He walked past the drone and approached the man, it was uncanny, he looked human but not.

His neck had been broken cleanly. The angle of his head was impossible, chin resting almost on his shoulder, one antler was slightly bent. And the other… it had shriveled it was curled inward like a dying plant. A faint, powdery residue clung to it like ash.

He stepped closer.

  The skin had changed what had been warm and bronze the day before was now almost translucent.

His throat was exposed from the way his head had twisted, showed something else: his vertebrae, each bone had fine, root-like filaments spiraling out from it, delicate and thin, as though his spine had once grown like a plant and the break had torn it.

The eyes were the worst part.

Wide, feline, and golden. Still open, as if his death was so quick he handnt even registered it. The pupils had narrowed into tiny slits it was like a last reaction.

Even so a book lay half-tucked beneath his arm, Its cover was worn it looked soft like old bark a mixture of fiber and leather.

He crouched beside him, careful not to touch the body.

He slipped it free carefully and sat a meter away from him and opened the book.

“Ace?”

“Language was not easy to add, the subconscious—the self, the you, was successfully transferred. Memory, Personality, Even intention. But language… Language lives deeper than thought. It’s embedded in the neural architecture. The structures for it are physical. Built over time. You don’t just understand a language. You need to form it on your own, especially the language of this age,”

“ So I am in a new world with no ability to communicate, this should go well,”

“I can act as your translated in the mean time,”

“It’s a diary a proximately 300 earth years old, at the beginning it gives a back ground, there are five powers that shaped the interstellar era.

The Human Federation, he calls them children of war. The Alliance, all the star born species that believe in peace but cannot get along with the humans, the Ar’… empire some of the words you can not hear. They were formed from space pirates and consists of almost all species descendants of those exiled from their home, cultia miniature beings that are extremely intelligent and work well to get her they are the builders and fixers and have no affiliation and something called sentient dust no explanation .

At the moment there is a war that has been going on for a hundred year. No side has really won.

This planet is one of the thousand refugee pockets where the common people come to run from war. It makes sense to dump Silvian here if even if there is a such party it will take them months to find. This man , his daughter and grandson were planning to run away from the planet when the man found an alliance drone he then changed his mind thinking he could hack it,”

“Mmh,”

“Is something the matter, sir?”

“I measured approximately one meter from the body before I sat,” he said slowly. “Does… does it look a bit closer to you?”

Before Ace could respond, the body twitched.

It was subtle at first, just a shift in the shoulder.Then something moved beneath the skin. It was not muscles. Not bone it was under the skin like slow ripple on water.

There was no blood.

But a pale, viscous fluid had crusted at the corner of the mouth. It shimmered faintly in the low light, and the air around it carried a sickly-sweet scent like burnt sugar.

“It’s a parasite,” Ace  said voice low and sharp. “An infectious one. It uses corpses as incubation chambers. Incubation starts immediately after death, but it reaches full mobility in two days. It was a biological weapon used during the war”

He looked at the body and stood up.

Ace continued. “Right now, it’s only been a few hours. That movement? Reflexes. But the parasite is already threading itself through the spinal cord. You need to run before it mends the body you are not strong enough.”

“How did he ge infected infect?”

“From the diary he wrote that he would experiment with himself, it could have been in his body domant until his death” Ace said.

“ is it contagious,”

 “No, the specific parasites create a home suitable for their own survival and cannot survive outside it.”

The body twitched again—more violently this time. A finger jerked.

“You’re not strong enough to fight it off, sir. Not yet,” Ace whispered. “We need to move. Now.”