It was as if something had been siphoned from one end of the entire village. The color drained away, inch by inch, until only a colorless gray remained.
The child was still growing.
His face was still that of a seven or eight-year-old.
But on that seven-year-old face, the eyes began to bulge outward.
They bulged out and then split open, new, smaller eyes sprouting from the fissures. Even smaller eyes then split forth from those.
His mouth stretched back behind his ears. Where it opened, there were no teeth, only rings of flesh the color of his throat, spiraling inward.
The milky, childish voice continued to recite in the sing-song rhythm of a nursery rhyme.
"The little boy grew so, so tall.
The villagers couldn’t see his face anymore, because it had grown up into the clouds.
But the little boy was still hungry.
The little boy said, ’Mother, I’m so hungry.’
The little boy said, ’Mother, there’s no more sweetness in the village. I’ve sucked it all away.’"
In the image, at the center of the gray village, a smaller human figure stood with its head tilted back. It was the child’s Mother.
"Mother said, ’There, there, my dear. Mother will make you some bread.’"
"The little boy said, ’Mother, the bread has no sweetness either.’"
"The little boy said, ’But Mother, you do.’"
The voice stopped there.
The entire projection fell silent.
The wheat fields were still, the gray village was still. The thing that had stretched out so long, its face lost in the clouds, bent down.
The milky, childish voice spoke again.
This time, it recited softly, gently, like the last words whispered before sleep.
"And so, there was no one left in the village.
No more wheat, and no more sweetness.
Only a good little boy, so very, very tall, who had learned a new way of Breathing.
He’s still standing there, and he’s still hungry."
"He’ll be hungry forever, because he sucked up everything he could.
But he can’t stop. The new Breathing doesn’t teach you how."
"And that’s the end of the story... Little one, wouldn’t you say that boy was the most promising child in the village?"
The image faded away.
Richard realized the pen in his hand had fallen onto the desk. Ink bled into a small black blotch on the corner of his fair copy.
The room was quiet. The list of thirty-six books was still nailed to the wall. Evelyn was humming an off-key tune.
He sat for a moment before picking the pen back up.
That voice, with its nursery-rhyme cadence, combined with the vision to demonstrate the general effects of the introductory Breathing Technique of the Abyss Path.
It inhaled all the Ether in one go, growing fast and strong, unable to stop, until it had drained everything around it dry, and then began to drain itself.
Following the text of the nursery rhyme was a detailed explanation of its principles of Mysticism.
He diligently transcribed it onto his manuscript paper, planning to digest it slowly later.
As he wrote, the drawn-out final syllable of the word "hungry" still echoed in his mind.
Richard rubbed his temples, rested for a moment, and then began to work on the second section.
The shape of the guiding symbols at the beginning of the second section was slightly different from the first.
The half-drawn circle was now fuller, the gap within it smaller.
He guided a wisp of Ether and pushed it in.
Another layer was peeled away from the room.
This time, it was a battlefield.
Ridge after ridge of churned-up black earth was strewn with broken wagon shafts, burnt-through banners, and corpses that could have been human or something else entirely.
The sky was iron-gray. In the distance, a city was burning, the flames licking the underside of the clouds a dark red.
A voice rang out.
This time, the voice belonged to an old man, thick with a layer of dust, and he had to clear his throat softly after every sentence.
"I’m going to tell you about a man," the old man’s voice spread across the battlefield. "A man who never lost."
In the vision, a Shadow walked out from the far side of the black earth.
Richard couldn’t see his face.
Everything else in the projection was perfectly clear, but this person looked as if someone had smeared their thumb across a painting, blurring his features together.
He wore a Hunter’s practical garb, an unnaturally long axe slung diagonally across his back.
At this point, he understood. This section was about the combination of the Abyss Tradition and a Hunter.
"He was a Hunter," the old man continued.
"At thirteen, he was braving icy waters. At fifteen, he had his first Ether burst. At twenty, he became a Practitioner.
Up to that point, he was no different from any other good Hunter."
The man with the blurred face walked into the center of the battlefield.
A tide of things surged toward him from the opposite side. Richard recognized them: mutants, deeply corrupted by Ether, swarming without formation, relying on numbers.
"But he wasn’t satisfied." The old man cleared his throat.
"He thought being a Hunter was too slow. Hacking away one axe-blow at a time, firing one Enchanted Bullet after another—he thought it was too slow.
He wanted a method where he could just lift his hand and everything on the other side would be gone."
"And so he went deeper."
In the image, the man didn’t raise his axe.
He made a small motion, as if pulling something out from his chest.
The black earth around him grew even darker.
So deep that Richard felt, ’If I were to step into it, I’d sink forever, with no bottom.’
The swarm of corrupted creatures that had been surging forward stopped as they reached the edge of the black earth. Then they went limp and were gone.
It was as if the very thing that allowed them to stand had been siphoned out from within them.
Layer by layer, from near to far, everything that moved on the battlefield went limp.
"You see..." The old man’s voice held no trace of joy or any other emotion. He was simply stating a fact.
"He won. He won just by lifting his hand.
After that, he won every battle the same way.
The packs of Bone Hounds to the north? He cleared an entire valley in half a day.
The filth in the southern swamps? He stood on the bank, and the other side simply fell silent on its own.
His superiors recorded his merits, until they no longer knew how to record them, because no other Hunter could do what he did."

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