return to the stairwell and pray the demon doesn’t splat me like a bug.

  Less than ideal.

  Option two. Use Astral Dip to go through the wall and pray I survive the fall.

  Curious about just how high up he was, Asher carefully felt his way through the darkness to the edge of the room before slipping into the astral realm and sticking his head through the wall.

  Immediately, he realized he was at least ten or so stories up, and he quickly pulled his head back in, nearly falling on his butt again.

  Okay, not liking my odds of surviving a fall from this height any more than my odds of getting past the demon.

  Wait… am I in a forest?

  Steeling his nerves, Asher stuck his head out of the wall once again, this time focusing on his surroundings rather than how high up he was.

  Sure enough, he could make out a sea of trees stretching from the base of the tower off into the horizon. There were a few mountains off in the far distance, and he thought he saw a couple of clearings dotting the woods here and there, but he definitely didn’t see anything that resembled civilization.

  Pulling his head back in, Asher leaned against the pedestal, realizing the flaw in his plan.

  Well crap. Even if I get out of this tower, where am I supposed to go? I suppose it makes sense that the undead wizard would build his tower far away from prying eyes, but that throws a real wrench in my escape plans.

  Even so, one problem at a time. Let’s get out of the tower before worrying about anything else.

  Seeing as the first two options both led to his likely rather painful death, Asher tried to come up with a third option. If he couldn’t Astral Dip through the door, and he couldn’t dip through the wall…

  Realizing he’d failed to consider the obvious, Asher shook his head, grinning at his latest plan. It was riddled with unknowns and still dangerous, but it was a hell of a lot better than fighting the demon or base jumping without a parachute.

  Taking a deep breath, Asher dipped into the astral realm.

  And let himself slip through the floor.

  Despite knowing what was coming and bracing himself, Asher still landed hard as he fell through the floor into the room beneath him. Hissing in pain at what felt like a sprained ankle after dropping ten feet onto solid stone, he quickly took in his surroundings, wanting to make sure there wasn’t another large demon waiting to crush him.

  Instead, his eyes widened as he realized he’d fallen straight into some sort of horrific nightmare.

  The room was filled to the brim with bones. Organized by size, condition, and shape, the mountains of bones filled dozens of barrels scattered around the room. Some of the bones looked eerily familiar and were almost certainly human, while others appeared far too large to be from any animal he’d ever heard of. Asher stared in shock at the insane collection, realizing there was a very good chance his own bones might end up stored in this room one day if he didn’t figure out a way out of here.

  At least the wizard went through the effort of cleaning them. Otherwise…

  Shivering at what the room would have looked like with blood and flesh hanging off all the gathered bones, Asher checked his foot. It had taken his newfound regeneration nearly a full minute to fix his sprained ankle, meaning the worse the injury, the longer his healing would take. He’d have to be careful going forward not to get hurt so badly that his healing would be outpaced by his injuries.

  Once he was confident his ankle was good as new, Asher steeled himself and slipped through the floor once more. This time he managed to land without hurting himself. Looking around, Asher took in the familiar scene before him.

  This room was some sort of morgue. There were a half dozen dead bodies each lying on simple stone slabs, and each of the corpses were in various stages of examination. The room wasn’t cold, but seeing as the bodies appeared to be in perfect condition, Asher could only assume the wizard had some sort of preservation spell going on in here.

  A room full of dead bodies wasn’t anything new to him, but Asher still shivered at the thought of how the wizard had accumulated so many. Praying he wouldn’t soon find himself on one of the empty stone slabs, he grabbed a handful of the embalming tools that he recognized and a few that he didn’t before dropping through to the next floor.

  And landed directly on top of an unsuspecting demon.