Chapter 11: Devouring the Hierarchy
The female contractor was still breathing when Orin returned, each inhalation a small rebellion against the bolt buried in her shoulder. Her eyes tracked him through the darkness, recognition dawning with the particular clarity that came from watching your executioner return for seconds.
"Forget something?" Her voice carried gravel, pain abrading consonants into rough edges.
Orin knelt beside her, studying the green birthstone on her hand. It pulsed with diminished light, essence circulation compromised by trauma but still present. Still flowing. Still there for the taking.
"Your birthstone," he said. "How much essence does a green-stone hold?"
She laughed, wet and bitter. "Planning to steal it? Cut off my hand, sell it to black market cultivators? Won't work. Birthstones die with their hosts, essence dispersing within minutes of the heart stopping."
"What about before the heart stops?"
The laughter died. Understanding arrived in her eyes like sunrise on a condemned man's last morning. "You're going to try absorbing from me. While I'm alive."
"Considering it."
"It'll kill me. Essence is life force channeled through the birthstone. You drain someone's essence, you drain their vitality, their capacity to exist." She shifted, pain lancing through her expression. "I've heard stories about essence vampires during the Unification Wars. They'd drain enemy cultivators, leave them as withered husks. Took twelve mages working in concert to put one down."
"I'm not a vampire."
"No. You're worse. You're desperate." She studied him with the clinical assessment of someone cataloging how they were about to die. "But you're hesitating, which means you still think morality matters. Let me help you past that: I was going to deliver you to Thorne. He'd have vivisected you over months, keeping you conscious for most of it, documenting how your birthstone functioned while you screamed. So whatever you do to me? Consider it karma with interest."
The logic was poison wrapped in permission. She was offering herself as justification, packaging her death as educational rather than murder.
Orin pressed his void stone against hers.
Nothing happened for three heartbeats. Then the pull began.
Not physical, not visible. But he felt it, a current establishing between their birthstones, essence flowing from her circulation into his void's infinite appetite. The sensation was electrical, intimate, violating in ways that transcended flesh.
The contractor gasped, her body convulsing. "Stop. Gods, stop. It feels like drowning in reverse, like my insides are being pulled through my skin."
He didn't stop.
The void stone was ravenous, drinking her essence with the enthusiasm of something long starved finally given sustenance. Her green birthstone flickered, light dimming as its reservoir drained.
**"ESSENCE ABSORBED: HUMAN CULTIVATION, GREEN-STONE GRADE. INTEGRATION COMMENCING."**
The voice in his head, cold as winter's judgment. Information flooded his awareness alongside the stolen power.
**ESSENCE ABSORBED: VERA TALLSTRIKE, AGE 32, GREEN-STONE WARRIOR**
**CULTIVATION: 15 YEARS ACTIVE**
**SPECIALIZATION: CLOSE QUARTERS COMBAT, BLADE WORK**
**INTEGRATION COMPLETE.**
**ATTRIBUTE ENHANCEMENT: STRENGTH +4, DEXTERITY +5, SPEED +4**
**TECHNIQUE ACQUIRED: [FLOWING KNIFE FORM - BASIC]**
Technique acquired. The words registered dimly through the horror of watching someone die by degrees. He could feel knowledge settling into his muscle memory, patterns of movement that weren't his, skills cultivated through someone else's fifteen years of training now embedded in his nervous system like parasitic wisdom.
Vera was whimpering now, tears cutting through the grime on her face. Her birthstone had gone dull gray, essence nearly depleted. She looked smaller somehow, like the vitality leaving her body was taking mass with it.
"Please," she whispered. "Please just finish it. Don't leave me like this."
Orin released the connection. The pull stopped, leaving her gasping, still alive but gutted of power. Her birthstone was ash-colored now, barely functional. She'd survive, probably, but cultivation was finished. She was baseline human, maybe weaker. Everything she'd spent fifteen years building, gone.
"I'm sorry," he said, because what else was there?
"No you're not." She closed her eyes, each word costing her. "You're efficient. There's a difference."
He moved to the next contractor, the one he'd dropped from above. Still unconscious, breathing shallow, his green birthstone intact and glowing. Orin pressed the void stone against it, felt the pull establish.
Easier the second time. The horror was still there, but muted, like pain you'd lived with long enough that it became furniture in your daily existence.
**ESSENCE ABSORBED: MARCUS BRENT, AGE 28, GREEN-STONE ENFORCER**
**CULTIVATION: 11 YEARS ACTIVE**
**SPECIALIZATION: GRAPPLING, SUBMISSION HOLDS**
**INTEGRATION COMPLETE.**
**ATTRIBUTE ENHANCEMENT: STRENGTH +5, DURABILITY +3**
**TECHNIQUE ACQUIRED: [IRON GRIP METHOD - BASIC]**
More stolen knowledge, more parasitic skill. He could feel the techniques settling in, muscle memory from people who'd bled for them, now his through theft and necessity.
The third contractor woke halfway through the draining, eyes snapping open to find his essence being pulled into darkness. He tried to fight, tried to channel power that was already leaving him. Orin held him down, forty-eight strength now versus diminishing resistance.
"What are you?" the man gasped, watching his birthstone fade from green to gray.
"Hungry."
**ESSENCE ABSORBED: RICHARD SLATE, AGE 41, GREEN-STONE VETERAN**
**CULTIVATION: 23 YEARS ACTIVE**
**SPECIALIZATION: RANGED WEAPONS, TACTICAL ASSESSMENT**
**INTEGRATION COMPLETE.**
**ATTRIBUTE ENHANCEMENT: DEXTERITY +4, SPEED +3**
**TECHNIQUE ACQUIRED: [STEADY AIM DISCIPLINE - BASIC]**
Twenty-three years of someone's life, compressed into attribute points and combat methodology. The void stone accepted it all with mechanical indifference, consuming cultivation like it was just another monster essence.
Orin stood among the three drained contractors, their birthstones dead ash, their bodies still breathing but hollowed. He felt stronger, faster, more capable. Felt techniques in his muscle memory that he'd never trained, knowledge stolen from people who'd earned it through decades of practice.
Felt like a parasite wearing human shape.
The void stone pulsed with satisfaction, silver specks swirling faster now, eager for more. Unlimited storage meant unlimited hunger. Every feeding just confirmed how much more it could consume.
*This is what you are now. This is what survival costs.*
The thought arrived without judgment, just observation. He'd crossed the line from stealing essence from monsters to stealing it from humans. The distinction probably mattered philosophically. Practically, both left people drained.
He checked his attributes, watching numbers that had been impossible a week ago climb into ranges that made him genuinely dangerous.
**ORIN FOX**
**AGE: 15**
**ESSENCE STORED: 26/∞**
**ATTRIBUTES:**
**STRENGTH: 56**
**DURABILITY: 46**
**VITALITY: 29**
**DEXTERITY: 53**
**SPEED: 45**
**TECHNIQUES:**
**[FLOWING KNIFE FORM - BASIC]**
**[IRON GRIP METHOD - BASIC]**
**[STEADY AIM DISCIPLINE - BASIC]**
Green-stone veterans averaged fifty in their primary attributes after decades of cultivation. He'd hit those numbers in a week through theft and desperation. Blue-stones and blackstones couldn't touch these ranges. Even promising green-stones required years to reach this level.
And he was still hungry.
The guards were still waiting ahead, six green-stones arranged in ambush formation. His Essence Sight showed their positions, their circulation patterns, the weak points in their coordination.
He could probably take them. Drain them all, add their decades of cultivation to his stolen collection. Become stronger still.
The temptation was visceral, physical. Power calling to itself, hunger breeding more hunger.
*No.*
The refusal arrived quiet but absolute. He'd drained three contractors who'd been trying to kidnap him for vivisection. Self-defense wearing monstrous clothing, justifiable through the particular logic of people who'd kill you regardless. But guards were different. They were following orders, doing jobs, probably had families who expected them home.
Draining them would be murder for convenience. Crossing from desperate survival into comfortable atrocity.
*Lines exist for reasons. You can't keep crossing them and pretend you're still human.*
Orin left through a side exit, circling the guard ambush, taking routes through the slums that avoided confrontation. The void stone pulsed with what felt like disappointment, hungry for more feeding.
He ignored it, which was probably like ignoring hunger during a famine. Possible, but the cost accumulated with interest.
Marrow's shop appeared through the pre-dawn darkness, shutters closed, the building sleeping or pretending to. Orin knocked, three quick raps that probably wouldn't wake the butcher but might get his attention if he was already awake.
Silence answered, then footsteps. The door cracked open, revealing Marrow's suspicious expression and the club he held ready for violence.
"It's three in the morning, boy. You better have a good reason for being here."
"Sorry, I do. I just... Don't know what else to do." Orin stepped inside before invitation. "I need your offer. The research subject arrangement. I'm accepting."
Marrow closed the door, secured it, studied Orin with the clinical assessment of someone examining meat for quality and defects. "You look different. Stronger. What happened?"
"I fed the stone. I... Fed it well."
"Monster essence?"
"Some." The lie tasted like ash. "Managed to acquire grade-three materials. Multiple doses. It's changing me faster than expected."
"Show me your attributes."
Orin hesitated, then pulled up the interface only he could see, reading the numbers aloud. Marrow listened, his expression shifting from skepticism to wonder to something approaching fear.
"Those are veteran-level attributes. You've had that stone for what, two weeks?" The butcher moved to his workbench, pulled out paper, started making notes. "Normal cultivation requires years of careful essence integration. You're compressing decades into days. Either your stone is miraculously efficient, or you're burning through your lifespan to fuel the growth."
"Which do you think?"
"I think you're an anomaly so profound that studying you might rewrite everything we understand about birthstones and cultivation." Marrow's hand was shaking slightly as he wrote, excitement or terror blending until they became indistinguishable. "I also think you're probably going to die young, burn out like a candle with too much wick exposed. But before that happens, we might learn something valuable."
The assessment was clinically honest, which Orin appreciated more than false comfort. "So you'll pay my tuition?"
"I'll pay it today. All twenty gold marks, delivered to the academy registrar before deadline." Marrow set down his pen, faced him directly. "In exchange, you submit to examination three times weekly. Blood samples, essence circulation analysis, birthstone structure mapping. Non-invasive initially, possibly invasive if we discover something that requires deeper investigation."
"Define invasive."
"Biopsies. Controlled essence drainage to study your stone's absorption mechanics. Possibly surgical examination of how your birthstone interfaces with your nervous system." Marrow's voice was steady, professional. "I won't lie to you and say it'll be painless. But I'll also promise it'll be careful. You're more valuable alive and functional than dissected and preserved."
The distinction was mercenary but real. Orin would be a test subject, but a protected one. Better than Thorne's laboratory, where he'd be specimen first and person never.
"I want it in writing. Contract specifying limits, compensation, my right to terminate the arrangement."
"Ha.. Smart. I'll draft it today." Marrow extended his hand. "Do we have an agreement?"
Orin took it, feeling calluses earned through forty years of butchery. The handshake was firm, professional, sealing a transaction that would fund his education while studying what he'd become.
"We have an agreement."
"Good. Now sit down before you collapse. You look like you've been fighting all night." Marrow moved to a cabinet, pulled out bread and dried meat, actual food instead of the garbage usually afforded. "Eat. Your body is rewriting itself. It needs fuel beyond essence."
Orin ate, tasting salt and fat and the particular satisfaction of calories that weren't stolen. Outside, the city was waking to its usual brutality, factories demanding labor, merchants opening shops, the machinery of exploitation starting its daily cycle.
But for now, in this moment, he had tuition funding secured. Had admission to the academy guaranteed. Had crossed another line in exchange for climbing higher.
The three contractors he'd drained were probably waking up now, if they'd wake at all. Finding their birthstones dead, their cultivation destroyed, decades of work reduced to ash through his hunger.
He'd stolen their power, their techniques, their accumulated years. Made them pay for his survival with their fundamental capabilities.
The void stone pulsed against his palm, satisfied and eager. Fifty-six strength, fifty-three dexterity. Numbers that would keep climbing as long as he kept feeding it.
As long as he kept crossing lines and pretending the destination justified the journey.
Marrow was watching him with professional interest, probably already planning examinations, cataloging questions, anticipating discoveries.
"You know what you are?" the butcher asked quietly.
"A blackstone with a broken birthstone."
"No." Marrow's expression was unreadable. "You're proof that the hierarchy is artificial. That power isn't predetermined by genetics and social architecture. That someone from the absolute bottom can climb if they're willing to pay the price."
"What's the price?"
"Everything that made you human." Marrow returned to his notes. "But maybe humanity is overrated when the alternative is being crushed into paste by people who never questioned their right to do the crushing."
The logic was diseased and perfect, justification for atrocity dressed as liberation philosophy.
Orin finished eating, accepted the contract Marrow drafted, signed his name in ink that looked disturbingly like dried blood.
Academy admission guaranteed. Research subject status accepted.
He'd sold pieces of himself to climb higher, same as everyone. The only difference was he knew exactly what he'd surrendered and approximately what he'd become.
The void stone pulsed, patient and hungry, counting the essence it had consumed and cataloging all the essence still waiting to be devoured.
Fifty-six strength today. What would it be tomorrow? Next week? Next month?
How high could he climb before he forgot what it felt like to be human instead of just hungry?
The question sat in his chest like swallowed glass, sharp and unanswerable, while Marrow cataloged measurements and the city outside ground people into paste and called it civilization.