# PSYCHIC HARVEST

### Chapter 1: The Feeding World part 2

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Doctor's clearance took twenty minutes and consisted mostly of a tired, kind-eyed woman named Priya shining a light in his eyes, checking his pulse, and asking him questions that all circled the same theme — *did it get inside your head, did you feel it pulling at something, does anything feel missing.* He said no each time, mostly because he didn't know how he'd tell if something *were* missing. How would you notice the shape of a hole in your own mind?

Food came next — something stewed and unfamiliar but genuinely good, and Ethan realized halfway through the bowl that his hands had finally stopped shaking. It was strange, the things that steadied a person. Warm food. A roof. The simple fact of other humans moving around him, going about ordinary business, as if the world hadn't ended at all — as if it had just relocated.

He found Sato in a workshop attached to the back of the intake building, hunched over a workbench cluttered with components that looked like they'd been salvaged from three different decades of technology at once, wearing safety goggles pushed up onto a mess of gray-streaked hair.

He was small, wiry, somewhere past sixty, and he didn't look up when Ethan stepped inside.

"New drop," he said, in accented but fluent English, with the coating of Japanese heritage. He was still soldering something delicate under a lamp. "Reyes bring you?"

"Yeah."

"Good. She has better instincts than half the security team." He set down the soldering iron, finally turning, showing an aged face creased with the many years of late nights and built up stress. He studied Ethan with an intensity that reminded him uncomfortably of the creature's ring of eyes. Then it passed, replaced by something almost warm. "You are wondering how we do it. The wolf. Reyes's wolf."

"Rook," Ethan said. "Yeah. I saw it absorb the thing that was eating me."

"Elegant, isn't it." Sato reached into a drawer and pulled out a small object, setting it on the bench between them. It was a boomerang, no longer than Ethan's hand, matte black, etched with a circuit-like pattern that pulsed faintly when Sato's fingers brushed it. "Ten years ago, I was a government researcher. Osaka. I studied psychic phenomena that everyone assured me did not exist, for a ministry that assured me I did not exist either, not officially." A dry, humorless smile. "Then one night the ceiling of my lab became a jungle, and I discovered that psychic phenomena were, in fact, extremely real, and extremely interested in eating me."

"But you're still here," Ethan said.

"I am stubborn, and I discovered something concerning the creatures." Sato tapped the boomerang. "They feed on psychic energy — specifically, on *intelligence,* on the structured, complex energy a thinking mind generates. Cognivores, That is the scientific name I gave them.. but it didn't stick as well as Vareth, which is what everyone calls them now... Their hunger for mental energy is what drives them. Their own evolution outpaced their ability to feed on each other — too many defenses, too much resistance built up over generations of eating their own kind. So they reached across the walls between worlds for something new. Something smart. Something psychically *empty,* so it couldn't fight back the way their own kind could."

"Humans," Ethan said quietly.

"Humans." Sato picked the boomerang back up, turning it in the lamplight. "But energy is energy, once you understand the mechanism. I could not out-fight them. I am an old man with a soldering iron, not a warrior. So I built something instead."

He held the device out, and Ethan took it without quite deciding to.

"This locks onto the psychic signature of any nearby creature," Sato said. "Throw it near one, and it will find its target — the resonance pulls it in, better than any human eye could aim. On contact, the nanotechnology inside does the rest. It burrows in, permanently, and forges what I call a *link* — a channel between the creature's feeding mechanism and its new owner. Once linked, the creature can no longer feed freely. It can only draw psychic energy through you, at a rate *you* control."

Ethan turned the object over in his hands. It was lighter than it looked. "So you're saying I could — control one of those things? Own one?"

"Owning is not quite the word I would choose," Sato said, something careful entering his voice. "The link makes them dependent on you. You become their only source of food. In exchange, you gain their strength, their senses, sometimes their abilities — fire, ice, lightning, whatever nature the creature carries. But dependency is not obedience born of trust. It is obedience born of *hunger.* Never forget which one you are dealing with."

"They're weaker, though," Ethan said, remembering Rook's calm, businesslike execution in the jungle. "Once they're linked. You said —"

"Considerably weaker than their wild counterparts, yes. A linked creature that fed freely in the wild might have killed you in that jungle without effort. Bound to a human, rationed, restrained — it becomes something a person can survive *beside,* rather than something that ends them outright." Sato's eyes sharpened. "This is the trade every survivor here has made. Power, in exchange for a leash."

Ethan looked down at the small black device in his palm and thought of the ring of eyes in the jungle. The pressure behind his own eyes, the awful clarity of realizing his fear was seasoning for his cognitive functions.. that were merely*food.*

"How many can a person link with?" he asked.

"That depends on the person, and on the creatures themselves." Sato held up a hand, ticking off points on his fingers. "First — elemental affinity narrows your options. Link with a water-type, and you close the door to fire forever; the two natures cannot coexist in one bound psyche. But water leaves other doors open — mud, poison, cold. The elements are not opposites so much as they are family trees, and once you graft yourself onto one branch, the others become unreachable." He held up a second finger. "Second — the more creatures you link, the weaker each one becomes, because they are all drawing from the same well: you. Most survivors here link exactly one, and pour everything into making that one bond strong. A few manage two, perhaps three, if their own reserves are unusual."

"And the most anyone's managed?"

Something flickered behind Sato's eyes — respect, or maybe worry. "Five. One person, in this entire settlement, carries five links, and even she does not use all of them at once except in true emergencies. We do not know yet if six is possible. No one has been foolish enough, or strong enough, to try. The Cognivores also evolve to adapt to their environment more rapidly than anything we've seen on earth.. this can put a great strain on the linked persons mind, especially if their abilities become more potent."

Ethan set the boomerang down on the bench, staring at it. Twelve hours ago he'd been thinking about eggs. Now he was standing in a workshop at the edge of a jungle full of things that ate minds, holding a device that could bind one of those things to his will.

"Can I learn?" he heard himself ask. "To use one of these?"

Sato studied him for a long moment — the same searching look Reyes had given him in the clearing, the look of someone gauging whether a fresh drop had what it took, or whether he'd end up one of the bodies curled small in a clearing somewhere, arms wrapped around his knees.

"Not yet," Sato said finally, not unkindly. "You survive your first month here. You learn the terrain, the patrol routes, the creatures that hunt in packs versus the ones that hunt alone. You learn to *see* them coming, the way Reyes did today, instead of feeling them arrive as pain." He picked the boomerang back up, tucking it into a drawer with something almost like reverence. "Then, if you still want power badly enough to carry the weight that comes with it — I will teach you to throw."

Outside the workshop window, the sun was beginning to set behind the jungle canopy, painting the walls of the settlement in long orange light. Somewhere beyond those walls, Ethan knew, the things that had almost unmade him tonight were still out there, patient, hungry, endlessly adapting.

He thought about the bodies in the clearing. He thought about the pressure behind his eyes, and the awful, intimate way that creature had *wanted* his fear.

And beneath the fear that hadn't fully left him yet, something else was starting to take root — small, and cold, and clear.

*Never again,* he thought. *Never again do I get to be the one who's hunted.*

Somewhere in the trees beyond the wall, something screamed, thin and distant, and was suddenly, permanently silent.

Ethan didn't flinch.

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*End of Chapter 1*