For a few days: Welcome to the living!! A phrase GR1m1, heard but carried no meaning for him. Was that his name or a code to reference himself?! Ideas that went on and on in his head.

  The words carried no comfort. They landed with the weight of a verdict, not a greeting. The room didn’t shift, didn’t pause, and didn’t acknowledge the moment as anything more than a procedural step. These medieval machines hummed. Someone adjusted a tray. A pen scratched against a clipboard. Life went on around him as if his own had not just been declared.

  He lay on the table. The straps held him still, firm across his wrists, his ankles in newly implanted legs, and his chest. They weren’t cruel, just efficient. That somehow made them worse. The lights above him hummed in a steady, indifferent rhythm. Their glow washed over the metal surfaces, the white coats, and the gloved hands moving with practiced ease.

  The alchemists resumed their work. No hesitation. No ceremony. One checked a blackboard with resumed information on the case. Another tightened a valve where the water liquid of the cylinders was regulated. A third leaned over him with a small lamp, lifting one eyelid, then the other, as if inspecting a tool fresh from the factory.

  GR1m1… The name echoed in his mind without forming a full memory. It didn’t feel like something he had earned or chosen. It felt stamped on him. A label. A tag. A reminder that he was not a person in this room, only a designation.

  GR1m1 was a name for an object of experimentation, not a name you give something you love. Not a name whispered to a newborn. Not even a name you’d give a pet. It was a code you printed on a crate so you wouldn’t lose track of it.

  He tried to reach for something, an image, a voice, a moment before this table, but nothing surfaced. Only the hollow sense that something had been taken long before he woke here.

  He felt betrayed by destiny. If destiny even cared enough to betray him. Was his future so little that he was destined to be a tool? A thing? A curiosity to poke and prod, to measure and record, to celebrate only when he produced results worth feasting for?

  A toy to play with in the pursuit of something greater. A discovery that would never include his name in the credits. A breakthrough that would never acknowledge the body strapped to the table beneath the lights.

  One of the alchemists spoke, not to him, but to the others. “Vitals stable. Neural response within expected range.” The words floated above him, clinical and distant. They weren’t meant for him. Nothing here was meant for him. And none of them made sense for him anyway.

  A cold touch pressed against his forearm. A sensor. A needle. He couldn’t tell which. He only knew the sensation of something foreign entering his skin, followed by a spreading warmth that didn’t belong to him.

  Furthermore, he tried to move. His fingers twitched. The strap across his wrist stopped the motion before it became anything meaningful. The restraint didn’t hurt. It didn’t need to. Its purpose was to remind him that his choices ended at the edge of the leather.

  Another voice murmured, “Increase the dosage. Let’s see if the reaction stabilizes.”

  Reaction… No response. Not reaction to pain… Not fear… No reaction, said the doctor evaluating him from afar and close by.

  As if he were a chemical in a beaker. He stared at the ceiling. The lights blurred at the edges. Something inside him stirred an instinct, a memory, a refusal, but it slipped away before he could grasp it. His breath hitched, shallow and uneven, and one of the alchemists noted it without looking at his face.

  “Respiratory fluctuation. Mark it.” Marked it… Record it… Study it… This could be the key for another breakthrough, in the first stages of the experiment.

  The warmth in his arm spread to his chest. His heartbeat quickened, then steadied, then slowed in a pattern he didn’t recognize as his own. It felt orchestrated. Controlled. As if someone else were conducting the rhythm inside him.

  He wondered if this was all he would ever be. A body on a table. A name that wasn’t a name but a reference. A life measured in data points. He wondered if anyone had ever expected more from him. If he had ever expected more from himself. The lights hummed. The straps held. The alchemists worked, through a built routine continuously. As if they had done it with other specimen.

  The morgue guy arrived with a metal cart, its wheels rattling across the tiles. On it lay the parts of another humanoid, specifically, everything below the torso, the pieces of GR1m1 was missing periodically as at time those they would stitch would perish after a few days. The limbs were arranged with a kind of careless practicality, stacked and strapped as if they were spare components for a machine rather than the remains of someone who once walked on their own.

  The man pushed the cart beside the operating table and stepped back, wiping his hands on his coat, as if the gesture could erase the fact that he had just delivered half a body. No one in the room reacted. They had seen worse. Or they had learned not to show it. By constant exposure to such events in the inside circle.

  This procedure wasn’t for anyone with a weak stomach. It wasn’t even for those with a strong stomach. It demanded a kind of numbness, a detachment that came only after years of watching bodies opened, rearranged, and forced into new shapes. The surgery stretched across days, long, grinding hours that would break the patience of anyone still too new to understand how organs behaved when placed inside a body that wasn’t originally theirs.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  They began by opening GR1m1’s head. Not a clean, elegant incision, but a deliberate one meant to expose everything they needed to see. They wanted access to the brain, to the pathways that still flickered with activity, even though his condition didn’t match anything they had documented before. They would test everything they could to see it react.

  An alchemist held a set of tools that looked more like instruments for sculpting metal than for working on flesh. Another prepared the nerves they would attempt to connect. They spoke in short, clipped exchanges, comparing readings, adjusting angles, and checking how the brain reacted to each new connection. GR1m1 heard fragments of their conversations words like “irregular,” “unexpected,” and “responsive” but none of them explained what he was becoming. Nor the changes they were forcing on him to evolve or devolve.

  They used needles that carried electric discharges, thin rods that sparked with a faint glow. The glow wasn’t from the metal. It came from their hands. A soft aura, controlled and deliberate, as if they were channeling something through their own bodies into his. GR1m1 watched the light move across their fingers and found it strangely interesting, almost distracting. The way the glow pulsed when they concentrated. The way it dimmed when they paused to speak.

  Then they dug deeper. Every time they touched a new part of his brain, something shifted inside him. His perception bent in ways he couldn’t predict. Colors changed. Sounds warped. Smells twisted into shapes that didn’t belong to anything in the room. Sometimes he saw things that weren’t there. Sometimes he smelled things he couldn’t name. It felt as if they had pressed something into his mind an imprint, a stain, a memory that wasn’t his.

  Or maybe they had touched something closer to his soul, if he even had one. Neither he nor the alchemists knew what this experiment would lead to. They didn’t know if they were creating something new or ruining something that had barely begun to exist. They only knew they had to keep going, as so was the order of the all mighty leader of the order.

  The project stretched on. Several days' duration blurred at the expense of his own mental fortitude. Some whispered it had been months. The alchemists checked every nerve they sewed, every connection they forced into place. They tested each one repeatedly, making sure it responded the way they wanted. They monitored how the new limbs accepted the signals from GR1m1’s brain and how the reconstructed body behaved when asked to function again.

  A body that had once been dead?? A body they were determined to bring back to life?? A body they hoped would obey?? All stages in their big plans, but just in the very beginning of the race.

  GR1m1 lies there through all of it, watching the ceiling lights flicker, listening to the hum of some sort of tools or machines, and feeling the strange new sensations ripple through him. He didn’t know what he was becoming. He didn’t know if he had a choice. But he knew they weren’t finished with him… not yet.

  Months passed before they managed to raise any real activity in his nerves. The progress was slow, almost insulting in its pace. At first, they could only coax faint signals down to his knees, tiny sparks that barely registered as movement. The alchemists treated each twitch like a breakthrough. GR1m1 felt nothing but the strange awareness of a body that wasn’t fully his.

  They introduced needles into his open spinal cord, long metal probes that slid between exposed tissue with practiced precision. Each needle carried a current, a command, a direction. They used them to force movement through his body while he remained trapped on the table, unable to shift even an inch on his own. The table had become his entire world a single place where time stretched and folded until he couldn’t tell one day from the next.

  They started small. Opening and closing his eyes. Forcing his mouth to move. Testing the muscles around his jaw. They watched every reaction, every delay, every failure. When they were satisfied, they moved on. They raised his arms. Tilted his head. Adjusted the dosage of whatever they pumped into him, so his body wouldn’t stiffen into something unusable.

  His reflexes were barely there. Slow, sluggish responses that made the alchemists exchange looks of concern or curiosity. They poked tendons, tapped joints, and shone lights into his eyes. Most of the time, nothing happened. His body felt dormant, as if it had forgotten how to be alive.

  But patience eventually paid off. They learned how much sedative he needed to stay calm through the procedures. Enough to dull the pain, but not enough to erase the reactions they wanted to study. They charted everything, every change, every anomaly, every unexpected consequence. They were shaping him into something that resembled a human but wasn’t one. Not really. Not anymore.

  Every day, they wrote down their observations. New nerve responses. Strange muscle contractions. Multiple ways his reconstructed body adapted to commands. They treated him like a project with endless potential, a puzzle they were determined to solve no matter how many times they had to cut him open to do it.

  GR1m1, meanwhile, felt himself slipping… Losing pieces of whatever he had been before this place. His sense of self eroded under the constant weight of experiments. The days blurred into each other, each one carving away another fragment of his will. He tried to resist at first. Tried to hold on to something, anything that felt like his own. But the needles, the sedatives, the endless manipulation of his body wore him down.

  A grudge began to form inside him. Not a clear, focused hatred, but something raw and growing. Something without shape or direction. He didn’t know the world outside this room. He didn’t know anyone beyond the twenty or so alchemists who opened him daily, adjusted him, rewired him day after day. They were the only faces he recognized, even though they were wearing masks. The only voices he heard. The people who had ever touched him. And they were the ones taking part in these experiments.

  He didn’t know what revenge meant. Not fully. But he understood the feeling that rose in him whenever they leaned over his body with their tools. He understood the thought that surfaced whenever they forced his limbs to move. He understood the quiet promise that settled in him as they stitched nerves and recorded data.

  Once he could truly move on his own, he would truly move and end this place. He didn’t care how. He didn’t care what it cost him. If he had to burn through whatever life they had forced into him, he would. If he had to destroy himself in the process, so be it. But he only knew one thing with certainty.

  When the day came, he would not hesitate.

  “???????? ??? ???????... ?????? ???? ?? ???????? ?? ?????? ?? ??? ?? ?????????...”

  “Monsters are mirrors... showing only the darkness we refuse to see in ourselves...”

  How was it??