Something inside it did.

First came the micro-spasms, muscle fibers contracting, as if electricity was being fired through the dead body. The jaw twitched. Tendons along the neck pulled tight, then slackened. Beneath the pallid skin, thin distortions rippled, like worms burrowing through soft clay.

The eyes were the worst part.

Wide, feline, and golden. Still open, as if death had come so suddenly the brain never processed it. The pupils were locked into narrow slits, the final reflex of terror.

Now, those pupils dilated.

Not from awareness.

Inside the skull, parasites had already replaced function of the brain. They moved through the brainstem, not understanding thought, only copying electrical patterns. They didn’t revive the dead , they puppeteered the vessel.

The body inhaled.

Air scraped into lungs stiff with partial rigor. Alveoli that should have collapsed flexed under foreign command. The chest rose too sharply, too mechanically, like a bellows forced by gears instead of muscle.

A finger jerked.

Then another.

Joints cracked as synovial fluid, thickened by cooling, was pushed through unnatural motion. Ligaments resisted. The parasites compensated by pulling harder.

The head tilted.

Skin stretched over bone. The mouth opened slightly.

And with that movement, the scent changed.

What had once smelled like burnt brown sugar, intensified into something sickly sweet and rotten, like caramelized decay layered with metal.

Anhin froze.

The smell was sweet but the chemical message it sent made his body stiffen with fear like a small mouse in front of a cat.

Ace’s voice sharpened inside his skull.

“The specific parasites create a home suitable for their own survival and cannot survive outside it. But they can lay eggs in side another host, the eggs are not it’s offspring but a biological clone of it self,”

The body twitched again — more violently this time.

The torso twisted. Vertebrae clicked.

The corpse rolled onto its side.

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

The body pushed itself upright.

It rose in segments, shoulder first, then spine, then hips, like a machine assembling itself incorrectly. The head lagged behind, snapping into alignment last.

When it stood, its balance was wrong. The knees locked too straight. The feet angled outward. Every step was guided not by proprioception, but by internal pressure.

It wasn’t walking, it was being carried from the inside.

Anhin backed away, slow and controlled. He didn’t turn nor did he breathe too loudly. His mind was already scanning escape routes.

He remembered the diary.

Ever since the war, the atmosphere had been destroyed. The planet’s weather shifted from one extreme to another without warning.

And now the dead were no longer staying dead.

He moved through the mansion using the path Ace projected into his vision. Despite the scale of the building, everything inside felt abandoned, fabric rotted, furniture split, metal corroded by something more aggressive than time.

He had wrapped himself fully in black, layers scavenged from what little intact clothing he’d found. Most of it had been too old, too torn, too thin. Even now, cold crept through the fabric like water through cracks.

The bag on his back was light. Too light.

He activated stealth on the drone. It vanished in a soft optical distortion before settling against his shoulder.

“You will temporarily be occupying this drone till I find material for a biological body,” Anhin said quietly.

Ace did not argue.

At the moment, Anhin’s mental strength was weak. Having an AI as powerful as Ace living inside his mind felt like pressure behind his eyes — not painful, but constant.

They moved deeper into the mansion.

Behind them, the corpse dragged itself after his scent.

Making large Eerie sounds as it moved.

The parasites had no eyes, no ears, but they followed chemical trails, temperature gradients and residual neural activity like predators trained on hunting with electrical currents and static electricity.

Anhin reached a narrow passage partially hidden behind a broken pillar. As he slid through, his hand brushed a smooth surface embedded in the wall.

The surface pulsed.

Ace reacted instantly.

“Pull back—”

Too late, the wall had opened.

Not mechanically.

Biologically.

The surface softened under Anhin’s fingers, shifting from solid to semi-liquid. Microstructures unfolded like living cilia, wrapping around his glove.

He tore his hand away just in time, behind him, the corpse stumbled forward, It struck the surface with its shoulder, the wall consumed it.

With no time to react was no violence, no sound.

The parasites never had time to react.

The flesh simply dissolved inward, drawn into the wall as if the building itself were hungry. Skin, muscle, bone broken down into nutrient slurry within seconds. The scent spiked violently, then vanished.

The wall sealed itself.

Smooth, Clean, Unmarked.

Ace spoke slowly.

“This structure metabolizes dead organic waste. It converts biological mass into energy.”

Anhin stared at the surface.

Then he placed his palm near it, and released his power.

The memory flooded in.

Sensations first, then images.

Cold rooms. Screams cut short. Bodies placed into slots. Experimental subjects , human and non-human, drained, processed, absorbed.

The mansion wasn’t powered by reactors.

It was powered by corpses.

He saw the owner , the same golden-eyed alien, overseeing the process. Recording data. Feeding the structure. Building an underground ecosystem that survived on death.

He pulled back sharply.

Disgust twisted through him.

“That man wasn’t just living here,” Anhin whispered. “He was feeding the mansion in return for power for his research.”

Ace was silent for a moment.

Then: “Which means the parasites didn’t choose him randomly. His body was already biologically valuable, he had corpse scent on him.”

Anhin moved on.

He reached a certain grey door and opened it, revealing a corridor with several doors identical to the one he had just opened.

At the end of the corridor he could see a dim light and several shadows moving.

It looked like people crowded in one place.

He slowly moved toward the area, minimizing his presence as much as possible.

The sweet, rotting scent returned faintly in the air.