Erina drew a slow, shuddery breath and stepped away from the thing. More and more capsules loomed from the darkness as she wandered further into the unit. Things in various stages of development and decay rested in their capsules, never to awaken. Some were malformed creatures—embryos that did not belong to humans. A tangle of tentacles. A child with two bestial heads. A mass of flesh lined with vacant unseeing eyes. Awe and terror welled up in Erina's heart. Far more complex than cloning, vastly beyond mere homunculi. Lazarus started from nothing and wasn't satisfied until she fashioned the human form from little more than clay and dust.

  Lazarus had treaded on the domain of the divine and returned accomplished.

  A terminal sat at the very back of the long room, past all of the failed experiments and dead siblings. Erina reached out and touched the keyboard. She felt a tug in her core, and allowed her mana to flow. For the first time in years, the huge monitor powered on.

  It offered a barebones interface with little more than lines of text. Erina blew away some of the dust from the keyboard and began clacking away, searching without knowing what she sought. Files with long strings of numbers and letters for names…

  "Dates?" she muttered to herself. "Shorthand," she decided.

  The files themselves were gone. Only their names and folders remained. Documents, logs, research, metrics, bio, power, model…

  "Model," muttered Erina. She opened it. More dated entries, but near a select few files near the bottom stood out.

  IDP1. IDP2. IDP3. IDP4-final. IDP5-re-final-amended.

  The last one had a file size above zero.

  Erina tried to open it and received a password prompt. She tried a few things—Lazarus' name, password, admin, password1, swordfish.

  She tried her own name.

  A window opened, and Erina's breath hitched. Displaying on the monitor was a transparent view of her own body. It rotated slowly, providing a view of her internal organs. Opaque objects were nestled between the translucent organic parts, attached by lines to extended descriptions on the side.

  There was no heart. A mechanical equivalent rested in its place, colored a unique shade of bright emerald. Half the liver had been cut away or replaced to make room for several machines. One kidney similarly swapped out. The spine seemed anatomically normal, yet its entirety was highlighted like the rest of the implants.

  Erina's hand wandered along the front of her shirt as her eyes wandered the screen. A web of vein-like structures surrounded each artificial part, independent of the circulatory system, integrating the machinery with the rest of her. Eventually, she figured out what she was looking at.

  Magic circuits were intangible channels in the body, sometimes referred to as the flow of chi or chakra. Mana reserves were an equally immaterial aspect of the soul. But right before her, Erina saw very literal magic circuits—wires reaching through every fiber of her. Artificial organs that emulated the conversion and storage of mana.

  Lazarus was no God. These were her compromises. Erina was flesh and blood, but only mostly. Perhaps it wasn't fully accurate to call her human either.

  She couldn't make out the tiny illegible text on the side. She couldn't figure out how to zoom the window either. All she could read was the line in the upper left corner of the screen.

  Iteration Drive Project Emisane Erina, Model 5.

  The only other intact document was a tiny file at the very bottom of the logs folder. All the rest had been scoured from the machine, ensuring no records of what occurred here remained except in the creator's mind. The contents of the one remaining file were brief and simple.

  It's time I buried the past. This is no place to raise a child.

  Erina extended her hand. A small spell circle formed at her fingertips. She could turn back time. Targeting seven years… or perhaps longer. Time flowed differently in the laboratory. Sixteen? With the laboratory willing to aid her, she expected she could do it. She could dig out what information had been scoured from this terminal sixteen years ago.

  But her eyes lingered on the screen. The glowing seals spun slowly before her hand. Lazarus wished to bury these days—to let them sink into the past, and disappear. Two conflicting descriptions bubbled to the forefront of Erina's mind.

  "A witch who would destroy the world…" she mumbled. "A hero with a vision for all future humanity…"

  The seals revolved at her fingertips. Then, slowly, it faded, and she lowered her hand.

  The terminal shut down as Erina stepped away. She made her way back through the dead unit, tracing her steps in the thick dust to the entrance. She kept her head down and gaze on the floor the whole way back, only looking up again when she reached the door.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  "I'm sorry," she whispered to the lifeless room.

  It was cold and silent. Vanished once more into the dark, the room did not respond.

  Erina stepped back. Slowly, delicately, as if closing a casket, she pushed the heavy metal door into its proper place with a deep echoing click of the latch.

  She continued further into the depths with only the sound of her footsteps for company. The light of her butterfly clip cast a pale eerie glow on what little she could see. The catwalk continued down, onwards and onwards. Erina didn't know if she'd been walking for minutes or hours.

  She didn't see the bottom first. She heard it. The sound of her footsteps in the void changed, her echoes returning sharper and quicker until they became one with the original step. A bare, open excuse for an elevator awaited at the end of the long walk, waiting to take her to her final destination.

  A trickle of her mana and it groaned to life. The grinding of old rusted gears and creaking of cables were all too loud in the dark. Erina descended to the absolute nadir of Lazarus' home of several thousand years. There was no place lower than this.

  The gate squealed as she stepped through it. The oppressive darkness receded as the elevator reached the bottom, allowing Erina's light to reach out across her surroundings. Gargantuan steel plates made up the floor, stretching endlessly as the vast empty space above. Down here, she could no longer see the starscape of the primordial stalactites.

  Pieces of rubble and smashed metal the size of houses lay strewn about. Broken units that had snapped off their immense chains fell all the way down here to their graves. Huge lengths of chain lay between the hills and mountains of ruin. Broken-off support beams the size of bridges rested here too. Erina walked through a graveyard of warped steel, surrounded by debris. She looked around as she passed through a particularly dense section. Everywhere she turned was more broken machinery, giant chunks of black plating, tangles of wires and cables thicker than her waist and all long since gone dark.

  Ducking under metal overhangs and skirting between tall armored plates, Erina paused. Her light cast sharp shadows on the object before her. She identified it as a cockpit of some kind, for the gigantic machine whose wreckage she currently stood in the midst of. Dried blood still stained the inside. That piece of house-sized rubble beside it looked like a giant armored head made of steel, its face torn open and smashed to pieces long ago. Even without pouring blood or gory meat, the shredded wires and ruined mechanisms made Erina queasy. She navigated her way through the massive metal corpse and continued on.

  The floor was battered and dented, caved under the tremendous impact of the fallen rubble. Parts of it were missing entirely. Immense cavernous holes where building-sized infrastructure punched clean through, valley-like trenches with equally huge stretches of curled metal torn up from the floor. There was nothing underneath, not even exposed rock. The laboratory that defied space and bent time only opened into infinite nothingness. If Erina were to fall, she would surely fall for eternity.

  Her chest felt tight as she advanced, around the mountains of rubble and under bent twisted beams. One thing remained intact here, its dimensions closest to a skyscraper than anything else. At first, Erina thought it to be an oversized replica of the reactor she saw in Lazarus' current bunker. A titanic base several stories tall with similarly huge cables piled and knotted around it. Huge spires of metal like curved dragon talons reaching high above. And even further up than that, Erina could barely make out a truly gargantuan structure.

  She intensified her light. It was a vast ring—a halo of steel, held aloft by no visible means. From this distance, the catwalks and cabling along its sides looked fit for ants. Gigantic extensions like horns or claws reached down, matching the curved talons jutting from the base.

  Tiny bits of rubble crunched underfoot. Erina took the thin mesh staircase leading up to stand on the base of the machine. An impossibly huge gem was slotted into it, towering far over Erina's head. Her light refracted within it, countless tiny lights staring back.

  Erina had it the wrong way around. This was the original. The modernized reactors of this laboratory and Lazarus' bunker were pale imitations.

  But this one didn't seem to produce any power. Erina extended her arm and focused.

  The mana flowed easily. Immediately, she knew she couldn't power it. It would take at least a thousand of her to activate the system. But there was something else here with her—something that was both alive and not in its own right.

  Drip. Drip. Droplets from high on up became tiny trickles became steady falling streams. Primordial mana fell blindly and then rose from its stagnant puddles and pools, airborne flows seeping into the seam between gem and base. One by one, the distant stars above turned on. The laboratory answered to its master. The gate recognized its rightful owner.

  The laboratory tremored. The gemstone the size of a skyscraper rumbled loose from its casing, hovering high in the air as yellow light sparked within it. Huge runes in a script Erina didn't recognize formed, etched in divine gold and white. Lines of the same color traced along the inner edge of the halo, completing mirror sigils above and below. Hundreds of thousands of runes in the common script adorned the inside of the lines, streaming endlessly across the wildly complex web of designs filling the spell circles.

  A powerful shockwave rushed out, kicking up dust and nearly blowing Erina off her feet. She staggered back, shielding her face from the rushing wind and blinding light. As it died down, she hesitantly lowered her arm, blinking and squinting against the brightness cutting through the dark.

  It was a golden tree of pure light. Its branches stretched beyond her ability to comprehend, their figures blending together and impossible to count through each other. Thick dense roots as numerous as the branches covered the floor, pouring from the base and spilling in every direction. The tree spread seemingly to the horizons, the roots winding down into the trenches and descending into the void below.

  Erina approached right up to the trunk as her eyes adjusted. The light grew more bearable. Erina stopped shying away. She took a better look at it, and then stepped even closer in awe. The tree was made of billions of tiny individual particles, thin filaments of light weaving them together. Tinted light yellow by the glow of the orbs, countless little reflections of Erina looked back at her with the same awestruck expression.

  Her shoulders loosened. A breath escaped her. Her body totally relaxed, entranced by the light.

  It wasn't a step. Without a single thought in her mind, Erina pitched forward and fell into the world beyond.