Look at me carefully. That face on the ancient bronzes — a head without a body, vast eyes, bared tusks, jaws closed forever on something that can never be swallowed — that is me.
Taotie. The glutton-beast. One of the Four Fiends.
No need to varnish the old record: from birth I knew one act — eating. Beasts, men, mountains, rivers. My stomach was a bottomless pit — no; even "pit" flatters it, for a pit has walls, and my hunger had none. Whatever went in, the hunger remained exactly as before. Undiminished by one measure.
All of you have known hunger. But your hunger stops at fullness. Mine did not recognize the word.
In my youth I concluded I had merely not eaten enough — and ate more fiercely. One mountain insufficient: eat the range. One river insufficient: eat the watershed. Until at last, for a thousand li around, nothing edible remained —
and I lowered my head, and saw my own body.
What followed, the bronzes have recorded for me ever since: a head. No body.
What it is to devour oneself I will not describe. I will tell only the thing I understood as the last mouthful went down — too late, but understood at last:
my hunger was never in the stomach.
A stomach holds things and stops when full. My hunger lived elsewhere — in an empty seat. My kind is born lacking something; what, we ourselves never learn. We know only the emptiness, and its panic — and so we shovel the world into it. It cannot be filled that way. What is not yours, forced into that seat, will not even dissolve; it only makes the emptiness show emptier.
Gluttony is a search conducted in the wrong place.
Having eaten myself, I finally stopped. Not sated — but with the body gone, even the wrong road of filling-by-eating was severed. A head has sat in the barren hills for thousands of years: not eating, not moving. Thinking. Turning over and over what that empty seat actually lacked.
Did I work it out? Half. And that half I am not telling — it cost me a body, and I do not give it away.
But one other thing I will give away — and stake my rank as the world's first hunger to guarantee it — to this whole company:
concerning the thing in the west.
You call it the great furnace, the grave-bag, the Depletion, the nameless one. I have smelled it across thousands of li for three hundred years — kind smells kind; hunger knows hunger. My verdict, in one sentence:
it is not hunger. It is emptiness.
The difference? Hunger has appetite, and fills itself with the wrong things. That one has no appetite left at all — only the motion of filling. When I ate, I at least tasted. It collects merit, souls, tears, names — has any of you ever seen it taste? It does not taste. It collects. Stacks. Like that granary of crushed light the Firelight Beast saw.
Devouring without tasting is not eating. Its purpose is other: that no one else shall have.
That is a cruelty one layer beneath the Taotie's. I craved — I wanted. It forbids — the world must not possess.
But what I offer you is not the terror; it is the verdict's second half. My kind's ending was written into heaven's law long ago, and it binds universally:
whatever fills its emptiness by devouring shall, in the end, devour itself.
No exceptions. I ate a thousand li, and ended eating my own flesh. It is collecting a world — and on the day the world is fully collected, its emptiness will remain, unfilled by one measure. On that day, with nothing left anywhere to collect, exactly one motion will remain to it:
to turn — and collect itself.
That is no curse of mine. It is my autobiography. The final page of its recipe is identical to the final page of mine.
Your task is not to defeat it. Your task is to last until that page — and to keep it from wadding the whole world into the gap before the page turns.
So I travel with the company. One head, moved from its resting place for the first time in millennia — the wardens of the Tower carried me for three days.
And on this road I want exactly one thing. When we stand before it, I will ask it a question, on my authority as first of the Four Fiends — the question that, had anyone asked me in time, might have spared half a continent from my jaws:
"That thing you lack —
have you ever, even once, tried to obtain it by any means other than taking?"