Chapter 28: Hunger Zero

Chapter 28: Chapter 28: Hunger Zero

Hours dragged on in absolute solitude and an eerie, suffocating silence. No one arrived.

​The bone-chilling cold slowly crept deep into his lungs. With every exhale, Krono’s breath materialized in the pitch-black air as clouds of freezing mist.

​[ Warning! Satiation level has dropped to 19%! ]

[ Warning! Satiation level has dropped to 15%! ]

[ Warning! Satiation level has dropped to 13%! ]

​Krono’s stomach violently growled, echoing with such an ominous, guttural sound that it felt as if an actual devil were stirring within his gut.

​But instead of losing his calm or succumbing to panic, his mind went to work. He began to think.

​If the temperature and his hunger kept dropping like this, he was guaranteed to die. He desperately needed to find a way out, or at the very least, something he could consume to survive.

​From the look of this desolate abyss, no one could see or hear him anyway. Pleading or crying for help would be entirely pointless. He had to save himself.

"Hello! Is anyone here?" he shouted for the first time into the darkness.

​Silence.

​"Hello? Does anyone know the way out of here? I don’t want to die!" he screamed again, his voice cracking.

​Once more, he was met with that same suffocating silence.

​But he refused to give up. His mind thought logically. Such a massive open-air prison like this could not possibly have been built to hold just one person. There had to be other prisoners somewhere in the Nephilis.

​However, after hours of screaming, his efforts were proving entirely pointless. It felt as if the other inmates were isolated in another dimension, preventing his voice from ever reaching them.

​Exhausted, he collapsed back to the ground, leaning his tired body against the exact same hard structure he had rested on earlier.

​[ Warning! Satiation (Hunger): 3% ]

​His satiation level had plummeted to the absolute lowest it had ever been since he first awakened the Ultimate Devourer System.

He did not know what would actually happen if that number hit zero.

​And he absolutely never wanted to find out.

​For the first time in his new life, a genuine primal fear gripped his heart. His instincts screamed at him that hitting zero would trigger a fate far worse than standard starvation.

​Driven by that terror, he dropped to his knees and began frantically devouring the freezing dark soil beneath his feet. Using his [Absolute Absorption], it actually proved effective at first, bumping his hunger meter back up by 2% or 3%.

​But soon, the system recognized the dirt as an empty, nutrient-less substance, and even that desperate tactic became completely ineffective.

"Am I really going to die like this?"

Krono’s voice was barely more than a whisper.

He lay motionless in the freezing darkness, his body gradually losing all sensation. The cold had seeped deep into his bones, numbing his limbs and slowing his thoughts.

He couldn’t see anything.

He couldn’t feel anything.

There was only the suffocating darkness, the biting cold, and the growing certainty that his life was slipping away.

"Is this really how it’s going to end?"

His consciousness began to fade.

Then, suddenly, an image flashed through his mind.

A frail, sickly old man stood alone in a dim, filthy room.

His face was pale and lifeless. His body trembled weakly as he struggled to breathe.

A rope was tied around his neck.

Moments later, his body hung motionless from the ceiling fan.

A pen slipped from his trembling fingers and fell onto the cold floor with a faint clatter.

Krono’s eyes widened.

"No..."

The scene played again.

And again.

And again.

Each time, the old man’s lifeless body swung slightly beneath the fan.

Each time, that lonely pen rolled across the floor.

Each time, the same unbearable truth stabbed deeper into Krono’s mind.

That old man was him. His past self.

The useless, nameless existence who had been crushed beneath the weight of his miserable life until he finally chose death.

Krono gasped violently. "Huff, huff."

The pain flooding through his chest was far worse than the freezing cold surrounding him.

His fingers trembled.

His breathing became ragged.

For a moment, countless memories surfaced through his mind. Failure. Despair. Loneliness. Regret.

Then something inside him snapped.

[ Hunger: 1% ]

Upon seeing the reminder, Krono clenched his fists so tightly that it actually hurt his palms.

"No."

The single word echoed through the darkness.

"I don’t want to die again."

His trembling gradually stopped.

The fear in his eyes slowly transformed into determination.

"Not like this."

He gritted his teeth and forced himself to remain conscious.

"I’ve already lived once as a nobody. I already know what it feels like to be powerless, forgotten, and trampled beneath the feet of others."

"I refuse to live like that again."

Krono slowly raised his head.

"I don’t care what kind of world this is."

"I don’t care how powerful the beings above me are."

"I don’t care how many obstacles stand in my path."

"In this new life, I will no longer be that nameless nobody."

His voice grew stronger with every word.

"I will carve my own destiny."

"I will seize everything that belongs to me."

"And if Heaven stands in my way..."

A devilish grin slowly appeared on his face.

"Then I’ll shake Heaven."

"If Earth stands in my way..."

"Then I’ll shake the Earth."

"In this life, I will make the entire world remember my name."

[ Hunger: 0% ]

Krono’r’s eyes instantly turned pitch black.

They no longer resembled human eyes. They looked like two bottomless abysses, swallowing every trace of light that dared to enter them.

The darkness surrounding him seemed to merge with his pupils, making it almost impossible to distinguish where his eyes ended and the shadows began.

Those abyssal eyes slowly scanned his surroundings.

There was no panic in them.

Instead, there was a faint, dark amusement.

Then...

< Sigh >

A tired sigh escaped his lips.

It was the kind of sigh a weary person would release after awakening from a long slumber.

Krono slowly lowered his gaze and examined his small body.

His tiny hands.

His slender arms.

His childish fingers.

He moved them one by one, observing them with genuine curiosity, as though seeing them for the first time.

Then, all of a sudden, his expression changed.

Shock flashed across his face.

"Huh?"

His voice was different.

It was deeper than a seven-year-old child’s voice should have been, carrying an inexplicable weariness.

"How can you still exist?"

His expression darkened.

"You shouldn’t be here, you disgusting worm."

The voice came from a woman.

And unlike Krono, she sounded genuinely shocked.

Inside the Sea of Mind, an endless expanse of darkness stretched into infinity.

Within that silent abyss stood a woman.

Her gaze was fixed upon a strange figure standing in the distance.

A bespectacled man.

He wore a tattered office suit that looked as though it had survived countless years of suffering. His clothes were wrinkled and worn, while his face carried the unmistakable exhaustion of a weary soul.

He looked nothing like a seven-year-old child.

He looked like a man who had already lived a lifetime.

The woman stared at him in disbelief.

For the first time, there was something resembling fear in her eyes.

The man slowly adjusted his glasses, flashing a faint smile on his tired face.

Who was he?

And why did this woman react as if she had seen a ghost?