Scraaaape. CRACK.
The heavy wooden planks above my cellar snapped like dry twigs. A shower of dirt and rusted metal flakes rained down onto my face. I pressed my back hard against the cold dirt wall of the basement, my breathing shallow and fast.
Through the darkness of my left eye, I could only see the faint, sickly green glow of the Aether-fog drifting down from the street.
But through the Old World monocle over my right eye, the world was a terrifying canvas of energy.
The iron grate above me didn't just bend; it was violently ripped away. A massive, blindingly red mass of thermal energy squeezed through the opening. The sheer amount of heat rolling off the creature warped the air around it.
With a heavy, wet thud, the Aberration dropped into my cellar.
It was easily the size of a black bear, but it looked like a starved, mutated hound. Its skin was pitch-black and hairless, pulled tight over jagged, unnatural bones. Its ribcage was exposed, and inside its chest, a chaotic clump of glowing orange organs burned like a furnace. It didn't have eyes—just a smooth, bony plate where a face should be, with a jaw full of jagged, glass-like teeth.
It was an engine of runaway heat. An exothermic nightmare.
The beast swung its heavy head toward me. It couldn't see me, but it could feel the empty, freezing void of my Negative Flux. To a creature made of burning heat, my body must have felt like a bucket of ice water in a sauna.
It let out a screech that sounded like grinding metal and lunged.
I didn't have a sword. I didn't have a gun. I was a malnourished slum boy who couldn't even lift a heavy rock. If I tried to block it, it would snap my arms like twigs.
But I was also a university student who understood the First Law of Thermodynamics.
Heat always flows from a hotter object to a colder object, my brain calculated in a split second. Always.
I didn't try to block. As the beast leaped through the cramped cellar, I threw myself flat onto the dirt floor, sliding under its massive, snapping jaws. The creature's claws gouged the earth where my head had just been.
It crashed into the wall behind me, shaking the entire basement. But before it could turn around, I scrambled to my knees and thrust both of my bare hands forward.
I slammed my palms directly against the creature's exposed, burning ribcage.
The heat radiating off the beast was intense enough to blister normal skin. But I didn't fight the heat. I didn't try to push it away.
Through the monocle, I could see the violet, endothermic energy flowing through my veins. I focused on my heart, visualizing that strange "vacuum" inside my chest. I opened the floodgates.
I became a heat sink.
The beast screeched, twisting violently. But it was too late. I was an absolute zero void, and nature hates a vacuum.
The blinding red thermal energy of the beast rushed into my hands like water draining down a pipe. My Negative Flux didn't just absorb the heat; it annihilated it. I watched through the monocle as the blinding red energy inside the monster's chest rapidly turned yellow, then dim blue, then pitch black.
In materials science, there is a concept called "Thermal Shock." If you take a red-hot piece of glass and plunge it into freezing water, the rapid change in temperature causes the different layers of the material to expand and contract at different speeds.
The glass doesn't just cool down. It shatters.
The Aberration was made of superheated, biological matter. In less than three seconds, I drained every ounce of kinetic heat from its body. The moisture inside its blood, its muscles, and its bones froze instantly.
CRACK.
The sound was as loud as a gunshot.
The beast froze mid-screech. Its pitch-black skin turned a frosty, brittle white.
I pulled my hands back, gasping for air.
The creature swayed on its feet for a fraction of a second. Then, gravity took over. The Aberration collapsed. But it didn't fall like a body of flesh and blood. It shattered like a dropped porcelain vase.
Chunks of frozen black meat and jagged ice scattered across the dirt floor. The glowing orange furnace in its chest had been reduced to a lump of dead, cold coal.
I sat back on my heels, staring at the frozen pieces of the monster.
The cellar was dead silent again, except for my ragged breathing.
I looked down at my hands. They weren't burned. They weren't even scratched. Through the monocle, I saw the steady, calm flow of blue energy resting quietly under my skin.
I hadn't used a magic spell. I hadn't prayed to the "Eye" in the sky. I had simply forced a violent, biological endothermic reaction. And it had killed a monster that would have slaughtered a dozen armed men.
"Okay," I whispered, my voice hoarse. "Okay. I can do this."
I reached up and gently touched the rim of the Old World monocle. It was a flawless analytical tool. It had allowed me to perfectly measure the beast's heat and my own freezing output. Without it, I might have drained too much and frozen myself.
But sitting in the dark, surrounded by shattered monster parts, the reality of my situation finally settled in.
I was powerful, yes. But my power was considered the ultimate Heresy by the Church. If I went out into the streets and started freezing things, the Inquisitors would hunt me down. I couldn't just walk around as Arthur, the slum boy who miraculously killed Aberrations.
If I was going to survive Erebos, uncover the truth of the Black Hole, and figure out how human civilization had fallen this far, I needed to play a very careful game.
I needed money. I needed a weapon to hide my true power. And most importantly, I needed a disguise.
I looked at the shattered, frozen chunks of the Aberration. In the Umbra, monster parts were incredibly valuable on the black market. The bones could be ground into medicine; the dead organs could be used for fuel.
I had just made my first kill. Now, it was time to get paid.
I grabbed my burlap sack from the corner of the cellar and started gathering the frozen pieces. It was time to visit the Grey Market.