MY DEVOURER SYSTEM

002. Evolution in progress

Ren woke up choking.

His hands clawed at wet stone before he remembered where he was, or that there was anywhere to remember at all. For a few seconds there was only the dark and his own ragged breathing. Then it came back in pieces — the Gate, the fall, the voice in the darkness, the pain that wasn't like any pain he had a name for.

He forced himself upright. His ribs screamed at the movement.

A pale violet window hovered in front of his face.

<User: Ren Kestrel>

<Race: Ravener (Evolution In Progress — 12% Complete)>

<Level: 1>

<HP: 4/40>

"No." His voice came out cracked.

The screen didn't go away. He reached toward it and his finger passed straight through.

"Okay." He swallowed. "Either I'm dead, or—..."

Something growled behind him.

Ren stopped breathing.

The creature standing at the edge of the darkness stood roughly his height, four arms hanging at its sides, its body like something carved out of blackened, wet stone. One eye opened. Then another.

Ren scrambled backward. The creature lunged.

He threw himself sideways and its claws tore through the ground where his head had been a half-second earlier. He hit the stone hard, pain lancing through his ribs.

<HP: 3/40>

"That's not ideal."

He had no weapon. No exit he could see. The creature turned, and for the first time Ren noticed a faint violet glow pulsing inside its chest — a core, the same kind of thing that had drawn every Hunter's eye in every briefing he'd ever sat through, except now his vision sharpened around it like something in him had been waiting to see it.

<Aether source detected.>

His stomach twisted, and it took him a second to recognize the feeling underneath the fear. Not nausea. Hunger. Real hunger, sharp enough that his mouth had already started watering before his mind caught up to why.

The creature charged. Ren ran, and it was faster, a claw caught his shoulder and slammed him into the cavern wall hard enough that his vision blurred at the edges.

<HP: 1/40>

The creature raised its arm for the finishing blow.

Something in Ren answered before he decided to let it. His hand moved on its own, palm out, and darkness poured from it in a way that had nothing to do with muscle or training.

<Hollow Grasp — activated.>

The creature froze mid-swing. Its body jerked, once, violently, and the glow in its chest dimmed like something had reached in and pulled the light out of it. It collapsed in a heap of stone-dark limbs, hollowed out where its center used to be.

Silence.

Ren stared at his own hand, then at the corpse, breathing hard. Whatever had just happened, some part of him had known how to do it before he did.

The core was still glowing faintly in the wreckage of its chest. Ren crawled toward it on legs that didn't fully want to hold him, and the notification waiting there answered a question he hadn't finished asking.

<Monster Core Detected. Consume to claim EXP and Bloodline Growth.>

Every sensible part of him said no. His body didn't wait for a vote. He bit down and it didn't taste like anything he had words for, pressure, maybe, the instant before a held breath finally lets go, flooding down his throat until his vision went white at the edges.

Somewhere in the part of his brain still capable of complete thoughts, Ren noted that he had just eaten part of a monster's heart, on purpose, and it had been the best thing he'd ever tasted. He filed that under problems to have a breakdown about later, once he wasn't actively bleeding on a cave floor.

<Core Consumed. +15 EXP.>

<Skill Confirmed: [Hollow Grasp] — Lv. 1>

<Skill Unlocked: [Aether Sense] — Lv. 1>

When his vision cleared he was on his knees, the shell crumbling to ash between his fingers. The rest of the window unfolded below it, patient, like it had been waiting for him to stop panicking long enough to look.

<Unallocated Points: 1>

<Might: 3>

<Speed: 3>

<Perception: 4>

<Vitality: 2>

<Resonance: 6>

<Shop: LOCKED (Requires Level 5)>

He thought about two years of being told what he wasn't strong enough for, and put the point into Resonance without fully understanding what it did. Whatever it meant, it was already the highest number on the screen. The locked Shop line sat there too, grey and unexplained, one more thing about himself he didn't have an answer for yet.

<Warning: Host requires additional Aether to sustain integration. Time until Deficiency Penalty: 22:59:47>

Twenty-two hours. One core, already spent.

He pushed himself upright. Legs shaking, but standing didn't cost him anything the way it should have. Thirty feet above, daylight leaked through the hole he'd fallen through, and voices carried down, warped by distance.

"...—no signal on his tag. He's probably just—..."

Corbin. Still up there. Still talking like Ren was already a line item on a report.

And then Ren felt it — not sound, not sight. A pulse. Faint, human, alive, directly above him. Then another, and another, a handful of separate heartbeats he had no business being able to count from this far down.

Corbin's signature stood out from the rest, bright and close and violently strong.

The hunger in Ren's chest turned toward it like something with its own instincts, its own opinion about which pulse in that crowd it wanted most.

Ren went very still.

The System hadn't offered him a way to become stronger. It had offered him a way to feed. And the nearest source, the easiest source, was standing directly over his head.