The creature's clawed hand closed around my throat.
Cold. Worse than cold—it felt like my skin was being burned by ice. I grabbed its wrist with both hands, trying to pry it loose, but the thing's strength was impossible. Dead muscle shouldn't have this much power. Dead anything shouldn't be standing.
My vision started to tunnel. Darkness crept in from the edges. The creature's ruined face leaned closer, and I could smell it now—not the reek of rot I expected, but something else. Something acrid and wrong, like burning hair mixed with spoiled meat.
The heat in my stomach exploded.
I screamed, or tried to. The sound came out as a strangled wheeze. But the heat—the hunger—surged up through my chest, into my throat, and suddenly the creature's grip didn't matter. Nothing mattered except the ravenous emptiness demanding to be filled.
My mouth opened wider than it should have been able to. My jaw cracked, popped, realigned into something that wasn't quite human. And I bit.
My teeth sank into the creature's forearm.
The taste hit my tongue like a physical blow—rot and ash and something underneath that sang to the hunger in my gut. The creature shrieked, a sound like metal scraping stone, and tried to pull away. But I held on, driven by an instinct that had nothing to do with my conscious mind.
The flesh in my mouth dissolved. Not chewing, not swallowing in any normal sense—it simply unmade itself, flowing down my throat as raw energy. The heat in my stomach roared in approval, demanding more.
The creature stumbled backward, finally releasing my throat. I fell to my knees, gasping and retching, but the hunger wouldn't stop. Couldn't stop. My body moved without permission, lunging forward on all fours like an animal.
The creature tried to run.
I caught its leg, pulled it down. We rolled in the dirt, and somewhere in the rational part of my brain that was still screaming, I registered that I was wrestling a corpse-demon in the middle of a forest that shouldn't exist. But the hunger drowned out reason.
I bit again. And again. Each mouthful dissolved into that same raw energy, feeding into the furnace in my gut. The creature's struggles weakened. Its shrieking faded to a gurgle, then to nothing.
When the hunger finally receded, I was crouched over what remained of the thing. Which was almost nothing—just a few scraps of gray flesh and a dark stain on the forest floor. Even as I watched, those final remnants began to dissolve into mist, evaporating like water on hot stone.
I scrambled backward, my hands and mouth wet with something I refused to think about. My stomach felt... full. Satisfied in a way that had nothing to do with normal food. And underneath that satisfaction, something else stirred. Something new.
Words appeared in my vision.
Not on a screen, not projected—they simply existed in my field of view, glowing with faint green light:
[GHOST STOMACH SYSTEM ACTIVATED]
[WILD GHOST CONSUMED]
[ANALYZING ESSENCE...]
[ABILITY EXTRACTED: NIGHT VISION]
[INTEGRATION COMPLETE]
I blinked hard, trying to clear the hallucination. The words remained, hovering in my sight like a heads-up display. Then they faded, leaving only a faint sensation—an awareness—in the back of my mind.
The forest around me had changed.
Or rather, my perception of it had. The darkness that had been absolute now showed layers of detail. I could see the individual leaves on the forest floor, the texture of bark on distant trees, the faint trails of mist curling between the trunks. Everything was rendered in shades of gray and silver, but it was clear. As clear as daylight, maybe clearer.
I looked down at my hands. They were covered in dark stains—blood or something like it. My jacket was torn. My rational mind tried to assert itself, tried to find the logical explanation.
I'd just eaten a demon.
And gained its power.
"No," I whispered. My voice sounded strange in the enhanced silence, sharper than it should have been. "This isn't real. This can't be—"
My stomach cramped again, not painful this time but insistent. A reminder. And with it came a flash of understanding that wasn't quite my own thought:
Consume. Adapt. Survive.
The Ghost Stomach. That's what the glowing words had called it. Some kind of... what? Parasite? Curse? Gift? My archaeologist's mind tried to categorize it, to fit it into a framework of understanding.
A rustling in the bushes to my left made me spin. My new vision picked out details instantly—a rabbit, normal-sized, normal-looking, freezing in place as it detected me. Just an animal. Nothing supernatural.
It bounded away into the undergrowth.
I stood slowly, testing my body. Everything worked normally, aside from the enhanced vision. No claws, no extra strength that I could feel. Just... me. Me with the ability to see in the dark. Me who had just devoured a walking corpse and somehow stolen its power.
Me, stranded in what appeared to be feudal Japan with no idea how to get home.
The logical thing would be to find civilization. People. Help. I was still wearing my research facility clothes—jeans, jacket, modern hiking boots. If this really was the Edo period, or something like it, I'd stand out like a neon sign.
Assuming anyone here would help a foreigner who could apparently eat demons.
I picked a direction at random and started walking, my enhanced vision turning night into day. The forest felt less oppressive now, less threatening. Or maybe that was just the Ghost Stomach's influence, the predatory certainty that I was no longer prey.
In the distance, maybe a kilometer away, I caught the faint glow of firelight. Torches or lanterns. Settlement.
I headed toward it, each step taking me further from the life I'd known and deeper into whatever nightmare—or destiny—I'd fallen into.
The hunger in my stomach purred contentedly, already anticipating its next meal.