William stood over the dead creature for a long moment before doing anything at all.
The storm still raged above the ruin, though the deeper chamber dulled its violence into distant thunder and a constant trembling in the stone. Blue light pulsed through the crystal veins in the walls with every strike outside, washing the chamber in a cold glow that made the corpse at his feet look even less natural than it already had.
Up close, the creature's body was worse.
The chitin along its back had cracked in several places during the fight, exposing the flesh beneath. Thin strands of blue ran through the meat the same way veins ran through crystal deposits in the walls. Some glowed faintly, especially when lightning struck outside and the energy running through the ruin intensified for a second or two before settling again.
William crouched beside it and studied the wound he had made.
He had no memory of hunting, skinning, or preparing food. Nothing rose in his mind to guide him beyond simple instinct and common sense. But common sense was enough to tell him one thing: if he stayed trapped in the ruin much longer, hunger would become a problem whether he liked it or not.
His stomach had already begun to remind him of that.
He set the dagger against one of the fallen stones and pressed a hand against his abdomen for a moment, more out of irritation than pain. He had gone too long without food. Water was still the larger problem, especially with the dry pressure in the air and the storm making it impossible to leave safely, but one problem at a time was better than pretending neither existed.
The creature was the only source of meat available.
That did not mean it was safe.
William reached for the dagger again and cut carefully into the softer flesh beneath the creature's broken shell. The blade moved with less resistance than before. He noticed it immediately. Even if the weapon had not fully restored itself yet, the edge had become cleaner, sharper, more willing to bite into whatever it touched. He carved out a small strip of meat and set it aside on a relatively clean slab of stone, then cut a second piece slightly thinner than the first.
The flesh was dense and dark beneath the outer membrane, with faint blue filaments spread through it in delicate threads. The smell was strange—closer to meat than not, but with a metallic sharpness underneath that made him hesitate.
For a few seconds he just stared at it.
Then another thunderclap rolled through the ruin, and part of the decision was made for him.
He needed to eat.
The chamber offered little in the way of fuel, but not nothing. Dry fragments of ancient wood had been preserved in a collapsed corner of the room, likely trapped there long before the deeper levels were buried completely by sand. Most of it was brittle and rotten, but some pieces still held enough structure to burn. William gathered what he could, along with a few scraps of dry fabric from the remains of whatever furnishings had once existed in the chamber, and built a small fire pit between several stones where the wind from the deeper corridors would not snuff it out immediately.
Starting the fire took longer than he wanted.
More than once he thought about giving up and eating the meat raw, but the image of the glowing veins inside the creature's flesh made that seem like a terrible idea. He kept working until the dry cloth finally caught, then fed the tiny flame carefully with splinters of wood until he had enough heat to hold.
The first piece of meat hissed the moment he laid it over the flame on a flat shard of stone.
A thin line of blue ran through it and brightened for an instant before fading into the surface as the flesh cooked. The smell changed as well. The metallic edge softened and was replaced by something richer, though still unfamiliar enough that William never stopped being aware he was about to eat part of a creature that looked like it belonged in a nightmare.
He cooked only a small amount. Hunger pushed at him constantly now, but he ignored it long enough to force himself into caution. If the meat carried poison, or if the blue veins in it were more dangerous than they looked, eating too much at once would be stupid.
When the first strip was done, he let it cool slightly and then tore off a small piece.
The taste was not good.
It was not horrible either. The texture was tougher than normal meat should have been, and the same metallic undertone remained no matter how much the cooking reduced it. But it was still food. He chewed slowly, swallowed, and waited.
Nothing happened.
William sat beside the small fire while the storm hammered at the buried city above and waited for the meat to turn against him.
Minutes passed.
He took another bite, then another after that. By the time he had finished the first strip and half of the second, he had almost begun to think he had been overly cautious. The food sat heavily in his stomach, but there was no immediate sickness, no dizziness, no sign that he had just made a fatal mistake.
The faintest sense of relief began to settle in.
Then the pain started.
At first it was only a tightening in his abdomen, the kind of discomfort that could have been explained away as hunger meeting food too quickly. William shifted slightly against the stone and frowned, pressing a hand to his stomach again.
The pressure worsened.
It spread outward from his core in slow, deliberate waves, moving through his torso and then into his arms and legs. Every muscle in his body began to feel too tight, as if invisible cords had been wound through them and were now being pulled harder and harder with each passing second.
William sucked in a breath through clenched teeth and tried to stand.
The attempt lasted all of two steps before his legs buckled.
He caught himself on one hand against the stone floor, the dagger clattering out of reach as another wave of pain hit him hard enough to blur his vision. This was not food poisoning. It was not nausea, not cramping, not anything as simple as the body rejecting something it could not handle.
It felt like his entire body was being forced to change all at once.
His heartbeat accelerated violently. Heat flooded through him, gathering in his chest and abdomen before driving outward through every limb in sharp pulses. The sensation was so overwhelming that for a moment he thought the storm had somehow entered the ruin and struck him directly.
He fell onto one knee, then both.
Every breath came harder than the last. His muscles seized and released in uneven spasms, not enough to stop him from moving entirely but more than enough to make movement meaningless. It felt as though his body had become a battlefield and something inside it had declared war on every weakness it could find.
William gritted his teeth and forced himself not to cry out.
Another surge hit him.
The pain sharpened, deepened, and then became something stranger. It still hurt—badly—but beneath it he could feel structure in it now, as though the agony had purpose. The tightness in his arms and shoulders was not random. The burning in his legs and chest was not simply destruction. It was adjustment.
His body was adapting to something it had never held before.
Blue light flashed across the chamber as lightning struck outside. The crystal veins in the walls flared in response, and for one disorienting second William thought he saw the same light reflected beneath his own skin, faint and quick as heat lightning through clouds.
He braced himself against the floor and endured it.
The process seemed to stretch forever, though in reality it could not have been very long. Pain came in waves—violent, then receding just enough to let him think it was ending before another would hit harder than the one before. Sweat ran down his back and soaked the collar of his clothes. His hands trembled so badly he could barely curl his fingers into the stone.
Gradually, slowly, the intensity began to break.
The heat inside him remained, but the savage edge of it softened. His heartbeat steadied. His breathing, though ragged, stopped feeling like an impossible task. By the time the last of the spasms passed through his muscles, he was left leaning against one of the pillars with his eyes closed, exhausted enough that he could have slept on the floor where he sat.
For several minutes he didn't move.
The storm continued outside, indifferent to whatever had just happened inside his body. Thunder rolled overhead. Stone groaned somewhere in the upper levels of the ruin. The small fire beside him had nearly died, reduced to a low bed of red heat.
Eventually William opened his eyes and looked down at his hands.
They were still shaking, but less than before.
He flexed his fingers once, then again.
Something was different.
Not dramatically. He did not feel transformed into something beyond human, nor did the pain leave behind any sudden rush of power that would have made the entire ordeal feel cheap. What he felt instead was subtler and, in some ways, more disturbing because of that.
His body felt cleaner.
Tighter.
The heaviness of exhaustion that had been following him since waking in the crater had lessened. The ache in his shoulders from climbing ruins and fighting for his life had not vanished, but it no longer felt like the ache of an untrained body being pushed beyond its limits. It felt like strain after exertion—real strain, but manageable.
When he pushed himself to his feet, the movement came easier than he expected.
William stood still for a moment and let himself test the sensation. His balance felt steadier. His breathing evened out more quickly. The lingering fatigue was still there, but it no longer clung to him like dead weight.
He looked at the remains of the cooked meat beside the fire.
So that was what it had done.
A creature like that had survived in the buried ruin because it had adapted to the blue energy saturating the city and the storm. By eating it, even in a small amount, he had taken some of that into himself.
The thought should have made him feel more alarmed than it did.
Instead, all he felt was a wary sort of clarity.
He was still hungry. That much had not changed. The pain had burned through some of the weakness in his body, but it had also left him drained. More importantly, it had answered one question while creating another dozen. The meat was not poison, at least not in the ordinary sense. It was something else—something tied to the same force moving through the crystal veins, the ruins, the weapon at his side, and the storm above.
William retrieved the dagger and looked it over in the blue glow of the chamber.
The runes remained lit, though dimly now. The edge had repaired a little more while he endured the change in his body, and the remaining chips seemed shallower than before. He slid the blade back into his belt, then looked toward the corridor leading deeper into the ruin.
He would need to move soon. Not immediately, but soon. The chamber had given him shelter, food, and enough time to survive the worst of the fight, yet the buried city was clearly larger than what he had seen so far. If the storm kept feeding the ancient structure, then there might be safer chambers deeper inside—places better suited to outlast whatever still remained of the storm's passing edge.
For now, though, he sat once more beside the dying fire and cut a smaller piece of meat from the strip that remained. He would not make the mistake of eating too much. Not after that. But he had learned enough to know he could not afford to ignore the only source of strength available to him either.
Outside, lightning continued to split the sky above the desert.
Inside the buried ruin, with the taste of strange meat still lingering in his mouth and the ache of forced change settling into something usable, William prepared himself for whatever waited deeper in the dark.