Chapter 552

Mei adjusted the strap of her backpack, the humid Malaysian air already clinging to her skin. The jungle was a living entity, a cacophony of chirps, clicks, and rustles that pressed in on her from all sides. This research expedition, meant to document undiscovered flora, was quickly becoming something more.

She consulted the worn map, its edges frayed from use. Professor Rahman had sworn this remote area was untouched, unmapped. "There's magic here, Mei," he'd said, a gleam in his eye, "things hidden from the world."

Mei wasn't so sure about magic. But, something did pull at her. There was no defined route, so she felt a strong feeling of displacement, an unsettling pull towards an unmarked valley. She pressed on, the dense foliage reluctantly giving way before her machete.

The air changed. The constant drone of insects diminished, replaced by an oppressive stillness that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. The light, already filtered through the dense canopy, seemed to dim further, casting long, dancing shadows.

A stone wall. Impossibly smooth, overgrown with thick moss and vines. It shouldn't have been there. This deep in the jungle, such structures were unthinkable. Mei ran a gloved hand over the cool surface, tracing the contours of unseen carvings beneath the vegetation.

"Hello?" she called out, her voice barely a breath in the stillness. Only the echo of her own voice answered.

With a surge of adrenaline, she hacked away at the vines, revealing a narrow opening. It was dark, and looked like it was an entryway of some sort. A passageway leading downwards, disappearing into the earth. Curiosity overriding caution, Mei switched on her headlamp and stepped inside.

The air inside was cool, dry, and unexpectedly...still. It was the quietest space Mei had ever encountered in her whole life, so quiet she felt like there was cotton stuck deep within her ears. The air carried a faint, unfamiliar scent - something ancient, mineral. She continued down into the darkness.

The passage sloped downward, the walls closing in. Mei's headlamp cut a meager swathe through the blackness. Carvings lined the walls, depictions of strange creatures and unfamiliar symbols. She moved forward very, very slowly.

She felt something soft underfoot. Squishy, with give. Mei quickly took a few steps back to avoid walking on anything else and pointed her headlamp down, illuminating a thick, gelatinous substance, dark red, clinging to the stone floor.

Her heart beat fiercely in her chest. The silence felt different, suddenly filled with some heavy and pressing tension. She told herself it was a mineral deposit. Some naturally forming red colored fungus, or a chemical reaction from the moisture. But it was more unsettling.

The passage opened into a vast cavern. Mei's headlamp couldn't reach the ceiling, its beam swallowed by the darkness above. Stone structures rose from the floor, like gigantic teeth jutting from a gaping maw. Buildings? Statues? She was shaking now, scared.

A soft, rhythmic dripping echoed through the cavern. Drip...drip...drip. Each drop was like a hammer blow against her resolve. It seemed so close but also incredibly far away.

She moved deeper into the cavern, her headlamp sweeping across colossal pillars and crumbling archways. This wasn't just a cave; it was a lost city, swallowed by the jungle ages ago. She didn't want to venture in further, but at the same time, had an overwhelming sense of curiosity.

Mei noticed small, shallow channels running through the floor. That's where it was running... That thick, red substance. She had been standing, looking for the source of the dripping, thinking it must be some leaking spring, but it wasn't that kind of substance...it looked thicker.

More of that organic material lay scattered on the ground, coating surfaces, some in glistening pools, some dried into cracked, flaky crusts. It reminded her of something that a butcher shop had behind it, an alley. She'd smelled that, once, and it was revolting.

A colossal structure loomed in the center of the cavern, a ziggurat-like building that seemed to defy gravity, reaching impossibly high. At the very top, a point where her lamp could just reach... something glistened. Wet. Moving.

She took a small, scared breath, trying to maintain control over herself and what she was witnessing. Mei needed a better look, a confirmation. As impossible as it sounded, and as disgusting as the reality was starting to become, she needed to head towards that center structure, towards what she realized now wasn't the distant dripping.

It was an incredibly slow approach, one in which Mei frequently felt like throwing up from what she smelled. As she approached the ziggurat, the awful truth became clear. The channels in the floor, carved with terrifying precision, all led up the structure, spiraling upwards.

The ziggurat's surface wasn't smooth stone, but bone. Interlocked femurs, tibias, ribs, and skulls, fused together into a hideous mosaic of death. Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of bones. That red liquid... she now realized was blood... and marrow. It seemed very, very recent.

At the peak, a grotesque, pulsating heart, larger than a car, throbbed slowly. It wasn't human. The dripping wasn't water. It was viscous fluids, leaking from that immense organ, running down the channels carved into the bone structure.

Figures, silhouetted against the faint glow emanating from the heart, moved around it. They were humanoid, but grotesquely emaciated, their limbs unnaturally elongated, their heads covered in a sort of fleshy cowl. They were chanting, a low, guttural sound that seemed to vibrate the very air.

One of the figures turned. Its "face," a blank, smooth surface devoid of eyes or mouth, seemed to sense her presence. It tilted its head, a slow, deliberate movement that sent a jolt of pure terror through Mei.

The chanting stopped. The only sound was the rhythmic throbbing of the massive heart. One by one, all the other figures turned, their blank faces all staring, empty of features or emotion. All of the attention was focused on her.

Mei took a shaky breath. "H...Hello?" she called again, her voice trembling.

The closest figure extended a long, skeletal arm, its hand ending not in fingers, but in sharp, bone-like protrusions. It reached toward her, not with menace, but with a slow, deliberate motion that made it impossible for Mei to resist.

She stumbled backward, dropping her headlamp. It clattered on the bone floor, the light flickering, revealing another pile of bones. These looked...fresher. And smaller. Much, much smaller. The skull sizes seemed a little larger than what might come from monkeys.

One of the cowled figures shuffled towards the broken remains, the sound like dry leaves skittering across pavement. It bent, and in a grotesque parody of tenderness, picked up one of the smaller skulls.

The figure brought it closer, towards the throbbing heart at the top of the bone ziggurat, the heart that gave life, power, sustenance... and presented its 'gift'.

Then the closest of them, the same one which reached a bony and spindly appendage out towards her...it placed one cold hand gently, surprisingly delicately, on the side of Mei's face.

The touch of that bone hand, its hard flesh... was colder than she could possibly imagine, colder than she had ever felt in her entire life. Mei didn't even want to understand what these things were or what they wanted. She needed out.

As if in response to her thoughts, another figure came toward her and grasped her gently by the wrist. The chanting, and that horrible low throb of the large heart, started once again, even lower now. They were going to present her as a gift, a piece for the heart.

The figures, gentle still, guided her towards the ziggurat, her body lead-weighted and refusing to respond as fear fully took her mind. It felt as though the walk was only taking minutes.

She was being helped up that monstrosity, gently pushed upwards and ahead. It made no sense...the heart consumed and kept on going. Kept on sustaining and growing and throbbing with that terrible and rhythmic pace, even when there were periods of silence and waiting.

As they placed her directly before the organ, she could see it. Into it. Its tissue wasn't solid, like in an animal. The ventricles and chambers and veins led into something darker. Like looking into space...looking into space itself.

The central figure, slightly taller than the rest, extended both of its arms, and the cowl of skin over its head slid back, revealing a head that was... a network of pulsating veins, connected directly to the throbbing heart.

It had no other features. It opened no mouth to speak but it whispered within her mind... "Welcome...to...us"

It pushed her, and Mei fell into the pulsating mass of heart-space... into a place where there were no dimensions, no stars, just cold and nothing and pain. A nothing pain beyond all pain.

And as she fell, her body dissolving into component atoms to fuel its cosmic hunger, her final thought, full of agony and despair, was... "They made me...one of them..." And it wasn't her mind...not entirely her. It was the thing above, its voice inside of her as it welcomed her again.