The city never slept, but Arthur Hayes wished it would if only so he could sleep too.
At 2 AM, the neon signs of downtown still blazed with artificial cheer, casting red and blue shadows across the cramped studio apartment where Arthur sat hunched over his laptop. His fingers hovered over the keyboard, trembling slightly. Not from cold. Not from exhaustion, though he'd been awake for thirty-six hours straight.
From hunger.
Not the kind that a meal could fix. He'd eaten dinner three hours ago—microwaved pasta that tasted like cardboard and regret. His stomach was full, yet the gnawing emptiness persisted, a void that had been growing inside him for as long as he could remember.
Arthur was 28 years old today. Not a single notification on his phone. No "Happy Birthday" messages, no calls, nothing. He stared at the screen displaying his bank account: $847.52. Rent was due in three days. He'd need at least $1,200.
"Fuck," he muttered, closing the laptop.
He stood and walked to the window, looking down at the street below. Even at this hour, people moved with purpose going somewhere, meeting someone, being someone. Arthur pressed his forehead against the cold glass.
"What am I even doing?"
Arthur Hayes had always been hungry.
As a child, he'd been hungry for attention. His parents, both high-achieving lawyers, had provided everything material good schools, nice clothes, a house in the suburbs—but they were always absent. Working late. On business trips. At important dinners.
"Arthur, we're doing this for your future," his mother would say, her smile tight and professional even at home.
His older sister, Miranda, was perfect. Valedictorian, scholarship to Harvard, now a successful surgeon. His younger brother, Derek, was the golden child charismatic, athletic, effortlessly popular. And then there was Arthur, the middle child who existed in the space between their achievements like a typo nobody bothered to correct.
He'd been hungry for recognition, so he'd excelled academically. Perfect grades, honor roll every semester. His parents' response? "We expected nothing less."
He'd been hungry for friendship, so he'd tried joining clubs, sports teams, study groups. But he never fit. Too intense. Too desperate. People could smell the need on him like cheap cologne.
He'd been hungry for love. At sixteen, he'd fallen hard for a girl named Sarah Chen. For three months, they'd dated or at least, Arthur thought they had. Turned out she'd been using him for homework help while actually dating the quarterback. When he'd found out, she'd laughed.
"Come on, Arthur. Did you really think someone like me would be interested in someone like you?"
By college, Arthur had learned to hide his hunger behind a mask of indifference. He stopped trying so hard. Stopped reaching out. He buried himself in books, in video games, in anything that could fill the void temporarily.
He discovered web novels during his sophomore year—stories of people transported to other worlds, given incredible powers, becoming heroes. He devoured them obsessively. Cultivation novels where protagonists consumed treasures to grow stronger. LitRPG stories where characters leveled up and conquered dungeons. Isekai tales where ordinary people became extraordinary.
For a while, these stories satiated him. He could imagine himself as the protagonist, finally enough for once.
But eventually, even that stopped working. The hunger grew.
After graduation, he'd stumbled into a job as a data analyst at a mid-sized insurance company. The work was mind-numbing processing claims, generating reports, attending meetings that could've been emails. But it paid the bills. Barely.
His coworkers were pleasant enough, but Arthur never let anyone get close. He'd learned that lesson. He ate lunch alone, left exactly at 5 PM, never attended happy hours or company events.
"Hayes is weird," he'd once overheard someone say in the break room. "Like, competent at his job, but it's like there's nothing there, you know? Like he's just... empty."
They weren't wrong.
Three months ago, something had changed.
Arthur met Emily Park at a coffee shop he'd started frequenting. She was a barista with dyed purple hair, a bright smile, and an encyclopedic knowledge of anime. They'd struck up a conversation about Hunter x Hunter, and for the first time in years, Arthur felt... seen.
They started talking every morning. Then texting. Then meeting up outside of work. Emily was easy to be around. She didn't judge his interests, didn't make him feel like he had to be someone else.
"You know what I like about you, Arthur?" she'd said one evening over bubble tea. "You're genuine. Everyone else is always performing, trying to impress. But you're just... you."
For the first time in his life, Arthur thought he might finally have something real. Someone who understood him. The hunger had quieted, just a little.
Two weeks ago, Emily had asked to borrow money. Her grandmother was sick, she said. Hospital bills were piling up. She didn't have insurance. She'd cried, and Arthur's heart had broken.
"How much do you need?" he'd asked.
"Five thousand dollars."
It was everything he'd saved over the past year. Every dollar he'd scraped together from his mediocre salary. But Emily needed it. And maybe, just maybe, this was his chance to finally be enough for someone.
He'd transferred the money without hesitation.
The next day, Emily's number was disconnected. Her social media accounts were deleted. When Arthur went to the coffee shop, the manager told him Emily had quit a week ago—hadn't even given notice.
"Said something about moving to California," the manager had shrugged. "Seemed rushed."
Arthur had stood there for ten minutes, coffee growing cold in his hand, trying to process what had happened.
He'd been scammed. Used. Again.
The past two weeks had been a blur. Arthur had stopped eating properly not that it mattered, the hunger was beyond food now. He'd stopped sleeping well. At work, he'd made mistakes, missed deadlines. His supervisor had called him in for a "concerned conversation" about his performance.
"Is everything alright at home, Arthur? You seem... distracted."
"I'm fine," he'd lied.
But he wasn't fine. He was drowning in the realization that nothing would ever be enough. No achievement, no relationship, no amount of money or success would ever fill the void inside him.
Today, on his birthday, sitting alone in his apartment with $847.52 to his name and nowhere to go, Arthur finally understood the truth:
He was empty. Had always been empty. Would always be empty.
No matter how much he consumed knowledge, stories, experiences, even love it all disappeared into the void inside him without a trace.
At 3 AM, Arthur found himself on the roof of his apartment building.
He wasn't sure how he'd gotten there. One moment he'd been sitting by the window, the next he was climbing the rusty ladder to the roof access, and now he stood at the edge, looking down at the street twelve stories below.
The wind was cold against his face. The city lights blurred together, forming a tapestry of lives that weren't his.
"Man, what's the point?" Arthur said to no one. "I'm just... empty. Always have been. Always taking, never giving. Always hungry, never satisfied."
He thought about his parents, who probably wouldn't even notice he was gone until they needed to update their holiday card photo. He thought about Miranda and Derek, who'd moved on with their successful lives and barely remembered he existed. He thought about Emily, wherever she was, probably laughing about the pathetic guy she'd scammed.
He thought about all those web novel protagonists he'd envied—people who got second chances, who were transported to worlds where they mattered, where their hunger for more was rewarded instead of punished.
"Guess that only happens in stories," Arthur laughed bitterly.
He looked down at his hands. Thin. Pale. Unremarkable. Hands that had never created anything of value, never held anything without eventually losing it.
A memory surfaced: he was eight years old, at a school friend's birthday party. The only party he'd ever been invited to. There had been cake chocolate with vanilla frosting. Arthur had eaten his slice, then asked for another. And another. He'd eaten until he was sick, until the other kids stared at him, until the birthday boy's mother had quietly asked Arthur's parents to take him home.
"You need to learn some self control, Arthur," his father had said during the car ride home. "That behaviour was embarrassing."
But Arthur hadn't been able to help it. The cake had been sweet and rich and for just a moment, it had filled the emptiness. He'd wanted that feeling to last forever.
It hadn't, of course. It never did.
Arthur closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
"I'm so tired of being hungry," he whispered.
The void inside him seemed to pulse in response, as if acknowledging the truth of his words.
He opened his eyes and looked at the city one last time. Somewhere down there, people were living lives that mattered. Lives that had meaning, purpose, substance.
His didn't.
Arthur took a step forward, his foot extending over the edge.
"What a fucking waste," he said.
Then he let gravity do the rest.
The fall felt longer than it should have. Wind rushed past him, stealing his breath. The ground approached with mathematical certainty—twelve stories, roughly 120 feet, terminal velocity in about three seconds.
Arthur didn't close his eyes. He watched the pavement rush up to meet him, watched the end approach with something like relief.
At least the hunger would finally stop.
CRACK.
The impact was instantaneous. No dramatic slow-motion, no life flashing before his eyes. Just sudden, absolute nothingness.
Arthur Hayes died at 3:17 AM on his 28th birthday, his body broken on the pavement behind his apartment building. Blood pooled around him like a dark halo. A couple walking their dog would find him twenty minutes later and call 911, but by then it wouldn't matter.
Arthur was gone.
Or so he thought.
In the space between existence and non-existence, where death ends and eternity begins, Arthur's consciousness flickered.
He was... aware. But of what? There was no body, no sensation, no light or dark. Just an infinite expanse of nothing.
"So this is it," he thought. "The void. Fitting, I guess."
But then something changed. A presence materialized in the emptiness—or perhaps it had always been there and Arthur was only now capable of perceiving it.
It was massive. Incomprehensibly vast. And it was hungry.
Not the desperate, human hunger Arthur had known all his life. This was primordial. Cosmic. An appetite that could swallow stars and still crave more.
And from that presence, a voice emerged ancient, resonant, filled with an insatiable greed that made Arthur's lifelong emptiness seem like a faint echo:
"FINALLY. ANOTHER WHO KNOWS TRUE HUNGER."
Arthur's consciousness recoiled. "Who what are you?"
The presence shifted, and suddenly Arthur could see or perceive a form. It was vaguely humanoid but wrong in ways that hurt to comprehend. Its body seemed composed of constantly consuming mouths, each one devouring and being devoured in an endless cycle. Wings that looked like they'd been stolen from a thousand different creatures. Eyes that reflected not images but absences the memory of things that had been consumed.
"I AM BEELZEBUB," the being declared, and the name itself seemed to devour the silence around it. "LORD OF GLUTTONY. DEVOURER OF EXISTENCE. AND YOU, ARTHUR HAYES, HAVE CAUGHT MY ATTENTION."
Arthur's consciousness trembled. This couldn't be real. He was dead. This had to be some dying hallucination, neurons firing randomly as his brain shut down.
"I'm dead," Arthur said. "This isn't real."
"OH, YOU'RE QUITE DEAD," Beelzebub confirmed, and something that might have been amusement rippled through its presence. "BUT DEATH IS NOT THE END. MERELY... A TRANSITION. AND YOU, LITTLE VOID, ARE FAR TOO INTERESTING TO LET SIMPLY DISAPPEAR."
The being moved closer or perhaps space itself contracted around them. Arthur felt the weight of its attention like a physical thing, pressing down on his consciousness.
"I HAVE WATCHED YOUR WORLD FOR EONS, ARTHUR. WATCHING SOULS PASS THROUGH, OBSERVING THEIR HUNGER AND DESIRE. MOST HUMANS WANT THINGS POWER, LOVE, SUCCESS. BUT THEIR HUNGER IS SHALLOW. SATISFIED BY SCRAPS."
Beelzebub's countless mouths seemed to grin simultaneously.
"BUT YOU... YOU CARRY TRUE EMPTINESS. A VOID THAT CAN NEVER BE FILLED. A HUNGER THAT CAN NEVER BE SATISFIED. YOU ARE, IN YOUR OWN PATHETIC WAY, LIKE ME."
Arthur didn't know whether to be insulted or terrified. "If you're trying to make me feel better about killing myself, you're doing a shit job."
A sound like laughter—if laughter could consume sound itself echoed through the void.
"I CARE NOTHING FOR YOUR FEELINGS, LITTLE VOID. BUT I HAVE A PROPOSITION FOR YOU."
"Of course you do," Arthur said bitterly. "Let me guess you want me to go to another world, kill some demon lord, save the day? I've read this story a thousand times."
"NO."
That single word carried such weight that Arthur's consciousness nearly shattered from it.
"I WANT YOU TO DEVOUR A GOD."
Silence. Complete, total silence.
"...Excuse me?" Arthur finally managed.
And then Beelzebub began to explain.