Four weeks had passed since Seyfe set out to retrieve Garuda's Cellik card.
Instead of reaching the next city, he found himself sprinting through a decaying forest, his boots slapping against the damp, uneven ground. Thorned, tentacle-like roots slithered across the forest floor, lashing out from the trunks of twisted, skeletal trees. The very bark seemed alive, groaning with rot and malice, coated in a wet sheen that reflected the sickly green hue of the roots.
One of the roots snapped forward, grazing his cheek. A sharp sting followed — not from the thorn, but from the revolting texture. It was warm, slimy, and pulsating, like diseased muscle wrapped in barbed wire. He grit his teeth, wiping the ooze from his face as he ducked under a broken log, the forest howling behind him.
The broken layer phase had caught him mid-travel — one moment walking a dirt trail toward the outskirt checkpoint, the next, spiraling into fractured reality like glass swallowing his body whole. Now, wherever this was, he couldn't tell if it was a realm, a dream, or a mistake in the world's stitching.
Whatever it was, it wanted him gone.
Seyfe's breath hitched as he ducked another lash from the thorned root, his shoulder scraping against bark — only this bark wasn't wood.
He stumbled into a clearing. For a second, he thought he'd escaped. Then he looked up.
The trees weren't trees.
Their trunks were masses of human flesh, stretched and fused together in unnatural ways. Twitching eyes blinked along the bark, tracking him with disjointed awareness. Bones jutted from soft tissue like splintered branches, their sharp ends draped with ragged, muscular cords. Limbs coiled around one another to form the boughs, some twitching, others limp, as if trying to reach for him but forgetting how.
Seyfe stepped back—then looked down.
The ground beneath him writhed.
What he'd thought were patches of brittle, dead grass were thousands of curled fingers, twitching as if they dreamed of grasping something. Mouths, half-formed and lipless, opened in the soil, mouthing silent words that never reached the air. No breath. No sound. Just empty gasping — a plea? A warning? He couldn't tell.
He staggered back, nausea threatening to rise up his throat. Every part of this place reeked of something fundamentally wrong.
Seyfe forced his breath to slow, steadying his pulse as he edged around a warped trunk. Every movement risked brushing against flesh that twitched reflexively, as if the tree still remembered pain.
He pressed forward, weaving between the living-wood horrors, until he reached a rise where the twisted canopy opened slightly—allowing him a better view of the terrain. The forest spread endlessly, a grotesque imitation of life: pulsating roots, trees with muscle fiber in place of bark, and branches that curled not with the wind, but with intention.
He crouched low behind a knot of fused torsos, watching. The tentacled roots hadn't caught up—yet.
A part of him wanted to believe this was just another nightmare realm, one of many he'd seen. But something here lingered. Not just the stench of rot, but presence. It was familiar… echo-like.
"Echoforms," he muttered to himself, lips dry.
But these weren't formed from the screams of fallen soldiers or tormented civilians. These weren't remnants of personal tragedy.
These were trees.
Or at least, had been.
The thought struck him like a slow, creeping horror.
Echoforms are born of emotion — raw, untethered emotion left behind by the dead. Anger. Sorrow. Fear. All coalescing into malformed existence.
What if… what if these weren't human?
He looked around again, this time with different eyes. The formation of the forest wasn't random. It had rhythm, old growth patterns, communal roots that once reached toward sunlight — now clawing toward the sky in resentment.
"These are trees… angry trees," he whispered. "Old ones. Cut down. Burned. Ripped apart for progress. This… this whole place is their echo."
A twisted, echoform hybrid — born not of human grief, but nature's fury. The emotional residue of an entire forest slaughtered by industrial greed. Trees that wanted to live longer… trees that died hating.
He pressed a hand against a nearby trunk, feeling its slow, shuddering twitch beneath his palm.
"Who knew they could hold a grudge," he murmured bitterly, before yanking his hand back as a fingernail grew out of the bark and tried to hook into his skin.
No path forward, no sky above — but Seyfe had survived worse. Somewhere ahead, there had to be a breach in the realm, or a flicker of stable layer energy.
Tugging his cloak tighter, he began to move again — careful not to make a sound, mindful not to wake whatever slumbered deeper within the trees' collective hate.
Seyfe trudged forward, ears trained to the faint rustling and wet creaks of the echo-trees behind him. The air was thick—not just with moisture, but with something intangible. Like walking through the breath of something ancient, something watching.
His boots squelched against the finger-covered ground, and he paused, wiping slime off his cheek where a low branch had grazed him.
Then he saw it.
Barely visible through the pale green mist, a structure rose out from the forest floor. Not a temple, not quite a ruin—more like a shrine twisted into something unnatural.
It was made of stone, but the stone seemed… infected. Chiseled edges now bulged with the same organic veins that fed the trees. Eyeless faces were carved into the side, stretched and crying, their mouths open mid-scream. A mossy symbol — vaguely runic — glowed faintly on the archway. Seyfe couldn't read it, but the energy pulsing from it told him it was a seal. Old. Not broken, but dying.
He crouched behind a cluster of torso-roots, studying the building's layout. It was sunken slightly into the ground, surrounded by a small clearing — a deliberate one, where no finger-grass grew.
As if even the forest knew not to touch it.
Seyfe's instincts screamed two things at once: Don't go in, and you'll die out here if you don't.
The arch opened to a dark corridor that spiraled downward. No torches. No light fixtures. But the glow from the runes provided a faint visibility as he stepped inside.
The deeper he went, the quieter the forest became — until even the twitching trees outside seemed to disappear from his thoughts.
This place wasn't just old. It was aware.
A low hum vibrated through the walls. Echo energy, but condensed. Focused. Someone — or something — had lived here long enough to try and control it.
And that meant he wasn't the first to be trapped in this realm.
His breath steadied. Maybe this was the break he needed.
Or maybe this place would finish what the forest started.
Either way, he moved deeper.
The hallway eventually widened into a vast atrium, lit in an eerie seafoam green that flickered like a dying pulse. Seyfe stepped forward cautiously, his eyes adjusting to the haze that permeated the air. The temperature dropped, but the humidity remained—it clung to his skin like breath.
Then he saw the chambers.
Lining the walls of the cavernous space, towering glass vats were embedded into the ground and supported by steel-like roots curling up their sides. Inside each container, something shifted—grotesque creatures suspended in viscous green liquid. Each was different, yet all carried that same distorted elegance only a nightmare could design. Long limbs, torn flesh stitched by unfamiliar patterns, eyes that blinked in too many directions, and bones where no bones should be.
But what made Seyfe pause wasn't just the horrors preserved in these vats—it was what powered them.
At the center of the room was a throne made of fused stone and twisted wood, grown into itself like a tumor. Upon it sat a corpse, regal in posture but horrifically violated. The body had no lower half—it had seemingly been grafted into the chair. Its skin was mummified, pulled tight over protruding bones. Wires of vine-like tubes snaked into the ribcage, connecting to a grotesque, pulsating heart exposed in the open chest cavity.
The heart wasn't made of flesh.
It was a green mass of nothingness, a core of raw echo energy shaped like a concept trying to exist—formless, translucent, alive. It beat slowly, each throb sending a ripple of fluid through tubes connected to the vats around the room. The liquid glowed brighter with every pulse, and Seyfe could feel the pressure building.
It's not just sustaining them, Seyfe thought. It's feeding them.
He turned slowly, noticing the walls were plastered in parchment. Hundreds, maybe thousands of sheets layered like scales, each covered in scribbles, formulas, anatomical sketches, and runes. Not the usual enchantment glyphs or augments—these were different. More invasive. The characters had a hungry quality to them, written not to invoke something, but to trap it. Or bind it.
Seyfe scanned the most recent entries and felt a chill up his spine. The research wasn't magical in nature.
It was philosophical. A theory.
"What is the boundary of death if the soul is not removed?""What if memory, intent, and identity could be inscribed into the vessel?""What if the container no longer decays?"
Immortality.
Not by preservation.
But by transmutation.
The twisted forest outside... it wasn't just born from nature's wrath. It was the test bed—the emotional wasteland left by hundreds, maybe thousands, of failed attempts to give the dead a voice and a vessel.
And now, Seyfe realized, he was standing in the place that made them.