On the seventh day, Yuki realised he hadn't eaten.
Not "hadn't eaten much." Hadn't eaten at all. Not since he'd arrived. Seven days of continuous physical and magical exertion, and he hadn't put a single thing in his mouth. No food. No water — aside from what he'd condensed from humidity for practice. Nothing.
He should have been dead. At the very least he should have been delirious with hunger, shaking, barely functional. A normal human body started shutting down after three days without water. Seven days without food wasn't fatal, but it wasn't fun either.
Yuki felt fine.
Better than fine, actually. He felt strong, alert, energised. The pressure in his chest hummed steadily. His body showed no signs of deprivation — no weakness, no dizziness, no muscle wasting. If anything, he felt better than he had on day one.
He sat in the dust and thought about it.
I'm not hungry. My body isn't hungry. But my brain thinks I should be.
It was a weird dissonance. His stomach wasn't growling. There was no physical craving, no lightheadedness, no weakness in his limbs. But his mind — the part that had spent seventeen years eating three meals a day — kept insisting that something was wrong. A habit loop with nothing to loop around.
Is the mana feeding me?
It made a kind of sense. His body was saturated with energy — an incomprehensible amount of it, constantly replenishing from the atmosphere. If mana could reinforce muscles and harden bones and accelerate neurons, why couldn't it sustain basic metabolic functions? Replace calories with raw magical energy?
He didn't know enough about biology or magic to confirm it. But the evidence was hard to argue with. Seven days, no food, yet no decline.
Still. I miss eating.
That was the thing. He wasn't hungry, but he missed food. The act of it. The taste. The comfort. Rice. Curry. The egg sandwich from the convenience store near school. His mom's miso soup — the one she made when it was cold out, with too much tofu and not enough green onion, and he'd complain about it every time even though he secretly thought it was perfect.
His throat tightened. He shoved the thought aside.
Okay. I'm going hunting. Not because I need to eat. Because I want to. And because I need practice on live targets anyway.
He stood up and started walking toward the edge of the dead zone.
The boundary was stark. Grey dust and skeletal trees on one side. Dense, living forest on the other. The transition happened over maybe twenty metres — dead ground giving way to thin grass, then undergrowth, then full canopy. Life and death separated by a line you could draw with a ruler.
Yuki stopped at the edge and listened.
The forest was loud. Birdsong — or something like birdsong, pitched slightly wrong. Insects buzzing. Leaves rustling in a breeze he couldn't feel from the dead zone. Branches cracking somewhere deeper in. And underneath it all, a low, ambient hum of mana — the living forest was rich with it in a way the dead zone wasn't.
He didn't go in.
Not yet. He wasn't ready for that. He'd been practising magic for less than a week, his control was still shaky, and he had no idea what lived in there. The dead zone was safe — nothing alive, nothing to threaten him, nothing to trigger his absorption. The forest was an unknown.
Instead, he stalked along the edge. Just inside the tree line — close enough to spot prey, close enough to retreat into the dead zone if something big showed up.
It took about twenty minutes to find something.
A small creature, tucked into a hollow between two roots. Roughly the size and shape of a rabbit, but with longer ears and fur that had a faint iridescent sheen. It was nibbling on a cluster of mushrooms, completely oblivious to his presence.
Perfect. Easy target. Good first test.
He raised his right hand. Formed a wind lance — the compressed air projectile he'd been drilling for the past few days. He'd gotten decent at it in practice. Tight spiral, good velocity, clean release.
He poured mana into it. Aimed. Fired.
The wind lance left his hand and the world split apart.
A crack of displaced air so violent it hit him like a physical slap. He slammed his hands over his ears a fraction too late — the sonic boom rang through his skull like a bell. The projectile crossed the distance to the rabbit in an instant, a blur of compressed atmosphere that —
Obliterated it.
Not killed. Obliterated. The rabbit, the roots it was sitting between, the mushrooms, a section of ground about two metres across, and the lower trunk of the tree behind it — all of it just gone. Replaced by a shallow crater of shattered earth and a cloud of debris that was still raining down when Yuki lowered his hands from his ears.
He stared at the crater. At the absence of rabbit. At the splinters of wood settling in the undergrowth.
...I was trying to hunt that. Not erase it from existence.
There was nothing to salvage. The rabbit had been reduced to a fine mist. He couldn't even find fur.
He stood there for a long moment, ears still ringing, and added another item to his growing list of problems.
Control. I still have no control.
The wind lance was his most practised projectile spell, and he'd just used it on a rabbit-sized target at close range like firing a cannon at a dinner plate. The power wasn't the issue — the power was always there, always excessive, always ready to go nuclear at the slightest provocation. The issue was calibration. He needed to learn how to produce a fraction of his output on demand.
Smaller. Quieter. Less... that.
He kept walking. It took another thirty minutes to find a second rabbit-thing, this one crouched in a patch of tall grass about fifteen metres from the tree line.
This time, he didn't form a lance. He pictured something smaller — a wind bullet. A compressed marble of air, dense enough to kill a small animal but nowhere near the apocalyptic overkill of the lance. He held the image carefully — small, contained, precise — and released it with a flick of his finger.
A sharp snap of displaced air, nothing more. The bullet crossed the distance in a blink, hit the rabbit in the side, and dropped it instantly. Clean. Quick. The grass around it barely rustled.
Yuki let out a breath he didn't realise he'd been holding.
There. That's more like it.
He walked over to collect the kill. The rabbit-thing was dead — the bullet had punched through its torso and stopped inside. No explosion. No crater. Just a small, clean kill.
Then the pull started.
It was subtle — much subtler than the chain reaction, much smaller in scale. But unmistakable. A thin stream of energy rising off the rabbit's body like heat shimmer, flowing toward him, sinking into his chest. His body absorbed it automatically. He didn't ask for it. Didn't try to do it. It just happened.
The energy was tiny — a drop in the ocean of his reserves. But he felt it. A faint warmth. A momentary spike in the pressure behind his ribs, so small it was gone almost before he noticed it.
It reminded him of waking up. Of the dead zone. Of lying unconscious while his body devoured everything for kilometres.
Same process. Same ability. Just... smaller scale.
Every kill fed him. Not food — energy. Mana. Life force. Whatever the creatures of this world ran on, his body claimed it on death.
He looked down at the rabbit in his hands. Then out at the dead zone stretching behind him. Kilometres of grey ash and skeletal trees — the result of that same absorption running unchecked.
I drain things when they die near me. The stronger the thing, the more I get. And I can't turn it off.
He filed that away. Added it to the list of things about himself that were useful and terrifying in equal measure.
For now, he had dinner.
He carried the rabbit back to camp — the rough clearing at the dead zone's centre where he'd woken up a week ago. It had become home by default. Four stone walls and a roof of earth. Flat ground, no obstacles, good sightlines in every direction. Safe, in the way that a barren wasteland can be safe.
He'd never prepared an animal. Seventeen years of city life hadn't exactly included a butchering module. But the rabbit-thing was small, and he had mana-sharpened fingers and a general sense of how anatomy worked.
It was messy. He was slow. The result wasn't pretty. But he got the fur off and the organs out and was left with something that looked vaguely like food if he squinted.
Fire was easy — a controlled flame, hovering above the ground, fed by a steady stream of mana. He didn't have a spit or a grill, so he improvised: a flat rock, heated from below, turned into a makeshift cooking surface.
The rabbit sizzled. Fat popped. A smell rose up that hit him like a freight train — not because he was hungry, but because it was familiar. Cooked meat. The first normal, human, real thing he'd experienced since arriving in this world.
His eyes stung. He blinked hard and focused on not burning dinner.
It tasted fine. Slightly gamey, slightly tough, not enough salt — not any salt, actually. But it was warm and it was food and eating it felt more like home than anything else he'd done in seven days.
He ate slowly. Not because he was savouring it — though he was — but because he wanted to make the moment last. A normal thing. A human thing. Sitting by a fire, eating a meal. For a few minutes he could pretend the grey wasteland around him was a campsite and the alien stars were just unfamiliar constellations viewed from a different latitude.
The pretence didn't hold. But it helped.