Bones cracked and bodies popped as the creatures struck the floor. Most leaped headfirst and quickly died, but the rest kept jumping.

  Truly, their time in the tubes had turned them insane. Poor bastards.

  I turned away from the ridiculous carnage and climbed up the wall until I reached the stairs. The way ahead of me was clear, and so I sprinted toward the ceiling.

  A single line of sky parted the twin metal doors above me as they slowly groaned open.

  But the groaning stopped by the time I reached the top.

  “No!”

  The doors had only opened a couple of inches, maybe half a foot at most. There was no way I could fit through that.

  Without the groaning of the metal doors, I could hear the chewing and slapping of the creatures eating each other. One glance down at that cannibalistic charnel house was enough to make me leap from the stairs to the cracked-open metal doors.

  My blood gloves caught on the cracked doorway, and I hauled myself up, pressing my face to the crack of light.

  I could make out a pure white sky thick with clouds. Cold air licked my face. The sterile smell of winter wind filled my nostrils.

  I needed to escape.

  I gripped the doors, the blood in my gloves surging, my muscles swelling and pumping, and I heaved. There was the tiniest, most minuscule hitch in the hinges. A flake of rust fell down to the mass of chomping flesh below.

  I pulled again, my enhanced strength tearing at my shoulders almost as much as at the doors, my feet kicked in the air as I tried to put every ounce of strength into tearing open the faulty doors, but to no avail.

  The doors wouldn’t open any further.

  It was torture to see the open sky and a snowy mountain top towering above the doors, but being unable to reach it. The sight was quickly driving me to the brink of insanity. What had been a vague and cloying claustrophobia before was now a world shrinking around me and…

  The walls were closing in!

  The floor was rising!

  I glanced back down.

  No… the floor wasn’t rising… but all the creatures were… fusing?

  The creatures that survived falling from the steps — their impacts softened by the corpses of their brethren — had finished feasting on the dead, their bellies bloating and distending, and now they ate each other, dislocated jaws slurping down wriggling limbs. It was a mess of stretched out stomachs and too thin limbs, growing serpentine as it swallowed, as the mob was reduced to a single monster that rolled fat and black eyes towards me.

  “Delicious one,” it said with a gurgling voice. “I want you.”

  I had to get out of here.

  I reached through the gap in the doors. My arm reached through to the elbow, and my bloody gloved hand scrabbled at the other side, looking for purchase. While the doors on my side were metal inlaid with a design so subtle they were almost smooth, the exterior was rough, snow-covered rock.

  My blood slowed as it cooled, the individual flowing ribbons collapsing together, and I struggled to maintain control. I slipped as my fingers dug through the snow, but I kept pushing myself through the gap, digging, and at last I gripped the rock.

  I shouldn’t have glanced down, but when I did, the behemoth below me smiled.

  He was long now, stretched out like a lizard over dozens of feet. His limbs remained spindly, but I could see strength in them as he leaned up against the wall of the shaft and gripped onto the staircase, before pulling himself up as though it were a ladder.

  I didn’t fear injury anymore, but I certainly didn’t want to be eaten.

  Would I wake up as that monster’s shit?

  Would I wake up at all?

  Best not to find out.

  I shoved my arm through the gap in the doors, and when my elbow caught, I forced it again. My elbow snapped, and I thrust my now limp arm through the gap until it caught at my shoulder. Using blood control, I kept my hand clawed and holding onto the rock beneath the snow. With another arm-breaking shove, I forced my other arm through the gap. Now both hands touched the snow on the other side of the doors.

  The creature was halfway up the staircases, pulling himself up as his long, fat body hung below like a candle’s dribbled wax.

  I pressed my face against the gap in the doors. My head was too wide, but there was a straightforward solution for that.

  One I wasn’t looking forward to it at all.

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  Two arms and the control over my blood gave me more than enough strength. I heaved my head up through the gap.

  My neck snapped first, and I hung there for a second with only the control of my blood stopping me from falling at all.

  I thought I’d lost complete control, but I could move again quickly, and I kept pulling. My jaw dislocated. I hitched at my cheekbones, for a moment my bone strained against my strength, and I listened to the creature slithering up the walls beneath me, before a crunch filled my ears.

  For another agonizing second, I couldn’t think, and then I was halfway out of the door, back in my body. I lay flopped on the snow, my skull cracked and crushed, and both shoulders and elbows broken. I was conscious for the sharp crack of my hips splitting. My legs dangled over the shaft as my bloody arms hauled me up the slanted plane of snow and rock that was the opening door.

  A bright sky stretched above me, full of blue and floating clouds and mountains. I wanted to weep with joy, but I wasn’t free just yet.

  It took a lot of concentration, but I could move with my blood taking up the role of broken bone and torn muscle.

  The creature hissed beneath me as I wriggled free. I looked back and saw him reaching for my ankles with gigantic hands.

  “Not so fast, delicious one!”

  I scrambled forward and spilled out of the door as his hand reached.

  His fingers were too fat, but they slimmed and lengthened, growing out like broomsticks before wrapping around my foot.

  “Come back here!” he shouted as he tugged me back down toward the cracked doors.

  His strength was almost overwhelming, but I thrust my leg into a crook in the rock for leverage. Pinning myself in place outside of the doors, I reached down to grab his fingers in my bloody gloves.

  “No!” I shouted. “You’re coming up here!”

  I yanked at his fingers, my bloody gloves squeezing deep into the pallid flesh and striking bone. I wrenched the fingers free from my foot and heaved. His wrist struck the door and wedged. He shrieked as I twisted and pulled at his hand.

  “Let go!” he shrieked. “I’ll kill you! Let go!”

  “You sound like you’re distressed,” I said. “Why don’t I give you a hand?”

  His tugging slackened for a second.

  “What?” he said.

  Confusion was the last sound I heard in his voice before I ripped his hand off at the wrist. Blood spouted and sprayed through the gaps in the doors. He fell to the bottom of the shaft with an echoing thunk.

  A deep groan shook the ground as the shaft doors swung closed. They sealed shut, and suddenly there was no sign of the facility below.

  I sat on a snowy mountaintop, surrounded in steaming, blood-drenched snow, holding a hand the size of a door.

  “Yes!” I shouted. “I’m free! I fucking did it!”

  I lay back in the snow, letting the little eddies of wind carry away the sound of my bones cracking back into place. I grew slightly peckish as I healed, and the sky grew darker. The thought of standing and walking anywhere was abhorrent — I would need to use my blood control to move, and my mind was like fried noodles.

  I really hadn’t realised how on edge I had been the whole time I was in the facility… not just the last week, but all those years.

  Now I was out, and I lay back as I waited for my body to fix itself.

  The process was rather draining. Truly, healing bones sucked.

  It was dark by the time I’d healed enough to walk with my body instead of my mind.

  I stood in a hurry to be on my way.

  It was nice not to feel claustrophobic again, but I really didn’t enjoy the cold. I didn’t feel pain, or the cold really, but I had too many memories of the horrors of winter and frostbite to enjoy hanging around here longer than I needed to.

  I’d surveyed the area as I healed, and so I started down a trail I’d spotted earlier.

  It was easy enough to make my way, even in the dark.

  I took the hand with me because I might need to eat, and because it would make an interesting tale when I brought it to a village.

  Surely enough for room and board at an inn for a week. I needed to know where I was in the world, and once I did, there were several journeys I needed to make.

  My mind held many memories that required answers, and I would have to look all over the empire.

  But I was in no rush right now.

  I broke through some trees and got my first good look at the surrounding region. The hills were like a dark and frozen sea, blurred by the expansive night, but a few towns burned with lights. Another mountain stood nearby, with lights dotted all the way up the grand slope.

  That must be the sect in charge of the area.

  “This way, sect brothers!” shouted a man further down the slope. “The demonic qi our master detected emerged in this direction.”

  “Let us purge the land of this filth!” shouted another.

  “Glory to the Shining Mountain Sect!” shouted a third. “Glory to the Heavenly Phoenix Empire!”

  Well, at least I knew I was still in the empire.

  There were a few more such cries as five men rushed up the slope. I could barely make them out as blurs in the dark as they leaped and bounded up the mountain.

  Not men, cultivators.

  Who were hunting demons.

  A lot of things clicked into place.

  Demonic qi and demonic cultivators were such a perfect explanation for my situation, I felt embarrassed I hadn’t thought of it before.

  I threw away the hand I was gnawing on with a sickened expression. To think I was eating a demon?

  Wait…

  I stared at my own hands in the light reflecting off the snow. Was I a demon?

  The cultivators got closer.

  I’m not stupid, I know how bad my situation looked. If I waited for the cultivators, they would, at best, hack me to pieces before continuing, and at worst, bring me back to their sect to be dissected.

  Or, they might stick me back in the facility.

  Nope.

  I was lucky to escape the demonic shaft that imprisoned me, and that was with no active guards. My hopes of escaping a fully manned sect were dismal.

  So I did the only logical thing.

  With blood surging through my muscles, I threw myself back up the path toward a ledge I’d found that overlooked the opposite face of the mountain. The drop below was stark, but the view was magnificent. There were fewer towns in that direction, tiny spots of light amongst the dark, undulating land, but what interested me most was the sliver of a moonlit river far below.

  Very far below.

  “I found something!” one cultivator shouted nearby.

  It must be the hand. They were getting close.

  “For glory!” one of them shouted as they crashed through the trees behind me.

  There wasn’t any more time.

  “For freedom,” I muttered to myself.

  Before the cultivator could get any closer, I leaped off the cliff.