The hunger was not a sensation of the stomach. It was a howling void, a gravitational collapse located somewhere beneath his ribs, demanding not bread or water, but existence itself.
Eren lay in the mud, the rain of the Grey Wastes plastering his hair to his skull. His chest heaved, sucking in air that tasted of sulfur and wet ash. Beside him lay Silas.
Just moments ago, Silas had been a threat—a dagger in the dark, a sneer, a violent end to Eren's miserable exile. Now, Silas was a husk. Eren looked at the body, really looked at it, and for the first time, he saw the world through the lens of the anomaly in his gut.
The visual spectrum had shifted. The muddy alleyway, usually a palette of browns and greys, was now overlaid with a suffocating, monochromatic static. But within that static, there were absences and presences. Silas's corpse was a grey outline, rapidly fading into the background noise. The faint, white mist that had once constituted his meager cultivation—the thing the black hole in Eren's dantian had swallowed reflexively—was gone.
Eren pushed himself up. His arms trembled. His left leg, shattered during the beating prior to his death, screamed in a high-pitched agony that felt distant, muffled by the roaring appetite.
*More.* The command echoed in his mind. It wasn't a thought; it was an imperative.
He dragged his body toward the brick wall, his fingers digging into the slurry of filth and gravel. He needed to hide. He needed to think. But mostly, he needed to feed.
His hand brushed against his chest, feeling the hard lump beneath his tattered tunic. The wooden doll. A crude carving of a woman holding a child, the wood worn smooth by years of anxious thumb-rubbing. His mother's legacy. It was the only thing in this alley that felt solid, the only thing that didn't look like potential fuel or waste. He clutched it for a second, grounding himself against the vertigo of his new senses.
*Focus,* he told himself.
He scanned the alleyway. The Grey Wastes were a graveyard of spiritual runoff, where the unwanted energies of the opulent cities above trickled down to mutate the flora and fauna below. To normal eyes, it was just trash.
To Eren's new eyes, it was a scattered buffet of dying embers.
He saw a patch of moss growing on a rusted pipe. It pulsed with a sickly, necrotic green light—a contamination of Wood Qi. He saw a puddle shimmering with oil, radiating a faint, toxic heat.
And then, he saw the trail.
It was a scuff mark of luminescence, a ghostly contrail drifting just above the mud. It was faint, the color of bruised violets. It smelled—not to his nose, but to his spiritual sense—of rot and frenetic energy.
*Movement.*
Eren froze, pressing his back against the cold brick.
Ten feet away, emerging from beneath a pile of shattered crates, was a rat.
It was a monstrosity of the Wastes. It was the size of a small dog, its fur patchy and falling out in clumps to reveal weeping sores. Its tail was a hairless, whip-like appendage that twitched with independent malice. But Eren didn't focus on the sores or the teeth.
He stared at the glowing core within the creature's chest.
It was a tangled knot of dirty light. A fragment of spiritual energy that the beast had ingested from the waste, which had mutated its body. It beat in time with the creature's heart. *Thump-thump. Thump-thump.*
The hunger in Eren's dantian flared, sending a shockwave of phantom pain through his meridians. It was a predator's response. The black hole spun, tightening, demanding the scrap of light inside the beast.
The rat paused. It lifted its snout, whiskers twitching. It smelled the blood on Eren. It smelled the death of Silas. Its beady red eyes locked onto Eren's form huddled in the shadows.
To the rat, Eren was meat. Easy, crippled meat.
To Eren, the rat was a battery.
The creature let out a low hiss, baring yellow incisors that looked sharp enough to shear through copper wire. It crept forward, its claws clicking on the stone.
Eren's muscles locked up. He had no weapon. Silas's dagger was lost in the mud somewhere. His leg was useless. He was a Mortal Root—trash. He had never cultivated a day in his life because his body couldn't hold Qi.
*But I don't need to hold it,* Eren realized, his breath catching in his throat. *I just need to take it.*
The rat lunged.
It was a blur of wet fur and teeth. Eren didn't try to dodge; he couldn't. He threw his left arm up, sacrificing the limb to protect his throat.
The jaws clamped down on his forearm.
Pain, white-hot and searing, exploded in his mind. The rat's teeth sank deep, grinding against the radius bone. The weight of the beast slammed him back into the mud, the breath leaving his lungs in a wet wheeze. The creature thrashed, shaking its head to tear the flesh.
Eren didn't scream. The hunger wouldn't let him waste the breath.
With a snarl that belonged to no human throat, Eren brought his right hand down. He didn't strike the head; he grabbed the rat by the throat.
His fingers, thin and caked with grime, dug into the loose, mutated skin. He squeezed.
The rat squealed, its claws raking down Eren's chest, shredding his tunic and carving bloody furrows into his skin. The pain was blinding, a sensory overload that should have knocked him unconscious. But the abyss in his gut was spinning faster, overriding the pain signals, converting the agony into adrenaline.
"Mine," Eren croaked, blood bubbling past his lips.
He squeezed harder. He could feel the cartilage of the rat's windpipe shifting under his thumb. The creature released his arm, snapping at his face, its foul breath washing over him.
Eren headbutted it.
Ideally, it was a foolish move. The rat's skull was thick, mutated bone. Eren's forehead split open on impact, blood blinding his left eye. But the shock stunned the beast for a fraction of a second.
That was all he needed.
Eren rolled, ignoring the scream of his broken leg, pinning the thrashing rodent beneath his weight. He jammed his forearm—the one the rat had just chewed on—into the creature's mouth to silence it, not caring about the damage. His right hand clamped over the glowing knot he could see in its chest.
He didn't know a technique. He didn't know a mantra. The Heavens had given him nothing.
So he used instinct.
He visualized the black hole in his stomach expanding. He visualized it traveling up his arm, through his palm, and latching onto that violet scrap of light inside the beast.
*DEVOUR.*
The sensation was instantaneous and violent.
It wasn't like drinking water; it was like uncorking a vacuum.
Under his palm, the rat convulsed. A high-pitched keen escaped its muffled throat, a sound of spiritual violation. Eren watched, wide-eyed, as the violet light was physically ripped from the creature's flesh. It flowed like liquid smoke, passing through the rat's skin and sinking into Eren's palm.
The connection was visceral. Eren gasped, his back arching.
The energy rushed up his arm, cold and oily. It carried the memories of the beast—the taste of garbage, the fear of the thunder, the burning itch of the mutation. It was dirty energy, chaotic and unrefined.
But to the black hole, it was ambrosia.
The vortex in his dantian grabbed the foreign energy, spun it, crushed it, and stripped it of its impurities in a heartbeat. The chaotic violet sludge was refined into a single, microscopic drop of pure, colorless power.
Then, the vortex released it back into his body.
The feedback loop hit him.
The drop of energy exploded outwards from his center. It didn't go to his nonexistent spiritual root. It went to his flesh.
Eren felt a horrifying, wet *squelch* inside his left leg. The bones, shattered and grinding, were seized by the power. They were forced back into alignment with a brutal efficiency that made him cry out. Muscles knit together with the speed of a burning fuse. The deep gash on his forearm ceased bleeding, the skin pulling tight over the wound, leaving behind a jagged, silvery scar.
It wasn't gentle healing. It was reconstruction.
The rat beneath him went limp. It didn't just die; it withered. Its muscle mass seemed to evaporate, leaving behind loose skin draped over brittle bones. The glow was gone. The essence was gone.
Eren collapsed on top of the carcass, his chest heaving.
The rain continued to fall, washing the blood from his face, but the heat inside him was a furnace. He lay there for a long time, listening to the squelching sound of his own internal organs repairing themselves.
Slowly, testing the reality of it, Eren moved his left leg.
It moved. It hurt—a dull, bruised ache—but the structural integrity was there. He flexed his fingers. The strength in his grip was terrifying. It wasn't the strength of a cultivator who used Qi to enhance their limbs; it was the dense, raw power of flesh that had been remade by something superior to Qi.
He rolled off the dead rat and sat up in the mud.
He looked at his hands. They were still thin, still covered in grime, but the tremors were gone. The weakness that had plagued him since birth—the frailty of the 'Mortal Root'—was receding.
He looked at the rat. It looked like it had been dead for weeks, dried out and hollow.
Eren reached into his tunic and pulled out the wooden doll again. He needed to see it. He needed to remember who he was, because for a moment, while he was draining the life from that creature, he hadn't been Eren Vale. He had been the Abyss.
"I'm alive," he whispered to the doll. His voice was raspy, but steady.
He stood up. He swayed slightly, but his feet found purchase.
The hunger in his gut had quieted, but it wasn't gone. It was merely purring, waiting for the next meal. The single scrap from the rat was a drop in the ocean. It had fixed his leg, closed his wounds, but it hadn't filled the void.
Eren looked up from the alleyway, toward the skyline of the slum.
Before, he had seen a maze of suffering, a place where he was destined to rot. Now, the chaotic jumble of shacks and ruins was a tapestry of faint, flickering lights. Every feral dog, every patch of toxic moss, every thug lurking in the shadows with a sliver of cultivation...
They were glowing.
A dark, humorless smile touched his lips, cracking the dried blood on his face. The Heavens had cast him out to die in the garbage, thinking him a cripple. They had thought the Wastes would consume him.
He took a step forward, his boot splashing heavily into a puddle, shattering the reflection of the grey sky.
They were wrong. The Wastes weren't his grave.
They were his larder.Word Count1857