Chapter 6: The Sprouting Madness

Devotion became decay. Priests who once healed the land now carved runes into their skin, drinking sap infused with Void fragments. Their bodies warped under its touch—not by magic, but by something older, deeper, crueler. Eyes bloomed where none should be. Jaws split like petals. They called it ascension. To the world, it was desecration.

Chants once used to awaken seedlings now summoned storms of locusts and moss that whispered. Villages were overrun with vines that remembered fear. Children were born bark-skinned, their veins glowing dimly with an iridescent sheen that pulsed in rhythm with the Shrine. The priests laughed, wept, and howled through the night, claiming they were becoming one with “The Pulse Beneath.”

They were no longer stewards of life. They were its undoing.

And at the center of it all, the Shrine pulsed—not as an idol, but as a wound. And like all wounds, it festered.