Armed with her new Ghoul Spawn class, Catherine thrashed back and forth and wiggled her way out into a position where she could get leverage, before ripping her way through the corpses and gore above her and bursting up to the surface.

As her head breached the surface, she spat out dirt and gore and inhaled her first ragged breath from the air of this new world and called for help from one of the nearby gravediggers, who rescued her and brought her to safety. And there was her computer! They had rescued it from her house and her favorite game had new content! She put on her headphones and sat down, but then the world shook and her computer fell over.

The ground opened up beneath her and she fell into a dark abyss. As the last vestige of light vanished into the distance above her, she could feel the earth closing in around her. Then suddenly she tasted blood and something worse. But she couldn't stop chewing. It was so delicious and she couldn't stop chewing on the flesh. She had killed them. She had killed them all.

----------

Catherine woke with a start. She could taste dirt and gore in her mouth and tried to scream but couldn't. She slowly realized where she was. The past days hadn't been a nightmare, but what she just woke up from was.

Wait. She had woken up. From a dream. From sleep. She'd slept. For the first time in days of this unending hell, she'd slept.

Something has changed

She was free! She could sleep! She could move!

She lifted her arms and… she couldn't lift her arms. Nothing happened. She tried to move her legs and they likewise didn't budge. It made sense. She checked her stats. Her health was still 0. She still had the decay effect. Her limbs had likely rotted to the point of being unusable even if they were under her control.

If only she had gotten a new class before her body had decayed to this point. She tried to scream in frustration and… her mouth moved.

What.

Consume has reached level 1

!!!

It appeared that either her mouth hadn't rotted as much as the rest of her or, more likely, skills didn't rely entirely on the actual capabilities of one's body, or maybe they changed how ones body worked in some way or…

Who cares. Let's see what I can do.

Consume allows you to eat to restore your body, improve or alter it

Catherine opened her mouth and bit off a piece of the body of whatever poor soul was on top of her. She swallowed, and while it still tasted like blood and gore and rot and dirt… she liked it. And suddenly Catherine could feel how ravenous she was. She felt like she could eat a cow. With her new class maybe she actually could.

Hopefully I'm the only one who was still aware even in death. If not… I'm sorry. But a girl's gotta eat.

And she ate. She ate and ate and ate and chewed and swallowed and licked and bit and tore at whatever was in front of her.

Consume has reached level 8

The more she ate the better she felt and the faster she could eat, but somehow she only seemed to get hungrier until suddenly she received a notification.

Health has reached 1. You are no longer dead. Through resurrection, necromancy, scaling the mountain, or some other means, you have returned from death. Welcome back.

Decay removed

Malnourished added

(Ghoul Spawn can survive a very long time without food, but have reduced attributes and may hibernate)

Grave Rot added

(as a ghoul Spawn, when wounded and lacking food, your body is corpselike, and by immersing yourself in the many gory intricacies of rotting corpses, you begin to look and smell like one. You emit a disgusting stench, charisma is heavily reduced)

Catherine rejoiced silently at the message, and continued consuming until her health was full, whereupon she noticed a new feeling. Her body seemed to get slightly denser with each bite, as if she were getting heavier by forcing more matter into every inch of her.

Malnourished removed

As she kept moving her mouth, now aided by her hands, to pull food into her mouth and swallow it, without even thinking, she moved the dense feeling toward her stomach. All she could think about was eating more and more.

It tasted so good. It felt so wonderful. She just wanted to get more of this delicious goodness inside her, and more than that she wanted it now. And as she focused on that, the denseness moved toward her core and seemed to shift before dissipating slowly. But as that denseness left her, she felt something shift. It felt like her insides were rearranging themselves, and opening themselves up. It… it hurt but in a good way. Like stretching sore muscles.

And suddenly she was eating much much faster than before, she ripped through a corpse in seconds, and nearly swallowed one whole. And then there was light.

Catherine burst out if the dirt, screaming, but there was no one around to see or hear her. The mass grave had been filled, covered in a thin layer of dirt, and abandoned. And for that she was grateful as she looked down at herself.

She was gaunt, covered in dirt and gore and rot. Her hair was matted and had clumps missing. Her fingers curled and with their thinness and jagged nails, looked more like claws than anything. But none of that was what she noticed first.

She looked down at her torso - at what should have been her chest, rib cage and belly button. But instead there was a gaping hole with her ribs sticking out. Or what used to be her ribs, now sharp and moving about like the limbs of some horrifying alabaster arachnid. Her gaping abdominal cavity leered up at her, filled with ribs and gnashing teeth and blood and gristle and rot.

And Catherine fainted.