Chapter 39: The Hunger Within

The first thing Lin Xiao ate after returning to the coalition was a bowl of congee that Ran Feng's people had prepared for the wounded.

Plain rice porridge. Bland. Warm. The kind of food that existed to fill a stomach without demanding anything from the person eating it.

He finished the bowl in four swallows and immediately wanted another. Not wanted—needed. The emptiness in his gut hadn't shrunk at all. If anything, eating had made it worse, like pouring water into a crack in dry earth and watching the crack widen.

He ate a second bowl. A third. By the fifth, the demon who'd been ladling the congee stopped offering and just stared.

"Are you... all right?"

Lin Xiao set down the bowl. His hands were shaking. Not from weakness—from restraint. The congee was nothing. Gruel. What he wanted was underneath it, behind it, woven into the spiritual essence of the grain and the water and the fire that had cooked it. He could taste the qi signature of every ingredient, and his body screamed at him to pull it out, to strip the essence bare and drink it down like marrow from a cracked bone.

"Fine," he said. His voice came out wrong. Too flat, too controlled, the kind of careful enunciation he used when something inside him was very close to the surface.

He left before the demon could ask another question.

---

The isolation chamber was a cave system beneath the coalition's main settlement—natural rock formations reinforced with suppression arrays that dampened spiritual energy. Old Ghost Feng had designed them for exactly this purpose: containing fragment surges that might otherwise damage the community.

Lin Xiao sealed himself inside and sat in the darkness.

The hunger didn't care about darkness. Didn't care about suppression arrays. It lived in his core now, tangled with Wrath and Greed and Pride but fundamentally different from all of them. Those fragments had desires, drives, ambitions that could be understood and managed. Wrath wanted to destroy. Greed wanted to possess. Pride wanted to dominate.

Gluttony just wanted. Endlessly. Without shape or direction or limit. It wanted everything, and the wanting never decreased regardless of what it received.

*You're attempting to conceptualize it as a desire,* the Emperor observed. *That's your error. The other aspects are emotions amplified to cosmic scale. Gluttony isn't an emotion. It's a process. Consumption for its own sake, feeding that exists independently of need.*

"How do I integrate a process?"

*I don't know. When I created the aspects, Gluttony was designed as a weapon—something aimed outward, never contained. The original bearer was chosen specifically because he had already lost the capacity to resist it.* A pause that felt heavy, almost guilty. *I designed it to be unstoppable. I never designed a way to stop it.*

"That's reassuring."

*Your sarcasm won't change the reality. The Gluttony essence you absorbed is already attempting to consume your other fragments. Not aggressively—it lacks the consciousness for aggression. But its nature is to absorb whatever it touches, and right now it's touching everything inside you.*

Lin Xiao closed his eyes and turned his awareness inward.

The Emperor was right. He could feel it—a slow, grinding erosion at the boundaries between his fragments. Wrath's burning edge was being licked by something that wanted to eat the fire itself. Greed's grasping tendrils were being pulled toward a void that promised to swallow them whole. Even Pride's towering architecture was developing cracks where Gluttony's influence seeped in like water finding every fault line in stone.

And at the center of it all, his own consciousness—the Core fragment that was supposed to integrate and unify—was surrounded by a hunger that didn't recognize it as master. That didn't recognize anything as master. That simply consumed.

His stomach cramped. Not a metaphorical cramp, not a spiritual sensation translated into physical terms. His actual stomach, contracting around nothing, demanding to be filled with something it couldn't name.

He doubled over on the cave floor and pressed his forehead against cold stone.

The rock had essence too. Faint, mineral, ancient—but present. And he could taste it through his skin.

---

Su Mei came to the isolation chamber after two days.

He heard her footsteps before she reached the door, felt her presence through the bond like sunlight through closed eyelids. Warm. Bright. Nourishing.

*Nourishing.*

The thought made his throat close with something that wasn't quite nausea and wasn't quite desire.

"Lin Xiao." Her voice, muffled by the reinforced stone. "I'm coming in."

"Don't."

"That wasn't a question." The seal on the door shifted as she applied the key sequence Old Ghost Feng had provided. "I've given you two days of space. That's enough."

"Su Mei, I'm not—" He stopped. Swallowed. Tried to find words that wouldn't sound like what they were. "The Gluttony fragment responds to spiritual essence. Your healing abilities are... concentrated."

A pause on the other side of the door.

"You're saying I smell like food."

"I'm saying the fragment sees you as—" He couldn't finish. The honest version was worse than what she'd guessed. The fragment didn't see her as food. Food was incidental. What it saw was her essence—the bright, complex weave of healing qi that made Su Mei who she was—and what it wanted was to unravel that weave thread by thread and consume the individual components until nothing remained but empty channels where power used to flow.

The fragment wanted to eat her soul.

"I'm coming in," she repeated. The door opened.

Su Mei stepped into the darkness of the isolation chamber carrying a small cultivation lamp that cast warm gold light across the stone walls. She wore plain robes—no spiritual artifacts, no enhanced garments. Just cloth and the person beneath it.

Her essence struck him the moment she crossed the threshold.

Not her physical presence. Not her appearance, though she was beautiful in the way that people who genuinely cared about others often were—warmth made visible. What struck him was the dense, intricate lattice of her spiritual signature. Healing qi woven through every cell, every meridian, every breath. To normal cultivator senses, she would register as a powerful healer with a unique affinity for restoration.

To the Gluttony fragment, she registered as the most perfect meal it had ever encountered.

Lin Xiao's fingers dug into the stone floor. Small cracks radiated from his grip.

"Talk to me," Su Mei said. She knelt three paces away—close enough to reach but far enough to give him space. "Not about the fragment. About you. What are you feeling?"

"Hungry."

"Beyond that."

"There isn't a beyond. That's what I'm trying to explain." He forced himself to look at her. His left eye—the demon eye that changed with each fragment absorbed—had developed a new quality since the Gluttony integration. The pupil dilated and contracted in rhythms that had nothing to do with light levels, expanding when it detected dense essence, narrowing when the source moved away. Right now, focused on Su Mei, it was dilated so wide that almost no iris remained visible.

She saw this. He watched her register it—the slight widening of her own eyes, the micro-flinch she couldn't quite suppress.

"That bad?" she asked quietly.

"My eye is doing something, isn't it."

"It looks like it wants to swallow me." She said this without melodrama. A clinical observation. The healer assessing symptoms. "Have you tried the integration techniques Old Ghost Feng developed?"

"They don't work. The Gluttony essence isn't structured like the other fragments—it doesn't have a consciousness to negotiate with or a drive to redirect. It's just... appetite. Pure function without form."

Su Mei was quiet for a moment. Then she extended her hand, palm up.

"What are you doing?"

"Offering contact. The bond stabilized you during the absorption. Physical touch strengthens the bond's effect."

"Su Mei, I just told you the fragment sees your essence as—"

"I heard you. I'm not asking the fragment. I'm asking you." Her hand remained steady. "Do you trust yourself?"

The honest answer was no. The hunger was a living thing inside him, and it had been growing for two days without relief. Every suppression technique he'd tried had slowed it at best, and now Su Mei was three paces away with her hand extended and her essence shining like a beacon to the bottomless void in his gut.

He took her hand.

The bond flared. Not with the dramatic surge of the battlefield connection—something quieter, steadier. A river rather than a flood. Su Mei's healing presence flowed through the physical contact and into his spiritual channels, and where it touched the Gluttony essence—

The hunger screamed.

Not in pain. In want. The fragment surged toward the healing energy with such ferocity that Lin Xiao's entire body spasmed. His grip on Su Mei's hand tightened hard enough that he felt bones shift beneath his fingers.

She didn't pull away.

"Breathe," she said. Her voice was strained—she could feel the fragment pulling at her through the bond, trying to drain her essence through the very connection meant to help. "Focus on my voice, not the hunger. The hunger isn't you."

"It's inside me. How is that different?"

"Wrath is inside you. Greed is inside you. Pride is inside you. Are they you?"

"They're becoming me. That's the whole point of integration."

"No." Her free hand pressed against his chest, over his heart. "Integration means making them part of you. Not becoming them. There's a difference." She pushed healing energy through her palm directly into his core, and the hunger lunged for it again—but this time she was ready, channeling the energy in patterns that the Gluttony fragment couldn't quite grasp.

Spiral patterns. Healing qi woven in loops that fed back into themselves, offering the appearance of infinite sustenance while actually recycling the same energy through different configurations.

An illusion of feeding that provided nothing to consume.

The hunger faltered. Not stopped—confused. The Gluttony essence tried to absorb the cycling energy and found itself chasing its own tail, consuming what had already passed through and been reconstituted.

"Where did you learn that?" Lin Xiao asked, the pressure in his core easing from unbearable to merely agonizing.

"I've been studying. Since the Hungerer fight. Healing is about understanding how energy flows and where it goes wrong." Su Mei's face was sheened with sweat from the effort. "Gluttony is a corruption of the natural consumption process—everything alive consumes to survive. What's corrupted is the limit. The recognition of 'enough.'"

"And the cycling technique?"

"Convinces the fragment that it's consuming without actually giving it anything. Like..." She searched for a comparison. "Like chewing food without swallowing. The mouth thinks it's eating. The stomach stays empty."

"It won't last."

"No. It's a temporary measure. But it gives you breathing room while we figure out something permanent." She met his eyes. "I'm not going to let this consume you. We'll find a way...right?"

The vulnerability in that last word—the seeking validation that was so fundamentally Su Mei—cut through the hunger more effectively than any technique.

"We'll find a way," he said. Not because he believed it, but because she needed to hear it, and because the alternative was admitting that the thing inside him might be bigger than both of them.

---

Old Ghost Feng arrived the next morning with a collection of ancient texts and a characteristically pessimistic assessment.

"Integration techniques won't work," he announced, settling his spectral form into a seated position and spreading scrolls across the cave floor. "Not the conventional ones. I've been through every reference I can access, and the consensus is clear—Gluttony essence has never been successfully integrated by a host. Every recorded case ended in the host being consumed from within."

"Encouraging. You came all this way to tell me I'm doomed?"

"I came all this way to tell you that conventional approaches are doomed. The conventional approaches. He's not listening. Never listens..." The ghost's muttering trailed into legibility and back. "The texts describe Gluttony as 'the aspect without a ceiling.' Other fragments have natural limits—Wrath exhausts itself, Pride has boundaries it won't cross, Greed eventually defines its targets. Gluttony has no such constraints."

"The Emperor said essentially the same thing."

"Did he offer a solution?"

"No."

"Hmph. Figures. Creates an unstoppable weapon, then acts surprised when it can't be stopped." Old Ghost Feng picked up one of the scrolls and held it toward Lin Xiao. "But there's something in these texts that your Emperor might have overlooked. Or deliberately omitted."

Lin Xiao took the scroll. Ancient demon script—the kind that predated human civilization, written in essence-ink that shifted meaning depending on the reader's spiritual state. Through the Gluttony fragment's influence, the characters seemed to writhe with appetite.

"The original Gluttony bearer—the first one, before the current Hungerer—was a woman named Yao Lin. She bore the fragment for three centuries before succumbing."

"Three centuries? The current Hungerer has existed for millennia."

"The current Hungerer surrendered to the fragment almost immediately. Yao Lin fought it. And according to this text, she discovered something during those three centuries of resistance." The ghost pointed to a specific passage. "She found that the Gluttony fragment could be partially satisfied—not through consuming external essence, but through consuming itself."

"Consuming itself?"

"A cycle. Turning the hunger inward, making it feed on its own energy. Not destruction—transformation. The consumed energy would reconstitute and be consumed again, creating a closed loop that occupied the fragment's attention."

"That's similar to what Su Mei did with the cycling technique."

"In principle, yes. But Su Mei was providing external energy in a loop. Yao Lin's method used the fragment's own essence as both food and fuel. Self-sustaining. Permanent. The hunger would still exist, but it would be feeding on itself rather than reaching outward."

Lin Xiao read the passage again. The demon script was fragmentary—damage and age had claimed much of the original text. What remained described the technique in broad strokes rather than precise instructions.

"Can you teach me this?"

"I can teach you what the text describes. Whether it will work for you—with partial Gluttony essence rather than the full fragment—is something we'll discover through attempt." Old Ghost Feng's expression softened fractionally, the gruff teacher momentarily replaced by something closer to the protective mentor he tried so hard to deny being. "But it's better than waiting for the hunger to overcome your other defenses. You've perhaps noticed that the suppression arrays are losing effectiveness."

Lin Xiao had noticed. The isolation chamber's dampening formations had been designed for his previous level of fragment energy. The addition of Gluttony had pushed his total essence beyond their capacity, and each day the suppression weakened a little more.

"How long do I have?"

"Before the arrays fail completely? Days, not weeks. Before the Gluttony essence begins actively consuming your other fragments? Perhaps less." The ghost met his eyes with the hollow stare that indicated genuine concern beneath the perpetual irritation. "We start now."

---

The training was brutal.

Old Ghost Feng's method required Lin Xiao to isolate the Gluttony essence within his core and then convince it to turn on itself—like persuading a fire to burn its own fuel supply rather than spreading. The technical challenge was immense. The spiritual challenge was worse.

Every time he touched the Gluttony essence with his consciousness, it tried to consume him.

Not his body. His awareness. His sense of self. The fragment's nature was to absorb everything it contacted, and "everything" included the consciousness attempting to manipulate it. Each training attempt felt like reaching into a furnace to rearrange the coals—necessary but searing.

"Redirect, not resist!" Old Ghost Feng barked from outside the isolation chamber. He'd refused to enter, claiming that his spectral essence would be too tempting a target. Lin Xiao suspected the ghost was simply afraid of what the fragment might do if given access to a concentrated spiritual presence. "The fragment's hunger is a river. You're not trying to dam it—you're trying to bend its course!"

"Easy for you to say from out there."

"If I were in there, I wouldn't be saying anything. I'd be lunch. Now focus. Identify the flow pattern and introduce a curve."

Lin Xiao closed his eyes and sank into his core.

The Gluttony essence moved like nothing else he'd experienced. The other fragments had structures—Wrath was a furnace, Greed was a web, Pride was a tower. Gluttony was formless. A current with no banks, flowing in every direction simultaneously, touching everything, tasting everything, wanting everything.

He reached for the current with the Core fragment's integrating power and tried to introduce a curve—a bend in the flow that would redirect the hunger back toward its own source.

The current swallowed his attempt whole.

Not violently. There was no resistance, no clash of powers. The redirecting energy simply ceased to exist, absorbed into the current as naturally as a drop of water into an ocean.

He tried again. Different approach—stronger force, more precise targeting.

Same result.

Again. This time using the Wrath fragment's destructive edge to carve a channel.

The hunger ate the destruction itself. Consumed the force meant to redirect it. Grew fractionally larger from the meal.

"It's eating my techniques," Lin Xiao said through gritted teeth. "Every method I use to redirect it, it just absorbs."

"Then stop using methods that can be absorbed."

"What does that even mean?"

"It means—" Old Ghost Feng paused, and when he spoke again, his voice had lost the teaching irritation. Something quieter underneath. "Yao Lin's text says she succeeded by offering the fragment something it couldn't absorb. Something that satisfied the hunger's shape without providing actual sustenance. She called it 'the taste of nothing.'"

"Nothing doesn't have a taste."

"To us. To a being defined by consumption, the concept of nothing—true nothing, absolute absence—is fascinating. Irresistible. And ultimately indigestible." The ghost's voice carried a weight Lin Xiao rarely heard from him. "But creating true nothing within your own core... that's not a technique. That's a philosophical state. You have to genuinely embody absence while being very much present."

"You're telling me the solution to infinite hunger is to achieve inner nothingness."

"I'm telling you that a woman who fought this fragment for three centuries found that the only thing it couldn't eat was the void. Make of that what you will." A pause. "In my day, students accepted cryptic advice without complaint..."

---

Liu Chen showed up on the fourth day.

He arrived the way he always did—loud, physical, barging past the guard with a skin of wine in one hand and something wrapped in cloth in the other.

"Right, so I know you're doing the whole brooding isolation thing, and I respect that, you know? But I brought dumplings." He held up the cloth-wrapped bundle. "Mrs. Fang's dumplings. Remember her? The old woman from the western settlement who cooks like she's angry at the ingredients? These ones have pork and—"

"Liu Chen."

"—and these little dried mushrooms that she gets from, honestly I don't even know where, but they're—"

"Liu Chen."

He stopped. Set down the wine and the dumplings. His expression shifted from performative cheer to something more honest—worry, covered thin by the reflexive humor that was as much a part of Liu Chen as his heartbeat.

"You look terrible."

"I feel worse."

"Yeah, I figured." He sat down across from Lin Xiao, outside the isolation chamber's threshold but close enough that his voice didn't need to carry. "The coalition's talking. People are worried. You've been sealed in here for days, and the only people who've come out are Su Mei looking exhausted and Old Ghost Feng looking more depressed than usual. Which is saying something, you know?"

"The Gluttony fragment is harder to integrate than the others."

"How much harder?"

Lin Xiao considered lying. Downplaying. Making it sound manageable to protect Liu Chen from worry he didn't need to carry. Then he looked at his sworn brother's face—the honest concern in his eyes, the way he sat with his shoulders squared as if preparing to absorb a blow—and decided that lying to Liu Chen was a cruelty he couldn't afford.

"The fragment might consume me from inside. The techniques we have don't work. Old Ghost Feng found a historical reference that might help, but implementing it requires achieving a mental state that took the original bearer decades to reach."

Liu Chen was quiet for several seconds. When he spoke, his voice was stripped of its usual verbal tics—the "you know?"s and "right?"s gone, leaving something raw and plain.

"What can I do."

"Nothing. This is a spiritual integration problem that requires—"

"No. What can I do. Not what makes logical sense for me to do. What do you need from me right now, as your brother, that might help."

The simplicity of the question cracked something Lin Xiao had been holding together with effort and suppression. He pressed his palms against his eyes and breathed through the sudden tightness in his chest.

"Stay," he said. "Just... be here. Talk about something that has nothing to do with fragments or hunger or existential threats."

Liu Chen settled in. "Okay. So. You know Bai Lian's been teaching some of the younger coalition members Orthodox healing techniques? Well, one of them—kid named Dao Ming, absolute disaster of a human being, you know the type—he managed to invert the cleansing array yesterday and instead of purifying, it basically... okay, I don't know the technical term, but it turned the practice room into a swamp. An actual swamp. There were frogs. In the practice room."

Despite everything—the hunger gnawing at his core, the knowledge that he might be losing a battle he couldn't even properly fight, the terrible awareness that Liu Chen's essence was radiating through the conversation like body heat—Lin Xiao almost laughed.

"Frogs."

"Seventeen frogs. Bai Lian counted. She was... I mean, you know how she gets when she's angry but trying to be diplomatic about it? She did that thing where she speaks very slowly and precisely, like every word costs money? And she told Dao Ming that his technique was 'creative in ways that suggest he should perhaps explore career alternatives.' The kid almost cried."

The hunger pulsed. Liu Chen's essence was different from Su Mei's—less concentrated, less refined, but warm and vibrant with the uncomplicated vitality of someone who attacked life headfirst. To the Gluttony fragment, it tasted like potential. Like raw ingredients that could be broken down and reassembled into pure energy.

Lin Xiao's hands tightened on his knees.

"What happened to the frogs?"

"Still there, actually. Nobody can figure out how to un-summon them. Old Ghost Feng took one look and said—and I quote—'In my day, failed arrays produced explosions, not amphibians. At least explosions had dignity.' Then he floated off to do whatever ghosts do when they're disappointed in the younger generation."

The hunger coiled tighter. Liu Chen was right there. Five paces away. Unprotected, his spiritual defenses casual and minimal because he was among friends, among family, and he had no reason to guard himself.

The Gluttony fragment didn't see a sworn brother. It saw calories.

Something must have shown on Lin Xiao's face, because Liu Chen's expression shifted again. The humor drained out, replaced by a quiet alertness.

"It's happening right now, isn't it. The hunger thing."

"You should go."

"Is it going to hurt me if I stay?"

"It might. I can't—" Lin Xiao pressed his fists against the stone floor until his knuckles cracked. "I can feel your essence. The fragment is calculating how much energy it could extract from you. Not metaphorically. I can sense the exact caloric value of your spiritual signature. It's treating you like a cut of meat on a butcher's block."

Liu Chen didn't move. Didn't run. His jaw worked once, processing, and then he nodded.

"But you're telling me about it. Not doing it. That counts for something."

"It counts for the fact that I'm still in control. Barely. Which is why you should go before barely becomes not enough."

His brother stood. Slowly. He picked up the dumplings and set them on the threshold.

"Mrs. Fang's dumplings," he said. "They won't fix anything. But eating something normal, something that's just food and not spiritual essence or fragment energy—maybe it helps remind your body what ordinary hunger feels like." He met Lin Xiao's eyes. "I'm not afraid of you."

"You should be."

"Probably. But I'm not. Because I know you. And the guy I swore brotherhood with would chew his own arm off before he'd hurt someone he loved." He tapped the doorframe twice. "I'll be back tomorrow. And the day after. And every day until you figure this out, or until you tell me to stop, and even then I'll probably come anyway, because that's what brothers do. Right?"

He left.

Lin Xiao stared at the dumplings on the threshold. The cloth wrapping was stained with grease from the filling, and the smell—pork and ginger and the slightly burned edges that meant Mrs. Fang had cooked them the way she always did, too hot, too fast, impatient with her own craft—was painfully, beautifully ordinary.

He reached for one. Bit into it. The flavor was simple and real and had nothing to do with spiritual essence or fragment energy or cosmic hunger.

The Gluttony fragment dismissed it as irrelevant.

But Lin Xiao tasted it. Every imperfect, mundane, human thing about it.

And for a moment—just a moment—the hunger retreated enough for him to remember what it felt like to eat because the food was good, not because the void demanded filling.

---

The near-disaster happened on the sixth day.

Lin Xiao had left the isolation chamber for the first time—briefly, carefully, with Su Mei's cycling technique providing a temporary buffer against the hunger's outward reach. He needed to see the sky. The walls had been closing in, stone pressing against awareness that was already compressed by the fragment's relentless appetite.

The settlement moved around him with the organized chaos of a community adapting to growth. Demons and humans working side by side, construction expanding the defensive perimeter, Bai Lian's Orthodox techniques being taught alongside the coalition's hybrid methods.

He kept to the edges. Away from crowds. Moving through the less populated sections where his presence wouldn't register on anyone's awareness.

A young demon crossed his path.

Low-level. Barely above beast intelligence. One of the refugees who'd joined the coalition after the Hungerer's rampage displaced entire populations. It walked with the uncertain gait of something used to being hunted, and its spiritual signature was thin—malnourished, depleted, running on reserves that had been dwindling for weeks.

The Gluttony fragment surged.

Not with the calculating assessment it applied to strong targets. This was something more primal—a predator's recognition of wounded prey. The young demon's weakened state made it easy. Pathetically easy. The fragment could drain it in seconds, strip its essence clean and add the pitiful energy to Lin Xiao's reserves without him even needing to move.

All it would take was letting go. Releasing the control that kept the hunger pointed inward rather than outward. One moment of surrender, one instant of relaxation, and the demon's life would flow into him like water into a drain.

Lin Xiao's hand was extended before he realized he'd moved.

His fingers were reaching for the demon's spiritual channels—not physically, but through the fragment's consumption ability, invisible tendrils of hunger extending toward the thin, trembling essence of a creature that didn't even know it was about to die.

He saw himself from the outside. A monster reaching for the helpless. The exact image that every Orthodox cultivator had ever painted of demon corruption.

He yanked his hand back with such violence that the motion sent a crack through the rock wall beside him. The Gluttony fragment howled—silent, internal, but devastating in its intensity. It had been so close. The meal had been right there.

The young demon startled at the sound of cracking rock and scurried away, never knowing how close it had come to ceasing to exist.

Lin Xiao pressed his back against the wall and slid to the ground.

His hands were trembling. His demon eye was dilated to its maximum, the pupil a yawning black hole that seemed to pull light toward it. His breath came in ragged gasps that tasted like bile and want.

He had almost killed something. Not in battle, not in defense, not in any context that could be justified or explained. He had almost consumed a helpless creature because it was weak and nearby and the hunger didn't care about right or wrong or anything beyond the next feeding.

*That's what Gluttony does,* the Emperor said. No judgment in the voice. Just ancient, tired recognition. *It strips morality from the equation. Consumption isn't cruel or kind—it simply is. The fragment doesn't understand why you stopped.*

"Because it was wrong."

*The fragment doesn't have a category for wrong. That's the challenge you face. Integration requires understanding the aspect you're absorbing, but Gluttony resists understanding because understanding implies limits, and Gluttony has none.*

"You created this. You designed it. There has to be a flaw, a weakness, something—"

*I created it to be perfect at what it does. And what it does is consume. I built no failsafe because I never intended to stop it.* The Emperor's presence was heavier than usual, the ancient consciousness pressing against Lin Xiao's with something that felt uncomfortably like regret. *In ten thousand years, that decision has cost more than any other I've made. Which, for a being whose decisions leveled civilizations, is a significant admission.*

Lin Xiao pressed his palms against his eyes hard enough to see stars.

The void in his core pulsed and pulled and wanted.

Somewhere in the settlement, the young demon he'd almost killed was going about its diminished life, unaware that its survival depended entirely on a sixteen-year-old former servant's ability to wrestle a cosmic force into something resembling restraint.

The dumplings had been a nice thought. Su Mei's cycling technique bought time. Old Ghost Feng's research pointed toward a theoretical solution that might work in decades.

But the hunger was now. Constant. Getting stronger every hour as the partial Gluttony essence continued growing, feeding on stray spiritual energy in the environment, on the residual essence of the isolation chamber's formations, on the microscopic qi signatures of the very air.

It was eating the world around him, slowly, and the pace was accelerating.

He needed an answer.

And for the first time since the fragment had merged with his soul, the Emperor admitted with unflinching honesty that he didn't have one.

*I will search my memories,* the ancient voice offered. *Ten thousand years of existence may contain something relevant. But I promise nothing.*

"What happens if we don't find a solution?"

The silence stretched. When the Emperor spoke again, his voice was barely louder than a thought.

*Then the Gluttony essence will eventually absorb your other fragments, your human consciousness, and everything that makes you Lin Xiao. And what remains will be a new Hungerer—smaller than the original, but no less driven. No less mindless. No less endless.*

The wall behind Lin Xiao cracked further under the pressure of his grip.

Somewhere above, the sky was blue and indifferent to the war being fought inside his body.

And the hunger kept growing.