CHAPTER 10: RECOVERY AND REST
Looking down at the wound on his abdomen, it was only at this moment that the pain finally radiated to his brain. Subject 198 felt the agony shoot through him, his body instinctively curling inward. Well, this was the very first time he had received such a severe open wound.
He had already experienced various forms of trauma, from suffocation and having his lungs sliced open as if by blades, to losing a withered arm on his back. Truth be told, when his arm was torn away, it hadn't felt entirely painful; it was mostly a profound sense of loss from missing a piece of his body. Even though that limb had been paralyzed, he had always felt its presence. Losing it left a hollow emptiness behind his chest, and the actual pain felt merely like missing a patch of outer skin. It should have been an excruciating torment, but perhaps due to the surge of frenzy and madness during the battle, the pain hadn't registered heavily.
Enduring this pain that felt both familiar and strangely novel, Subject 198 struggled to use his right hand to push his exposed stomach back inside his abdominal cavity. For the first time in his life, he was holding and feeling his own internal organs. The stomach felt wet and slippery against his palm, making him feel as though it might slip from his grasp at any second. It felt like holding a thick-walled rubber pouch.
Driven by the cold curiosity of a biological entity, he squeezed the organ slightly. He instantly regretted it. A sharp, burning ache convulsed through his viscera, throbbing so intensely that he nearly dropped his own stomach to the ground. Holding onto it firmly, he noticed a tube-like structure connected to the stomach, extending outward like an arm—and it was an actual arm.
When he first saw it, his initial instinct was to yank it out with brute force, but an ominous intuition flared in his mind. He stopped. What if ripping it free tore a massive hole directly into his stomach? What would he do then besides lie there and wait for death?
It was the hand of the monster, seemingly trimmed much shorter compared to its other braided limbs. Although it had been hastily attached with needle-like glass shards, a few patches of scar tissue had already begun fusing, integrating this alien limb into his Outcast physiology. Of course, that connection was minimal; the rest of the surrounding flesh remained completely open.
He tried moving this new limb. Not the three original arms attached to his upper torso, but this new appendage mọc out from his belly. It actually worked. Though only a few muscle fibers in the new arm responded, it was genuinely moving under his command.
Struggling to cram his stomach back into his abdominal cavity, he used this newly grafted arm to pry the edges of the wound open. He shoved and forced the protruding organ past the narrow tear, re-experiencing the sharp visceral agony from moments ago. This time, however, the torment lingered far longer, refusing to recede even after he finished the action.
Beads of heavy sweat poured off him. Genuinely, he was sweating. Subject 198 found it entirely bizarre. When he was sprinting for his life and fighting until his arm was ripped off, his body hadn't shed a single drop of sweat. Yet now, merely stuffing his own internal organs back inside made him break into a heavy sweat.
Smelling a strong scent of chlorine rising from his perspiration, instead of being surprised by the chemical odor, a sudden realization hit him. Wait. He had no nose. His six breathing vents led straight to his lungs, and he possessed no external nasal structure or scent receptors. Did this mean his lungs possessed the ability to smell?
A fascinating piece of new anatomical data, Subject 198 thought to himself.
Temporarily setting aside his newly acquired anatomical knowledge, his focus shifted to the gaping wound on his belly. He pondered his next move. Instinctively, he wanted to stitch the split skin shut just as he had done with his hand wounds. But he froze. If he tightly sewed the outer epidermis, what would happen to the glass shards inside his stomach that were anchoring the monster's hand? They would be crushed. Inwardly sighing, he decided to leave the wound raw and open.
Limping heavily, he dragged his broken frame toward the spot where he had dumped his harvested moss, his weapons, and the monster's carcass near the stone tree. This spot served as his feeding ground and primary camp. Sinking down and leaning his back against the rough stone trunk, Subject 198 closed his eyes to rest. Once his mind quieted down, his memories of the chaotic events from last night began to piece themselves together.
After passing out from severe blood loss following the battle, he hadn't actually awoken in the morning. He had regained consciousness in the dead of night, beneath the glare of the moons. At that moment, for reasons beyond his understanding, he had succumbed to a wave of madness. Yet, unlike the torturous agony and feral rage of his previous episodes, this madness filled his mind with a profound, manic sense of happiness. He laughed hysterically within his mind, wrapping his arms around the two limbs on his back that were no longer paralyzed. An indescribable ecstasy filled his soul as he realized those two arms were no longer useless; his body felt slightly less broken, less khuyết thiếu. He clung to his newly awakened arms for an immeasurable time, only snapping out of the manic trance as the moons high above began to sink toward the horizon.
As the absolute euphoria receded and his cold focus started to return, his eyes locked onto the dead carcass of the monster. A sudden surge of jealousy, rage, and bitter resentment flared within his brain. Why? Why did this wretched abomination possess mouths to feed, while he was left mouthless? The fury overrode his nervous system. He lunged at the dead beast, beating the corpse senselessly, though his blunt blows failed to inflict any real damage. The resentment peaked.
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A roaring thought echoed inside his mind: “You miserable piece of trash. If I don't have it, I will rip it from your flesh and make it mine! It belongs to me, not you!”
Striding toward his glass stone knife, he grabbed it and returned to the carcass. He hacked into the flesh with frantic yet highly precise strikes at a fixed point until the fanged hand was severed from the monster's body. Without a single shred of hesitation, he sliced a deep, wide gash across his own bloated belly, his dark blood pooling heavily onto the crystalline earth.
Even as he mutilated his own flesh, his eyes remained curved in a manic, silent grin. He pulled his stomach out of his body, glaring at it with a desperate vow: “I will steal it. I will become perfect!” He gouged a hole directly into his stomach wall, letting the highly concentrated gastric acid leak out. Then, he took the monster's severed hand and forced it into the opening. Like fitting pieces into a jigsaw puzzle, he wedged the creature's rounded arm bone into the hollow. The monster's bone tube was slightly too thick, severely stretching and deforming his stomach. Once it was jammed inside, he retrieved sharp glass shards and stitched the internal connection secure, just as he had done with his hands. Throughout this entire horrific self-surgery, an elegant, soothing melody drifted melodiously through his mind. When the internal stitching was complete, a supreme sense of accomplishment washed over his soul, and he lost consciousness from sheer exhaustion.
Waking up some time later, everything unfolded exactly as he had experienced at midday. But he noticed a strange shift: whenever the madness flared now, instead of just a chaotic explosion of raw emotion, it was structurally intertwined with a cold, highly calculative, and twisted will.
Letting out a soft sigh, since his open abdominal wound prevented him from making any violent movements, he could only occupy himself with light tasks around the camp while he healed. The glass stone knife he had crafted was now heavily fractured along its edge; its crystalline structure had never been designed to withstand such brutal hacking and chopping. Inwardly sighing, he turned his focus to smaller chores. He checked on his garden. Over the span of two days, the strands of his cultivated glass-moss showed clear signs of creeping toward the pool of blood grass extract, beginning to sprout and take root against the stones.
Using his heavily cracked knife, he patiently dissected the remaining parts of the monster's carcass, accumulating raw materials. He meticulously sorted the skin, bones, teeth, finger phalanges, small bone fragments, and meat. Most importantly, he harvested and carefully preserved the creature's tough tendons; these biological cords would play a critical role in his upcoming engineering plans.
Two days had passed since his manic self-surgery. Currently, he was preparing his meal of monster-blood soup. Due to the incredibly dense energy concentration found within animal tissue, he no longer needed to feed every single day like he did with the meager glass-moss. Now, a single feeding provided enough raw vitality to sustain him for three full days.
The good news was that the internal graft within his stomach was rapidly healing. The bad news, however, was that the open outer wound on his belly had begun to fester from lack of closure. Yellow fluid oozed out, and a rancid, putrid stench drifted straight into his breathing vents. Facing the spreading infection, Subject 198 acted ruthlessly. He used his knife to carve away the necrotic flesh around the gash, then calmly resumed preparing his food.
He began the process of making bone-marrow cakes. He crushed dried glass-moss into a fine powder, mixing it with a small amount of blood grass fluid until it formed a malleable dough, and set it aside. Next, he prepared a bowl filled entirely with the monster's thick blood. He took the creature's severed limb bones and shattered the circular bone tubes with his mallet, exposing the rich, sweet marrow inside, which he poured directly into the blood soup. He then ground the finger bones into fine, sharp fragments. Taking the moss dough, he wrapped it around the bone fragments and small pieces of raw meat, shaping them into dense cakes sized slightly smaller than his chest vents to ensure they could pass through.
The feeding process began. Using one of his newly restored upper hands, he scooped the viscous blood soup and poured it into his six chest vents. The sludge rushed down into his lungs, but he did not rush to swallow. Next, he used his hands to push the solid marrow cakes down into his airways. With his lungs completely engorged with the raw blood soup and the coarse marrow cakes, the suffocating pressure became unbearable. Subject 198 compressed his chest cavity, forcing his bronchial passages to spasm violently, forcing the entire mass straight down into his stomach.
A steady, highly stabilized wave of nourishment—devoid of the violent, volatile surges of his first meal—radiated outward from his stomach, slowly repairing the internal lacerations and the open gash on his belly. To prevent the outer wound from sealing prematurely and trapping the temporary glass needles inside his abdomen, Subject 198 ruthlessly used his fingers to pull the edges of the split skin apart, deliberately halting the epidermal healing.
The reason this massive surge of energy wasn't flowing wildly or explosively through his veins was due to a calculated act of self-mutilation he had performed earlier: he had used his mallet to violently smash his own leg muscles. By doing so, he forced the body’s healing energy to concentrate entirely on the areas suffering the most severe trauma—his belly and hands—preventing the vitality from being wasted elsewhere.
He repeated this grueling routine until the meal was finished and the marrow cakes were completely consumed. Lying down at the camp, he verified that the internal connection inside his stomach had completely fused. Without hesitation, he plunged his fingers back into the open abdominal wound and plucked the temporary glass needles out of his flesh. Then, he took a fresh strip of raw monster meat, stuffed it directly into the outer laceration, and began joining the skin.
Based on a bizarre, intuitive synthesis of all his current biological data, Subject 198 held a strong premonition: this would likely be the very last time he would ever have to feed through his lungs.
Having finished closing the outer epidermis with long, needle-like glass shards, he lay down in the middle of the blood grass field to rest. Inside his mind, his consciousness began systematically scanning his past-life archives, searching for historical fragments regarding primitive cold weapons, structural mechanical advantages, and kinetic force multipliers.
After a long silence, Subject 198 snapped his eight eyes open. He had formulated a preliminary plan to heavily upgrade his entire arsenal. In all likelihood, once these ranged upgrades were complete, the monster that had once hunted him would cease to be any threat at all.