The stranger's name was Shen Yi.
Lin Feng learned this over the course of two days, not by asking, but by carrying water to Elder Zhao's house and keeping his ears open while Shen Yi made himself useful.
The man was good at useful. He'd offered to help with the village fortification effort within hours of arriving, and Han, suspicious of outsiders under the best circumstances, had grudgingly accepted after watching Shen Yi drive fence posts with a competence that didn't match his merchant story. The man's hands were callused in the wrong places for someone who spent his life handling herbs and ledgers. Callused across the palms and the first knuckle of each finger, with a particular hardness along the outer edge that Lin Feng recognized from Old Ghost's descriptions of cultivation training.
Sword calluses. Or staff calluses. Or the calluses of someone who'd spent years gripping something with controlled force, repeatedly, in patterns designed to build specific muscle groups.
"He helped me lift the corner beam for the watchtower." Zhang Wei delivered this report at the stream, where they'd established a habit of exchanging information under the cover of water noise. "He picked up his end one-handed. It took me and Han Bao together to hold ours. When he saw us struggling, he shifted to two hands and made a show of effort. Pretended it was heavy."
"Pretended."
"The beam weighs as much as a man. He lifted it like a sack of rice and then caught himself and acted normal." Zhang Wei skipped a stone. His tone was flat, the reporting voice he used for facts that disturbed him. "I've been a hunter for three years. I know what strength looks like, and I know what performance looks like. Shen Yi is performing normalcy."
"Has he asked about anything specific?"
"The beasts. He's very interested in the beasts. Asked Han detailed questions about the attack: how many, what they looked like, how they behaved. Told Han he'd heard reports of similar creatures in the lowland provinces and wanted to compare." Zhang Wei's jaw tightened. "A merchant who hears beast reports. A merchant who studies them. Collects details. Asks about behavior patterns."
"A scholar, maybe. A naturalist."
"A naturalist who lifts corner beams one-handed." Zhang Wei met his eyes. "Be careful around him, Lin Feng. Whatever he is, he's not what he says."
Lin Feng was careful. For two days, he was careful.
He watched Shen Yi during his water-carrying rounds. Noted the way the stranger moved through the village, cataloguing details with eyes that never stopped working. The man visited the goat pens, examining the damage. Walked the perimeter, studying the terrain as if memorizing it. Spent an hour at the western tree line where the boar and the ridge beast had fought, crouching over the torn earth with the focused attention of someone reading a text.
He found the wolf husk.
Lin Feng was hauling water past the northern tree line when his channels, still recovering and operating at maybe a quarter of their capacity, registered Shen Yi's life force near the spot where the wolf had died. The stranger was kneeling beside the drained corpse, and his posture was different from the casual assessment he showed in the village. His back was rigid. His hands hovered over the husk without touching it. His head was tilted at an angle that suggested deep concentration.
And Lin Feng's channels, for one instant, registered something.
A flicker. A micro-fluctuation in Shen Yi's life force signature, the steady, unremarkable energy that had read as baseline human since his arrival. For one heartbeat, less than a second, the signature deepened. Gained texture. Displayed a complexity that didn't exist in someone who had never cultivated.
Then it smoothed. Normal. Unremarkable. A merchant kneeling by a dead animal.
Lin Feng walked on. His heart was beating too fast for the pace he was carrying the water. The flicker had been brief, but his channels had caught it the way a trained ear catches a wrong note in a familiar song. Not because it was loud, but because it didn't belong.
Shen Yi was veiling. The technique Old Ghost had described, suppressing his cultivation behind a facade of normalcy. And the wolf husk had disrupted his control, because whatever process had drained the wolf was something Shen Yi recognized.
Something that had surprised him badly enough to drop his mask for a heartbeat.
---
That night, Lin Feng didn't go to the cave.
He went to the boundary marker and sat with his channels open, tracking Shen Yi's position in the village. The stranger was in Zhao's guest room, a life force signature that was perfectly, impossibly steady. No fluctuations. No variation. Normal humans' energy shifted constantly, rising and falling with heartbeat, with breath, with the micro-adjustments of a body that was never truly still. Shen Yi's signature was flat. Controlled. The energy of a person holding their breath, indefinitely.
Nobody's energy was that steady unless they were managing it.
"The man I was's records include seven categories of essence veiling." Old Ghost's voice came from the direction of the gorge. The ghost had extended his range, stretching his presence along the path between the cave and the village boundary. His form was invisible at this distance, but his voice carried through the resonance Lin Feng's channels maintained with the cave inscriptions. "The simplest requires a minimum of the third stage of cultivation. The most sophisticated, the seventh."
"Which one is he using?"
"I cannot tell from this distance and through your senses. But the fact that his control slipped near the wolf's remains is informative. The devouring technique leaves a particular energy signature, a void pattern, an absence where life force should be. Any practitioner trained to sense essence would recognize it, and the recognition would provoke an involuntary response."
"He's trained to sense essence."
"He sensed what happened to the wolf and reacted. The reaction disrupted his veil. This tells us three things: he is a cultivator, he is disguised, and he did not expect to find evidence of the Devourer's Path in a mountain village."
Lin Feng leaned against the marker. Stars filled the sky, thousands of them, unpolluted by city light, spread across the black in patterns that had meant something to cultivators ten thousand years ago and now meant nothing to anyone alive.
"Is he dangerous?"
"All cultivators are dangerous. The question is what kind of danger. If he is a remnant of one of the old sectsâ"
"Sects. Like the Devourer's sect?"
"The Devourer had no sect. The man I was walked alone. But the path existed within a world of sects, factions, and power structures, some of which persisted longer than others after the gods departed." Old Ghost's voice grew more distant, the range taking a toll. "If any sect remnants survived to the present age, they would be degraded. Reduced. But even a degraded sect retains knowledge, techniques, and most relevantly, institutional memory. They would remember the Devourer's Path. They would recognize its signatures."
"And they'd want the Scripture."
"They would want many things. The Scripture most of all, but also the practitioner. A functional channel-bearer on the Devourer's Path would be the most significant cultivation discovery in millennia. Worth more than territory, than artifacts, than any material prize."
Lin Feng stared at the stars.
A cultivator in his village. Looking for something. Finding things that surprised him. And between them, a drained wolf corpse with Lin Feng's channel signature all over it, lying in the open where anyone with the right training could study it.
He should have buried the wolf.
He should have done a lot of things differently. But the night of the attack had been chaos and panic, and burying evidence hadn't made the list when he was running on no sleep and borrowed energy. The wolf husk was sitting in the northern tree line like a signed confession.
---
The mistake happened on the third day.
Not because Lin Feng was careless. Because he was exhausted and outmatched and trying to manage too many variables with too few resources, and one of those variables made a move he didn't anticipate.
He was at the cave. Pre-dawn session, working with the second chamber's inscriptions under Old Ghost's guidance from the passage. The marking technique required a more subtle application of channel energy than the pulse, precision instead of power. The principle was the same as the sensing ability: his channels extended outward and interfaced with corrupted energy. But where sensing was passive, marking was active. It deposited a fragment of his resonance into a corrupted signature, creating a persistent link.
The practice was delicate work. He pressed his palm against the anchor inscription, formed the temporary circuit, and tried to project a thread of resonance outward rather than blasting a pulse. Fine motor control through channels designed for broad vibration. Like threading a needle wearing gloves.
He failed eleven times. Succeeded on the twelfth: a thin thread of channel energy that extended from his palm and held its shape for four seconds before collapsing.
"The technique will require refinement, but the foundation is viable." Old Ghost from the passage. "Your channels can project directed resonance. With practiceâ"
"How much practice?"
"Weeks. Months. The man I was's students requiredâ"
"I don't have months. Give me the shortcut."
"There is no shortcut. There is the technique, performed correctly, or there is failure. Every candidate who demanded shortcuts found them, and every shortcut led to the same destination."
"The two who consumed themselves."
"One of them. The other found a shortcut to the marking technique and discovered that an improperly formed mark creates a two-way link. He marked a corrupted beast, and the beast's corruption marked him back. The corruption entered his channels through the link and consumed him from the inside."
Lin Feng pulled his hand from the anchor. The circuit collapsed. He sat on the second chamber floor, surrounded by desperate inscriptions carved by dying hands, and breathed.
"Weeks."
"Weeks of consistent practice. At your current rate of improvement, functional marking in approximately twenty days." Old Ghost paused. "Which assumes the beasts allow you twenty days."
"They won't."
"No. They will not."
Lin Feng climbed out of the cave as dawn grayed the sky. His body was running on reserves that had been depleted days ago. Stubbornness held him upright, along with the residual effects of the wolf's consumed energy, which had made permanent changes to his channel sensitivity even after the raw power had faded.
He reached the boundary marker. Checked the beast positions. All four were far out, further than they'd been since the attack. The intelligence was barely within his sensing range, a faint signature at the extreme edge of awareness.
Recovering. Regrouping. Planning.
He turned toward the village and his channels caught a familiar signature.
Shen Yi. On the north path. Moving toward the gorge.
Not toward the village. Not toward the western tree line where he'd been studying beast evidence. Toward the gorge. The path that led to the cave entrance. At a time of morning when no one else was awake and no one would notice a stranger walking into the wilderness.
Lin Feng's blood went cold.
He couldn't get back to the cave before Shen Yi. The stranger was closer, moving faster, and Lin Feng's body had just spent four hours being worked over by inscription energy. He couldn't intercept. Couldn't redirect. All he could do was follow at a distance and hope that Shen Yi didn't find the shaft entrance.
The shaft entrance was hidden. Naturally concealed by the rock formation, covered by brush, accessible only if you knew exactly where to look. Lin Feng had found it by falling into it. Someone would need specific knowledge or specific senses to locate it deliberately.
Shen Yi had specific senses.
Lin Feng followed. Kept distance. Used the terrain the way the gorge had taught him, staying low, using rock outcroppings for cover, moving when the stranger's back was turned. His channels tracked Shen Yi's signature, and he noticed something he'd missed before: when the stranger moved through the gorge, his life force became slightly less controlled. The perfect flatness developed micro-variations, tiny adjustments, as if Shen Yi was using his suppressed cultivation to scan the environment.
He was sensing. Through his veil, using techniques sophisticated enough to function while masked, Shen Yi was scanning the gorge for energy signatures.
Lin Feng pressed himself against a boulder and stopped breathing.
His own channels; were they detectable? He'd been using the sensing technique openly, broadcasting vibrations through his meridians without any thought to who might be listening. Old Ghost had never mentioned concealment because in a world without cultivators, concealment was unnecessary.
The world had a cultivator in it now.
Shen Yi passed within thirty feet of the shaft entrance. Paused. His head turned, slowly, sweeping, and Lin Feng felt the stranger's veiled senses brush across the area like a searchlight sweeping a dark room.
The brush over the shaft entrance trembled. Not from wind. From the residual energy that leaked through the cave's weakened formations, the same energy that drew corrupted beasts, the energy that Lin Feng's nightly sessions had been amplifying.
Shen Yi crouched. Examined the brush. His fingers touched the stone near the shaft opening, not quite finding it, but close. Two feet to the left. His hand moved across the rock surface with the deliberate care of someone feeling for something they knew was there but couldn't quite locate.
Lin Feng's channels pulsed.
Involuntary. A spike of anxiety that translated through his overworked meridians into a burst of vibration, brief and undirected.
Shen Yi's head snapped toward him.
Not slowly. Not with the casual scan he'd been performing. Fast, the reflexive response of a trained practitioner detecting an energy signature. His eyes locked onto the boulder Lin Feng was hiding behind, and in that instant his veil dropped entirely.
The man's life force bloomed.
Lin Feng's channels screamed with the sudden input. Shen Yi's cultivated energy was nothing like the corrupted beasts' signatures. It was ordered, structured, layered with the complexity of decades of training. Not massive. Not overwhelming. But refined to a degree that made raw power irrelevant, the difference between a bonfire and a focused beam.
Fourth stage. Maybe fifth. Old Ghost's students had been seventh-stage cultivators. Shen Yi was weaker than them in absolute terms but stronger than anything Lin Feng had encountered in his short, desperate career as a channel-bearer.
The stranger crossed the distance between them before Lin Feng could stand.
"Interesting." Shen Yi's voice was different without the merchant mask. Harder, more direct, the accent resolving into something that was clearly not provincial. "The cripple. The water carrier. With functional channels."
Lin Feng's back was against the boulder. His channels were still pulsing, broadcasting his anxiety into the energy spectrum. He couldn't stop it. Couldn't control the output. His meridians were too raw, too overworked, too newly awakened to perform under the pressure of a cultivator's direct scrutiny.
"Your veil is terrible," Shen Yi observed. "Actually, you don't have a veil. You're broadcasting openly. How long have you been channeling?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Your meridians are vibrating at a frequency I can feel from thirty feet away. I could feel them from the path." Shen Yi crouched to Lin Feng's eye level. His expression was clinical, the same detached assessment Old Ghost used, the look of someone examining a specimen. "Shattered channels. Omniresonant vibration. No cultivation base. But functional. Barely functional, held together with spit and stubbornness, but functional." His eyes narrowed. "Who taught you?"
"Nobody taught me anything."
"The wolf in the tree line. Drained. Void-pattern energy signature. The devouring technique." Shen Yi's voice dropped lower. "Nobody has practiced the devouring technique in nine thousand years. The last sect that studied it was destroyed by the other seven sects in a joint purge that burned for a decade. And you're telling me nobody taught you."
Lin Feng's mind was racing. Old Ghost's warnings about sects, about institutional memory, about the value of a Devourer's Path practitioner, all crashed against the reality of a cultivator crouching two feet from his face.
"I found a cave."
Shen Yi blinked. "A cave."
"With inscriptions. Old ones. My channels respond to them." Lin Feng kept his voice flat. Gave Shen Yi facts, not context. "I didn't know what cultivation was until a week ago."
"You learned the devouring technique from wall inscriptions in a week." Shen Yi's disbelief was sharp enough to cut. "Without a teacher. Without a foundation. With broken channels."
"My channels areâ"
"Omniresonant. I can see that. Every meridian vibrating on a different frequency simultaneously. Something that shouldn't be possible and isn't, in any cultivator I've studied." Shen Yi stood. His posture changed, not threatening, but controlled. Ready. The stance of someone recalibrating their assessment of a situation. "The cave. Where?"
Lin Feng said nothing.
"The cave, cripple. Where is it? These inscriptions you describe, if they contain what I think they contain, they're the most significant cultivation artifact discovered since the Silence." His voice hardened. "I'm not asking again."
"Who are you?"
"Someone who has spent six years tracking rumors of pre-Silence artifacts in the mountain territories. Someone who detected the energy signature of your cave from forty miles away and followed it to this village." Shen Yi's hands were still at his sides, but his cultivated energy shifted, rising, pressing outward, creating an ambient pressure that pushed against Lin Feng's channels. "And someone who recognizes the devouring technique's void pattern and understands exactly what it means that a crippled boy in a mountain village is practicing it."
"It means I'm trying not to die."
"It means you have access to the Scripture of Eternal Consumption." Shen Yi's eyes were bright. Avid. The clinical assessment had shifted into open hunger, the human kind, the hunger of a person who had spent years searching for something and was standing in front of it. "The Devourer's Scripture. The most feared and coveted cultivation text in pre-Silence history. Lost when the seven sects burned its owner's sanctum to ash." He paused. "Except they didn't burn it. It survived. And you found it."
Lin Feng's channels were broadcasting. He could feel it, his anxiety, his exhaustion, his conflicted thoughts all translating into vibrations that Shen Yi could read as easily as spoken words. His meridians were an open book in a language the stranger was fluent in.
"The beasts," Lin Feng said. "The corrupted beasts attacking the village. That's what matters. Not a cave or a scripture."
"The beasts are drawn by the Scripture's energy signature. Your amateur practice is amplifying the signal, broadcasting it across the region. Every corrupted creature within fifty miles is converging on this location because you've turned the cave into a beacon." Shen Yi's voice carried the particular patience of someone explaining obvious facts. "I can help. I have the training to suppress the signature, to drive off the beasts, to protect the village."
"In exchange for what?"
Shen Yi smiled. The first genuine expression Lin Feng had seen on his face, not the merchant's pleasantry or the worker's good nature, but a real smile, showing teeth. It didn't reach his eyes.
"Show me the cave."
---
Lin Feng showed him the cave.
Not because he trusted Shen Yi. Not because the stranger's offer of help was genuine, though it might be, or it might be the opening move of an extraction operation, or something he didn't have the experience to predict.
He showed him the cave because Shen Yi was right about the beacon. Because every night Lin Feng spent with the inscriptions amplified the signal that drew corrupted beasts. Because the village couldn't survive another coordinated attack, and Wang Da might die from the first one, and the intelligence was out there learning from its mistakes.
And because Shen Yi would find the cave anyway. The man was a cultivator who'd followed the energy signature from forty miles. Refusing to show him would delay the discovery by hours, not prevent it, and would cost Lin Feng whatever minimal leverage his cooperation provided.
Old Ghost had a different opinion.
"No." The ghost's voice came from the inscription wall as Lin Feng led Shen Yi down the shaft. "Do not bring a cultivator into this sanctum. The man I was built these defenses against precisely thisâ"
"The defenses are failing. You told me that yourself." Lin Feng spoke under his breath, quiet enough that his voice wouldn't carry over the sound of Shen Yi's boots on the stone.
"There are things worse than failing defenses."
Shen Yi's feet touched the chamber floor. His head tilted back. His cultivated senses, no longer veiled, fully active, swept the room.
His breath caught.
"The inscription array." His voice had changed. The hard precision was gone, replaced by something softer, younger, the voice of a student standing before a masterwork. "Third-era formation script. Full-spectrum defensive lattice. The energy density, even degraded, even afterâ" He moved to the wall. His fingers hovered over the characters, not touching. "This is his work. The Devourer's work. The original inscriptions."
"Don't touch them."
Shen Yi's hand stopped. He turned to look at Lin Feng, and his expression was layered: respect, calculation, and barely contained excitement sitting on top of the hard foundation of someone who made decisions based on cost-benefit analysis.
"You've been training here. Pressing your channels against these inscriptions. Learning the resonance patterns." Not a question. Shen Yi was reconstructing the story from the evidence. The worn spots on the inscription wall where Lin Feng's back and palms had pressed nightly. The disruption patterns in the ambient energy. The traces of blood and skin oil on the stone. "Without a cultivation base. Without a teacher. Just raw contact between broken channels and ten-thousand-year-old formation script."
"Can you suppress the energy signature? Stop the beacon?"
"I can." Shen Yi turned from the wall. The excitement in his eyes had cooled into something more considered. "The formations have degradation points, nodes where the original energy flow has been interrupted. I can bridge those points with my own essence, restore partial function to the suppression array. The beacon would drop to a fraction of its current strength."
"Do it."
"First, I want to see the Scripture."
The silence that followed had edges. The quality of a space in which multiple people were making calculations simultaneously.
"The Scripture is embedded in the formation array," Lin Feng said. "It's not a separate object."
"The Scripture of Eternal Consumption is a scroll. Physical medium. The man who created it was a calligrapher before he was a cultivator. He recorded everything in ink on treated silk." Shen Yi watched Lin Feng's face. "You knew that. Which means someone told you. Which means the cave has a guardian, and you've been speaking with it."
Old Ghost's form materialized.
The ghost appeared between Lin Feng and Shen Yi, a translucent figure, half-visible, flickering at the edges. His features were sharper than Lin Feng was used to seeing. The face of the young man the ghost had been before the path consumed him, defined and hard, with eyes that held ten thousand years of watching and waiting.
Shen Yi did not step back. He went very still, the kind of stillness trained fighters adopt when something enters their threat assessment, and his cultivated energy rose to a defensive posture that Lin Feng's channels could feel as a tightening of ambient pressure.
"A spirit remnant." Shen Yi's voice was controlled. Clinical. But his energy told a different story, the careful fluctuations of someone processing surprise. "Bound to the sanctum's formation array. The Devourer's own consciousness, preserved through the inscription lattice."
"The man I was left instructions." Old Ghost's voice carried a tone Lin Feng hadn't heard before. Formal. Cold. The voice of authority addressing a trespasser. "This sanctum is not for visitors."
"And yet you've taken a student." Shen Yi's eyes moved to Lin Feng. "A crippled boy with no cultivation base. Of all the vessels for your legacy, you chose the most broken one available."
"The boy chose himself. His channels resonate. The Scripture accepts him." Old Ghost's form stabilized, fully present, more solid than Lin Feng had ever seen it, as if Shen Yi's presence had pushed the ghost into a state of maximum coherence. "You are not welcome here, cultivator. Your energy disrupts the formation balance. Your intentions are transparent."
"My intentions are preservation." Shen Yi spread his hands, a gesture of openness that his energy didn't support. "The Scripture is too valuable to lose. The Devourer's knowledge, the inscription techniques, the path itself: these are humanity's inheritance. They shouldn't be guarded by a fading spirit and a boy who'll get himself killed in a month."
"Humanity's inheritance." Old Ghost's voice could have frozen the air. "The seven sects called it that when they came for the man I was. Humanity's inheritance was their justification for the purge that destroyed every practitioner of the Devourer's Path. For the burning of every text, every record, every student's notes. For the murder of the seven candidates who had committed no crime except learning what the man I was taught."
The cave was silent.
"Which sect?" Old Ghost asked. "Which of the seven do you descend from?"
Shen Yi's mask held. His face remained composed, his energy controlled, his posture open. But something in his eyes shifted, a micro-expression that was there and gone, quick enough that a normal person would have missed it.
Lin Feng's channels caught it. The energy equivalent of a flinch.
"The sects are dead," Shen Yi said. "Whatever existed before the Silenceâ"
"The sects do not die. They transform. They shed names and structures and pretend to be something new while carrying the same knowledge, the same agendas, the same institutional memories that drove them to genocide when the path threatened their monopoly." Old Ghost's form crackled. "Which. Sect."
"The Hollow Wind Sect," Shen Yi said. Quietly. The words came out with the weight of something held back and now surrendered. "Or what remains of it. A lineage. A tradition. Not a sect anymore. A family that remembers."
"Hollow Wind." Old Ghost's form dimmed. Not from weakness, but from recognition. "The Hollow Wind Sect was the most vocal advocate for the Devourer's destruction. Their patriarch led the combined force. Their techniques burned the sanctum."
"And their descendants have spent nine thousand years studying what they destroyed." Shen Yi met the ghost's eyes, a feat that required either bravery or arrogance, and Lin Feng couldn't determine which. "The purge was a mistake. My family has known this for generations. The Devourer's knowledge, your knowledge, was lost because frightened men destroyed what they didn't understand."
"And now you want it back."
"I want to preserve it."
Old Ghost turned to Lin Feng. The ghost's face was unreadable, performing a calculation that involved variables measured in millennia.
"The boy decides," Old Ghost said. "This is his path. His choice."
Both of them looked at Lin Feng. The ghost and the cultivator. The dead man's remnant and the living man's hunger. Two pairs of eyes, one translucent and one dark, both waiting.
Lin Feng stood in the cave where his path had begun. The cave he'd fallen into, the cave that had broken open his channels and shown him a vision and introduced him to a ghost and a hunger that grew with every use. He looked at Shen Yi and saw what Old Ghost saw: a representative of the people who had destroyed the Devourer's legacy, returning with smooth words and practical offers.
He also saw what Old Ghost couldn't: a cultivator who could suppress the beacon, protect the village, drive off corrupted beasts. A resource that two hundred people needed to survive.
"Suppress the beacon," Lin Feng said. "Reduce the signal. Protect the village from the beasts."
"And the Scripture?"
"One thing at a time."
Shen Yi studied him. The avid hunger in his eyes hadn't diminished, but something else had entered the calculation. A reassessment. The cripple with broken channels and no cultivation base had just told a fourth-stage cultivator to wait, and the request carried the weight of someone who understood that he held the only leverage in the room.
"One thing at a time," Shen Yi agreed.
He moved to the inscription wall and began working on the formation nodes. His cultivated energy flowed into the degraded connections, precise, surgical, nothing like the brute resonance of Lin Feng's broken channels. The inscriptions brightened where his essence touched them, the ancient characters drinking the offered energy with a thirst that spoke of millennia without nourishment.
Lin Feng watched. Old Ghost watched.
And in his channels, the hunger hummed its patient note, and a new frequency had joined the song. Shen Yi's cultivation, now woven into the cave's formation array. A fourth-stage cultivator from the sect that had destroyed the Devourer's legacy, feeding his energy into the Devourer's inscriptions, with access to the cave and knowledge of Lin Feng's abilities.
The village would be safer.
Everything else had just gotten more complicated.
Lin Feng leaned against the passage wall and felt the choice settle into him. He'd traded secrecy for security, information for protection, and the exchange had the shape of a bargain where both parties believed they'd gotten the better deal.
He had twenty days to learn the marking technique, a cultivator in his cave, four corrupted beasts in the wilderness, and a hunger that grew each time he fed it.
Outside, the sun was rising on a village that didn't know its cripple had just invited a different kind of predator through the front door.
