Entry 8: The Price of Power

Age 26 - Umbra Scarring

The corruption is in me now, and I invited it in.

Not the mind-twisting, body-warping kind that turns people into the monsters I hunt. Something else. Something that makes me faster, stronger, more deadly - and pays for it with pieces of my humanity carved away like bark from an ancient tree.

The first scar came during the Thornwood Massacre. Forty-three corrupted villagers, transformed into a living forest that screamed with their voices every time the wind moved through their branches. I should have died in that fight. Would have, if something vast and patient hadn’t whispered instructions in the spaces between my shadow-steps.

Step here. Strike there. Let the darkness flow through you like water through roots.

When the battle ended, I found a mark carved into my forearm. Not a wound - more like a tattoo made of living shadow that pulses sometimes, especially when I’m fighting. Makes my blade cut deeper, my movements flow like liquid darkness itself.

The visions are clearer now. I can see the corruption’s source - something immense pressing against reality’s boundaries, using our world as a testing ground for experiments in breaking down natural laws. The upward-flowing waterfalls aren’t just dreams anymore. They’re glimpses of what happens when physics themselves become corrupted.

Each scar makes me more effective against it. Also makes me less… human. I catch myself making tactical decisions about people’s lives with chilling efficiency. Calculating acceptable losses. Prioritizing targets based on corruption threat levels rather than individual worth.

Three weeks ago, I would have tried to save the infected children in Millbrook. Yesterday, I eliminated them immediately because my scars showed me they were already too far gone.

I was right. The autopsies I performed afterward proved the corruption had replaced their nervous systems entirely, turning them into living lures for more victims. But the ease with which I made that choice terrifies me almost as much as the gratitude in their eyes as I freed them.

Is this how it starts? Does everyone who fights monsters eventually become one?

The worst part is that I’m more effective this way. More lives saved overall. More corruption sites neutralized. More preparation for whatever cosmic horror is coming.

But I look in the still water of corrupted pools now and sometimes don’t recognize what looks back. The scarred thing in the reflection grins with too many teeth, and its seafoam eyes hold depths that speak of bargains made with darkness itself.

Yet somehow, impossibly, I still find reasons to laugh. Yesterday I left a corrupted tax collector hanging upside down from a tree with a sign: “Interest rates now adjusting for inflation AND corruption!”

Maybe humor is the last thing the darkness can’t touch. Maybe laughter is what keeps me human even as I become something else entirely.


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Journal Entry 8 of 10 - The cost of power