…
'Three days.'
The words came back to him.
It hadn't been a nap.
It had been a seventy-two-hour blackout.
A self-induced coma from exhaustion, perhaps.
'I'd better not overthink it,' Nihil told himself—but it was impossible.
Time had slipped through his fingers like sand.
With another sigh, he picked up his phone.
The screen lit up, showing two main notifications:
New contact added: Lyra
10 New Messages From: LAPLACE
He opened the chat with his old—and maybe only—contact from his previous world.
'Message from Laplace'
- Hey.
- You still alive?
- Saw a couple of corpses on my way to work today.
- People really shouldn't leave their trash all over the main avenue.
- Didn't anyone tell them it's rude to litter in public places?
- Meh.
- Did you manage to find a job?
- Or are you still as lazy as always?
- Knowing you, you probably crashed in an alley or a park.
- That, or you've already started prostituting yourself.
Nihil snorted—neither laughter nor frustration.
Laplace, as always, was a cynical anchor to reality.
'I knew I was forgetting something,' Nihil thought, dropping the phone onto the bed.
- Agggg… I need to find a job.
He told himself, lying back and fixing his gaze on the cracked ceiling.
The weight of the debt—abstract until now—began to take concrete shape: paying for the room, eating, not dying (more) before the bank came to collect its share.
- If I don't want to end up worse than I already am, I need to find a way to pay my debt…
The time glowed on the screen: 2:45 PM.
He had lost an entire morning—or three days—depending on how one looked at it.
His bony fingers moved across the touchscreen.
"Reply from Nihil"
- Honestly, that last option doesn't sound that bad.
- hough I seriously doubt anyone would like a body like mine, lol.
- Maybe a necromancer or a necrophiliac. Other than that, I think my market options are pretty limited.
- So yeah, I'm looking for a reasonably decent job.
He locked the screen and set the phone aside, staring at the ceiling as if the cracks in the plaster might contain the next step—the answer to the question now buzzing in his skull like an insistent mosquito.
-Sigh… what should I do?
The room—his new "tomb"—didn't answer.
Only the faint hum of the fridge and the distant sounds of HellTown beyond the window filled the silence.
He had an eternal contract, an unpayable debt, the phone number of a bank employee who fell apart, and the urgent, vulgar, absolute need to find a job.
Nihil spoke to himself, as if expecting an answer to all his questions to appear out of nowhere.
- … I seriously hate it when Laplace is right. I should look for a job. Maybe prostituting myself, like he said, isn't such a bad idea after all…
…
- Nah. I don't have the guts to let myself be used like a toy… or at least I think I don't.
…
'I've already lost more than three days. What's a couple more?'
The idea of getting up lacked the strength necessary to overcome the gravity pinning him to the mattress.Nihil simply let himself fall flat on his back onto the bed.
There was no point in rushing out with an urgency he didn't feel, to look for a job he didn't want, just to pay for a soul whose fate he couldn't care less about.So he chose the option that drained him the least, which was, obviously—at least to him—to go back to sleep.
…
…
…
Unconsciousness was not rest, but a dark, dense swamp.
Within its depths, a distant sensation began to seep in. At first, it was an imperceptible tingling; then, a moist and deliberate presence slithered inside his own skull.Something viscous and alive explored every crevice of his "face": the empty sockets, the curve of the jaw, the imaginary nasal cavities.
The strangeness was such that his sleeping mind could barely categorize it.
Until the tingling turned into a sharp, stabbing pain in his neck, right where an artery should be pulsing.
Consciousness snapped back like a whip.
- W-What?!
The first moments were pure sensory chaos.
The throbbing pain in his neck.The weight of a foreign body on top of his own.
When his vision finally focused, the pale silhouette with long black hair made everything click—it was the ghost girl from the hallway, sprawled across his torso like a lover.
He could feel the spectral cold of her body rubbing against him, and the pressure of lips—teeth?—sunk into his jugular.
Surprisingly, fear never arrived.
Instead, the first coherent thought surfaced, stained with monumental exhaustion:
- Hmmmm… if you wanted to have sex, you could've told me. There are protocols.
The creature slowly pulled her face away from his neck.For an instant, a thin strand of saliva connected her lips to his skin before breaking.
Instead of replying, she tilted her head and leaned back in—this time not toward his neck, but toward his skull.She began licking the surface of the bone with near-desperate eagerness, letting out a low, satisfied sound.
- So… should I take that as a yes?
Nihil was frozen, but more from the absurdity than from terror.
As if suddenly remembering her manners, the ghost fully pulled away and slid down to sit on the edge of the bed.She wiped the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand in a mundane gesture.
- Thanks for the meal.
Nihil's confusion was now deepest , but he still managed to speak.
- You know this counts as breaking and entering, right?
He asked more to fill the silence than to expect a serious answer.
- …
- Look, if I'm going to get assaulted in the end, the least you could do is add some warmth. A compliment? A kiss? You know?
- …
It was like talking to a wall.The entity merely watched him, her expressionless face wrapped in shadows, maintaining absolute silence.
- Sigh… Are you at least going to tell me your name?
- Morwen.
Her voice was neutral, but unlike Lyra's mechanical coldness.That neutrality concealed something else: a faint arrogance, a certainty of superiority bordering on condescension.
- Well, better than nothing. Nice to meet you, Morwen. I'm Nihil. I guess it's a pleasure.
- The pleasure is mine.
Her tone sounded almost dignified, like a queen accepting a peasant's greeting.It wasn't annoying. It was revealing.
She didn't just believe she had control—she assumed he already knew it.
- Would you mind, in your infinite generosity, telling me what the hell you were doing?
- Feeding.
- Feeding? On… on me?
- Correct.
- And am I at least tasty?
The question slipped out automatically, his humor making a last stand against the incomprehensible.
- You can bet what little remains of your soul that you are. All that accumulated despair, fresh anguish, anxiety over a future you know won't improve… it's a feast. I hadn't tasted something so… delicious in decades.
- … Thanks? I guess.
His day really couldn't get any better.
- I'm satisfied now, so I'll be leaving. Bye bye.
Before he could form a reply—an insult, a question, or an existential breakdown—the female figure slid off the bed and effortlessly merged with the brick wall, vanishing into the next room.
Nihil remained seated on the bed as the stillness of the room filled with a palpable absurdity.
The air still smelled of dust and something cold and metallic, like the breeze of a crypt.
He had absolutely no fucking idea what had just happened.
But one certainty forced its way through the confusion:if even necrophagous ghosts—or emotion-eaters, or whatever they were—found him irresistible as a buffet, then maybe it was some cosmic, absurd, pathetic sign that he needed to get the hell out of there and find a damn job.
With a sigh that seemed to come straight from his bones, he stood up and left the apartment.