Beast Tamer of the Strange

There's something inside me that's been hungry for three years.

When it isn't eating the uncanny, it feeds on my blood.

Three years ago, on that night, one-sixth of the world's population disappeared.

Chen Ye survived. The price was that something moved into his shadow.

The black mist known as “Faceless” neither eats nor drinks nor speaks. But sometimes it moves: when he's asleep, when he's bleeding, when he runs into a ruined building he should never have entered. It surges out over the tops of his feet, devours the thing that crawled out of the mirror, then slips back and brushes against his trouser leg. Warm. Like the breath of someone who's just finished a hot meal.

The Night Watchers' evaluator said: Beast-taming ability, E-rank, useless.

But the evaluator didn't know that Faceless wasn't something he'd tamed. Someone had put it inside him before he was born. His mother walked into the depths of a rift because of it, and never came back.

Now the mass of mist has started speaking on its own. It wrote its first line on the mirror:

“Are you ready? Ready to stop being human?”

This isn't a story about a boy taming the uncanny. It's about a boy who discovers that uncanny blood runs through his veins, and learns to bargain with the abyss.

Now it has learned to write my name in the mirror.