Rick's eyelids fluttered and he groaned, fighting the urge to fall unconscious once more. It felt like they had been attached to twenty-pound weights as they fought against his command to open them, and his entire body ached with a bone-deep fatigue. Although he had been unconscious for the past six weeks, there was no portion of him that could even remotely be considered to have been "resting" during that time.

"Shepherd!" Katarina shouted as she rushed over to his bedside, the doctor and the two men she had ordered to drag him out of the room forgotten.

The doctor in question fell to the floor himself, the men holding him aloft by his arms having dropped him. He rushed to the bed and muscled Katrina out of the way, then injected an ampoule of adrenalin directly into Rick's heart, helping him win the battle against the fatigue accumulated over his past six weeks of unconsciousness. As a side effect, it would also force the blessed into a fight-or-flight mode, thus prompting their blessings to manifest, which had been accidentally discovered when the first person to awaken from their forced evolution had buried an entire basement in gravel as their earth affinity was stimulated by the drug.

They had also learned a harsh lesson on the drawbacks of overdrafting one's abilities that day as well, as the blessed collapsed and turned catatonic due to the agony of forcing himself so far beyond his limit. When they dug the blessed out and saw the results of the catastrophe-three dead and one catatonic- their following experiments became much more cautious and they had finally pinpointed the correct dosage to use to force the blessings to manifest without causing many casualties or injuries.

"Nothing?" Katarina and the doctor looked at each other in confusion as Rick's blessing failed to be activated. Both of them were surprised, as he had obviously undergone an evolution. So why had nothing happened despite using the correct dosage of adrenalin to force the cult leader's blessing to be made manifest?

"Sir.... Sir.... Sir...!" Katarina shouted at Rick, whose gaze had grown vacant and withdrawn. His body lay still and she was caught between fury and terror. Fury toward the doctor, who must have fucked something up; and terror toward the future, as she still needed Rick to aid her in her pursuit of vengeance.

But there was no response from the newly blessed cult leader; he remained indifferent to every attempt to provoke a response, no matter what they tried.

"His blessing's already been activated. The only thing we can do now is wait for the adrenalin to wear off before we try anything more drastic. If we disturb him now, he might lose control of it and harm us," the doctor said. This time, everyone listened to him and the thugs even left the room, taking seats on the chairs lining the hall of the makeshift basement turned third-world hospital ward.

Rick's eyes had opened and he was vaguely aware of his surroundings, but before his eyes could adjust to the light they hadn't received for the past six weeks, he had been injected with adrenalin and forced into a fight-or-flight response. His heart pounded and his vision shrank to a pinprick of light at the end of a very long tunnel as his higher reasoning capacity was disconnected, leaving his hind brain to make the decision whether to fight or flee. Then, the odd things began.

His vision once again broadened to include his entire field of view, but it didn't stop there. All the colors he could see were tinted with shades of purple, with white objects now appearing in pastel lavender shades and black objects seemingly replaced by identical replicas built entirely from deep violet material.

But compared to the rest of the things happening to him, the color shift quickly became the least of his concerns. As he focused on trying to see reality as, well, it really was, he noticed fine, glimmering white threads attached to him from somewhere off in the distance. As they resolved themselves in his vision, he saw that they were pulsing toward him, bright dots traveling through the threads to his body like drops of water slowly traveling through a clear tube.

'What the fuck is this shit?' he asked himself. He looked down and saw so many threads attached to him, like silk from a spider's spinnerets, that he glowed a brilliant white in his own currently distorted vision. He tried counting them, but the way they were shifting and vibrating made the count completely impossible, so he gave up when he lost count for the fifth time.

Instead of attempting to count them for a sixth time, he focused on the brightest one with the most rapid... flow, for lack of a better term. It pulsed and writhed far more energetically than the rest of the threads attached to him, and as he focused on it, his vision blurred and he fell into a deep purple nothingness. When his surroundings came into focus again, it was as if he had moved to a different position. The cognitive dissonance between what his body was telling him-that he was laying supine in bed-and what he was seeing confused the ever living fuck out of the man.

'What the actual fuck?' he shouted in his mind. While he felt himself laying in bed, though the feeling was rapidly fading as the rest of his mind caught up to his eyes, what he saw was a shriveled, starved version of himself laying in a bed in front of his eyes.

In his field of vision, he saw the blindingly white glow coming from "his" body shifting and writhing before trailing off into the aether around him. All except for one. The brightest of the threads led from the base of his left index finger directly to his new viewpoint, or perhaps through it.

He tried closing his "eyes", and a rich purple darkness closed in around him. Within the tranquil silence, he heard someone say, "Is he really okay? If something happened to him, I'm going to burn the doctor alive. No, that's too good for him... I'll torture him until his mind breaks, then throw him to the perverts and have him fucked to death. How dare he not take care of my savior's health, even with his life on the line?"

Along with the words, he began feeling foreign, intrusive emotions carried along with them. The intrusive thoughts and emotions grew more and more dangerous and complicated, which was an unpleasant sensation to him; after all, he hadn't felt any kind of emotion in quite a long time.

'Calm the fuck down, Rick,' he ordered himself in a hail mary attempt at regaining his emotional even keel, despite knowing there was nothing he could do to control what was happening to him.

However, much to his surprise, silence returned once again. When he opened his "eyes", he saw that the flowing pulses of light were now flowing from his body to... wherever, or whomever, he was in. The feeling was almost orgasmic, with each of the pulses coming in a more concentrated fashion through the single many-times-enlarged thread that connected his physical body to his ethereal self, and his exhaustion seemed to melt away as a result.

But before he could settle in and really properly enjoy himself, he heard a woman's pain-filled scream and felt a splitting headache. He momentarily blacked out, then his vision returned to normal, and from the viewpoint of his own body. The screaming continued and there was the thud of a body falling to the floor, so he turned his head to see if his suspicions were correct.