It's disgusting. The texture of raw meat and cold ichor should have made me gag, but somehow, the flavor isn't bad.
"What?" I croaked, the sound of my own voice startling me.
In my hand, I held what was clearly the jaw of the beast. My teeth were sunken deep into the remaining gristle. On the floor lay the rest of the head, gnawed and mangled. Everything that could be eaten had been consumed... by me.
I knew I should throw up. I knew I should feel a crushing weight of self-loathing. But I didn't. Instead, I took another bite. Then another. And another.
With every swallow, the meat seemed to melt, transforming into something invigorating—a surge of heat that raced through my veins. It was a strange, addictive fuel that dragged me out of my primal slumber and back into the light of reason.
"How am I standing?" I looked down at my legs.
Both were there. Whole. Perfect. As if the beast had never torn my thigh to ribbons.
"What?! How?!"
I dropped the jawbone, my heart hammering against my ribs. Had I regenerated? To test the impossible, I grabbed a shard of bone—a sharp, jagged splinter—and stabbed it into the palm of my hand. I watched, mesmerized. The wound closed three times faster than any human injury should, but that wasn't the most intriguing part.
The bone shard in my hand was drinking.
As my blood spilled onto the calcified surface, the bone absorbed it, pulsing with a faint, rhythmic light. It began to repair its own jagged edges, knitting itself back together using my essence. This should be impossible. What was this creature?
I stared at the remains of the head, truly seeing it for the first time. During the fight, my mind had labeled it a "lion" just to make sense of the horror. But it wasn't a lion. The mane was a cluster of writhing, dead tentacles. The four eyes were lidless and pupilless, staring into nothing. The "fur" was a coat of cold, interlocking scales, and the claws were fixed, bone-like extensions.
This was a nightmare plucked from the pages of a Lovecraftian horror. And yet, I wasn't horrified. I wasn't even afraid.
The realization brought a much more important question to my mind.
"What am I?"
There were no mirrors in this desolate place—no polished surfaces, no still pools of water. Yet, I could see myself. It wasn't through sight, but a strange, 360-degree perception, as if the very air around me were reporting my own image back to my mind.
I looked like myself. Human.
I traced the features of my face: eyes, nose, ears, mouth. My hair was there, messy and dark. I was naked, my body lean and corded with a new, underlying strength. I was undeniably male, just as I had been before.
"This is very interesting..." I murmured.
The wind howled across the gray jagged rocks, carrying the scent of sulfur and static, but I didn't shiver. I didn't feel the bite of the cold or the abrasive grit of the dust. My skin felt less like a barrier and more like a sensor, perfectly tuned to the environment. I was standing in a graveyard of a world, naked and exposed, and I felt as comfortable as I had been in the void.
Then, a thought struck me—a cold, logical realization that shattered my calm.
To see, one needs light. But this world was draped in a dense, suffocating mist, illuminated only by the frantic, thin flickers of atmospheric lightning. Under any normal circumstances, my human eyes should have been blind.
I focused on my body and realized the truth: I wasn't actually hearing the wind. I wasn't smelling the sulfur. My lungs weren't moving. My perception was feeding me a simulation of senses, translated from the raw data of the abyss. My body was an island of stillness.
Panic, sharp and instinctive, flared in my chest. My "human" brain took over, demanding air. I forced my chest to expand. I took a deep, desperate breath.
A mistake.
The atmosphere of this world was pure poison. It hit my throat like liquid fire and filled my lungs with the taste of corroded metal and acid. I collapsed to my knees, gagging, as my internal organs buckled under the toxicity.
Am I dying? I thought, the old human fear clutching at my throat.
I was. Until I wasn't.
My body violently expelled the unwelcome gases, and the damage was unmade almost as quickly as it had been inflicted. I forced my chest to go still. I would not breathe again. The idea of opening my eyes crossed my mind, but I discarded it instantly; if the air could melt my lungs, what would it do to my retinas? I preferred not to think about how my bare skin survived such an atmosphere—at least not until I could leave this place.
But how? And where to? Back to the Abyss? What if more of those creatures were waiting for me in the dark?
Then, the questions flooded my mind. What happened to the rest of the beast? How did it die? What killed it?
As the questions came, so did the memories. It was like watching a movie where someone else was the protagonist and I was merely a passenger. I saw myself, yet it wasn't me. I watched the rift appear—a jagged tear in reality that fulfilled my desperate desire to kill the beast. I watched myself devour it like a rabid animal until Reason finally clawed back control.
"Did I do this?" I whispered. "Me? How?"
I tested it. I focused my mind on the space where the rest of the beast's carcass remained, drifting in the void. I didn't pray or chant; I simply Willed it to be here.
I felt a sudden, sharp drain—a weakening of my internal essence—but reality obeyed. A rift tore open, and the massive, headless corpse of the beast landed heavily on the dirt.
Somehow, I could open portals.
I looked at the corpse with different eyes now. I didn't see a monster; I saw it as a predator sees its prey. I found myself walking toward it, my body instinctively refusing to let all that essence go to waste.
The rift snapped shut. I stared at the massive, headless carcass.
Essence. The word felt right. It wasn't meat I was consuming in the traditional sense; it was the very being of the creature. I knelt by the remains and began to eat again. Nothing was wasted. Even the dense, scaled bones melted in my mouth like sugar, dissolving into pure, revitalizing energy.
With every swallow, I felt the strength in my limbs solidify. But something else was growing, too.
A dark, jagged impulse began to itch at the back of my mind. I found myself wanting—no, needing—to meet another beast. I wanted to feel its hide tear beneath my fingers. I wanted to pay back the agony of my mangled leg a thousand times over. I wanted to hunt.
This violence was entirely new. In my previous life, I had been a man of peace, or perhaps just a man of apathy. Now, the prospect of unleashing this raw, Abyssal savagery was intoxicating. I could feel my heartbeat—a phantom rhythm I didn't actually need—accelerate at the thought of the kill.
I caught myself. I forced my hands to stop.
Control, I reminded myself. Reason. Despite the power surging through me, I was still, in some lingering way, a man. And these creatures were not just animals; they were Lovecraftian apex predators. No human could manfight a lion and expect to live, and no matter how much I had evolved, I was still an amateur in this graveyard world.
Instead of finishing my prey immediately, I sat back and studied it.
It was a monster, through and through—the kind of thing that would drive a normal person to the brink of madness before it even touched them. It was a chaotic assembly of biological parts. I reached out, my fingers brushing against its exposed innards. To my surprise, they weren't inert. The heart, the lungs, the stomach—everything was pulsing with a desperate, residual life. As I touched them, they clung violently to my hand, seeking a host, seeking essence.
I didn't find it disgusting. I found it... normal.
The human left in my mind was horrified, screaming silently at the sight of my blood-stained hands and the way I didn't recoil from the twitching flesh. What is wrong with me? it asked.
But that voice felt distant, like a radio signal fading into static. It didn't matter. I leaned forward and began to eat the rest.
I realized then that the process was a trade-off. Every bite of this "living" meat fueled my body, but it also fed the jagged impulse in my chest. The more I consumed, the more the Violence grew—directly proportional. It was a slow, oily numbness that started to coat my Reason.
I hated it. I didn't want to be that mindless thing I had seen in my memories—the rabid animal that didn't think, only destroyed. I wanted to be the Architect. I wanted to be the master of the Temple.
I finished the last of it, standing up in the silent, toxic mist. I was stronger, faster, and more alive than I had ever been in that other life. But the cost was written in the dark thoughts now swirling in my head.
"Control," I whispered to the empty wasteland. "I must maintain control. I must create a system."
The silence of the graveyard world offered no answer, only the distant crackle of lightning. I sat cross-legged amidst the gray dust, ignoring the way the toxic mist swirled around my skin. I closed my eyes—not my physical ones, which were useless in this dark, but the eyes of my mind.
I retreated.
I stepped back into the White Room.