Geummo woke up cold.
The sky was still the same color—a dirty grey that never got brighter or darker. He didn't know how long he'd been out. His body was one big ache. His broken arm was swollen and crooked. Every cut and scrape throbbed. The brand on his forehead burned with a low, steady heat.
He sat up slowly. The bones under him shifted and cracked. He was thirsty. His throat felt like sand.
There was the black stream nearby. The stuff that had burned him. He crawled to the edge and looked at it. It was thick and slow, like oil. It smelled like rust and rotten things.
He was thirsty enough to not care.
He cupped his good hand and dipped it in. The liquid was cold. It hurt where it touched the cuts on his palm, a sharp, biting pain. He brought it to his mouth and drank.
It tasted like metal and mud. It burned going down. His stomach cramped immediately, hard. He doubled over, but nothing came up. After a minute, the cramp faded. The burning in his throat was gone. He was still thirsty, but the worst of it was dampened.
He drank more. Each swallow was a fight against his body's urge to vomit. When he'd had enough, he sat back, panting. He felt sick, but he wasn't dying of thirst anymore. It was a trade.
Food was next.
He looked around. The bone-field stretched in every direction, broken up by jagged black rocks and pools of that black sludge. He saw more of the purple mushrooms. He wasn't touching those again.
There were other things. Grey, stringy moss clinging to rocks. Fat, pale grubs wriggling in a rotten patch of… something. His stomach turned.
He crawled to a rock and scraped off some moss. It was tough and tasteless, like chewing on hair. He forced it down. It sat in his stomach like a rock.
He needed more. He was so empty.
A sound made him freeze. A skittering, scratching noise from behind a mound of bones.
He turned slowly. A creature was watching him. It was about the size of a dog, but it looked like a lizard crossed with a rat. Its skin was patchy and grey, pulled tight over sharp bones. It had too many yellow eyes. It was gnawing on a long bone, cracking it to get at the marrow.
It saw him looking. It stopped chewing. It hissed, showing needle teeth.
Geummo didn't move. He had no weapon. No power. Just a broken body.
The creature seemed to decide he wasn't a threat. It went back to chewing.
Geummo watched it. The creature was eating. It had food. A stupid, hot feeling rose in his chest. Anger. This ugly thing was eating, and he was starving. He was a person. He was a cultivator. Or he had been.
Now he was just meat in a pit.
The anger was too much. He felt the Sealed Heart Meridian, cracked and damaged, strain. A warning pain shot through his chest. He pushed the anger down. Swallowed it. His face went blank again.
The cold spot over his heart pulsed softly. It liked the anger. It wanted him to feel more.
He ignored it. He started crawling away, looking for something, anything else to eat.
He found a crack in a boulder where dirty water had collected. It had dead bugs floating in it. He drank it anyway.
He found a clump of tough, bitter roots. He dug them up with his fingers and ate them raw.
It wasn't enough. The hunger was a constant, gnawing hole.
Days passed. Or he thought they did. The sky didn't change, so he measured time by his own suffering. By how many times he drank the burning water. By how many roots he choked down. His broken arm started to heal wrong, crooked and weak. The cuts on his skin got infected. They oozed yellow and hurt all the time.
He was getting weaker, not stronger.
One time, he tried to move a rock to look for grubs underneath. It was too heavy. His body, drained of all its cultivated strength, was just a normal man's body. A hurt, starving man's body. He slumped against the rock, breathing hard. The frustration was a physical thing in his throat.
*This is stupid*, he thought. *I'm going to die here. Slowly. Over nothing.*
The cold spot over his heart pulsed again, harder this time. It sent a chill through his whole body.
**Hungry**, it seemed to say.
"I know," Geummo muttered, his voice a dry rasp.
**Not you. Me.**
The thought wasn't his own. It came from the cold spot. Clear and cold. An empty stomach, but not his.
He looked down at his chest. The birthmark looked darker. The edges seemed sharper.
He heard the skittering again. The lizard-rat thing was back. It had found another bone.
Geummo watched it. The cold spot in his chest was fixed on the creature. He could feel it. A focused, pointed hunger.
He was hungry too. But his hunger was for food. This was different. This was a hunger for… the creature itself. For its life. For its heat.
It was a disgusting thought. He shook his head.
The cold spot pulsed, impatient.
The creature finished its bone and started sniffing the air. Its many eyes locked on Geummo. It started moving toward him, slow and curious. Maybe he smelled like easy meat now.
Geummo tried to back away, but he was too slow. The creature darted forward and bit his bad leg, right where a cut was festering.
Pain, white and sharp. Geummo cried out—a short, rough sound. He kicked at it with his other leg. It dodged and bit his hand.
The pain. The fear. The pure, stupid rage of being bitten by this ugly thing in this stupid place. It all boiled up at once. The dam cracked more.
The cold spot over his heart **opened**.
It wasn't a physical hole. It was a feeling. A pull. A vacuum in the center of his being.
Where the creature's teeth were sunk into his hand, something happened. The pain… stopped. Not faded. Was *sucked away*.
The creature let go with a startled screech. It backed up, shaking its head. A wisp of something grey and faint, like steam from its body, was pulled toward Geummo's chest. Toward the cold spot.
The cold spot drank it.
A tiny, tiny drop of that liquid void—Void Qi—formed inside him. A speck. But it was something.
The creature felt weaker. Slower. Its hunger was gone. It looked confused.
Geummo's own hunger was still there. But now it had company. A new, deeper hunger. And it had just gotten its first taste.
He looked at his hand. The bite marks were there, but they didn't hurt. They felt numb. Dead.
He looked at the creature. It was just standing there, dazed.
A cold, simple idea came to him.
He lunged forward, his good arm shooting out. He grabbed the creature by its skinny neck. It squawked and thrashed, but it was slow now. Weak.
Geummo dragged it closer. He didn't know what he was doing. He just pressed the thing against the cold spot on his chest.
The pull happened again. Stronger.
The creature shuddered. Its thrashing slowed. Its many eyes dimmed. More of that grey steam—its energy, its life force—streamed out of it and into Geummo. The cold spot drank it greedily.
The Void Qi inside him grew. From a speck to a drop.
The creature stopped moving. It wasn't dead. It was empty. Its body was warm, but its eyes were blank. It had no fight left. No will.
Geummo let it go. It slumped to the ground and didn't get up. It just breathed, slow and shallow, staring at nothing.
He felt sick. He'd just… eaten something alive. Not with his mouth. With something worse.
But he also felt stronger. The aches in his body were less. The hunger in his stomach was quieter. The cold spot was satisfied. For now.
He looked at the empty creature. Then he did something practical.
He broke its neck.
He skinned it with a sharp piece of bone. The meat underneath was dark and tough. He ate it raw. It tasted terrible, but it was food. Real food.
As he ate, sitting on the bones in the grey light, he felt the two hungers inside him. His own stomach, full of nasty meat. And the cold void in his chest, full of stolen life.
One hunger kept his body alive.
The other hunger was something new. Something that had woken up when he hit the bottom.
And it was only getting started.
The lizard-rat meat was gone by the next time he woke up. The hunger was back. Both hungers.
He stood on shaky legs. The food had given him a little strength. The Void Qi—the drop of cold nothing inside him—made the constant pain from his wounds feel distant. Like the pain was happening to someone else.
He needed to find more. More food. More of the grey steam that the void wanted.
He started walking. There was no path. Just bones and black rock and the oily streams. The air was always cold. The sky was always grey. It was like being trapped inside a bruise.
He found more of the bitter roots. He dug them up and ate them as he walked. They didn't fill the hole in his stomach, but they kept him moving.
After a while, he heard a new sound. Not skittering. A low, wet gurgle. It came from ahead, around a bend in the canyon.
He moved slowly, keeping close to the rock wall. He peeked around the corner.
There was a bigger creature. It looked like a boar, but its skin was hairless and grey, covered in weeping sores. Long, yellow tusks curved from its mouth. It was rooting in a pile of sludge with its snout, eating whatever was in there.
It was bigger than him. It looked strong.
The void in his chest pulsed. A sharp, eager pull. It wanted the boar-thing. It wanted that bigger life, that thicker steam.
Geummo felt a chill that wasn't from the air. This was stupid. The thing could gore him. He had one working arm and no weapon.
He started to back away.
The void pulsed again, hard. A spike of cold need shot through him. No. It wasn't a word. It was a command of pure hunger.
The boar-thing lifted its head. It sniffed the air. Its small, red eyes locked on him.
It snorted, a cloud of foul steam puffing from its nostrils. It lowered its head, tusks pointing right at him.
Run. He should run.
But his legs felt heavy. The void was holding him there. It was hungry. It didn't care about danger. It just wanted to eat.
The boar charged.
Geummo threw himself to the side. The tusk grazed his hip, tearing through the ragged cloth and opening a deep cut. He hit the ground hard, the wind knocked out of him.
The boar skidded, turned, and charged again. Faster this time.
There was no time to get up. Geummo did the only thing he could. He rolled onto his back and held out his good hand, palm out, like he could stop it.
The void took over.
The cold spot on his chest didn't just pull this time. It reached.
A tendril of darkness, thin and wispy like smoke, shot from the center of the birthmark. It was so faint he could barely see it. It stabbed toward the charging boar, not at its body, but at the air in front of it.
It touched the boar's anger. Its animal fury to kill.
And it ate that feeling.
The boar stumbled. Its charge lost all its purpose. It slowed to a trot, then stopped a few feet from Geummo. It looked confused. Its red eyes were dull. It shook its head, as if trying to remember what it was doing.
Geummo scrambled up. His hip screamed where it was cut, but he ignored it. The void was pulling, drinking the grey steam that was now pouring from the boar—the steam of its stolen rage. The Void Qi inside him grew. Another drop. Then another.
But the boar was still big. Still alive. The confusion wouldn't last.
He needed to finish it.
He looked around. A heavy, pointed bone from some giant rib lay nearby. He grabbed it. It was slick and cold.
The boar was starting to snort again, its anger returning.
Geummo didn't let it. He ran forward, the bone spear in his hand. He didn't aim for the heart. He wasn't a hunter. He aimed for the neck, the big, thick neck.
He drove the point down with all his weight.
It was harder than he thought. The bone point wasn't sharp. It took three hard, desperate jabs to punch through the tough hide. The boar screamed—a horrible, wet sound. It thrashed, throwing Geummo off. He landed in the sludge, the wind gone again.
The boar staggered, blood pumping from its neck. It tried to charge once more, but it was weak. It fell to its knees.
Geummo crawled over. He didn't use the bone this time. He put his hands on the boar's heaving side. He pressed the cold spot on his chest against its hot, filthy skin.
FEED.
The pull was violent this time. It wasn't a sip. It was a gulp. A rush of grey steam, thick and hot, flooded out of the dying boar and into Geummo. The Void Qi inside him swelled. It wasn't drops anymore. It was a small, cold pool.
The boar's thrashing stopped. Its eyes went empty long before its heart did. It just lay there, breathing shallowly, all its wildness, its life, gone. Sucked out.
Geummo sat back, breathing hard. He felt… full. Not of food. Of something cold and heavy. The void was quiet, satisfied.
His own stomach growled.
He spent the next hour with the sharpest bone he could find, cutting into the boar. The meat was dark, stringy, and smelled terrible. He ate until he was sick, then ate some more. He wasn't thinking about taste. He was thinking about not being hungry tomorrow.
He made a pile of the leftover meat. He didn't know how to preserve it. It would probably rot. He didn't care.
As he sat there, covered in blood and sludge, his body began to change.
The deep cut on his hip from the tusk stopped bleeding. He watched as the flesh around it turned grey and numb. Over the next hour, it didn't scab. It just… sealed. Like it was stitched closed with threads of shadow. It left an ugly, smooth scar, darker than the rest of his skin.
The infected cuts on his arms and legs dried up. The yellow ooze stopped. They too turned into dark, numb scars.
He felt stronger. The constant ache of his broken, crooked arm faded to a dull throb. He could move it a little better.
But he also felt colder. The world seemed quieter. The grey light looked flatter. When he looked at his hands, they seemed like they belonged to someone else.
He looked down at the birthmark on his chest. It was bigger now. It had grown. What was once a smudge was now a definite mark, about the size of his palm. The edges were sharper, like a stain spreading on cloth.
He touched it. It was cold. Colder than his skin. It didn't feel like part of him.
It felt like a hole. A hole he was falling into.
He got up. He had meat. He had water, even if it burned. He had a strange, cold power that let him steal the life from things.
He was surviving.
He looked at the empty shell of the boar. At the bones all around him. At the endless, ugly grey sky.
This was his life now. An endless cycle of hunger and feeding. Of becoming less human to stay alive.
The void in his chest was silent, content.
Geummo felt nothing at all. Just the cold, and the quiet, and the knowledge that tomorrow, he would have to do it all again.
He walked back to where he'd left the pile of meat. He sat down beside it, his back against a black rock. He stared at nothing.
He was alive.
It didn't feel like winning. It felt like losing something else.