The Cult's Failed Summoning

Chapter 12: Ouroboric Transmutation

He went to work smoothly, making a swift, precise incision to examine the internal structure with quiet, detached curiosity.

Moving systematically down through the torso, he mapped out the anatomy with clinical efficiency, carefully examining each structure he encountered. The subject remained stubbornly, indifferently alive.

By the time he finished, his white coat was still pristine, but his gloves were soaked through with dark red. He straightened, stepping back from the table, and raised both hands before his face.

He stared at them.

For just a moment—barely a second, like a light flickering in a storm—his hands changed. The gloves dissolved. The skin beneath rippled and shifted, the fingers elongating, the surface losing its human texture entirely before snapping back into shape. Clean gloves. Unmarked skin. As if the blood had never been.

He lowered his hands.

Boros looked back at the man on the table, who, against all reasonable expectation, was still breathing. Shallowly, barely, but breathing.

*Fascinating.*

*Setting aside the resilience, which is remarkable, the basic anatomy is not so different from the humans of my world. The organ systems, the structural logic, the chemistry of the blood. The gap is smaller than I expected.*

*But the mana pathways are another matter entirely.*

He reached for a fresh instrument, his eyes moving along the interior of the exposed chest cavity, searching.

*The channels that allow them to use magic—I remain utterly clueless. Except for a vague impression of its presence. But I cannot yet determine the mechanism.*

He pressed his fingertips together, thinking.

*I need more time. More subjects. More data.*

"I've been meaning to ask."

He blinked. Yelan's voice cut through his analysis like a needle through cloth.

"Those clothes you're wearing." She was watching him from the desk, her chin resting lightly on one hand. "You made them from your own skin, didn't you."

"Yes," Boros said simply. "Why?"

Yelan held his gaze.

"Doesn't that mean you're completely naked right now?"

The laboratory went very quiet.

The torches crackled. Somewhere behind them, Stone methodically unfastened the restraints on the man on the table and began forcing another prisoner forward to take his place—calm, practised, entirely unbothered.

Yelan looked at Boros.

Boros looked at Yelan.

Neither of them said anything.

"...Forget I said anything," Yelan said at last, looking away.

Stone secured the new subject to the table and stepped back without a word. This prisoner was younger—lean, with dark eyes that darted frantically between Boros, the instruments, and the man being quietly moved aside.

Boros approached.

He worked with the same efficiency as before, but this time his focus was different—narrower, more deliberate. He made a single clean incision along the subject's back, then carefully separated the outer layer from the tissue beneath.

Layer by layer, the skin came away smoothly, revealing the pale surface beneath. The subject's voice rose, then broke, before finally going silent as something in him made the decision to retreat somewhere deep inside his own mind.

Boros lifted the skin and held it up to the torchlight, turning it slowly, studying the inner surface with the same expression a craftsman uses when evaluating raw material.

"What are you planning to do with that?" Yelan asked. She was trying to sound unbothered. Almost succeeding.

"Wear it," Boros said.

"You want to wear human skin?" Yelan asked, shocked.

"What's the difference between that and wearing animal skin? Besides, I'll process it."

Yelan opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

She had no answer. Logically, there was no difference. She knew that.

She looked at him and, for a moment, just beneath the white coat and the red tie and the careful human shape of him, she saw the silhouette of the monster she was truly speaking with.

Then it was gone.

Boros had already set the skin flat on the floor and was lowering himself in front of it, crossing his legs. He extended his right hand forward, supporting his wrist with his left, and held the position for a moment—fingers arranged in a precise configuration, joints locked, the whole gesture carrying the weight of something rehearsed over a very long time.

Then he began his chant.

His voice deepened, returning for a moment to a hollow shriek. It was not loud—barely above a murmur—but it *carried*, pressing against the walls and settling into the spaces between the stones.

“Nigredo: The Blackening”

"In the mouth of the serpent, all things end.

Strip away the shape; return the soul to the dark.

What was whole must now rot.

Solve et Coagula.

I call the void: Return Prima Materia."

The skin on the floor changed. Its colour darkened as though it were decaying, until what lay there was a lightless black mass—a distortion in space, dark matter.

“Albedo: The Whitening”

"The shadow dies; the silver dawn rises.

Wash the ash in the lunar tide until only truth remains.

Cold light, burn away the dross.

Through the cycle, be reborn.

Purify the soul."

The Dark Matter began to pale. Silver-white light rose from its centre, moving against the torchlight and casting no reflection. The shape on the floor seemed to breathe, contracting and expanding in a rhythm that had nothing to do with air.

“Rubedo: The Reddening”

"The tail meets the head; the circle is closed.

From the white snow, the red sun wakes.

The blood of the dragon is the life of the Cosmos.

Nothing is lost, everything is one.

Achieve the Great Work."

“Magnum Opus”

The last word left his mouth, and the room held its breath.

Then, quietly, without spectacle, the light settled.

Where the skin had been, a set of clothes lay folded on the stone floor. A white doctor's coat. A dark shirt. A deep blue vest. A red tie. Combat gloves. Pressed trousers. Every piece identical to what Boros was wearing.

He stood slowly. He raised his arms and turned his head in a full rotation, all the way around, far past what a human neck allowed, observing his form and confirming what his mind already told him.

*I lost considerable mass for something this simple,* he noted internally, with mild dissatisfaction.

"What," Yelan said, "did you just do?"

She was standing now. She had moved without realising it. She was staring at the folded clothes on the floor, then at him, then at the floor again.

Boros considered the question with genuine thought, the way he always did when something he considered ordinary apparently wasn't.

"It's similar to what you would call alchemy," he said.

Yelan shook her head with certainty.

"I've seen alchemy before." Her voice was quieter now. Not frightened, just unsettled. "It looked nothing like what you just did."

Boros looked at her.

"Huh.”