Lira had positioned herself against one of the hall's pillars with her arms crossed, watching him the way someone watches a horse they are considering buying and have not yet decided is worth the price.
Lin Feng rose from the throne slowly. His body was still weak, the muscles in his legs registering a faint, persistent tremor that he chose to ignore. His posture stayed straight anyway. There was no confusion in his expression, no fear. Only the cold, quiet attention of someone who has already done the hardest accounting and arrived at a number they can live with.
I already died once. I won't die again because of panic or poor judgment. If this is the price of continuing to exist, I'll pay it. Everything else comes after.
"I know I didn't ask for this," he said. His voice came out steadier than he expected. "But if this is the price to keep existing, then I'll learn."
Lira blinked. Just once, but it was the blink of someone who had been prepared for a different answer. She uncrossed her arms and tilted her head, studying him with slightly more interest than before.
"At least you're not a panicking idiot," she said. "That's something."
The Mother of the Abyss had not moved from the throne. She watched them both with the patience of something that has seen every version of this conversation before and is simply waiting to see which version this one turns out to be.
"Lira," she said finally, her voice carrying through the hall without effort. "The hunger has already begun to wake in him. If he does not learn to manage it soon, he will lose his reason."
Lin Feng felt the hollow in his chest respond to those words, tightening the way a wound tightens when you press it. It was not pain exactly. It was urgency, the specific urgency of a body that has decided something is necessary and will not be reasoned with about it.
I need to live. Everything else, the anger, the betrayal, Mei Ling's face, all of it can wait. First this.
Lira clicked her tongue. She let out a sigh with the dramatic weight of someone accepting an inconvenience they had been warned about.
"Wonderful. My first assignment with a newly awakened devourer, and he's unstable on top of it." She pushed off the pillar and walked toward the door, her dress moving at her ankles. "Come on. I'll teach you how to hunt without losing your mind in the process. If you pass out, I'll drag you. If you go mad, I'll kill you."
The portal she opened led somewhere gray.
Thick mist blanketed everything. The trees that rose through it were stripped of leaves and bark, their branches reaching in directions that seemed wrong, too many joints, too much intention. The air sat heavy on the tongue, carrying the sourness of corrupted spiritual energy and something older underneath, the iron smell of dried blood that had been there long enough to become part of the ground.
Lin Feng stepped through and stopped.
Something moved through him. Not a sound, not a sight. Something older than either of those, a pull in the blood, a sudden awareness of the space around him as a map of living things and the spaces between them. He turned his head slightly without knowing why.
Fear. Ahead. And hunger that isn't mine.
"You felt it," Lira said. She was standing beside him, and her voice had dropped, carrying something that might have been approval.
"Yes. Something wrong. Ahead." He paused. "Fear. And hunger."
She smiled, small and without warmth or coldness.
"Good. Your blood has truly woken up. Keep up."
They moved through the mist without speaking. Their footsteps disappeared into the ground before they could echo. The trees thinned eventually into a clearing where a man sat on a flat stone with a curved blade across his knees, sharpening it with the slow, rhythmic focus of someone with nowhere to be. Against a tree nearby, a young woman had been tied with rough rope, her head hanging, her wrists and ankles ringed with bruises in the deep purple of several days.
Lin Feng looked at the man.
This isn't anger. Anger isn't useful here. This is calculation. He made a choice that crossed a line. That simplifies things.
"What is he?" he asked quietly.
"Low-ranking cultivator. He captures mortals and uses their fear to accelerate his own cultivation. Common enough." Lira's eyes were on the man. "Unpleasant, but common."
"Then he has already crossed a line."
"Exactly. Acceptable target."
The man's head came up. Some cultivator's instinct had finally caught the edge of their presence.
"Who's...?"
Lira's shadow moved before he finished the word. It rose from the ground and took him at the throat with a precision that left no room for a second thought. His body convulsed, the blade hitting the stone with a ring that the mist swallowed immediately. He went to his knees. His eyes were open and they were full of something that had nothing to do with fighting anymore.
Lira walked to him without hurrying and pressed her hand to his chest.
"Unstable," she said, half to herself. "Guilt, fear, years of it. Good for practice."
The dark mist that rose from him condensed in her palm. The body folded and went still, dry and hollow, the life gone out of it so completely it looked like it had never been there.
The hunger in Lin Feng's chest woke up all at once.
His hands were shaking. His heartbeat had changed, faster and less patient than it had been a moment ago. He was aware of the sphere in Lira's palm with an attention that had nothing voluntary about it.
I need this. I don't want to need it. But if I don't feed, there won't be anything left of me to have opinions about it.
"Wait." Lira raised her free hand. "Absorb that directly and you take everything with it. His screaming, his paranoia, every bad night he ever had. I filter it first."
She closed her fingers around the mist. Red runes surfaced over it, turning slowly, and the sphere condensed, its color deepening toward something cleaner.
"Open your shadow."
Lin Feng breathed. His shadow on the ground thickened on its own, pulling away from his feet like ink with somewhere to go.
Lira pressed the filtered sphere into it.
The pain arrived without warning and without sound, a pressure behind his eyes that became a crack and then something flooding through the crack, memories that were not his and did not fit the shape of his mind. Women running. A face crying at a window. The specific paranoia of a man who had done enough wrong that he saw consequences in every shadow. Lin Feng went to his knees and held onto the inside of his own skull with everything he had.
He did not scream.
He did not beg.
He stayed.
The hunger settled. Slowly, with the reluctance of something that had gotten what it wanted but was not ready to admit it. The shaking stopped. Strength returned to his arms in increments, real and solid and his.
"You held it," Lira said. There was something in her voice she had not put there on purpose. "Most people don't, the first time. Some of them attack whoever is closest."
"I already lost everything once." He was still on his knees, still breathing through it. "I can't afford to lose my mind on top of it. I just want to live."
She was quiet for a moment, looking down at him. Then she reached out and pulled him to his feet.
"I understand."
She turned and walked to the tree. A blade of shadow formed in her hand and cut the ropes in two clean motions. The young woman startled awake, saw them, and ran into the mist without a sound.
Lin Feng watched the place where she had disappeared.
"You choose who you take."
"Always." Lira wiped her hands on her dress. "It's selection. If we took blindly, we would have become the thing people are afraid of a long time ago."
He felt his chest settle, the hollow still there but quieter now, less insistent.
"Then for now I depend on you."
"Until you can filter on your own," she said, with a shrug that was doing more work than a shrug usually does. "After that we'll find out what you're actually made of."
He held her gaze.
"Then we are bound."
"Partners," she said, the correction landing lightly but without any give in it. "Not by destiny. By necessity. Don't read into it."
The portal opened ahead of them, its edge catching the gray light of the mist.
When they returned to the palace, the Mother of the Abyss was in the Throne Hall exactly where they had left her, in the position of someone who had not moved and would not have moved regardless of how long they had been gone.
"And?"
"He held." Lira stopped beside Lin Feng. "Took the absorption without losing himself. Controlled it without screaming. For a first time, that's more than most manage."
The Mother smiled. Small, precise, satisfied in the way of someone checking a box they had expected to check.
"Good. That means he can walk with us."
Lin Feng felt the hollow in his chest settle further. Still there. Still present. But contained now, a thing with edges, something he could carry rather than something that carried him.
He looked at Lira.
"Will you keep coming with me?"
She looked away. The silver in her hair caught the dim light for a moment before she turned back.
"Until you can walk on your own."
He nodded and left it there.
For the first time since waking up in that cave with his chest open and everything he had built in ashes, he did not feel like he was standing at the edge of something about to give way beneath him.
He felt, cautiously, like someone who had taken a first step.