A groan left his mouth.
The sound came out wrong — low, scraped, dragged through a throat that barely knew how to produce noise. It didn't sound like him. It didn't sound like anyone.
He was face down on the forest path.
Pain was everywhere. His side. His shoulder. His back where the impact had torn across skin and muscle. Something warm ran along his ribs. The taste of earth and iron filled his mouth.
He pushed himself up.
His arms shook. His palms pressed into dirt and root. The first push only lifted him a few inches before his strength gave out and he dropped again.
He tried once more.
This time he got his chest off the ground.
Then he heard it.
A low growl, already close. Paws striking earth. Something heavy moving fast.
He turned his head.
The beast was charging again.
It was already halfway to him, head low, muscles bunched, mouth open. The same beast. The same path. Coming for the same target.
Di Yusheng's body tensed.
Then something changed.
The pain began to fade.
Not slowly. Not gradually. It pulled back fast, like heat leaving metal after the forge. The torn flesh along his side tightened. The deep ache in his shoulder thinned. Warmth ran through him in a strange, steady pulse, moving from the wounds outward, and the wounds closed behind it.
But it did more than close.
He could feel it. The skin where the claws had torn was pulling tighter, thickening. The bruised muscle underneath was shifting, compressing, turning denser. Something in his body was rebuilding the damage into something harder than what had been there before.
He knew what this was.
The same attack would not hurt him like that again.
The knowledge sat in him clear and certain, as if his own flesh had told him so.
He did not know how he knew.
It did not feel like the foreign memories. It did not feel like anything from the shed. It came from somewhere deeper, somewhere he could not locate — somewhere that belonged to his body and not to his mind.
There was no time to think about it.
Because the hunger came.
It hit the moment the healing finished. One breath he was whole. The next, his stomach folded in on itself with a violence that made his vision blur.
Not ordinary hunger.
Not the dull ache of a missed meal.
This was something total. It rose from his core and swallowed everything else — pain, confusion, fear, all of it burned away by a need so sharp it felt like its own kind of wound. His hands trembled. His knees went soft. The emptiness in his stomach was so complete it felt like something had been taken from inside him.
The beast was ten paces away.
Di Yusheng looked at it.
He was not afraid.
That should have frightened him. A five-year-old child, alone in a forest at night, facing a charging beast, and fear was simply gone. Burned out by the hunger. There was no room for it. The only thing left was the terrible, hollow need and one blunt question that rose unbidden:
Would it be enough to fill him?
His hand found a rock.
It was rough-edged, heavy for his small grip, about the size of his fist. His fingers closed around it and held.
The beast lunged for his neck.
Di Yusheng ran at it.
Not away. Forward.
His legs drove hard against the ground. The beast's jaws swept toward him — and at the last possible moment, his legs pushed sideways. His body cut left. The beast's teeth snapped shut on empty air where his throat had been a half-breath before.
The miss created the opening.
Di Yusheng planted one foot against the beast's shoulder and launched himself upward. His small hands seized the coarse mane at the back of its skull. His legs clamped against its neck. The rock was still in his right hand.
The beast twisted and thrashed beneath him.
Di Yusheng swung the rock into its left eye.
The impact was wet and final. The beast screamed — a sound that was almost human — and its whole body bucked. A massive head swing nearly tore him loose. His fingers slipped in the mane, tore, held.
He swung again.
The rock drove into the right eye.
The beast reared. It threw its head left, right, forward, every direction at once. Di Yusheng's grip broke. He was ripped from the beast's back and flung sideways. He hit the ground, rolled once, and came to a stop against a root.
The rock fell from his hand.
He lay there.
The beast was blind now.
It raged across the path, smashing into trees, rocks, anything in its path. Its claws tore great gouges in the earth. It slammed into a trunk hard enough to crack bark. It turned and charged the other way, striking nothing, howling. The forest shook with the sound.
Di Yusheng watched it through half-closed eyes.
He was still hungry.
The fight had done nothing to change that. If anything, the emptiness was worse now. His arms felt thin. His legs were unsteady. The hollow ache in his stomach had spread to his chest, his limbs, his fingers. His vision pulsed.
He tried to stand.
His legs held for a moment. Then one buckled and he caught himself against the root.
The beast stumbled somewhere in the dark, still raging, still blind. Its howls grew fainter as it staggered deeper among the trees.
Di Yusheng stood alone on the broken path.
The hunger did not fade.
It deepened.
His stomach clenched so hard it doubled him over. His vision went white at the edges. His knees gave. He caught himself on his hands and stayed there, breathing shallow, shaking, trying to hold onto something that was slipping away from him fast.
He felt like he was going to collapse.
Not from pain.
Not from wounds.
From the emptiness inside him that was eating him alive.