Rina never panicked.
Even when she first opened a small rift into the dark dimension to research death magic, she only recorded her body's reactions in an experiment journal.
But that night, after looking into Elias' eyes and finding no reflection of a soul…
for the first time in years, she closed all the windows of her room.
And prepared herself to kill.
Night in Rina's Private Laboratory
Under her usual work desk, there was an unmarked iron door.
She knocked on it in a 3–2–3–1 pattern, then entered a basement that was not registered in the Gravemire system.
There: seven bottles of greenish liquid, a blood bond altar, and two living corpses—a failed half-experiment between necromancy and rune programming.
Rina stood in the middle of the room.
Her hands trembled slightly as she unrolled the spell scroll.
"If I'm right…Elias isn't Elias. And if he's a vessel…then his original consciousness still remains. Buried. But not dead."
