The threshold didn't open so much as it peeled. Layers of reality flaked off like dead skin, revealing a hallway made entirely of hunger.
Not metaphor.
The walls pulsed with wanting. Mouths stitched shut. Eyes blind but aware. Something deeper than need lurked here.
Veyne stepped in and shut the door behind him. It didn't close. It disappeared.
The air was thick, not with scent, but memory. The memory of starvation. Of clawing at unseen things in the dark. He recognized it not because he remembered it—but because the Tower made him feel it.
He walked. The floor was soft. Breathing. It accepted his steps like a mother accepts a curse.
After seven paces, the corridor changed.
A girl stood in the middle.
No older than ten. Hair like coal. Eyes like holes.
She held a string. At the end of it, a severed head, blinking.
"Name?" she asked.
Veyne didn't reply.
"Wrong answer."
She tugged the string. The head opened its mouth and screamed in seven voices. None of them human. One of them his.
**Instinct Triggered: Echo Feed.
Would you like to consume, reflect, or invert?**
He chose invert.
The scream reversed. Echoes sucked inward. The girl gasped as her own breath vanished. Veyne stepped forward and cut the string with a whisper of intent.
The head fell. The girl vanished.
New Trait Acquired: Hunger Immunity (Stage I).
A staircase descended ahead, made of ribs.
He took it.
The next room was a feast.
Meat. Bread. Wine. Blood. Laughter.
Every chair filled with someone from Veyne's past.
Dead. Imagined. Regretted.
They toasted him.
He didn't sit.
The food looked real. The scent, divine. But his Instinct shrieked:
This is the hunger feeding on itself.
He reached down, touched the table.
It screamed.
False Reality Identified. Consuming backloop.
The room shivered. Flesh turned to dust. People to wax. Wine to ash.
A single figure remained.
Thin. Smiling.
A guide.
"Welcome," it said. "I'll lead you now."
He remembered the Seamwalker's warning.
Don't trust the guide.
"You'll try," Veyne said. "But I don't follow lies."
The figure tilted its head.
Then collapsed into worms.
At the center of the table, a door formed. No frame. Just door.
Marked with a single word:
Feed.
He touched it.
The Tower fed on him.
Not pain. Not injury. But something was taken.
When it was over, he remembered something he never knew.
A name.
Eris.
He whispered it.
The door opened.
And the next trial began.