The Alabaster Feast

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14

The mist of Oakhaven does not hide the town; it preserves it. The nobility of the valley live in estates of white marble, their skin as pale as moonlight, their lives stretching across centuries. I was a 'Vessel', a biological sculpture crafted from the finest clay and stolen memories, designed to be the ultimate luxury: a living, breathing archive of a dead era.

I spent my youth in the gardens of the House of Valerius, playing the harp and reciting poetry in a language that no one had spoken for a thousand years. I was loved, in the way a collector loves a rare vase. I was cherished for my purity, for the way my eyes could reflect the sorrow of a century I had never lived.

But the beauty of Oakhaven is a mask for a starving hunger.

On the eve of my twentieth year, I discovered the Ossuary. Beneath the marble floors lay a forest of calcified remains—thousands of Vessels, their bodies drained of everything that made them sentient. I realized then that the nobility did not just 'live' for centuries; they fed. Every fifty years, they would harvest the consciousness of a Vessel, absorbing its memories, its emotions, and its vitality to refresh their own fading spirits.

My escape was a frantic flight through the weeping willows and the silver streams. I ran until my lungs burned, until the marble walls of the estate were nothing but a smudge on the horizon. I found a sanctuary in the deep woods, a place where the mist was thick and the shadows were kind.

But the hunger follows.

I began to notice the change in my own reflection. My skin was becoming translucent, and my thoughts were starting to fragment. The nobility hadn't just designed me to be a vessel; they had linked my life-force to theirs. By escaping, I had severed the connection, and now I was leaking.

I sat by a black pond, watching my fingers slowly turn into glass. I realized that the 'freedom' I had found was just a slower way of dying. I was a masterpiece that had been removed from its gallery, and without the gallery to sustain me, I was simply dissolving into the air. I closed my eyes and listened to the wind, waiting for the moment I would finally become as silent and still as the marble I had left behind.

*** OTMES_v2_Code: [M7:8, M4:9, N2:0.7, K1:0.8, theta:90°, I:1.0]


© 2026 - Authored by Z R ZHANG ( EL9507135 -- パスポート番号[ちゅうごく] 중국 여권 번호 Номер паспорта หมายเลขหนังสือเดินทาง Passnummer رقم جواز السفر CHN Passport) and his beloved father.

The aforementioned Author hereby grants to OXFORD INDUSTRIAL HOLDING GROUP (ASIA PACIFIC) CO., LIMITED (BRN74685111) all economic property rights, including but not limited to the rights of: reproduction, distribution, rental, exhibition, performance, communication to the public via information network, adaptation, compilation, commercial operation, authorization for third-party use, and rights enforcement.

Such grant is exclusive and irrevocable. The term of such rights shall be 49 years from the date of publication.

To contact author, please email to datatorent@yeah.net

Based on the pending patent application document (202610351844.3), creationstamp.com has calculated the tensor feature encoding of this article:

OTMES-v2-UNKNOWN

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