Geummo walked. The meat was gone. He'd eaten the last of it two days ago. The hunger was back, worse than ever.
He'd been following the black stream. It seemed to be the only thing that moved in this dead place. It had to go somewhere.
The landscape changed slowly. The fields of bone gave way to rocky slopes and deep ravines. The air got thicker, harder to breathe. It felt heavy, like it was pressing down on him.
He saw more creatures. Things that scuttled in the shadows. He avoided them when he could. The void in his chest wanted him to hunt, to feed it. But he was tired. Draining those things took something out of him too. It left him feeling emptier, even as the Void Qi grew.
His body was different now. The scars from his wounds were all dark, smooth, and numb. The broken arm had set itself crooked, but it didn't hurt much. He could use it to carry things. His senses were strange. Sometimes he could hear the scuttling of creatures far away, clear as a bell. Other times, he'd stare at his own hand and not recognize it.
The birthmark was bigger. It covered most of his chest now. It looked less like a mark and more like a hole. If he stared at it too long, he felt dizzy, like he was falling in.
He found a new kind of mushroom. Blue, with white spots. He was desperate enough to try it.
It didn't kill him. It made the world melt. Colors bled together. The rocks whispered. He saw his father, who had never looked him in the eye, nodding in approval. He saw Sooyoung smiling at him, a real smile. He knew it wasn't real. It made him sick.
He stumbled for hours, lost in the visions. When he finally came back to himself, he was on his knees, vomiting black water. The void had eaten the poison, but not the memory of the visions. The happy lies felt worse than the pain.
He kept walking.
Finally, the stream widened and joined a larger, slower river of the black sludge. And on a bend in the river, he saw it.
A town.
It wasn't a real town. It was a jagged, broken thing clinging to the base of a cliff. The buildings were made of piled-up black rock, chunks of old, rusted metal, and packed bone-dust. Some had roofs of tattered, cured hides. Smoke rose from a few holes, smoke that smelled like burning hair and rotten fat.
There were people. Or things that had been people.
He stood at the edge, hidden behind a boulder, and watched. Figures moved slowly between the shacks. They were thin, wrapped in rags. Their skin was grey or stained with strange colors. Some had odd growths—extra fingers, lumps on their backs, patches of scales.
This was a place for things the world had thrown away. Just like him.
He had two choices. Walk into the wilderness and probably die. Or walk into the town and probably die.
The void in his chest pulsed. It was curious.
He walked toward the town.
The first person to see him was a woman sitting by a small fire, boiling a pot of something that bubbled green. She had one milky white eye and one normal one. She looked at him, at his ragged clothes, at the dark brand on his forehead. Her normal eye narrowed.
"New meat," she grunted. "You got anything to trade?"
Geummo stopped. "Trade?"
"Scrap. Spirit-iron. Curie-fungi. Good bone. You got anything, or you just another mouth?"
He had nothing. He shook his head.
She spat into the fire. It sizzled. "Then get to the Pit. They always need bait."
She went back to stirring her pot.
Geummo walked deeper into the town. The paths were just packed dirt and ground bone. People watched him from doorways. Their eyes were empty, or hungry, or crazy. No one looked friendly.
He saw a bigger building. It had a sign made of a cracked shield, with a crude picture of two stick-figures fighting. He could hear shouting from inside.
He pushed through a hide curtain.
The smell hit him first. Sweat, blood, and a sweet, sickly smell he didn't know. The room was a big, round pit dug into the ground, with a rough ledge for people to stand on and look down. A dozen men and women stood around, yelling.
Down in the pit, two people were fighting.
One was a huge man with one horn growing from his forehead. He was bleeding from a cut on his arm. The other was a skinny kid, maybe sixteen, fast and desperate. The kid had a sharp piece of metal. The big man had his fists.
The kid dodged a swing and slashed the man's leg. The crowd roared. The big man roared louder, grabbed the kid by the throat, and slammed him against the dirt wall. Once. Twice. The kid went limp.
The big man dropped him and raised his arms. The crowd threw small, dark chips of something into the pit. The man gathered them up.
A greasy-looking man with a lopsided smile saw Geummo. "Hey. New face. You looking to fight? We're short a body for the next round. You get a quarter-share of the take if you live."
Geummo looked at the kid in the pit. He wasn't moving.
"No," Geummo said.
The man's smile didn't change. "Suit yourself. Nothing's free here, boy. You don't fight, you find another way to pay. Or you become what everyone eats."
Geummo left.
He wandered until he found a quiet space between two shacks, a narrow alley filled with trash and stinking puddles. He sank down against a wall. He was so tired.
He must have slept. A kick to his ribs woke him up.
Two men stood over him. They were bigger than him, with the tough, mean look of people who'd been here a long time. One had a knife made from a sharpened spine.
"Brand-new," said the one with the knife. "Still soft. Check him for loot."
The other man knelt and started patting Geummo down. His hands were rough.
Geummo didn't move. He let it happen. He had nothing.
"Nothing," the kneeling man said, disappointed. "Not even a decent scrap."
The man with the knife shrugged. "Take his clothes. They're better than rags."
They started pulling at his shirt.
A hot, sharp feeling cut through Geummo's tiredness. It was small, but it was there. Anger. He was so sick of being pushed. Of being nothing.
The void in his chest woke up. It liked the anger.
As the man tore his shirt, his hand brushed against the dark birthmark.
The void reached.
It wasn't a big pull. Just a taste.
The man yelped and snatched his hand back. "The hell? His skin's ice-cold!"
He looked at his fingers. The tips were pale, almost white. They looked… drained.
Geummo looked up at him. He didn't say anything. He just let the cold in his chest leak out into his eyes.
The man with the knife saw it. He saw the dark mark on Geummo's chest, bigger than any normal birthmark. He saw the brand on his forehead. He saw the dead, dark scars on his skin.
He took a step back. "Cursed," he muttered. "He's not just exiled. He's cursed-touched."
The other man scrambled away, holding his numb fingers.
"Stay in your alley, curse-touch," the knife-man said, his bravado gone. "Don't bring your bad luck near us."
They left quickly.
Geummo pulled his torn shirt closed. He sat there, breathing slowly.
He had found a new way to survive here. Not by fighting. Not by trading.
By being feared.
It wasn't a good feeling. It was just another kind of cold.
But it was something.
A voice spoke from the shadows at the end of the alley. "They're right, you know. You are bad luck."
Geummo looked up.
An old man stood there, leaning on a cane made of a thick, polished bone. He was the oldest person Geummo had seen in the valley. His skin was like leather, pulled tight over his skull. He had no hair. One of his ears was missing. But his eyes were clear and sharp.
"What do you want?" Geummo asked, his voice rough.
"To see," the old man said. "We don't get many fresh exiles with the Union brand. And we get even fewer who carry the Eclipse Mark and live."
Geummo's hand went to his chest. "You know what this is?"
"A death sentence. Usually." The old man took a step closer. "It means the old war's poison is in your blood. From your parents, or their parents. Most babies born with it die young. Their own hearts freeze. The ones who live… well. They usually end up here. Or they become monsters up there." He pointed a bony finger toward the ceiling of rock and grey sky.
"What is it?" Geummo asked.
"A hole," the old man said simply. "Where your life should be, there's a hole that wants to be filled. It'll eat anything. Food. Energy. Feeling. Other people's lives. It'll keep eating until there's nothing left of you, and then it'll just be a hole walking around in a skin."
Geummo listened. It sounded right. It sounded like what was already happening.
"Can it be controlled?"
The old man laughed, a dry, crackling sound. "You don't control a hole. You feed it, or it feeds on you. But… you can learn what it likes. How to point it."
He turned and started walking away. "Come on. You can't sleep in the trash. Even bad luck needs a roof."
After a moment, Geummo got up and followed.
The old man's shack was at the very edge of town, built against the cliff face. It was slightly bigger than the others, and cleaner. Inside, it was dark and smelled of herbs and dry earth. There were shelves with jars of weird things—pickled eyes, glowing moss, powdered bone.
"Sit," the old man said, pointing to a stool.
Geummo sat. The old man put a clay bowl in front of him. It had a thick, grey stew in it. It smelled like meat and mushrooms.
"Eat."
Geummo didn't need to be told twice. He ate. It was the best thing he'd ever tasted.
While he ate, the old man talked. His name was Xiu. He'd been a low-level scribe for the Jin family, a scholar of oddities and curses. He'd spoken up about the side-effects of a "purification" ritual the Baek family was using. They'd called it treason and sent him here forty years ago.
"This place is a filter," Xiu said. "The strong, the crazy, the cruel—they go to the Pit, they run gangs, they become kings of the garbage heap. The weak die. The smart, like me, we find a niche. I trade knowledge. I know what mushrooms won't kill you. I know where the weak spirit-iron veins are. I know the signs of the deeper curses."
"And me?" Geummo asked, finishing the stew.
"You're a new kind of problem. The Eclipse Mark is awake. It's feeding. That means you have power here. The kind of power that scares the big fish in the Pit. But it's a power that will eat you from the inside out."
"How do I stop it?"
"You don't. You steer it. You want to live? You need to get stronger. Not just for food. The real predators in this valley aren't the boars or the lizard-rats. They're the people who've been here so long the curse has changed them. The ones who hunt us for sport. Or for parts."
Xiu leaned forward. "Your hole. It likes life-force, yes? The heat of living things?"
Geummo nodded.
"There's a place. A cave, half a day's walk from here. A creature lives in it. A 'Wailing Banshee.' It's not big, but it's pure spirit, almost. Made of sorrow and lost screams. Your hole… it might feast on that. It might give you a real jump. Enough to make the predators think twice."
"Why tell me?" Geummo asked.
Xiu smiled, showing few teeth. "Because if you get stronger, you can protect this shack. And because I want to see what happens. An Eclipse Mark, awake and hungry… it's been centuries. I'm a scholar. I'm curious."
It wasn't a good reason, but it was an honest one.
Xiu gave him directions. He also gave him a small, sharp knife made of dark metal. "Spirit-iron. It'll cut things normal steel won't. Don't lose it."
Geummo left at first light—the slight brightening of the grey to a lighter grey.
The cave was where Xiu said it would be. The entrance was a dark slit in the rock. A sound came from it, a low, constant weeping that made the air feel thick and sad.
Geummo stood outside. The void in his chest wasn't pulsing with hunger. It was… still. Listening. It wanted what was in there. He could feel its desire, cold and sharp.
He took a deep breath and walked into the dark.
The weeping got louder. It wasn't in his ears. It was in his head. He saw flashes—a woman clutching a dead child, a soldier dying alone in the mud, a man betrayed by his brother. The creature's food was sadness, and it was sharing its meal.
Geummo's own sadness, locked behind the broken dam, stirred. The memory of the tribunal. Sooyoung's cold eyes. His uncle's turned back. The loneliness of the bone-field.
The void reacted. It didn't like this. This sadness wasn't food. It was a rival. It was another hole trying to swallow him.
MINE, the void seemed to snarl.
The cold in his chest exploded outward.
The darkness in the cave wasn't just absence of light. It was a living thing. And Geummo's void attacked it.
He didn't see a creature. He felt a presence, a knot of pure, weeping energy. His void stabbed at it with tendrils of hungry cold. He felt a resistance, a terrible, sorrowful will.
But his hunger was simpler. Colder. It didn't feel. It just consumed.
The weeping in his mind turned to a scream. Then to a gurgle. Then to silence.
A flood of energy, cold and heavy and tasting of salt and tears, poured into him. The Void Qi in his core didn't just grow. It doubled. It filled him with a weight that made his knees buckle.
He fell to the floor of the cave, shivering. The darkness was just normal dark now. The presence was gone. Eaten.
He felt powerful. Strong. The cuts and aches of his journey were gone. His crooked arm felt straight, the bone somehow realigned by the surge of dark energy.
He also felt… less. The memory of Sooyoung's betrayal was still there, but it had no heat. It was a fact, like a rock. The sadness the creature tried to feed him was gone, swallowed by the void. He couldn't summon the feeling, even if he wanted to.
He walked out of the cave. The grey light seemed brighter, but also flatter. Colors were duller.
He looked at his reflection in a stagnant pool.
His eyes were wrong. The brown was almost gone, swallowed by the black pupil. His hair had a stark white streak at the temple. The mark on his chest was visible through his torn shirt, a black blotch that seemed to suck in the light around it.
He looked like a ghost. A hungry ghost.
He made his way back to Xiu's shack. The old man was waiting outside.
Xiu looked him up and down. His sharp eyes saw everything—the straight arm, the dead eyes, the way the shadows seemed to cling to him.
"You fed it," Xiu said, not a question.
Geummo nodded.
"And it fed you well." Xiu's face was serious. "Good. You'll need it. A pack of Deep-Dwellers was seen near the town at dusk. They're hunting. They've taken three people this week."
"What are Deep-Dwellers?"
"Men and women who went too deep into the old battlefields. The curse got into their minds. They're fast, strong, and they like the taste of human fear. They're coming tonight."
Xiu looked at Geummo. "You can hide in my root cellar. Or you can use that new strength. Your choice."
Geummo thought about hiding in a hole in the ground. He thought about the two thugs from the alley, backing away from his curse.
He looked at his hands. They didn't look like his hands anymore.
"I'll stay up here," he said, his voice flat.
Xiu nodded, a flicker of something—respect? pity?—in his eyes. "Then we wait."
Night in the valley wasn't dark. It was a deeper, more solid grey. The wailing started just after the last of the dim light faded. Not from one direction. From all around the town.
The hunters had arrived.