Now I needed to consider my next steps, so for that what did I know about my current situation?

I was in a dystopian hive city on a planet that might not even be Earth. I considered the dark hue of the sunlight cascading through the thick smog above the city and changed that to 'probably not Earth'.

I was some kind of shape-shifting alien now that could copy the bodies of things I 'ate'. This also meant that I could regenerate, well recreate anything that was destroyed based on the template I had with the energy I got from absorbing biomass.

The city was dead silent. Not a single hovercar or whatever people would use to get around in the future. Not a single living being ever since I got here.

I could go towards the centre of the city, the building got increasingly taller that way or I could aim to get out of the city. That wasn't too interesting though, the muddy, dark earth in the distance seemed dead as it could get.

The gigantic broken pipes I saw even from here probably weren't too good for the flora.

What did I want? No that didn't matter as much as what I needed. To survive.

My current energy storage would keep me going for a long time, who knew human corpses were so nutritious?

I grimaced at the thought, was I always like this or was this something that came with being an eldritch alien?

No. No matter how weird I was I don't think I would have even considered eating rotting human corpses for sustenance outside of fiction.

Weirdly enough I wasn't too disturbed by the revelation. If I broke down down there or got scared of even using my abilities I would never have even managed to get here. Breathe less shitty air and feel the light of a sun on my skin.

Speaking of the sunlight, it was constantly trying to give me skin cancer. Thankfully reabsorbing cancerous cells into biomass the moment they were made was quite easy, still it didn't make up for the lost energy I needed to heal the destroyed cells.

While my transmutation of biomatter to energy might be close to perfect the same couldn't be said about the cancerous cell division and its use of my nutrients. It was a negligible loss, maybe lessening my current 5 years of life by a day or two at most but it was annoying.

There was also the matter of extending that five years by finding more biomass to eat.

I wouldn't die if I ran out of energy, my instincts told me that, I would enter a sort of hibernation. A dreamless sleep until something deigned to wander too close to my sleeping form and get turned into breakfast.

I didn't want to get myself into such a vulnerable state so finding food was a must.

Considering the city is dead there must have been other rituals like the one down there all around the place. The rooms and hallways were dusty but it wasn't like it has been uncleaned for decades. Maybe a month or two at most.

Why didn't anyone come here to investigate?

Back on earth if a city went entirely dark like this people would know the next day at the latest. Governments even sooner, so why wasn't there any futuristic robocop here to investigate?

The only reason I could come up with was that whoever made the rituals killed every single person on the planet, or there is a blockade around the planet. FTL travel was unrealistic even by sci-fi standards so intergalactic communication might be the same.

If this planet was dead and no one sent distress signals it could be centuries before anyone stumbled across it and discovered it had been fucked up by cultists.

I would starve myself into hibernation by then so let's hope they managed to get a distress signal out.

I'm still just going off of conjectures and assumptions though. Assumptions that used sci-fi books as their foundation so not the most solid.

For now, I want to see what's in the other direction. From here I can only see this small slice of the city, maybe I could find something promising from higher up.

I glance up at the towering building, it extends hundreds of meters upwards towards the sky but I can see the top from here, while I can't see the bottom of it. The wind might be a problem though, I note as I feel it whip my shoulder-length hair around.

My disturbing fur protects me from most of the cold but this high up with no other building blocking it in this direction it might throw me off even with my now stronger muscles.

I can either find a way further up inside the building or try to climb up while in my tentacle-y form. I have no idea at the moment how long I could bear being in that form, the nausea and dissonance might overwhelm me before I reach the top.

I guess inside it is.