Tomb of Horros Part 6 (End of Acererak)

They destroyed Acererak once in a dream.

In that shared nightmare, they learned what he was.

A flurry of magic missiles from Salt and Bangqiu struck the floating jeweled skull and burst like rain against stone. Acererak did not even seem to notice. But when Lao Ren spoke a single word—Shatter—and a hairline crack split the demi-lich’s jaw, the skull turned its ruby gaze upon him. In an instant, the sage became a bubbling ruin of flesh, his soul pulled screaming into one of those gleaming gems.

Bo-Jing did not hesitate. Testing the angel’s gift—the two-handed blade that burned with a purifying flame and had felled so many undead fiends—he struck twice. Bone split. The skull broke.

The dream ended.

They woke on the deck of the Crimson Reprieve, gasping, surrounded by companions who had watched their bodies writhe and scream in shared terror.

Salt rose first.

“We know what to do.”

---

Preparation

Captain Hu’s seadogs dug out the long-buried central entrance. This time there would be no wandering through false doors or painted deceptions. Knowledge was their lantern.

Bo-Jing gathered those who would enter for the true descent:

His brother-in-law Batzorig.
Ryu the priest.
Malekandathil of the Order of Mar Thoma.
Akana Kiku, the majou from the island port near Guibao.
Ma Tsu, guardian of the Library of Tushuguan.
Fen and Nekhil at Salt’s side.
Captain Hu himself, and four seadogs who would not be denied redemption.

They entered the mosaic corridor in disciplined silence. Lamps were lit. Eyes adjusted.

The tiles were bright and beautiful. They did not trust them.

Without touching the floor, Bo-Jing, Salt, and Bangqiu moved the entire company past the hidden pits.

“Do not put your hand in the green devil’s mouth,” Salt said plainly.

Bangqiu and Lao Ren marked the wall and carved a passwall into the throne chamber.

“Do not go near the glowing purple gem.”

They obeyed memory. Memory obeyed them.

The crown was bagged.
The silver scepter touched the throne.
The secret door opened.
The bronze key was taken.
The gold end of the scepter opened the mithril doors.

There was no hesitation.

---

The Efreeti

Bo-Jing freed the efreeti from the urn. The being regarded them with a curious familiarity, as though dream and waking were less separate than mortals believed.

The party wished for a map.
They wished for notice of the keys.

For the third wish, Bo-Jing claimed his right:

“A sword strong enough to destroy Acererak.”

The efreeti vanished and returned with a blade so sharp it sang in the lamplight, cutting drifting dust in two. Bo-Jing placed it in Malekandathil’s hands—for use within the tomb only.

The iron statue was toppled by the seadogs. The secret tunnel lay open.

One task remained.

Bangqiu turned the ochre jelly into a flounder and retrieved half the gold key. Salt’s unseen servant braved the vat of acid for the other half.

The key was made whole.

Endgame.

---

The Final Plan

In the dream, they had learned the cost of delay.

The party leaders were confident they could destroy Acererak as they had done it in their dream. But could they do it like lightning, before Acererak had a chance to suck out anyone’s soul?

Bangqiu made the decision he had been avoiding for months. He had studied the spellbooks of the necromancer Mouru Zhai.

Mouru Zhai—once Acererak’s apprentice, later his intended victim—had written of a word of annihilation, a syllable to be spoken from the Astral Plane that would burn itself from existence as it destroyed its target.

Mouru Zhai had never lived to test it.

Bangqiu would.

He had hoped that one day he would be powerful enough not only to read it but to learn it, and utter it himself whenever he needed it. But he needed it today.

He would not keep the spell.
He would end the tomb.

If the word failed, Bo-Jing and Malekandathil would strike. Salt and Lao Ren would shatter. Nekhil stood ready with his rod of smiting.

There would be no second attempt.

---

The Tomb Within the Tomb

Salt dropped the bronze and gold keys for the unseen to carry. The vanguard stepped with Ma Tsu into the Astral Plane.

The servant turned the gold key three times. The wall descended. They entered the bare chamber.

The bronze key turned in the floor.

Stone ground against stone.

The vault rose.

Bangqiu glanced again at Mouru Zhai’s book, and another spell caught his attention. He cast Haste upon himself and felt his reflexes sharpen to those of a viper. He knew he would strike first.

Akana Kiku, with faint amusement, cast the same spell upon Bo-Jing.

“Or perhaps your sword will be faster than his word.”

History will argue which was quicker.

It was not Acererak.

Bo-Jing’s blade split the jawbone in a single downward stroke.
Bangqiu spoke the word.

The skull burst apart.

Ruby eyes and diamond teeth spilled across the stone floor.

The Tomb of Horrors ended not in terror—but in precision.

---

When silence settled, they gathered what remained.

There was no hoard of coin. Only fantastic jewels.

An opal the size of a large man’s fist. Diamonds cut like teeth. Sapphires that seemed to hold captive lightning. Jewels from the skull itself and others hidden in alcoves.

There was a sword that tempted Bangqiu for a moment before he saw and grasped Acererak’s staff.
“Mine. I relinquish claim to the rest.”

There were scrolls, potions, and other arcane objects whose enchantments felt layered—and perhaps not entirely benevolent.

Some items would demand study. Some caution. A few might yet require destruction.

They took them all the same.

Captain Hu and his seadogs did not claim a single gem. Their debt was paid. The body of Niao would be laid to rest, and the centuries of undeath that had bound them to her would come to an end. They met mortality not as punishment, but as peace.

Lao Ren stood with Ma Tsu and Malekandathil among the fragments of the skull and allowed himself the smallest smile.

“What did I tell you? The clever ones.”

---

Aftermath

Every living soul who entered the tomb had walked back out.

They did not divide the treasure immediately.

The gems were gathered and shared in principle—claimed as common spoils of a common descent—but they remained in chests aboard the Crimson Reprieve while the ship turned westward in search of quiet water and the right place to bury Niao. Captain Hu and his crew taught Bangqiu how to sail the ship that would be his—or perhaps more wisely, how to defer to the one who already could: Bo-Jing.

They found it far from trade lanes and flags—a small green island rising from a blue sea, untouched by continent or crown.

There, the crew went ashore for the last time.

The sailors and seadogs set to work with shovels and laughter that startled even themselves. They dug not trenches for war, nor pits for punishment, but simple graves in neat rows facing the sea. Some argued over depth. Others over alignment. One insisted on a view of the sunrise.

It might have seemed macabre to an outsider.

It was not.

These were men who had labored beneath borrowed centuries. To dig one’s own grave is a grim business—unless one has waited three hundred years for the chance.

When the graves were finished, they dug one more.

Niao was laid to rest again—properly this time. Her bones were washed, wrapped, and placed beneath the open sky with words spoken only for her.

The wind was gentle.

Captain Hu stood a long while. Then he knelt and touched the earth.

“I am finished,” he said simply.

Together with his crew, one by one, they lay down in the graves they had prepared. No screams. No ceremony. Only long breaths exhaled in relief.

By dusk, the island held only stillness.

The Crimson Reprieve sailed again before dawn.

She did not look back.

---

Historical Note

In later years, when the tale was told in Guibao, Zhou-Song, Zhou-Deng, in Zipang and across the steppes, the argument was inevitable.

Akana Kiku insisted it was Bo-Jing’s blade that ended Acererak.
“The jawbone split first,” she would say. “Bone fell before sound.”

Bangqiu would smile thinly and reply that without the word spoken from the Astral, the skull would have reformed, as demi-liches do.

“The sword struck matter. I struck essence.”

Those inclined toward balance noted that the gem-eyes shattered at the same moment the blade cleaved. Some argued that neither alone would have sufficed.

Ma Tsu would only say that timing is a kind of wisdom.

Lao Ren, when pressed, would close his eyes and answer:

“The clever ones were faster.”

And refuse to elaborate.

Tomb of Horros Part 5 (All the Keys)

On what felt like their third visit to the throne room—though by now “third” was an unreliable category—the party acted decisively.

They left the crown untouched and took only the scepter.

Noting the small silver symbol set into the throne itself, Salt directed her unseen servant to touch the silver end of the scepter to it. The result was immediate and mechanical: the obsidian throne sank smoothly into the floor, revealing once more the passage to the multicolored stairway below.

They descended, retrieved the bronze key, and returned to the mithril doors. This time, Salt used the golden end of the scepter. The doors opened without protest.

Inside the anti-magic funerary chamber, Bo-Jing once again opened the bronze urn.

The efreeti emerged, as before—contained, intelligent, and apparently resigned to the strange rhythms of this place. Bo-Jing wished first for a new map of the tomb. The efreeti obliged. Then for a complete list of all magic items in the tomb.

From this list, the party learned something critical: access to Acererak’s true tomb required two keys—the bronze key they already possessed, and a gold key divided into two parts.

For the third wish, they asked for Acererak’s real name.

The efreeti gave it.

It was Acererak.

Stepping back out of the anti-magic chamber onto the multicolored stairway, Lao Ren attempted something bold and very nearly catastrophic. Using the “real name,” he attempted to gate Acererak directly into the room, hoping to end the matter immediately.

A gate opened. . .

. . . and they saw a small chamber overflowing with gems and magic items. Funeral biers stood empty save for dust. At their center lay a skull with rubies set in its eyes and diamonds for teeth.

The skull rose, drifted toward the gate, and spoke a single blasphemous insult.

The gate snapped shut.

Shaken but alive, the party retreated to the funerary room.

Frustration now gave way to brute force. Bo-Jing, nearly giving himself a hernia, managed to knock over one of the massive iron statues, revealing a secret tunnel behind it. At the end of the passage lay a hallway that, according to the efreeti’s map, led toward Acererak’s true resting place.

There was a keyhole.

They had no way to open it—except with the gold key.

Using the map, they began a systematic search.

They navigated pit-filled corridors, passed through a natural grotto veiled in silvery mist where a beautiful woman spoke freely but knew little, and eventually located the laboratory: three large vats exactly as described by the efreeti’s list.

One vat contained acid.
One held muddy water.
The third churned with half-sentient goo.

In the acid vat, an unseen servant retrieved one half of the gold key without difficulty.

According to the list, the second half was supposed to be found in a spiked pit outside the laboratory.

It wasn’t.

They searched carefully: the pit, the surrounding corridors, the nearby library cluttered with rubbery green-brown tapestries that Bo-Jing nearly tore from the floor. Nothing.

Finally, Bo-Jing suggested the unthinkable: the efreeti’s list might be wrong.

Or incomplete.

They returned to the vats. Acting on a hunch, they poured a potion of invisibility into the vat of goo. The liquid vanished from sight, revealing at the bottom the second half of the key.

Bangqiu polymorphed the goo into a flounder. The unseen servant retrieved the key.

With both halves joined, they attempted to teleport back to the sealed hallway—and instead found themselves outside in the muggy swamp, on top of the tomb, far above the ground.

Too high.

They used passwall, straight down.

This time, they arrived exactly where they intended.

The bronze key went into the first lock. The slab of stone descended into the floor.

Behind it waited another door.

They opened it.

Tomb of Horrors Part 4 ("Are You Living in My Dream or Am I Living in Your Dream?"

Remembering the price of the silver choice, Salt directed her unseen servant to take the golden end of the scepter and touch it to the mithril doors. There was no lightning. The doors opened.

Beyond lay what appeared to be a funerary treasure chamber, bright beneath a silvered ceiling that reflected light much as the stair chamber had done. The walls were ivory inlaid with gold. The floor was polished agate—common stone, but worked to a mirror sheen.

In each corner stood a nine-foot iron statue, black as pitch and radiating both magic and evil. Each bore a different weapon: a saw-toothed greatsword, a spiked mace, a vicious morning star, and a voulge. Their faces were monstrous and deeply unsettling.

They did nothing.

Salt and Bo-Jing soon learned why. The room was lined with lead and suffused with anti-magic. Spells failed. Magic items fell silent. Even the unseen servant winked out of existence.

Bo-Jing, convinced the statues would animate at any moment, tried to wrench weapons from their grasp or deface them. The iron would not yield—though disturbingly, the statues did shift slightly, as if resisting.

Against one wall stood a granite sarcophagus, its lid inlaid with platinum glyphs spelling ACERERAK. The far end had been smashed open long ago. Inside were rotted remains: fragments of bone, torn wrappings, ruined jewelry, dust, and the unmistakable wreckage of a magic staff . When Salt probed further, a cracked skull rolled free.

Whatever had once lain here was gone.

There were also massive iron chests, triple-locked and set directly into the stone. They did not yield.

And then there was the bronze urn—large, ornate, sealed with gold fill, a thin thread of smoke escaping from a tiny vent.

On a whim—perhaps out of frustration, perhaps out of instinct—Bo-Jing opened it.

Fire poured out of the urn and resolved itself into a towering efreeti, a being of living flame and intelligence. It demanded to know who had opened its prison.

When Bo-Jing stepped forward, the efreeti surprised them all.

It owed him three services before returning to the Elemental Plane of Fire.

Chastened by what wishing had already done to Lao Ren, Salt and Bo-Jing deliberated carefully.

Their first request was cautious: a map of the tomb.
The efreeti vanished in a puff of smoke and returned moments later with a singed parchment. Compared against the crude map they had found earlier, this one proved to be essentially perfect.

For the second service, they asked for a list of the twenty things needed to defeat Acererak. This disappointed Bo-Jing: the list was mostly mundane preparations—ten-foot poles, methods to counter gravity, potions of flight. Sensible. Practical. Unheroic. He already had a magic broom. Or at least, he used to.

The third service required the most care.

They wanted their equipment back. Their weapons, armor, clothes. Their companions. Their strength.

Before they could finalize the wording, the efreeti interrupted:

“Are you living in my dream, or am I living in your dream?”

Salt and Bo-Jing admitted they did not know. They acknowledged that whatever freedom they were offering him was likely temporary—illusory, even—contained within a vision.

Then Salt said something different.

“We are coming to destroy Acererak.
We are coming back for real.
And when we return, we will free you for real.”

The efreeti considered this. He could not reshape reality. But he could reshape a dream.

If that was what they wanted.

It was.

In an instant, Salt and Bo-Jing found themselves outside the tomb, reunited with Bangqiu and Lao Ren. They were clothed, healed, armed. Spells returned to memory. Strength returned to limbs.

But the crown, the scepter, the efreeti’s map, and every other artifact taken from within the tomb were gone.

They were in a dream inside a dream—but they remembered some things from the first dream.

For instance: do not take the northwest tunnel where the rocks fall.

This time, rather than digging through the middle entrance with swords, they used passwall, tunneling through the mud and into the now-obscenely familiar mosaic corridor with the green devil mouth at its end. Bangqiu could not remember what had happened to him inside that mouth—but he knew, with absolute certainty, that he did not want to return.

Between the four of them, they had enough magic to move quickly. They evaded the pit traps, ignored the temptations, and at the end of the corridor phase doored through the wall.

They emerged once more into the throne room.

The place where, in another dream, they had found the crown and the scepter. And the glowing gem. Once again, all these deadly tools were waiting.

Tomb of Horrors Part 3 (The Crown and the Two-sided Scepter)

The vision resumed in an oddly shaped chamber dominated by a staircase unlike any other in the tomb. A narrow landing gave way to six broad steps that funneled outward as they ascended southward. Each step was fashioned from a different precious stone, unmistakable even in the strange light of the place: onyx, pink marble, lapis lazuli, black marble, golden serpentine, and malachite.

The chamber itself was lavish and unsettling. Its walls were paneled in untarnished copper, gleaming warmly between sections of rare wood inlaid with ivory. Above, a silver ceiling curved and folded in such a way that it caught and multiplied light, reflecting it endlessly until the room seemed brighter than it had any right to be.

Resting plainly upon the fourth step was a large cylindrical bronze key, displayed openly, as if daring someone to take it.

At the top of the staircase stood a pair of enormous mithril doors, their surfaces flawless and cold. The bronze key seemed clearly made for them.

As Salt, Bo-Jing, and Lao Ren debated their next move, they were interrupted yet again by a demonic presence. This one was doglike in form, smaller and less imposing than the horrors they had already faced. It did not attack. Instead, it argued.

The crown and the scepter, it insisted, did not belong with the party. They belonged on the throne. Perhaps the demon had witnessed the destruction of so many of its fellows; perhaps it was simply cautious. It pleaded, reasoned, and threatened vaguely, but the party refused.

In the midst of this tense exchange, a second demon arrived—frog-like in shape, rolling before it a massive sphere of force. Trapped inside the sphere was another demon, one the party recognized as the captive from an earlier encounter.

The smaller dog-demon broke off the argument at once.

“Later,” it promised the party, before chasing the frog-demon and its imprisoned burden out of sight.

With the chamber momentarily quiet, Salt directed her unseen servant to retrieve the bronze key and attempt the mithril doors. The moment the key was brought near, a violent blast of lightning erupted from the doors, forcing the attempt to be abandoned.

Examining the doors more closely, Bo-Jing and Salt noticed a round indentation set into the mithril—perfectly sized for the spherical ends of the scepter. It seemed clear now that the scepter itself might be the true key.

Again, the question arose.

Which side?

They chose silver.

The answer was immediate and unforgiving.

In an instant, the world folded and tore. The vision cast them violently back to the tomb’s entrance hall.

When they regained their bearings, they realized what had been lost in the transition.

They no longer had the crown.
They no longer had the scepter.
They no longer had the bronze key.
They no longer had the glowing gem.

Though shaken by their sudden return to the tomb’s entrance, the party had learned from the ordeal. They did not linger. Moving swiftly back down the long mosaic corridor, they avoided both the misty archway and the green devil mouth, instead choosing the narrow space between them. There, they stepped deliberately into the stone and passed once more into the Ethereal Plane.

Blinded and disoriented by the thick ether, they stumbled forward until the world resolved again into the vast throne room.

The dog-like demon was waiting for them.

It sat upon the obsidian throne, the crown perched awkwardly upon its head.

For a moment it seemed frozen by embarrassment. Then it rose at once, protesting, stepping away from the throne and fumbling desperately at the crown, trying to remove it. It failed. At first the demon denied the truth, but under pressure it admitted what had become clear: the crown would not come off.

Salt offered help. She asked for the scepter, promising she could remove the crown safely.

The demon refused.

As this tense standoff played out, the frog-like demon appeared once more, observing silently from a distance, as if eager to see how events would unfold.

At last, a compromise was reached.

Salt would not take the scepter. Instead, she would advise the demon how to use it.

“Touch it to your head,” she said.
“The silver side.”

The demon followed her advice.

There was no scream.

In an instant, the dog-demon was incinerated, reduced to nothing. The crown and the scepter clattered to the floor, unharmed and intact. The frog-demon wasted no time in making itself scarce.

Once again, the party located the glowing orange gem, pulsing with its dreadful, wish-twisting power, where they had first discovered it. With careful use of unseen servant, they gathered the crown, the scepter, and the gem, then passed back through the ether toward the chamber of the colored staircase.

The bronze key still rested upon the fourth step.

By now, even the unseen servant was overburdened. Salt took the gem into her own hands—and was immediately overwhelmed by the sense of its power and danger. She passed it quickly to Lao Ren.

Pressed by fatigue, mounting tension, and the desire to end the vision decisively, Lao Ren formed a plan. If they could draw Acererak into the open, they might finally destroy him.

Holding the gem, he spoke:

“I wish that I could fight Acererak—”

There was a flash of sickly purple light.

When it faded, Lao Ren and the gem were gone.

Tomb of Horrors Part 2 (Green Devil Mouth)

 

DM note: The PCs are 10th level, and they are assisted by a 14th level NPC Magic-User, the sage Lao-Ren. Clearly, there are hazards in including high-powered "DMPCs" in an adventure, with great potential for them to overshadow the party. I think it works for this adventure because Lao-Ren is very clear about why he needs the PCs. For decades, even centuries, he has been seeking "the clever ones," which he has come to understand will distinguish themselves not by their raw power, but by how they use it, their uncanny access to insight greater than their own-- i.e. that of the players. So Lao-Ren can cast 7th level spells and he can explain what it means to be ethereal, something that the players and I are still trying to make sense of. But all the clever ideas have to come from the PCs.

I included some use of etherealness in earlier adventures, partly in anticipation of running TOH. Along with Bryce Lynch and others, I oppose disallowing certain high-level spells simply because they "break the adventure." That's what clever PCs are supposed to do. I think the TOH solution is a good one-- being ethereal within the Tomb attracts demons. One demon is easy for a high-level party to deal with, but it drains resources, which is frightening for a party that wants to save its high-level offensive spells for Acererak.  
__________________________________________________________________

Still within Lao Ren’s ritual of vision, the party found themselves in a long, wide corridor of dazzling color. Faint daylight that passed through the clog of mud and silt at the entrance revealed that the passage was unlike anything they had seen before: walls, ceiling, and floor were coated in smooth plaster and painted with vivid scenes untouched by time. Fields of grazing cattle, wolves lurking at the edge of forests, slaves of many races and strange hybrids going about their work. Some frescoes depicted interior chambers—a library heavy with books and scrolls, a torture room, a wizard’s workshop. Birds, bats, spiders, doors, chests—an entire world painted flat and watching.

The floor was a mosaic of brilliant stone, and running through it was a narrow, winding path of red tiles. Bangqiu studied the symbols worked into those red stones and realized they formed a kind of riddle or poem—guidance for navigating the tomb safely. But the guidance was incomplete.

Hidden pit traps lined the corridor. Being ethereal, the party could drift safely above them—but that same ethereal state left them exposed to infernal creatures likewise confined to that plane. Without weapons or armor, they were forced to rely entirely on magic. Bo-Jing, unable to bring his strength or sword to bear, found himself uncomfortably sidelined.

 

At the far end of the corridor loomed a green devil face, its mouth gaping open. Nearby stood a misty archway that likely promised teleportation—and danger. Having learned from bitter experience, the party avoided both.

 

Instead, they carefully retraced their steps, studying the mosaics near the entrance while fending off infernal attackers drawn to their presence.

After the party destroyed a vulture-like creature, a more cautious demon emerged from the mist: a horned, dog-faced creature that called for parlay.

 

“You want Acererak,” it said. “I will call him.”

Moments later, a skeletal figure appeared at the far end of the hall, beyond the reach of Salt’s steam breath. Taking a desperate gamble, Bangqiu cast polymorph, declaring that the figure should become “a panda. Without legs.”

The skeletal form collapsed. The spell appeared to work.

But when Bangqiu approached, he found himself staring not at a helpless animal, but at a panda with Salt’s face. In that instant of confusion, the demon struck him from behind with a blast of force, hurling Bangqiu bodily into the green devil’s mouth.

Bo-Jing, with nothing else to do, struck the demon with his bare hands. It was like punching solid marble. The horrific Salt-Panda hybrid on the floor proved to be an illusion and disappeared.

Salt and Lao Ren destroyed the demon with magic. There was no discussion of following Bangqiu into the devil face, nor of testing the misty archway. Instead, the remaining three stepped into the stone wall itself, drifting blindly through dense ether until the world reshaped around them.

They emerged in a vast throne room.

Scores of massive columns filled the chamber

Near one devil face lay a ring of charred remains—ashes, bones, and ruined gear—surrounding a glowing orange gem that pulsed with dreadful power.

At the heart of the room stood a black ebony dais bearing a silver-inlaid obsidian throne. Resting upon it were a crown and a scepter, both heavy with magic.

Salt called on one of her most rudimentary spells, normally used for sweeping floors or carrying water, an unseen servant to retrieve the crown, the scepter, and the glowing gem.

While they explored, another vulture-like demon attacked, which Lao Ren trapped inside a sphere of force.

Testing the crown, Lao Ren found that it granted him perfect sight in the throne room—but once they stepped through the ether into another chamber, a triangular-shaped room dominated by a multi-colored flight of steps, he was left blind.

Recalling the riddles inscribed along the red path, Lao Ren asked Salt to remove the crown with the scepter.

Gold end or silver?

Trusting the poem—or luck—they chose gold.

The crown came free.

Tomb of Horrors Part 1 (Crimson Reprieve Finale adventure)

 

DM note: Yes, that Tomb of Horrors, that notorious bogeyman. Among its other issues, there is a big "why" and how to translate player interest in tackling a challenge to character motivations.

My solutions: Ravenloft's "Ship of Horror" as a prelude. One of Acereak's construction contractors has been roaming the seas for centuries. With the party's help, the basic requirements of lifting a curse have been lifted, but given everything he's gone through, Captain Hu wants to follow through and destroy the demi-lich. The party, based on what they've heard, are also committed, and have a few clues about what to do to destroy Acererak.

______

Captain Hu left the Crimson Reprieve under his First Mate’s command and joined Bo-Jing’s magical folding boat as a company of roughly two dozen made their way upriver toward the buried tomb of Acererak. With Bo-Jing, Salt, and Bangqiu traveled their retainers, Lao Ren and Ma Tzu, members of the Peacock Society, and a contingent of sailors and marines from the Reprieve.

They arrived in the early afternoon. Captain Hu explained that the tomb—once a great stone mausoleum—had long since sunk into silt, leaving only a leering skull-face of standing stones visible above the riverbank. At Salt’s direction, sailors began excavating the northwest corner of the burial mound.

Lao Ren then proposed an elegant alternative to blind exploration. He possessed a ritual of vision, which—when empowered by a magical gem that would be destroyed—could allow himself and three others to enter a shared prophetic vision of the tomb. Pain and fear would be real, but death would simply end the vision. It would answer one question above all others: What would happen if?

The ritual was shared with Bangqiu, Salt, and Bo-Jing.

Within the vision, they entered a cobweb-choked tunnel and opened the doors at its end—triggering a rockfall that nearly crushed them, a shocking reminder of how dangerous this place was, and what a precious opportunity Lao-Ren's vision gem had offered them. 

Beyond the doors was only a blank wall. Impatient, Bangqiu urged a bold escalation: access the Ethereal Plane.

Through a strange pairing of spells—phase door to cut an ethereal tunnel through stone, followed by passwall to breach the membrane itself—they slipped into the Ethereal, trusting a crude map recovered from Ma Tzu’s library. The gamble paid off. They emerged in a small chamber containing a three-armed gargoyle statue. 

Still ethereal, they followed a nearby tunnel and emerged into a brightly painted hall filled with strange disk-bearing figures. Their arrival attracted hostile creatures from the lower planes—mostly nuisances, until a massive ape with tusks and vestigial bat-wings appeared. Salt and Bangqiu destroyed it instantly with magic missiles.

Knowing further attacks were inevitable and their resources finite, they pressed on, bypassing the colored disks and charging through a glowing arch.

They were teleported into another painted chamber with a mosaic floor.

Only their ethereal bodies.

All weapons, armor, clothing, and equipment were left behind.

Still in the Ethereal plane, they could see they were now close to the tomb’s true entrance—the correct path. They could pass through the mud and stone in their current state, but they could not re-equip themselves from the material world.

Naked, unarmed, and stripped of every hard-won magical treasure, they chose to continue the vision anyway.

  

Curse of the Crimson Reprieve: The Necromancer Beneath the Snow

 The wind howled across the mountaintop as the party stood before the twin mausoleums—white marble gleaming under drifting snow, their doors flanked by towering statues. Between them, a patch of disturbed ice concealed what they had come for: a trapdoor.

When they opened it, a thin, shrill piping echoed across the peaks—a sound not meant for human ears. Without hesitation, they descended into the darkness below.

The air was colder there, damp with the scent of dust and oil. Bo-Jing drew his flaming sword; its light revealed a chamber filled with crates, barrels, and sacks—but also coffins and urns, too many for comfort. The faintest suggestion of movement made them press on, down a corridor lined with skeletons frozen at attention.

When the first skeletons stepped forward, Salt reacted instantly—her magic missiles struck those closest to them like lightning bolts. For the larger horde, Bangqiu followed with a burst of scalding steam, shattering bone and ice alike.

The second wave came silently from deeper within the hall. The group stood their ground, Salt unleashing another blast, until the air itself seemed to hiss with heat. The hallway fell still.

The next obstacle was an ice maze—a winding field of transparent walls and hanging stalactites. Bangqiu levitated upward to scout and discovered the ceiling bristled with brittle ice spears. With a grin, he shook the cavern itself. The ice fell like rain, clearing a new path through the maze.

At its end was a sloped tunnel of smooth ice. Salt went first, sliding down into a vast, torchlit cavern. A balcony glowed dimly across the expanse. As the others assembled, the torches went out.

In the dark, Bo-Jing and Bangqiu each rose into the air, their enchanted boots and spells carrying them along the ceiling. When they neared the balcony, the magic faltered. Bangqiu dropped—recovering his levitation inches before the ground. Bo-Jing landed hard but steady, sword ready.

There was someone there. A man hunched over a circle of ash and black candles. The necromancer Mouru Zhai—once Acererak’s apprentice, now his would-be destroyer—was in the middle of a ritual. His voice cut off as he turned toward Bo-Jing.

Bo-Jing’s katana guttered, its flame dead in the anti-magic field, but the blade was still sharp and the warrior still skilled. He struck first. Mouru Zhai reeled back, abandoned his spell, and retaliated with necrotic missiles that burst across Bo-Jing’s chest like shards of darkness. The pain drove him forward rather than back, driving the necromancer against the wall.

Bangqiu rose again, his eyes glowing faintly as he hurled his own missiles of pure force. The necromancer staggered under the combined assault. When he fell, the torches reignited themselves for a moment—then died again.

When the echoes faded, Bo-Jing exhaled, and the two of them began the grim work of searching the necromancer’s lair. The laboratory reeked of blood and preservation fluid. On a slab lay Niao—their long-lost companion—her body reanimated and augmented, four arms crudely sewn on. The enchantments had failed when her master died. They gathered her remains gently, detaching the extra limbs and placing her true body into Mouru Zhai’s own bag of holding.

The necromancer’s chambers were a study in poor housekeeping skills and worse personal hygiene. His spellbooks, though foul-smelling, were intact. Salt unearthed notes describing Mouru Zhai’s final obsession: a Power Word spell capable of destroying Acererak—but only if cast from the astral or ethereal plane. The margins were filled with desperate calculations and half-legible invocations.

When they returned to the ship, the sage Lao Ren was waiting. He congratulated them, declaring that by defeating Mouru Zhai, they had opened the path to their true purpose—the destruction of the source of all this evil: Acererak himself.

Salt, who had long resisted this quest, felt her resolve waver. Lao Ren’s reasoning was cruel but convincing: while the curse persisted, they would share Captain Hu’s strange advantage. Any mortal death suffered within the tomb would not be final. For a time, they would be unkillable.

She looked at Bo-Jing, who simply nodded.
Bangqiu’s eyes reflected torchlight.
The Crimson Reprieve would sail again—this time toward Acererak’s island.