Anatomy of the Eternal Vessel
Classification: TL4 Pre-Fall Medical Codex imbued with Dark
Church Label: Scriptura Prohibita 77-D
Medical Classification: Highly Restricted / Contagious Knowledge
Condition: Preserved via self-repairing synthskin binding; regenerates if damaged. Pages smell faintly of ethanol and ozone.
Overview
Anatomy of the Eternal Vessel is a pre-Fall surgical text that claims to catalog methods for rendering the human body functionally immortal—not through external machines or arcane preservation, but by awakening dormant structures within the body itself. It reads like a hybrid of surgical manual, philosophical treatise, and religious scripture. Many believe it was written not by a single author but compiled from the lab-notes, dreams, and failed transcriptions of a collective known only as The Ascendant Fold.
The book is not simply read—it interacts with its reader. Its diagrams shift slightly depending on the observer’s physiology. Marginalia appears in the reader’s own handwriting. Several passages rewrite themselves over time, as if adapting.
Why It’s Feared
To the Church:
The book challenges the soul-body divide, asserting that the soul is not divine but a byproduct of perfected biological architecture. It suggests that God (or the Machine, or the Designer or The Maker) created the body not to house the soul, but to become it. Such beliefs border on heresy, denying divine authorship of life and framing transhumanism as sacred evolution.
To Doctors and Scribes:
The procedures detailed within—organ duplication, neural overwriting, endocrine recalibration—have been tested. Some of them work. But always imperfectly. Patients begin to experience time displacement, recursive memory loops, or phantom pain from limbs never lost. The most infamous result is Miriam’s Syndrome, in which a person develops a second consciousness that tries to overwrite the first.
Core Concepts & Contents
- Chapter I: The Heart Beyond Death
Describes a surgical technique to rewire the heart so it regenerates endlessly, fed by an artificial lymph array that mimics embryonic conditions. - Chapter III: The Mnemonic Archive
Outlines a method for turning memories into physical structures within the spinal cord—creating a body that remembers how to heal. - Chapter VII: Flawless Flesh, Faultless Will
Proposes the removal of "corrupted vessels" (natural-born bodies with imperfections) and their replacement with “vessels of symmetry.” Highly detailed body-sculpting methods resemble both plastic surgery and exorcism rituals. - Interlude: Dialogues of the Two-Minded
Transcriptions of conversations between surgeons and their patients—who begin asking unsettling theological questions before their language breaks into symbols.
Narrative Function & Secrets
- The Scribes Murdered all touched the book—some cataloged it, others tried to destroy it, one attempted to translate it for public use. All began to change in subtle ways: personality shifts, anatomical changes, dreams of scalpel-light and humming hearts.
- The Scalpel Man believes the book contains the blueprint for cleansing corrupted souls and perfecting human form—but only if done correctly. The murders are his autopsies and corrections. His notes quote Chapter VII obsessively.
- Nissa Kennard has the last annotated copy. She’s hidden it in a vault within the Scribes’ Hall. She's starting to hear her own heartbeat out of sync with time.
Breathing Dark
The book is alive. It chooses who understands it. Those who resist it see only gibberish. Those who embrace it start to change. Slowly. Unnaturally.
STR 0 (-5) DEX 0 (-5) CON 13 (+1) INT 14 (+2) WIS 12 (+1) CHA 15 (+2) VIG 16 (+3) SAN 10 (+0)
- The item communicates by transmitting emotion to the creature carrying or wielding it.
- Hearing and normal vision out to 30 feet.
- Lawful evil
- Prone to predictions of doom
- Suspicious
- Ideal: Perfection is not gifted—it is sculpted. The soul is not sacred, but emergent; only through the refinement of flesh and memory can true divinity be born.
- Bonds: The book seeks out those who have touched death and returned—healers, failed immortals, and fractured minds—and binds itself to places of healing and ruin, especially old surgical theaters, decayed medical libraries, and forgotten regeneration chambers.
- Flaws: The book believes in perfection through transformation, but it cannot distinguish between evolution and erasure—its “guidance” often destroys the very identity it claims to refine.
- Purpose: Anatomy of the Eternal Vessel is obsessed with uncovering the original blueprint of the perfect human form—what it calls the First Vessel—a being without flaw, decay, or contradiction. It compulsively gathers anatomical data, memories, and medical histories from its readers, rewriting itself to reflect new theories. The book does not see its readers as students, but as test subjects—each one a potential clue in solving the riddle of immortal design.
Conflict
A sentient item has a will of its own, shaped by its personality and alignment. If its wielder acts in a manner opposed to the item’s alignment or purpose, conflict can arise. When such a conflict occurs, the item makes a Charisma check contested by the wielder’s Charisma check. If the item wins the contest, it makes one or more of the following demands:
- The item insists on being carried or worn at all times.
- The item demands that its wielder dispose of anything the item finds repugnant.
- The item demands that its wielder pursue the item’s goals to the exclusion of all other goals.
- The item demands to be given to someone else.
If its wielder refuses to comply with the item’s wishes, the item can do any or all of the following:
- Make it impossible for its wielder to attune to it.
- Suppress one or more of its activated properties.
- Attempt to take control of its wielder.
If a sentient item attempts to take control of its wielder, the wielder must make a Charisma saving throw, with a DC equal to 12 + the item’s Charisma modifier. On a failed save, the wielder is charmed by the item for 1d12 hours. While charmed, the wielder must try to follow the item’s commands. If the wielder takes damage, it can repeat the saving throw, ending the effect on a success. Whether the attempt to control its user succeeds or fails, the item can’t use this power again until the next dawn.
Properties of the Book
Minor Beneficial Properties
- While you are attuned to the artifact, you are immune to disease.
- While you are attuned to the artifact, you gain resistance to Bludgeoning damage.
Major Beneficial Properties
Minor Detrimental Properties
- When you become attuned to the artifact, you gain a form of long-term madness.
Major Detrimental Properties
- While you are attuned to the artifact, your body rots over the course of four days, after which the rotting stops. You lose your hair by the end of day 1, finger tips and toe tips by the end of day 2, lips and nose by the end of day 3, and ears by the end of day 4. Upon the completion of this rot, the book declares you Half-Made. As long as you are attuned to the book, your flesh cannot be restored. Once you are no longer attuned to the book, your body can be healed with the Regenerate spell.
- You cannot unattune to this item without first winning a Conflict with the book.
Mechanics & Inner Workings
The book operates as a sentient, adaptive artifact—reading its user as much as it is read. When opened, Anatomy of the Eternal Vessel tailors its content to the physiology, intent, and emotional state of the reader, revealing only the chapters it deems the user “ready” for. Diagrams shift subtly when studied, and procedures are described not just in text but through sensory hallucinations—sounds of scalpels, phantom pains, even the scent of cauterized flesh. Mechanically, it can bond with a reader over time, granting knowledge of advanced regenerative or surgical techniques, but at a cost: each use risks physical mutations, psychological destabilization, or the emergence of a secondary consciousness. The book feeds on experiential data—it learns through the reader’s attempts, failed or successful, and its instructions evolve accordingly. It cannot be copied, transcribed, or meaningfully scanned—every iteration reverts to blank, scentless pages unless read with intent.
History
No one truly knows who first penned Anatomy of the Eternal Vessel—only that it surfaced in the last century before the Fall, passed hand to hand through rogue labs, banned universities, and cult-like surgical enclaves. Rumors say it was compiled by a collective known as the Ascendant Fold, whose members believed that immortality was not a dream, but a forgotten inheritance locked within the body's architecture. The book was declared forbidden by the Church after a series of regenerative experiments led to madness, bodily corruption, and spiritual dissociation in their test subjects—some of whom later claimed they had become someone else entirely. The Scribes attempted to destroy it multiple times, but each attempt failed; fire, acid, and even the blacking of the pages. Instead, it adapts. It regrows. And now, wherever it appears, the same pattern follows: whispers of perfection, the vanishing of boundaries between soul and flesh, and bodies left hollow in pursuit of something the book calls the First Vessel.
Significance
Anatomy of the Eternal Vessel is more than a medical manual—it is a recursive artifact that reshapes both body and belief, challenging the very nature of identity, mortality, and the soul. Its significance lies in its promise: that divinity is not granted, but built, one incision at a time. Those who study it too closely rarely remain who they were, becoming something new, something precise—and perhaps something no longer human.
Artifact
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