Hard-hitting junkies went missing soon after the Pharmacyst came to town. Rumor was they went to live fulltime in his bunker, completing the irreversible metamorphosis enforced by his eldritch substances.

A small dose doesn’t enact a noticeable difference, so you wouldn’t fear having a second hit, then a third. Something stronger than addiction takes hold. The user’s biochemistry transmogrifies into impossible directions. Eye-drops distend the iris. Inhaled smoke colonizes the bronchioles. Liquid injections taint the blood. Snort the powder and feel its crystals vivisect your gray matter, opening up wounds for infection by a macroscopic foe.

See them now. Sink past dreariest dungeons and discern the gruesome machinations: organs harvested from twisted junky cadavers, hormones siphoned to synthesize new compounds for fresh generations of victims. Sallow survivors wander aimless corridors until their time arrives. At the behest of the Pharmacyst, ghoulish orderlies squeeze jellied brains into pillcaps, sieve amber pus into hypodermic needles, and crush bone into dust to cut with cocaine—the customers may be right, but they never know any better.

You spot skin, hard as petrified bark. Fauna gives birth to flora and fungi. Three bodies hang from ceiling hooks, intertwined via splintered twig arms. Leaves and flowers, reeking of odious rot, unfold between their fingers. Mushroom caps sprout from gnarled toenails, ripe for the plucking.

An undercooked fetus elongates into a symbiotic vine, enwrapping its parents’ trunks. The perverse family unit bears physical fruit; a jaundiced mesocarp drips sweet juices from splitting tumescent flesh. One subject tastes this pome, and feels a figwasp ovum rapidly developing in her belly. Parasitic visitors from innermost realms burst into our sliver of reality, celebrating the open-ended orgy that is All Creation.

Near the bottom, we find a ward housing xeno-amphibious forms, formerly human. The transfiguration left them with skin akin to earthly frogs. This gelatinous surface breathes Earth’s air, metabolizes various gasses, and secretes fluid coveted by only the most perverse addicts. Emitting froglike croaks, the tsathögguans must be kept in tanks tuned to binaural beats. Any naked eardrum that absorbs its vibration begins transmuting the surrounding skin to an exogenetic structure matching the source. Word is Virus.

Things get darker. Woven cocoons quiver in the grimiest guts of the citadel. Furtive nostrils ponder our astral scent as we pass their cells. Chitinous hairs chitter in anticipation of a meal. Curious third eyes gaze brightly from the tips of protuberant pineal glands. Slavering mandibles lunge out—

—and snatch you from the metafictional air.

Digestive enzymes pull apart the essential cogs of your mental machinery. Vicious biochemical troops rip through protofilaments and pillage delicious proteins from your doomed neurons. Curious stomachs digest juice sickly rich in consciousness. You feel yourself melt into them. Ovipositors plant eukaryotic yolks between your sulci and gyri. Your undiscovered carcass will sustain families for generations to come. Great-grandchildren will chew on your flickering subliminal sewage. Slurp up scumpunk soup.

“Open wide,” smiles the Pharmacyst, “and swallow your medicine.”