Chapter 4: Hunger Economics
The problem with power, Orin discovered, was that it made you stupid.
Three days of feeding his void stone had transformed him from barely functional to legitimately dangerous. His strength sat somewhere between a decent blue-stone laborer and a green-stone military recruit. Fast enough to surprise, durable enough to endure, and ravenous enough to make terrible decisions at midnight.
Case in point: he was currently crouched on a warehouse roof, watching a caravan unload monster parts worth more than his entire district's collective lifespan earnings.
The moon hung fat and indifferent overhead. Below, guards in green-stone regalia moved with the casual competence of people who'd never questioned their right to violence. Six of them, rotating in pairs, protecting a shipment of essence-rich materials bound for the noble quarter's private weavers.
Orin had learned about the shipment from Puck, a fellow errand-runner with sticky fingers and a philosophical approach to property rights. The kid traded information like currency, always calculating angles, always three moves ahead of whatever disaster he'd just engineered.
"Private convoy," Puck had said, sketching the route in spilled beer on a tavern table. "Twice monthly. Monster parts from the Thornwall hunts. High-grade essence, properly preserved. Worth a fortune if you can move it."
"Can't move it," Orin had replied. "Can't sell noble goods without noble connections."
"True." Pucks grin had been all teeth and bad intentions. "But you're not trying to sell, are you? You're trying to eat."
The observation had landed like a blade between ribs. Marrow's contaminated scraps had pushed Orin's attributes into respectable territory, but respectable wasn't enough. The academy exams would pit him against green-stones and blue-stones who'd been training since childhood, backed by family resources and proper cultivation techniques.
He needed an edge.
So here he squatted, twenty feet above cobblestones, contemplating theft and the various ways it could end his life.
The guards changed rotation. Two disappeared inside the warehouse, leaving four outside with the wagons. Professional, but predictable. They'd repeated the pattern three times now, mechanical as clockwork.
Orin studied the nearest wagon. Canvas covered the cargo, tied down with rope that probably cost more than his clothes. Underneath, wooden crates stamped with the Thornwall Hunting Company's seal. Inside those crates, preserved organs from monsters that made gutter prowlers look like pets.
*Grade four essence, minimum.* The thought his stomach turn. *Maybe grade five. That's military cultivation territory.*
His void stone pulsed against his palm, responding to proximity or just anticipating. Hard to tell which. The silver specks swirled faster lately, like something inside was waking up and stretching.
A guard coughed. The sound carried in the night's stillness, followed by muttered conversation Orin couldn't parse. They were bored, complacent. Good. Boredom made people sloppy.
He waited until the next rotation, when two guards moved to the far side of the warehouse. Then he dropped.
Twenty feet of controlled fall, muscles absorbing impact that would've shattered his ankles a week ago. He landed in a crouch behind the wagon, breathing through his mouth, listening.
Nothing. The guards hadn't heard.
Orin's fingers found the rope, untying knots with hands that trembled less from fear and more from anticipation. The void stone was hungry. He was hungry. The distinction was blurring.
Canvas parted. Moonlight spilled onto stacked crates, each one labeled with neat script identifying the contents and grade. His eyes caught on one label: *Ironback Spine Sections, Grade 4, Durability Enhancement.*
Perfect.
He pulled a knife, pried at the crate's edge. Wood creaked, far too loud in his paranoid imagination. He froze, counting heartbeats, waiting for shouting.
Silence held.
The crate opened. Inside, vertebrae the size of his fist sat cushioned in sawdust, each one etched with natural essence channels that still glowed faintly amber. Beautiful and terrible, pieces of a creature that had probably killed dozens before hunters brought it down.
Orin grabbed one vertebra, shoved it inside his shirt, reached for another.
"Hey!"
The shout cracked across the night like breaking bone. Orin's head snapped up. A guard stood ten feet away, green birthstone already glowing as essence flooded his system. The man's muscles swelled, enhanced strength rippling through his frame.
*Shit.*
Orin ran.
Not toward safety, because safety didn't exist. Toward the warehouse wall, toward shadow, toward anywhere that wasn't here. Behind him, boots hammered cobblestones. More shouts joined the first, guards converging like antibodies attacking infection.
He hit the wall at full sprint, fingers finding purchase on crumbling mortar, muscles burning as he climbed. Below, a guard swung a club enhanced by green-stone strength. It smashed brick where Orin's leg had been half a heartbeat earlier. Shrapnel peppered his calf.
*Up. Just get up.*
He hauled himself onto the roof as hands grabbed for his ankle. Kicked backward, felt his boot connect with something soft. A grunt, a curse, "Fuck!" then he was over the edge and sprinting across tiles that tried to murder him with every step.
"Stop! You thieving little bastard!"
Like that had ever worked.
Orin vaulted between buildings, the city's broken architecture his only ally. Behind him, the guards coordinated, spreading out to cut off escape routes. Professional hunters adapting to prey behavior. Bad news.
He changed direction mid-leap, landed on a lower roof, used momentum to carry him into a roll that would've torn something important three days ago. Instead, he came up running, the vertebra pressing against his ribs, "all this for some fucking bones." He thought in Amusement.
A guard appeared ahead, having taken a parallel street. The man grinned, certain of his advantage. Green-stone speed put him faster than any blackstone by physics and genetics.
Except Orin wasn't blackstone anymore.
He accelerated. The guard's grin faltered, replaced by confusion as the impossible blackstone closed distance. They collided at the roof's edge, grappling, neither willing to risk the three-story drop.
The guard outweighed him by at least forty pounds. Training and conditioning made the man dense as hardwood. But Orin had desperation and stolen vertebrae pressing against his heart.
He twisted, using the guard's momentum against him, and kicked hard at the knee. Something crunched. The guard howled, grip loosening. Orin shoved, putting all twenty-nine strength points into the push.
The man went backward, arms windmilling, and disappeared over the edge.
The impact was wet and final.
Orin stared at the roof's edge, breathing hard. Below, the guard wasn't moving. Blood pooled beneath his skull, black in the moonlight.
*First person I've killed.*
The thought arrived clinical and distant, like he was observing someone else's life. Shock, probably. Or the void stone's influence. Hard to distinguish internal dialogue from external corruption when both lived in your skull.
More shouts. The other guards had found their fallen comrade.
Orin ran before grief or rage could organize pursuit. He navigated by instinct, taking routes only slum kids knew, places where the city's infrastructure had given up and left gaps perfect for disappearing.
Twenty minutes later, he collapsed in his warehouse sanctuary, lungs burning, hands shaking, the vertebra clutched against his chest like stolen salvation.
*Killed a man. Killed a guard. That's a hanging offense. That's a hunt-you-forever offense.*
But the void stone pulsed with hunger, indifferent to legality or morality, demanding he finish what he'd started.
Orin pulled the vertebra from his shirt. Amber light pulsed through essence channels carved by evolution and necessity. This was grade-four cultivation material, the kind that made green-stones into veterans and veterans into legends.
He pressed it to his void stone.
The absorption was violent. The vertebra crumbled to dust in his grip, essence flooding through impossible channels. His vision whited out as the voice returned, cold and absolute.
**"ESSENCE ABSORBED: IRONBACK ALPHA, GRADE FOUR. POTENCY EXCEEDS CURRENT INTEGRATION THRESHOLD. FORCED ADAPTATION REQUIRED."**
Pain arrived like punishment from an angry god.
His skeleton was rewriting itself, bones hardening, thickening, essence burning through marrow like a forge consuming raw materials. Orin bit down on leather he'd grabbed for exactly this purpose, screaming into the muffled darkness while his body betrayed him with transformation.
**"ADAPTATION COMPLETE. INTEGRATION COMMENCING."**
**ESSENCE ABSORBED: IRONBACK ALPHA, GRADE FOUR**
**INTEGRATION COMPLETE.**
**ATTRIBUTE ENHANCEMENT: STRENGTH +8, DURABILITY +15, VITALITY +6**
The numbers climbed, beautiful and terrible. His durability had jumped to thirty-seven, putting him solidly in green-stone territory. A hit that would've broken ribs last week would now bruise at worst.
Orin lay on the warehouse floor, tasting blood where he'd bitten through his cheek, and laughed. It came out ragged and broken, but genuine. He'd killed a man and stolen power from nobility's private stock. Consequences would follow like sunrise, inevitable and uncaring.
But right now, in this moment, he was stronger.
The void stone's silver specks swirled, satisfied like a recently fed predator.
*More,* something whispered. His thought or the stone's. The distinction was getting foogy in his mind.
*Need more.*
He pulled up his attributes, studying the impossible mathematics of his existence.
**ORIN FOX**
**AGE: 15**
**ESSENCE STORED: 9/∞**
**ATTRIBUTES:**
**STRENGTH: 37**
**DURABILITY: 37**
**VITALITY: 23**
**DEXTERITY: 26**
**SPEED: 23**
Green-stone baseline sat around thirty-five in primary attributes. He'd just crossed that threshold in two categories. But green-stones had training, technique, actual combat experience beyond alley brawls and desperate theft.
The academy exams were in two days.
*Not enough time. Not enough essence. Not enough anything.*
But when had enough ever been available? Blackstones learned early that sufficiency was a myth sold to people with options. You took what you could grab, you climbed however possible, and you hoped gravity didn't notice until you'd gotten high enough that falling meant something.
Orin stood on legs that trembled less from weakness and more from the fading adrenaline. His warehouse sanctuary suddenly felt exposed, vulnerable. The guards would report the theft, the death. Investigators would come sniffing, asking questions, looking for blackstone thieves with more ambition than sense.
He needed to move. Needed to find somewhere safer to cultivate. Needed to visit Marrow and confess his escalating stupidity before the butcher heard it from worse sources.
But first, he needed to sit in the darkness and acknowledge what he'd become.
Murderer. Thief. Anomaly. Monster wearing human shape and pretending the distinction mattered.
The void stone pulsed against his palm, pleased with the transaction. Feed it violence, receive power. Simple economics, the kind that built empires and buried civilizations.
Orin looked at his hands, at the birthstone glittering with stolen starlight, and wondered if there was a point where climbing became falling in a different direction.
The moon offered no answers. It just burned, cold and distant, while below a guard's body cooled and the city began organizing consequence.
Two days until the exams. Two days to become someone who could pass without revealing what he'd stolen.
Two days to figure out if the void stone owned him, or if he could still pretend otherwise.
The warehouse settled into silence, and in that silence, Orin Fox began planning his next theft with the methodical precision of someone who'd learned that hesitation and poverty were synonyms.
Somewhere in the noble quarter, alarm bells started ringing.
He smiled into the darkness, all teeth and bad decisions, and wondered which would kill him first: the guards or the hunger.