A couple days passed as Cain settled into his new life.
But then the very next day...
The sun had barely risen when the word spread.
The merchant had arrived.
A battered, creaking wagon rolled into what remained of Glintmere's village square, its wooden wheels grinding against dirt and debris. The lone horse that pulled it looked half-dead from fatigue, while the two assistants behind the merchant looked scarcely better. But despite the grim picture, the villagers rushed out to greet them, their faces alight with hope.
They were desperate.
Nearly the entire village had been razed in the Gem Master battle. The survivors had nothing—no proper food reserves, no tools, no coin. Communication lines were severed. Even the town's messenger birds had been lost in the flames.
They couldn't even afford to send a runner to the next town, for he too was dead and there was no one fit enough to take the position or strong enough to endure the danger of beasts on the way.
As such, this merchant was the first contact they'd had with the outside world in weeks.
And for a people drowning, even a drifting plank looked like salvation.
Cain watched it all unfold from a distance, seated on the broken fence of the village well.
He didn't move, didn't speak. Just watched.
The merchant was plump, pompous, and clad in silks too fine for a man riding a rat-bitten wagon that utterly oozed insincerity.
His words were filled with honey, but his eyes swept over the villagers like a butcher choosing pigs.
He promised to carry word to the nearest town, to send help and food, to "bless the poor faithful of the gods."
But every smile he gave was measured, every nod a calculation.
Cain saw through it all.
He had known men like this in his past life for they were parasites who lived on the misfortune of others, vultures who fed on charred remains.
To most, they were just merchants.
To Cain?
They were lower than insects.
He felt no desire to speak with him. No curiosity, no interest. He didn't even want to waste a glance.
But the hunger… it returned.
At first, it was a whisper.
By afternoon, it had become a throb—deep in his chest, just under the ribs.
By sundown, it was a roar.
Not pain.
Not thirst.
But a pull.
Like a string wound tightly around his soul… tugging.
When night fell and the village slept in fitful silence, Cain rose.
He didn't want to. He fought it hard.
He tried to meditate, to breathe, to distract himself with analysis and logic.
It didn't matter.
His feet moved anyway.
Drawn not by will, but by need.
The merchant and his men had been housed in the ruined estate of the late landlord—an old, three-room structure on the village's edge, half its roof collapsed, one of its walls scorched black. It should have been uninhabitable.
But merchants were opportunists.
They'd chosen it not for safety, but rather for distance from the "stinking rabble," as Cain had overheard one of the guards mutter earlier that day.
Cain approached in silence, his breath shallow. The hunger in his chest had sharpened into something tangible now. Not just a craving, but a compass.
It pointed in there to something inside that house. Something that his body wished for, or more accurately the fragment wished for. Something his mortal being could not afford to reject nor deny.
As such, he reached the side window and crouched low, his eyes scanning the darkness within.
One of the guards was asleep near the collapsed doorway, his head lolling back, snoring softly.
Cain moved quietly, shifting through the jagged opening of a broken window.
He landed on soft soot and crept forward.
The pull was stronger now. Every heartbeat echoed with it.
Thump.
Pull.
Thump.
Pull.
His vision seemed sharper in the dark, his ears more attuned. He could hear the creak of the merchant's bed, the slow drip of water from a cracked drain channel that now leaked into the walls.
The rustle of fabric as one assistant turned over in their restless sleep.
And then—
There it was.
A faint glimmer.
Not bright. Not obvious.
But enough to make Cain's breath hitch.
A relic.
Half-buried in a chest of scrap metal and trinkets near the merchant's bedroll. It looked like nothing more than a broken pendant—silver, tarnished, cracked down the center.
But Cain could feel it well. He could feel it true.
The trace of divinity.
A whisper of a God Gem's residue.
The hunger inside him surged, clawing upward like a beast gnashing its teeth.
Cain took a step closer.
Another.
And then—
"—Who's there?!"
A voice barked sharply.
A flash of light erupted from a nearby lamp as one of the assistants sat up, panic in his eyes.
Cain froze.
The merchant stirred, groaning and rolling over.
Cain had mere seconds.
He lunged.
Not for the merchant. Not for the assistant.
But for the relic.
His hand closed around the pendant just as the assistant drew a short blade and rushed forward.
"Thief!"
Cain twisted, ducked, and leapt through the same broken window he'd entered from—glass scraping his arm, his legs hitting the ground hard as he rolled and bolted into the trees behind the estate.
Shouts echoed behind him.
Boots slammed the ground.
A warning bell clanged somewhere from the center of the village.
But Cain didn't care.
The moment his hand had closed around the pendant, the hunger had vanished.
And in its place—power.
It wasn't strong. It wasn't stable.
But it answered him.
The fragment of Annihilus stirred again, and the pendant pulsed in his hand.
Cain ducked into a thicket, heart pounding, adrenaline surging.
He did not care that he had stolen. He did not care that he had potentially put his fathers effort to waste. All he cared was that his 'hunger' was satisfied.
He looked down at the tarnished relic now glowing faintly in his grip.
And with a grin, he whispered:
"…Mine."