Dawn arrived not as a gentle promise, but as a sterile, grey accusation. The pale light seeped through the grimy window, illuminating the small, cold room and the huddled figure within. Zero had not moved. He was a statue carved from exhaustion and trauma, his back pressed against the wall, his gaze fixed on the basin of pinkish, stagnant water. The night had been a long, slow descent into the abyss of his own actions, a silent, solitary funeral for the last, lingering echoes of the boy he had once been.
The trembling had stopped, replaced by a profound, bone-deep numbness. The screaming of Ashe's ghost had faded, not into silence, but into a low, keening hum of grief in the back of his mind. He felt hollowed out, scoured clean by the horror of the preceding hours.
He finally pushed himself to his feet, his limbs stiff and protesting. Every movement was a conscious, deliberate effort. He looked at his hands. They were clean now, the cuts on his palm already beginning to scab over. But the phantom stain was still there, a feeling like a second, invisible skin.
He had to get rid of the evidence.
He methodically emptied the basin out of his window, the water arcing into the darkness of the alley below. He retrieved the blood-stained brick, wrapped it in a spare piece of cloth, and tucked it deep into his porter's pack. He would dispose of it in the academy's main incinerator later, a piece of common refuse among a thousand others. He was already thinking like a criminal, covering his tracks, erasing his sins. The process felt unnervingly natural.
It was as he was securing his pack that the System, which had been blessedly, unnervingly silent all night, chose to remind him of its presence.
A single, stark white window shimmered into existence before him. It was a skill notification, a formal, clinical announcement of the 'reward' he had earned.
[SKILL ACQUIRED: FLESH DEVOURER'S STRENGTH (PASSIVE, LVL 1)]
Beneath the title, in smaller, sharper script, was the description. The same words that had sent him spiraling into a vortex of revulsion in the alley. He forced himself to read them again, his eyes tracing each monstrous letter.
[Description: You are a predator. You are a scavenger. You are what waits in the dark. Gain a permanent, minuscule increase to your base Strength by consuming the flesh of your slain enemies.]
He stared at the words, his mind a cold, flat plain. The initial, visceral horror was gone, burned out by a night of self-flagellation. What was left was a chilling, analytical curiosity. This was not a gift. It was a curse. It was a shackle, a chain binding him to the very act that had just shattered him.
His gaze flickered over the final, damning line.
[Synergy: This skill actively suppresses the host's natural aversion to consuming humanoid flesh. Continued use will result in psychological adaptation and potential dependency.]
Psychological adaptation. Dependency.
It wasn't just a skill. It was a conversion process. A slow, methodical rewriting of his fundamental nature. The System was not just giving him power; it was telling him what he had to become to use it. It was a predator, and it was teaching its host how to hunt.
He dismissed the window with a wave of his hand, a gesture of pure, defiant revulsion. He would not become a ghoul. He would not let this monstrous, alien power dictate the terms of his existence. He would find another way. He had to.
And then he felt it.
It started as a low, dull ache in the pit of his stomach, a feeling like the first, distant pangs of hunger after a long fast. But this was not normal hunger. It was a cold, gnawing emptiness, a parasitic craving that seemed to radiate from his very bones. It was a hollow, aching need that had nothing to do with food.
He tried to ignore it. He dressed in his simple student's uniform, the familiar, rough fabric a grounding sensation. He splashed cold water on his face, trying to wash away the grey pallor of a sleepless night. But the hunger grew. It was a persistent, insidious whisper in his gut, a low hum of pure, biological need.
He thought of the breakfast that would be served in the refectory. Stale bread, thin porridge, a piece of dried fruit. The thought, which should have been at least mildly appealing, turned his stomach. His body didn't want sustenance. It wanted… something else.
The hunger sharpened, becoming a physical pain, a cramp that made him double over, his hand clutching his stomach. His mind, unbidden, flashed with an image from the alley: the dark, cooling blood on the cobblestones. The scent of it. The taste of it.
He gagged, a dry, retching sound, and pushed himself away from the basin, his knuckles white.
No.
This was the curse. This was the true price of the skill. Not the act of consumption, but the desire for it. The constant, gnawing temptation. His own body had become his enemy, its new, monstrous appetites at war with the last, lingering vestiges of his human soul.
He had to fight it. He had to control it.
He stumbled to his desk, grabbing one of the books that had fallen to the floor. 'A Field Guide to Arcane Flora.' He forced himself to open it, to focus on the intricate diagrams of mana-infused plants, the dry, academic text. He tried to lose himself in the familiar comfort of knowledge, the cold, clean logic of his past life as a scholar.
He read a full page, his eyes scanning the words, but his mind absorbed nothing. The hunger was a constant, distracting static, a high-pitched whine in the background of his thoughts. It was a parasite in his consciousness, and it was demanding to be fed.
He slammed the book shut, a surge of desperate, impotent rage washing over him. He was trapped. He was a prisoner in his own skin. He had come back to this life to be the master of his own fate, to be the one who pulled the strings. Instead, he found himself a puppet, his strings being pulled by a monstrous, invisible hunger he could not comprehend.
He looked at his reflection in the dark, grimy window. The pale, haunted face of a sixteen-year-old boy stared back. But the eyes… the eyes were no longer those of a boy. They were old, weary, and for the first time, they held the cold, calculating, and utterly alien gaze of a predator, looking at its own reflection and wondering what, exactly, it had become. The hunger was not just in his stomach. He could see it there, in the depths of his own eyes, a dark, patient, and waiting thing. And he knew, with a chilling, absolute certainty, that this was a battle he would have to fight every single day for the rest of his new, cursed life.