The next door opened into silence.

Leonard expected more blood, more horrors, more flesh to carve and cook—but instead, he stood in a vast, empty void.

No monsters. No labyrinth walls. Just darkness, stretching endlessly.

He stepped forward, boots sinking into ground that felt like flesh trying to remember how to be stone. The void inhaled, a slow, deliberate breath.

Then the book returned.

It tore itself from his chest, pages unfolding in mid-air like a wounded thing desperate to tell its secrets. The skin-bound cover pulsed, veins spidering across the surface, as if it had fed off every meal Leonard had created.

It was fatter now, swollen with records of every dish, every creature, every moment of survival. Each page was soaked in blood, inked not with words, but with wounds remembered.

Leonard reached for it, but the book fled his touch, floating just beyond his fingers like a playful ghost.

Then it spoke.

Not in words. In memories.

His vision fractured—flashes of his past bleeding into the void.

He saw himself as a child, scavenging from corpses on a war-torn street. His hands were too small to hold the rusted knife he used to cut flesh from men who hadn’t yet gone cold.

He saw the female warlord who took him in, only to use him as both a child soldier and a toy for her sadistic pleasures. The memory of her fingers wrapped in his hair, dragging him through mud, while forcing him to smile for her twisted amusement—it burned brighter than any fire.

He saw his first kill. Not a man. Not a monster. Her.

He saw what it cost him to survive.

And then the visions shifted—to every creature he had killed in the abyss. Every dish prepared, every meal consumed. The book had recorded it all—not just the recipes, but the price he paid for each one.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Leonard fell to one knee, breath ragged, as the memories poured into him like molten lead. The book wasn’t just a record—it was a ledger of his transformation.

The more he cooked, the more he became part of the abyss itself.

The entity appeared beside him, her presence cold and intoxicating at once. She didn’t walk. She flowed—a shadow given form, silk and knives wrapped into a woman who could rewrite his fate with a whisper.

She knelt beside him, fingers tracing the edges of the book. “You’ve made my game… so much more entertaining than the others.”

Leonard forced himself to stand, blood dripping from his nose. “What others?”

She smiled—a smile that could cut skin if stared at too long. “The ones who broke before they could become this.”

Her fingers touched the book, and it fused into Leonard’s chest once more. But this time, something changed.

He felt the weight of every page, not just as memories—but as currency.

The book had stopped recording only his meals. Now, it recorded his worth.

Every perfected dish, every brutal kill, every refined technique—they were shaping his price.

Leonard’s skin split open, not from pain—but from symbols burning into his flesh. Recipes written in forgotten tongues, cooking techniques fused with ancient runes, sigils that turned knife skills into invocation.

He had become the Alchemist of Hunger.

The entity leaned closer, her breath cold against his ear. “You are almost ready.”

Leonard’s pulse hammered. “Ready for what?”

She kissed his cheek, her lips leaving a brand that seared into his skin.

“For the final banquet.”

The void trembled as the walls reappeared, but now they weren’t flesh or stone. They were living pages, all written in his own blood.

The book had become the labyrinth itself.

He was no longer merely inside it. He was part of its design.

Before the first horror could crawl from the walls, before Leonard could brace for the next trial, the entity whispered one last question:

“Pleasure… or power?”

The void waited for his answer.