He kept moving, mapping mentally as he went. The outer ring seemed to spiral around a central mass of stone. Whatever mattered most—Lilith’s inner sanctum, the Rotfather’s heart, or both—would likely be buried in that core.

  But corridor after corridor was empty. No servants. No thralls. No echo of heels on stone. The silence felt deliberate now, not neglect.

  Have they all gone out together? Or are they somewhere I’m not supposed to reach?

  A side door opened into a small chapel-like room. Benches faced a raised slab, almost like an altar. Above it, a relief depicted a humanoid form hanging upside-down, arms spread, veins trailing downward into a stylized pool. Where the heart should be, the stone bulged outward, carved in grotesque detail, arteries flaring like roots.

  He leaned closer, searching for inscriptions. None. The only text was a single word, carved in a writhing script he couldn’t read—the same language the vampires had used earlier. He traced its shape into his mind to recreate later, then stepped back.

  Tension coiled tighter in his chest. If I break something here, I might trigger a ward she feels. I need information, not a fight on her home turf, whoever or whatever this Lilith is.

  He left the chapel intact.

  Every instinct insisted that answers lay below, not above. Corruption seeped from the ground in most such places; hearts, literal or symbolic, liked depths.

  John found a narrow stair hidden behind a half-rotted tapestry, stone steps drenched in a faint film of slime. He descended into thicker gloom, air turning damp and metallic.

  At the bottom, a corridor stretched out, lined with doors of black iron. He checked each in turn.

  Behind the first: a cell, empty. Shackles bolted to the wall still smelled faintly of blood. Grooves in the floor showed where something heavy had been dragged away—recently enough that the tracks hadn’t filled with dust. No prisoners, no corpses. Just absence.

  Second door: another cell, this one with a cracked crimson cocoon slumped in one corner, its membrane dry and split. Whatever had been inside was gone, leaving only a faint copper tang and a smear on the stone. He imagined humans or elves stored that way, slowly siphoned over days.

  Third and fourth: more cells, empty. One contained a heap of discarded clothing—small tunics, torn dresses, a child-sized boot crushed underfoot. He crouched long enough to note the variety: human cut, elven fabric, even something that might have been dwarf-weave. All trophies without owners now.

  His fists clenched, claws threatening to push through his skin. I came too late for these ones. But not for the next.

  Farther down, the corridor ended in a heavy door banded with black metal. No window, no keyhole—sealed from the other side. He pressed his palm against it, feeling for wards.

  Cold slid into his skin, a numbness that wasn’t physical. There was something behind this barrier—old, awake, and not amused by probing. Not the Rotfather’s heart, but attuned to it, perhaps.

  He withdrew before it reacted more sharply. Forcing entry here would be a declaration of war. He might come back here but it would blow his cover to force entry even if for now it was the only valid clue.

  No other clues. Just more reasons to move carefully.

  He returned to the upper levels and tried the opposite direction, ascending now instead of descending. A spiral staircase hugged the inside of a tower, walls narrowing as he climbed. Arrow slits gave glimpses of the outside: tar-pits burping bubbles, misshapen beasts wandering aimlessly, sky still sick and overcast. No sign of the vampires returning.

  At the top, he stepped into what should have been a watch room.

  Windows ringed the circular chamber, though half were sealed with fleshy growths that pulsed faintly, obscuring the view. A stone table stood in the center, its surface carved with a rough map of the surrounding lands—swamps, spikes of rock, the outline of the castle itself. Someone had once used this as a planning room, maybe before the corruption took over these lands.

  He scanned the carving. Lines radiated outward from the castle insignia, marking known paths through the corrupted lands, maybe patrol routes. One thicker line led deeper inward, toward an area left… blank. No details, no symbol, just a gouged circle where the carver had stopped and hacked away whatever was there. Could this be his destination?

  His fingers hovered over it, jaw tightening. That’s maybe where the heart is—or at least where they think of it. But no distances, no landmarks. Just an idea born of the desperation of not knowing where to look.

  On a shelf against the wall lay a pile of bone tokens scratched with runes. Some bore the same character he’d seen in the chapel, the word under the hanging figure. Others looked like tally marks. He slid a few aside, checking for hidden compartments. Nothing.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  He left the tower more frustrated than enlightened.

  Room after room yielded atmosphere but no data. Guest chambers with canopied beds, sheets stained and stiff. A wardrobe packed with clothes in every style—from elven finery to peasant rags—likely taken from victims and repurposed. A bathing room where the water in the sunken tub had turned to a thin, undulating slime, moving subtly against gravity. A gallery of statues that, at first glance, depicted heroes and monsters mingled… until he realized every “hero” wore an expression of terror, every “monster” one of weary ecstasy.

  The castle told him what it was: a place where corruption was beauty, and beauty a weapon. But it refused to tell him where its master hid.

  All the while, tension threaded his movements. He kept his aura sealed to mere boy-level, claws retracted, mind shield drawn tight in case any mind-reader like the blue demi-god existed here. Every creak underfoot, every distant drip of something viscous, every groan of strained stone pressed the same question into him:

  Where are the vampires? And why is it this quiet?

  If they were hunting, fine, although he felt, it should not be fine, he should save the innocent... If they or even Lilith was watching though, biding her time, this emptiness might be the eye of a storm.

  He knew one thing: he could not blunder straight into the core without any idea of what waited. If someone was watching him and he could not notice, maybe his strength was not as astronomical as he thought. Maybe there were evil demi-gods around or worse.

  He needed information he could read, not what the architecture implied.

  He decided to go back to the door that seemed to hide something. It was a gamble but he used his abnormal strength to force the passage. The presence he felt beyond quieted though, no declaration of war after all. He found some stairs.

  Descending one more flight, he turned down a narrower corridor and caught a different scent—dust, dry and old, undercut with the brittle tang of rotted paper. No perfume. No blood. No mold-sweetness.

  It led him to a pair of tall doors slightly ajar.

  John slipped through and stopped just inside, eyes adjusting.

  Shelves filled the room from floor to ceiling, stretching down aisles like ribs in a beast’s chest. Many leaned at precarious angles, their wood warped; some had already collapsed, spilling their contents into ankle-deep drifts of parchment and broken bindings. The air was thick with motes that glittered in the weak light filtering through a single, grime-smeared window high above.

  He took a few steps in. Under his boot, pages crunched softly—text eaten by time, ink faded to ghosts.

  Rows nearest the entrance held volumes whose spines had entirely flaked off, leaving only pale, anonymous slabs. Farther in, titles still clung in places, sometimes in the common tongue, more often in characters unreadable for him, maybe related to the same harsh language the vampires had spoken. He picked up one cracked tome; it disintegrated at his touch, pages crumbling into powder.

  Not all were dead, though. On a central table lay a cluster of thicker books, stacked haphazardly but not yet fully succumbed to decay. Their leather was cracked but intact, metal corner-guards only lightly corroded.

  He approached, heart rate steadying for the first time since he’d left the bedroom.

  This, he thought, fingers hovering over the nearest cover, might actually talk to me.

  The title was embossed in a jagged script he couldn’t yet read—but books meant knowledge, and knowledge meant patterns he could exploit. Even if the language was alien, diagrams, maps, or repetitive symbols might give him a line on the Rotfather’s heart.

  The castle itself had yielded nothing concrete, only hints and horror.

  The library, though dilapidated, might be a starting point.

  John worked his way through the central table’s stack, slowly, stubbornly.

  He opened one tome with both hands, easing brittle pages apart. Lines of jagged script glared back—harsh hooks and serpentine curves, dense with cramped marginalia and inkblots like dried blood. He traced symbols, searching for patterns: repeated shapes that might be “heart,” “god,” “blood.” Nothing clicked despite his scholar craft. Another book, this time more pictorial—twisted anatomical diagrams, circles around organs, arrows pointing to a central lump stylized as a knot of roots. Helpful, but still mute.

  Minutes bled into what might have been an hour. He skimmed, flipped, squinted, compared glyphs across volumes. The more he tried, the more the text swam. It wasn’t just a new alphabet; the structure itself felt alien, built for minds that reveled in a different logic.

  This is pointless, he admitted finally, jaw tight. I can’t brute-force a whole language in one sitting, not while Lilith or her vampires might walk in at any time.

  He let the book close with a soft thump, dust puffing up around his fingers.

  Then a thought slid into place with the quiet inevitability of a falling stone.

  The skill tree.

  His Sovereign of Paradox tree had been a blank constellation, mocking him with “Undefined” nodes. No pre-made paths, no standard skills. The system had decreed that he must define his own powers, then refused to tell him how. He’d tried before—imagining skills, naming them, pouring intent into the empty branches—only to be met with silence.

  But that was before he’d stood in a forgotten vampire castle, up to his ankles in languages he couldn’t read, with a god’s heart somewhere in the distance and an almost obscene surplus of saved skill points burning a hole in his metaphysical pocket. Not having skills to spend them on and his levelling up and back down with the potions had led to exorbitant numbers.

  He sat down at the table, spine straightening, and summoned his status.

  The translucent window blinked into being. Statistics, titles, the familiar dual-level entries…and the Sovereign of Paradox tree, still a vast scaffold of blank branches labeled only “Undefined.” And one single skill, Paradox Convergence, he had managed to materialize into the tree in the past. The counter at the corner shimmered with an almost mocking generosity: an accumulation of unspent points from all his level-up-and-down potion loops.

  Minor, not earth-shattering, he told himself. No trying to invent “Destroy All Gods” as a test. Something the system can’t claim breaks its own rules as the skill he had created in the past to make mana and aura coexist in one body. Something it could have given someone else, just never did for me.

  He focused on the problem in front of him: texts he couldn’t read. Vampiric records in a tongue that made his head ache. Worlds full of secret languages he’d encountered—weretigress rituals, ancient elven dialects, dragon runes. He needed a foothold, not omniscience.

  He closed his eyes and shaped the idea carefully.

  A skill that lets me understand foreign languages when I hear or see them in written form, as long as they’re common or at least mortal in origin. No instant mastery of divine tongues, no rewriting system code—just comprehension. No offense, no direct combat edge. Utility.