More," Eren repeated. The word was a wet, ragged tear in the silence of the drainage tunnel.
"You've had enough, boy," Silas whispered, his voice hitching. "The runoff... it ain't meant for a belly as empty as yours. It burns if you take too much. Burns the gut, then the mind."
Eren didn't argue. He didn't have the strength for debate. He simply shoved his hand forward, the movement jerky and uncoordinated, his fingers curled into a claw. The demand was absolute. It was the desperation of a drowning thing grabbing at a jagged rock.
With a sigh that rattled in his chest, Silas dipped the cup back into the slow-moving current of the pipe. The liquid was thick, gray streaked with iridescent swirls of violent violet—the spent spiritual energy of the cultivators in the Gilded City above. It smelled of ozone and human waste.
Silas handed it over. "Drink, then. Drink and rot."
Eren snatched the cup. He tipped his head back, pouring the sludge down his throat. It didn't taste like food. It tasted like licking a battery terminal coated in bile. As it hit his stomach, the sensation wasn't warmth—it was a localized fever, a hot, angry knot that began to radiate outward.
He dropped the cup. It clattered against the slime-slicked stone.
Eren slumped back against the curved wall of the pipe, his chest heaving. The "nourishment" coursed through him, but his Mortal Root—that useless, inert stone in his dantian—did not hum. It did not cycle the energy. It merely sat there, a blockage in the flow, forcing the chaotic Qi of the runoff to seep into his flesh and bones instead.
"Told you," Silas muttered, retrieving his cup and tucking it into his rags. He looked at Eren with a mixture of pity and that lingering, primitive fear. "Now we wait. If you don't puke it up, you live another night."
***
The fever did not come immediately. It crept in like the fog of the Grey Wastes, slow and suffocating.
By the seventh day, Eren Vale no longer knew where his body ended and the damp stone began.
Time had dissolved into a series of agonizing loops. There was the dripping of the pipe. There was the scuffling of rats the size of dogs. There was the burning heat that started in the marrow of his bones and tried to boil his blood.
He lay curled in a dead-end alleyway, sheltered only by a rusted sheet of corrugated iron Silas had propped against a dumpster. The drainage pipe had become too dangerous; the rains from the upper city had turned the trickle into a torrent, forcing them out into the labyrinth of the slums.
Eren shivered, his teeth clacking together with a sound like dice in a cup. His skin was pale, translucent, blue veins standing out like a roadmap of his suffering.
*It's the pollution,* his mind supplied, the thought drifting by like a leaf on a stream. *Spiritual poisoning.*
Cultivators expelled impurities. They cycled the ambient Qi, refined it, and pushed the waste out of their pores. That waste washed down the gutters, gathered potency, and became the sludge of the Grey Wastes. To a cultivator, it was filth. To a mortal with no way to filter it, it was slow-acting venom.
Eren's hand, trembling uncontrollably, drifted to the pocket of his tattered trousers. His fingers brushed the smooth, worn wood of the doll.
It was crude. Just a thumb-sized piece of drift-wood his mother had carved for him when he was five, before the clan had decided she was better used as a sacrifice than a parent. It had no face, just the suggestion of a human form.
He gripped it tight. The wood dug into his palm. It was the only thing in this world that wasn't cold or wet.
"Boy?"
The voice seemed to come from underwater. Eren forced his eyelids open. They felt crusted and heavy, glued shut by the discharge of his sickness.
Silas loomed over him. The old beggar looked worse than usual. His limp was more pronounced, and a fresh bruise bloomed purple across his cheekbone.
"Water," Eren croaked. His tongue felt like a strip of dry leather.
"Water won't fix this," Silas grunted. He crouched down, his joints popping. He placed a cool, calloused hand on Eren's forehead. He hissed through his teeth. "You're burning up. The Qi is eating your organs because it's got nowhere to go. You're a sealed vessel, boy. A Mortal Root is a cork, and you've been pouring pressure into the bottle."
Eren stared at him, understanding only half the words. He felt an irrational surge of anger. *A cork. Trash. Useless.* Even dying, he was defined by what he lacked.
"I need... to eat," Eren whispered. The hunger was a constant, sharp pain beneath the fever.
Silas looked away, staring down the gloomy alley toward the flickering neon lights of the slum market. The air smelled of frying grease and old blood.
"The sludge is killing you," Silas said, more to himself than Eren. "You need solid food. Something with a grain of purity left in it to soak up the poison. Spirit-bread. Even the moldy ends would do."
Eren tried to sit up, but his arms were like wet paper. He collapsed back into the mud. "I can..."
"You can't do shit," Silas snapped, though his tone lacked its usual bite. He stood up, adjusting the rope belt that held his rags together. He looked down at Eren, and for a moment, the madness in the old man's eyes cleared, replaced by a weary resignation. "Stay here. Don't make a sound. The Iron-Tooth gang is prowling tonight. They're looking for 'volunteers' to test a new batch of stims."
"Silas..."
"Shut up. Save your breath for dying."
Silas turned and limped away, his uneven gait carrying him toward the mouth of the alley. Eren watched him go, the silhouette of the hunched old man dissolving into the smog-choked twilight.
Eren closed his eyes. He squeezed the wooden doll until his knuckles turned white.
*I will not die here,* he thought, the mantra weak and hollow. *I will not die in the mud.*
But the heat in his belly laughed at him. It was a churning, corrosive force. He could feel his Mortal Root—that solid, distinct lump in his energy center—throbbing. It wasn't designed to hold this much volatile waste. It was vibrating, aching, a stone under a hydraulic press.
Minutes dragged into hours. Or maybe it was seconds. The fever warped everything.
A shout shattered the haze.
Eren's eyes snapped open. The sound had come from the alley mouth.
He knew that voice. It was a high, thin wail of protest.
*Silas.*
Adrenaline, sharp and chemical, spiked through Eren's veins, overriding the lethargy for a heartbeat. He rolled onto his stomach, gasping as the movement sent spikes of pain through his abdomen. He clawed his way forward, dragging his useless legs through the muck.
He reached the edge of the dumpster and peered around the rusted metal.
Thirty feet away, at the junction where the alley met the main thoroughfare, three figures stood over a crumpled heap.
The streetlights sputtered overhead, casting the scene in a sickly, flickering yellow. The thugs wore leather armor made from stitched-together scraps, and their arms were wrapped in iron chains—the signature of the Iron-Tooth Dogs.
Silas was on the ground. He was curled into a ball, protecting something against his chest.
"Give it here, old man," one of the thugs sneered. He was tall, his skin pockmarked, holding a rusted pipe wrapped in barbed wire. "We saw you snag it from the waste-bin behind the bakery. That's Iron-Tooth territory."
"It's... it's just mold," Silas wheezed. Blood bubbled from his nose. "Green mold. Poison to you cultivators. Please."
"If it's poison, why do you want it?" the thug laughed. He swung his leg, a brutal, casual kick that connected with Silas's ribs.
The sound was a wet *crack*.
Eren flinched. His fingers dug into the mud. He wanted to scream. He wanted to stand up, summon the power of the Vale bloodline, and incinerate these insects.
But he had no power. He was trash. He was a spectator to his own tragedy.
"Let go!" The second thug, a woman with a shaved head and tattoos crawling up her neck, stomped on Silas's wrist.
Silas cried out, his hand spasming open. A small, hard lump of bread rolled across the cobblestones. It was blue-green with rot, hard as a stone.
The tall thug picked it up. He sniffed it, grimaced, and tossed it over his shoulder into a puddle of oily water.
"Garbage," he spat. "Just like you."
"Please," Silas moaned, reaching out with his broken hand toward the ruined food. "The boy... he needs..."
"Boy?" The tall thug looked around, his eyes scanning the shadows of the alley. "You hiding a pet, old man?"
Silas froze. Even from this distance, Eren saw the realization hit him. If they found Eren, they would kill him. Or worse, sell him to the organ harvesters.
"No," Silas croaked, forcing himself up to his knees. He grabbed the thug's leg. "No boy. Just me. Just... hungry."
The thug looked down with disgust. "Get off me, filth."
He didn't use the pipe. He didn't use a technique. He simply drew a short, serrated knife from his belt and drove it downward.
It wasn't dramatic. There was no slow motion. Just the sudden intrusion of steel into the soft hollow between Silas's neck and shoulder.
Silas stiffened. The thug twisted the blade and yanked it free. A fountain of dark arterial blood sprayed the cobblestones, black under the yellow light.
Silas slumped forward. He didn't fall immediately. He swayed, his hands grasping at the air, before collapsing face-down into the muck.
The thugs didn't even check his pockets. He had nothing. They laughed, a harsh, barking sound, and turned away, disappearing back into the neon haze of the street.
Eren watched it all.
He didn't breathe. He couldn't.
The silence that followed was heavier than the gravity of a collapsing star.
Eren dragged himself forward. Inch by inch. The fever burned hotter now, fueled by a cold, arctic rage that seemed to freeze his heart while his skin boiled.
He reached the body.
Silas lay in a growing pool of his own blood. The red liquid mixed with the grey sludge of the alley, swirling together.
Eren reached out, his hand shaking, and touched the old man's shoulder. He pulled. Silas rolled over heavily. His eyes were open, staring up at the smog-choked sky where the Heavens were supposed to be watching. There was no fear in them anymore. Just nothing.
"Silas," Eren whispered.
No answer.
Eren looked at the bread lying in the puddle a few feet away. The bread Silas had died for. A piece of trash for a piece of trash.
Something inside Eren snapped.
It wasn't a mental break. It was physical.
A sharp, audible *crack* resonated from his lower abdomen.
Eren gasped, doubling over, clutching his stomach. The pain was blinding, eclipsing the fever, eclipsing the grief. It felt as if he had swallowed a grenade and the pin had just been pulled.
His Mortal Root.
The inert stone that had marked him as a cripple since birth. The solid, unmoving curse that had stripped him of his family, his name, and his life.
Under the immense pressure of the toxic spiritual runoff he had ingested for a week, combined with the sudden, violent surge of adrenaline and hatred, the Root had reached its critical mass.
It didn't dissolve. It didn't open.
It fractured.
Eren screamed, a sound that died in his throat as blood filled his mouth. He collapsed onto Silas's chest, his vision swimming in red and black.
Deep within him, through the hairline fracture of his broken foundation, something... *else* began to leak out. It wasn't Qi. It wasn't spiritual energy.
It was a vacuum. A hunger so ancient and profound that the surrounding shadows seemed to recoil from his skin.
The spiritual fever that had been cooking his organs suddenly stopped spreading. It reversed. The toxic heat was pulled inward, sucked toward the fracture in his root like water down a drain.
Eren's eyes rolled back in his head. The pain was transcendent. He was dying. He had to be dying.
But as his consciousness faded, dragged down into the abyss of that impossible hunger, he felt the blood on his chest—Silas's warm, cooling blood—begin to tingle against his skin.
And then, the blood began to move. Not flowing off him, but sinking *into* him.
Eren's heart gave one last, thunderous beat, and then stopped.
The silence of the alley returned, absolute and terrifying.