The Void-Whisker's Banquet
By @john1208
The funeral for culinary patriarch Kheng was supposed to be a somber, quiet affair at The Obsidian Cleaver, Ouros City’s most prestigious restaurant. Instead, it becomes a slaughterhouse. Kheng didn't die of natural causes; he choked on a mass of black fur after boiling the sacred Void-Whisker cat alive to supply the city's lucrative underground medicine trade. Now, the beast’s vengeful spirit has sealed the five-story restaurant. As the curse accelerates, the guilty family members and elite diners who profited from the panacea begin mutating into feral, razor-clawed abominations that mimic the cat’s dying yowls. Shy but stubbornly determined, Kheng's daughter Ouli must take up a meat cleaver to survive the night. Alternating between Ouli’s desperate fight and the perspective of Dassan, a lowly prep cook harboring a bittersweet, unspoken love for her, they are forced to team up with Ouli's bitterest culinary rival. Together, they must carve their way to the rooftop shrine to claim the mythical 'Nine-Fold Fortune' and end the lockdown. But what if the folklore's ultimate reward for breaking the curse is a trap designed to breed the next sacred beast?
2
The Chanda Requiem: Nursing the Damned
By @john1208
For centuries, the six-armed Chanda-Beast slept in the center of Piyol, absorbing the traumas and dark urges of the villagers to protect them from the psychic, carnivorous forests of Othkar. But when Patriarch Jurok slaughters the gentle creature to sell its crystallized brain to a mainland poet, the beast's vengeful spirit returns with a horrifying twist. The curse doesn't just punish Jurok's bloodline - it transforms their bodies into living, fleshy containment vessels for all the unconsumed nightmares of the village. As Jurok and his family physically mutate into agonizing amalgams of the town's darkest sins, they beg for the sweet release of death. But Kavrin, the outcast gravedigger, discovers a terrifying truth: if the guilty die, their bodies will rupture, and a shockwave of concentrated madness will annihilate the entire valley. Forced to become the tortuous caretaker of the monsters who once tormented him, Kavrin must force-feed and heal the begging patriarch while preparing to hunt down the poet to reconstruct the beast. Can Kavrin reclaim the stolen brain before the mutating elites finally figure out how to commit suicide?
1
Chords of the Glass-Throated Crane
By @john1208
In the obsidian terraces of Khol-Zhan, the Glass-Throated Lyre-Crane was revered not as a god, but as a vital acoustic instrument. Its haunting, subsonic songs pacified the colossal tectonic worms slumbering beneath the magma vents. But when Baron Morvath butchers the sacred bird to craft a crystalline chandelier from its vocal cords, the earth begins to violently splinter. The curse of the Crane does not kill the guilty immediately. Instead, Morvath and his cronies are afflicted with the Tremor-Plague. Jagged glass vocal cords erupt through their human throats, compelling them to emit agonizing, melodic screams that mimic the dead bird. Thura, a deaf ash-digger who navigates the world purely through vibrations, feels the tectonic worms rising to consume the innocent villagers. She discovers a horrifying truth: the scattered screams of the cursed nobles are acoustically out of tune. To pacify the deep earth, Thura cannot wait for them to die. She must drag them to the volcanic vents, break their ribs, and stretch their mutating necks to achieve the perfect harmonic resonance. Will she lose her own humanity as she physically tunes her oppressors into screaming, living instruments?
1