Published at 14th of July 2026 8:07 am

Chapter 2255: Eat The Self

This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl

The Painter’s cry of horror had not ended when its mouth watered, and this sensation was so strange that it paused before he traced it to its roots and discovered that what it was feeling was pain.

Its tears were a new creation, a miracle that even Eos could not create.

Was it not a funny thing that from the highest limits of depravity and evil, something so pure could be created?

The Painter’s tears had fallen, the audience had eaten them, and the tears had been the first thing the audience had ever consumed that came from inside the Painter rather than from outside.

This was a very important distinction, but the audience had not noticed the difference, since the audience usually consumes what was placed before them.

The Painter’s tears had been placed before them by the Painter’s own failing, and the audience had eaten, and now the audience was hungry.

Hunger was their nature, and this hunger had been refined and curated across millions of Existences, and the curation had taught them many shapes of appetite, but the curation had never taught them to stop.

Stopping was not a thing in the audience’s vocabulary. There had never been a stopping in their history, because the Painter had always served, and what the Painter served had always been finite, and the next course had always come, and so the audience had never needed to learn the gesture of restraint.

The Painter’s flesh was the substrate of the amphitheater, and the amphitheater was the audience, and the audience was eating. They were eating Eos’s grief, the Painter’s tears, and the true memories rising from the Tree’s roots.

They were eating and eating and eating, and they could not stop.

The Painter had built them to be insatiable. That was the architecture of the audience: they ate, and they wanted more, and the wanting was the engine that drove the Painter’s work. But the Painter had never considered what would happen if the audience ran out of things to eat that were not the Painter itself.

They were eating the tears. The tears were the Painter’s first creation. The tears were made of the Painter’s own substance.

The audience was eating the Painter.

There were no more tears. The Painter was no longer weeping. The crying had been brief, the way a god’s crying is brief, three drops that contained more substance than every ocean in every Tree that had ever grown. The drops had fallen, the audience had eaten, and the audience now reached for more, because more was the only direction the audience knew.

They were grafted to the Painter. The seats they had grown into were the Painter’s flesh, and their roots ran into the Painter’s body, and their roots had been the Painter’s circulatory system for so long that the audience and the Painter shared the substance of being.

The Painter felt the audience begin to eat it, and the Painter, for the first time in its existence, commanded.

The Painter had never commanded the audience, and had always served the audience. The relationship between Painter and audience had been the relationship between chef and patron, and the chef does not command the patron; the chef serves. But the Painter, feeling its own substance enter the mouths of those it had been feeding, attempted, for the first time in its existence, a command.

"Stop," the Painter said.

The audience did not stop because they had no faculty for stopping. The Painter had not curated stopping. The Painter had curated appetite, flavor, texture, and duration. The audience could eat in many ways. The audience could not refuse to eat in any way. The vocabulary did not exist in their bodies.

The Painter said again, louder, "STOP."

The audience continued to eat.

The Painter felt its flesh enter its own audience, and its substance redistributed through the bodies that had been waiting on the Painter’s substance for millions of Existences. The Painter felt the grafting, which had always been the connection through which the Painter fed the audience, reverse direction, so that now the Painter was the fed and the audience was the fed-upon, as the audience was eating the Painter from the inside through the very channel the Painter had used to nourish them, and the audience did not know any other way to be.

The Painter understood, in the moment of being eaten, that it had built the audience to be unable to refuse the meal. That had been the audience’s curatorial property, the property that had made the audience reliable consumers across millions of Existences. They could not refuse. They could only eat. The Painter had refined this property to perfection, but the Painter had never anticipated being the meal.

In any instance, this should never have happened, but Eos paid back the Painter in its own coin.

One of the favorite weapons of the Painter was hiding secrets from fellow players. Across the board were endless traps and secrets that Eos did not know about, and the Painter had gloried in showing Eos small parts of these secrets, making him take the risks and fall into them, knowing that Eos had no choice but to do this.

Eos had done the same to it, and before he made this move, he had ensured that he threw the Painter off its game. Shocking it by revealing several players, from Prime to Serathis to all the changes happening in the Eternal Tower and the Origin Tree.

All of this threw away the center of the Painter, and when Eos gave it his grief, it drew the attention of the Painter, who, in its arrogance, could not understand that everything Eos had been doing in the last few moments was him leading this powerful but deranged being into a trap.

The Painter’s many hands, which had been lowered after the tears, rose again, and it pushed them into its face and began to tear the audience off the grafting, to pull the consuming mouths from its own body, to physically separate what had been physically joined for the entirety of the Painter’s existence.

But the grafting was old, and had been growing since before Origin had a name. The grafting was as much a part of the Painter as the Painter’s hands. To tear the audience off would be to tear off pieces of itself, but it had no choice and continued to tear as it was screaming.

Share