Chapter 3: The Butcher's Bargain
The slums had a rhythm, a pulse you learned or died ignoring. Morning meant factory whistles and the shuffle of the exhausted. Noon brought heat that cooked garbage into perfume. Evening delivered violence, casual as weather.
Orin spent the afternoon in his corner of the warehouse, pretending to sleep while his mind catalogued impossible facts.
His ribs had stopped screaming. Not healed, but quieter, like someone had turned down the volume on his nervous system. The vitality enhancement, probably. Two points didn't sound like much until you remembered that most blackstones lived their entire lives at baseline human capacity, their stones offering just enough improvement to make backbreaking labor slightly less fatal.
He flexed his hand, feeling the strength there. Subtle, but present. Four points above what he'd woken with yesterday. The difference between struggling with a fifty-pound sack and lifting it with only moderate complaint.
For a blackstone, that was revelation.
For whatever he'd become, it was table scraps.
*Unlimited storage.* The words sat in his skull like broken teeth, sharp and undeniable. He'd absorbed two grade-one essences, the kind of bottom-feeder extract that most blackstones got once in their lives. His birthstone had consumed them like a man swallowing raindrops in a drought.
What happened if he fed it something real?
The thought tasted like copper and ambition. Dangerous. But then, existing while blackstoned was dangerous. At least this particular danger came with numbers that climbed instead of staying fixed at *not enough* forever.
Orin waited until the warehouse settled into its evening cacophony, then slipped out through the gap in the back wall that everyone knew about and nobody acknowledged. The city's oversight regarding structural integrity was generous to the point of negligence, which worked in favor of people who needed to move unseen.
The Shambles occupied the commercial district's diseased appendix, where legitimate business gave way to the kind of trade that happened in alleys and required minimal questions. Orin knew it intimately. He'd spent three years running errands for anyone willing to pay a blackstone kid in food or copper.
The butcher shop squatted between a pawnbroker and something that claimed to sell "imports" but mostly sold whatever fell off wagons. A hand-painted sign declared it "Marrow & Sons," though everyone called it the Knacker's based on what ended up on the cutting blocks.
Orin pushed through the door. A bell chimed, cheerful and grotesque.
The interior smelled like iron and old blood, the kind of scent that colonized your sinuses and set up permanent residence. Sawdust covered the floor in a losing battle against various fluids. Hooks hung from the ceiling, empty at this hour, their chains still swaying slightly like something had recently been removed.
"We're closed," a voice called from the back. Thick, phlegmatic, belonging to someone who'd spent decades breathing in death.
"I'm not buying meat."
Silence. Then footsteps, heavy and deliberate.
Dave Marrow emerged from the back room, wiping his hands on an apron that had probably been white in a previous life. He was broad the way old trees were broad, solid and immovable, with the kind of face that looked carved rather than born. His birthstone sat blue and dull on his hand, marking him as labor class. Respectable. Useful.
Trapped.
"Orin Fox." Marrow's voice carried no warmth, but no hostility either. Just recognition, neutral as geology. "Thought that was you. Heard Vance's boy used your face to practice his kicking."
"He's very athletic."
"He's very noble, which means he's very protected." Marrow studied him with eyes that had probably watched a thousand creatures die and learned to read the signs. "You here for sympathy? Fresh out. Try the temple."
"I'm here about your waste."
That got a reaction. Marrow's eyebrows climbed toward his receding hairline. "My waste."
"The parts you can't sell. Organs from monsters, the essence-touched bits that are too contaminated for eating but too cheap to bother refining properly." Orin kept his voice level, factual. "I want to buy them."
Marrow stared at him for three full heartbeats. Then he laughed, a sound like rocks grinding together. "You want to buy garbage."
"Specifically, monster garbage."
"Why?"
"Because I'm planning to eat it."
The laughter died. Marrow's expression shifted into something harder, more clinical. "You planning to kill yourself, boy? Because there are faster ways. Essence contamination from raw monster organs will rot you from the inside. Seen it happen. Man ate a direwolf's liver trying to gain its strength. Spent three days vomiting blood before his insides liquified."
"I'm not planning to eat it traditionally."
"There's a traditional way to eat poison?"
Orin hesitated. This was the pivot point, the moment where he either committed to the insanity or walked away and accepted his blackstone limitations forever. He thought about Garrett Vance's boots, about Maya's hollow eyes, about fifteen years of being told his existence was a burden the world tolerated out of habit.
He pulled off the rag he'd wrapped around his left hand and showed Marrow the birthstone.
The silver specks swirled beneath the black surface like captured stars.
Marrow went very still. "That's not normal."
"Got damaged. In the fight." The lie was wearing a groove in his mouth, smooth from repetition.
"Damaged birthstones don't glow, boy. They crack or they die." Marrow leaned closer, his bulk casting Orin in shadow. "What happened to you?"
"Something probably stupid." Orin met his eyes, refusing to flinch. "But possibly useful. My stone absorbs essence now. Fast. More than it should. I'm thinking maybe I can process things that would kill normal people."
"You're thinking maybe, or you know?"
"I'm thinking maybe, which is why I'm starting with garbage instead of, say, a dragon's heart."
Marrow straightened, considering. His hand went to his own birthstone, an unconscious gesture. "Even if your stone can absorb contaminated essence, integration is different from absorption. The essence might enter, but if your body can't handle the integration, you'll still die screaming."
"But you have the contaminated parts."
"I have them because nobody else wants them. They're worthless."
"Then sell them to me. Worst case, I die and you're rid of a stupid kid. Best case, I owe you a favor and I'm not stupid enough to forget debts."
Marrow studied him like he was a cut of meat and the butcher was deciding which parts were salvageable. The silence stretched, filled with the shop's ambient sounds: the drip of something in the back room, the creak of chains, the city's muffled noise beyond the walls.
"You got coin?"
"Some." Orin had seventeen copper marks saved from two years of errand running. A fortune for a blackstone kid, poverty for anyone else.
"Contaminated organs go for scraps when they go at all. Five copper per pound." Marrow named a price that was simultaneously robbery and charity. "But I'm not selling you anything that'll kill you quick. You die slow from bad decisions, that's on you. You die fast from my merchandise, that's bad for business."
"So you'll sell?"
"I'll sell you one pound of rendered slurge from a gutter prowler. Low-grade predator, essence concentration barely registers. If your magic rock can handle that without turning your blood to paste, we'll talk about moving up the chain."
Marrow disappeared into the back room. Orin heard the sounds of rummaging, the wet slap of something hitting metal. When the butcher returned, he carried a glass jar filled with gray-brown sludge that looked like someone had liquidized regret.
"Gutter prowler liver and spleen, rendered down. Normally I'd burn this, but seeing as you're volunteering for the job..." Marrow set the jar on the counter with a dull thunk. "Five copper."
Orin counted out the coins, each one a small betrayal of financial security. Marrow swept them into his apron pocket with practiced efficiency.
"You do this in private," the butcher said, his voice dropping into something almost paternal. "Don't care where, but not here, not anywhere someone can watch. Blackstone kid suddenly absorbing monster essence draws attention. Attention draws questions. Questions draw the kind of people who dissect first and apologize to your corpse after."
"I understand."
"Do you?" Marrow's expression was granite, unmoved by sentiment. "Because I've seen what happens to anomalies, boy. Five years back, a green-stone in the Narrows developed secondary essence affinity. Rare, valuable, should have been celebrated. The nobles came and took him. Said it was for study. Said it was voluntary. His family got a purse of silver and a corpse three months later, returned with all the interesting bits removed."
The words hung in the air like smoke, dark and suffocating.
"Why tell me this?" Orin asked.
"Because you remind me of someone." Marrow's hand went to his blue birthstone again, that unconscious gesture. "My son. Died six years ago, stupid and brave, thinking his stone meant something more than what the world decided. Took on a contract above his grade, trying to prove himself. They sent back pieces."
The silence was a living thing now, heavy with grief that had calcified into scar tissue.
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry. Be smart." Marrow's voice roughened. "You want to climb? Fine. Climb. But do it quiet, do it careful, and for fuck's sake don't do it where the wolves can see you bleed."
Orin took the jar, feeling its weight, its potential. Inside, the slurge sat inert and disgusting. But if the voice in his head was right, if the void stone was real, that slurge was power.
Small power, pathetic power, but more than he'd had yesterday.
"One more thing," Marrow said as Orin turned to leave. "You survive this, you come back. Not just for more essence. You come back and you tell me what you've become. Because if you're really different, if that stone of yours is really broken in a useful way..." He paused, choosing words carefully. "Then maybe there's hope for the rest of us poor bastards stuck at the bottom."
Orin nodded, not trusting his voice. He left the shop with the jar clutched against his chest, the bell chiming behind him like a tiny funeral dirge.
The slums swallowed him, and he let them. He navigated by memory and instinct, taking the long route to avoid gang territories and the watchmen who occasionally remembered they had jobs.
The abandoned warehouse sat at the district's eastern edge, where the city gave up pretending to care. Three stories of collapsed dreams and structural failure. Orin had found it two years ago and claimed the second floor, the one relatively intact room with a door that still closed, it was the perfect safe house too cold to sleep in but perfect for hiding.
He lit a stolen candle, set the jar on the floor, and stared at it.
*Moment of truth.*
He uncapped the jar. The smell hit him like a physical blow, rank, meaty and wrong. His stomach attempted to vacate through his throat. He swallowed it down, tasting bile.
"Unlimited storage," he whispered to the darkness. "Don't make me a liar."
Orin dipped his fingers into the slurge. It was cold, viscous, clinging to his skin like it had opinions about being touched. He pressed his contaminated fingers to his birthstone.
The reaction was immediate and absolute.
The slurge didn't absorb. It was *annihilated*, yanked through his stone so fast his fingers came away clean. The void stone pulsed once, silver specks spiraling into a vortex.
The voice returned, and with it, pain.
**"ESSENCE ABSORBED: GUTTER PROWLER, GRADE TWO. CONTAMINATION DETECTED. PURIFICATION PROTOCOL INITIATED."**
Fire erupted in his veins. Not metaphorical, not hyperbole. Actual burning sensation, like his blood had been replaced with molten glass. Orin bit down on his own hand to keep from screaming, tasting copper as his teeth broke skin.
**"PURIFICATION COMPLETE. INTEGRATION COMMENCING."**
The fire shifted, transformed. It crawled through his muscles, his bones, rewriting something fundamental. His vision doubled, tripled, the numbers appearing again in his mind.
**ESSENCE ABSORBED: GUTTER PROWLER, GRADE TWO**
**INTEGRATION COMPLETE.**
**ATTRIBUTE ENHANCEMENT: STRENGTH +5, DURABILITY +3, DEXTERITY +4, SPEED +3**
The pain faded like a tide receding, leaving him gasping and sweat-soaked on the warehouse floor. He lay there counting breaths, counting heartbeats, confirming he was still alive and intact.
Then he stood up.
*Oh.*
The difference was night and day. His body felt lighter, more responsive, like someone had removed weights he hadn't known he was carrying. He threw a punch experimentally. The air whistled. His fist moved faster than it had any right to, driven by strength that felt borrowed from somewhere else.
He looked at the jar. It was half-empty.
*What happens if I finish it?*
Orin dipped his fingers again. The void stone drank deep. The pain came again, familiar now, almost welcome. Because pain meant change, and change meant he wasn't stuck in the same worthless shape forever.
**"ESSENCE ABSORBED: GUTTER PROWLER, GRADE TWO. INTEGRATION COMPLETE."**
More numbers climbing. More power settling into muscle and bone.
When the jar was empty, Orin stood in the candlelight and pulled up the impossible interface only he could see.
**ORIN FOX**
**AGE: 15**
**ESSENCE STORED: 5/∞**
**ATTRIBUTES:**
**STRENGTH: 29**
**DURABILITY: 22**
**VITALITY: 17**
**DEXTERITY: 26**
**SPEED: 23**
He'd more than doubled his baseline attributes. A single pound of contaminated monster essence, the kind of garbage that should have killed him, had pushed him past any blackstone's natural limit.
And he was still hungry.
Orin looked at his hands, at the void stone glittering with stolen starlight, and laughed. It started quiet, then built into something manic and breathless, echoing through the abandoned warehouse.
Five days until the academy entrance exams. Five days to figure out how to pass while hiding what he'd become. Five days to gather more essence, to climb higher, to transform himself into something the world couldn't ignore.
He was going to need more jars.
The candle guttered, throwing his shadow huge against the wall. It looked hungry, that shadow. Eager.
Orin smiled at it, and the shadow smiled back with too many teeth.