Darkness did not fall; it rose.
It welled up from the cracks in the cobblestones, from the damp rot of the alley walls, and finally, from the depths of Eren's own failing chest. The silence was not peaceful. It was heavy, a suffocating blanket of lead that pressed the last breath from his lungs and held it there, refusing to let him draw another.
He was dead. He knew this with a cold, detached clarity that floated somewhere above the pain. The thudding agony of the spiritual fever that had boiled his blood for days was gone, replaced by a terrifying numbness. The stench of urine, mold, and old blood that permeated the Grey Wastes faded into neutrality.
Yet, consciousness lingered. It was a spark trapped in a cooling ember, refusing to be extinguished.
*Is this it?* The thought was sluggish, moving through molasses. *Thrown away by my father. Spat on by the Heavens. Dying in a puddle of sludge next to a boy killed for a crust of bread.*
Beside him lay Silas. Not the Patriarch—not the man who had cast Eren into this hell—but Little Silas, the rat-faced orphan who had shared his corner of the alley. Silas, who had taught Eren how to steal rainwater without getting dysentery. Silas, whose throat had been slit an hour ago by the Iron Tooth Gang because he'd found a piece of green-spotted spirit bread.
Eren couldn't turn his head, but his fading mind's eye saw the boy's corpse. The heat was already leaving Silas's small, malnourished frame.
*Trash,* the world whispered. *You were born trash, and you die trash.*
Rage flickered in the dark. It was a small, pathetic thing at first, but it found fuel in the absolute injustice of the silence. Eren Vale had done nothing but be born. He had committed no crime other than possessing a Mortal Root in a world of immortals. For that sin, he had lost his name, his home, and now, his life.
*No.*
The refusal rippled through the stillness of his corpse.
*I do not accept this.*
Deep within his lower abdomen—the Lower Dantian, the sacred vessel where cultivators stored their Golden Qi and mortals stored nothing but disappointment—something shifted.
Usually, a Mortal Root was described as a withered twig, a calcified knot that could not hold water. Eren had felt it his whole life, a blockage that made him heavy and dull. But now, under the crushing pressure of death, that knot didn't just break.
It collapsed.
It was not a spiritual awakening. There was no golden light, no celestial choir, no descending lotus blossoms. It was a structural failure of reality within his own body. The withered root imploded, folding in on itself, denser and denser, crushed by the sheer weight of Eren's hatred and the encroaching void of death.
*Crack.*
The sound was internal, audible only to the soul. The Mortal Root shattered.
In its place, a singularity formed.
It was a pinprick of absolute black. A vacuum. A hungry mouth where a soul should be.
The sensation hit Eren's dormant nervous system like a lightning bolt made of ice. The numbness vanished, obliterated by a sudden, violent demand. It wasn't pain. Pain was a signal of damage. This was **Hunger**.
It was a hunger so ancient, so profound, that it felt like the starvation of a thousand years compressed into a single second. The black hole in his Dantian spun, sluggish at first, then faster, grinding against the walls of his spiritual cavity.
*Feed,* the Void whispered. It wasn't a voice; it was an instinct, a command written in the code of the universe. *Feed or cease.*
The vortex expanded.
The first thing it consumed was the fever.
The spiritual fever was a chaotic, toxic energy—runoff qi from the noble districts above that poisoned the groundwater of the slums. It had been cooking Eren's organs, rotting him from the inside. To a normal cultivator, it was venom.
To the swirling abyss in his gut, it was an appetizer.
Eren's body jerked. A spasm racked his limbs, his back arching off the grime-slicked stones. The toxic heat that had been ravaging his bloodstream was seized by an invisible gravity. He could feel it physically moving, dragged through his veins not by the pumping of his heart—which was still silent—but by the suction of the Dantian.
The burning fire of the fever was pulled down, swirling into a tight spiral, and dumped into the maw of the black hole.
*More.*
The fever was gone in an instant, crushed into nothingness, stripped of its toxicity and converted into raw, chaotic fuel. But it wasn't enough. It was a drop of water on a desert of salt.
The suction increased. The gravity well deepened. It clawed at the walls of Eren's stomach, his lungs, threatening to consume his own flesh to sustain itself.
*Need. Sustenance.*
The vortex reached outward. It ignored the barrier of skin and bone, extending its invisible tendrils into the damp air of the alley.
It found Silas.
Little Silas was dead, but the spiritual energy inherent in all living things had not yet fully dissipated. Humans in this world, even the non-cultivators, were touched by the Heavens. They had trace amounts of ambient qi in their blood, in their marrow. And Silas, having just eaten that piece of spirit-bread before dying, held a tiny, concentrated pocket of energy in his stomach.
Eren's consciousness watched in horrified fascination as the connection formed.
He couldn't see it with his eyes—they were rolled back in his head—but he *felt* it. He felt the cold, invisible tendrils of his Dantian latch onto the cooling corpse beside him. It was a violation. A desecration.
*Stop,* Eren tried to think. *That's Silas.*
The Void did not care. The Void did not know friendship. It knew only emptiness and the need to fill it.
*Devour.*
The pull was violent.
From the corpse of the boy, wisps of pale, grey mist began to rise. It was the residual life force, the fading echoes of a soul, and the traces of grain-qi from the bread.
Eren's body convulsed again, a grotesque marionette jerked by strings of gravity. The grey mist was ripped from Silas's body. It streamed through the air, piercing Eren's chest, flowing directly into the spinning black star in his gut.
It felt cold. Like swallowing slush.
Eren felt the essence of the boy flood into him. For a fraction of a second, flashing images bombarded his comatose mind.
*The taste of moldy bread. The sharp sting of the knife. The fear. The longing for a mother he never knew. The sound of rain on a tin roof.*
Silas's memories. His final moments.
Eren screamed silently in the prison of his mind. He was eating him. He was eating his friend's existence.
The Void ground the memories down. It shredded the emotions, stripping away the humanity until only the raw energy remained. It took the fear, the pain, and the tiny spark of potential Silas had carried, and it crushed them into fuel.
*Crunch.*
The energy hit the singularity. The black hole flared.
The intake of power slammed into the walls of Eren's Dantian, sending a shockwave through his physiology. The energy wasn't cycled; it wasn't refined through meridians like a normal cultivator would do. It was simply *taken*.
The singularity pulsed. It sent a backlash of dark, heavy power surging outward, flooding Eren's stopped heart.
*Thump.*
The sound was like a war drum in the silence of the alley.
Eren's chest heaved. A jagged, ragged breath tore through his throat, sounding like the gasp of a drowning man breaking the surface.
*Thump-thump.*
The heart, fueled by the stolen life force of a dead friend and the toxic runoff of the slums, beat with a terrifying strength. It didn't pump red blood anymore. The fluid moving through his veins felt thicker, hotter, charged with a predatory vibration.
His fingers, curled into claws against the wet stone, twitched. The joints popped.
The spiritual fever was gone. The weakness of starvation was gone. In their place was a cold, iron-hard vitality that felt alien to his own skin.
Slowly, agonizingly, the paralysis of death retreated. The nerves fired, sending spikes of pins-and-needles pain through his extremities.
Eren Vale was alive.
But he was not the same.
The Eren who had died minutes ago was a victim. A boy who kept a wooden doll carved by his mother in his pocket and dreamed of mercy. The thing that lay shivering on the cobblestones now was a vessel for something else.
He pushed himself up. His arms shook, the muscles corded and tight. The movement was jerky, unnatural. He felt heavy, as if the gravity around him had increased, or perhaps he had become denser.
He sat up, his back against the slime-covered brick wall.
The alley was dark, shadows stretching long from the distant, flickering spirit-lamps of the upper city. The smell of the slums rushed back into his nose—shit, rot, and despair—but now, underneath it, he smelled something else.
He smelled *light*.
He turned his head toward Silas.
The boy's body looked different now. Before, it had been a tragic sight. Now, to Eren's senses, it looked... empty. Like a husk of corn shucked and discarded. It was grey, utterly devoid of the faint luster that even corpses usually held for a few hours. Eren had taken everything. Even the warmth was gone, leaving the skin frosted with unnatural ice.
Eren lifted his hand. He looked at his palm. It was caked in dirt, but the skin beneath was pale, the veins dark, almost black, pulsing with a rhythm that felt too slow to be human.
He felt the Void in his gut spinning. It was quiet now, purring like a sated beast, but the hunger was still there, lurking at the edges, waiting for the fuel to burn out so it could demand more.
He had eaten a human soul. Or parts of one.
He waited for the guilt. He waited for the horror to break him.
It didn't come.
Instead, a cold logic settled over him. Silas was dead. The energy would have dissipated into the air, wasted, returning to the Heavens that despised them both. Eren had merely... repurposed it. He had denied the Heavens their tithe.
*The Heavens eat us,* Eren thought, the realization crystallizing in his mind with the hardness of a diamond. *They eat our potential, our dreams, our lives. They set up the roots to harvest us.*
He clenched his fist. The power of the devoured fever and the dead boy surged through his arm. It was dirty power, jagged and unrefined, but it was *his*.
*If the Heavens want to eat...*
Eren took a deep breath. The air hissed through his teeth.
*...then I will eat the Heavens.*
He lowered his hand and raised his head.
For the first time since his heart had stopped, Eren Vale opened his eyes.
They did not reflect the dim light of the alley. The irises, once a warm, muddy brown, had been bleached of all color. In the center, the pupils were no longer round. They were fractured, shifting shapes of absolute blackness that seemed to pull the light into them, twin events horizons staring out from a human skull.
Across the alley, in the shadows of a pile of refuse, a large, mange-ridden spirit-rat—the size of a dog—froze. It had been creeping forward, drawn by the scent of fresh death, intending to feast on Silas's soft tissues.
Eren locked eyes with the beast.
The rat squealed. It wasn't a sound of aggression; it was a shriek of primal terror. Animals had instincts that humans had long forgotten. The rat didn't see a boy. It saw the bottom of the food chain suddenly opening up to swallow the top.
The creature scrambled backward, claws skittering on the stone, desperate to flee.
Eren felt the Void twitch in his gut. It liked the fear. It wanted the rat. It wanted the life pulsing in the creature's feral heart.
"Run," Eren whispered.
His voice was a ruin. It sounded like grinding stones, layered with a sub-harmonic vibration that made the puddles on the ground shiver.
The rat bolted into the darkness.
Eren didn't chase it. Not yet. He needed to understand what he had become. He looked down at his chest, at the tattered rags he wore. He reached into his pocket, his trembling fingers brushing against the rough wood of the small doll his mother had carved.
It was still there. The one thing he hadn't devoured.
He gripped it tight, anchoring himself to the memory of humanity, even as the abyss in his stomach churned.
A sound echoed from the mouth of the alley. Footsteps. Heavy, confident boots splashing through the muck. The rhythmic clinking of cheap armor.
"Told you I heard a squeal," a rough voice grunted. "Probably the rats finishing off the little trash."
"Check the bodies," a second voice sneered. "If the big one is dead, chop off his head. Boss wants proof the Vale exile is finished."
The Iron Tooth Gang. The men who had killed Silas.
Eren remained seated against the wall. The darkness of the alley seemed to cling to him, wrapping around his shoulders like a cloak.
The Void in his Dantian woke up. The purring stopped. The rotation accelerated.
It sensed fresh meat. *Stronger* meat.
Eren's lips peeled back, revealing teeth stained with his own blood. He didn't feel fear. He didn't feel the urge to beg.