CHAPTER 2: THE FLESH OF THE RESENTFUL (PART 1)
An overwhelming shock collapsed upon Subject 198’s mind as he stared at his reflection in the glass-like stone.
He had no mouth.
In his past life, his biological framework was designed to suppress all emotions. He knew no pain, no sorrow, no joy, and certainly not curiosity or excitement. Yet, in the depths of his flawed soul back then, there had always existed a single, remaining emotion. Faint but undeniable, it was the raw desire to live, to survive.
He did not want to live for noble reasons like family, passion, or happiness, nor for vulgar desires like greed, laziness, or lust. He simply wanted to live, and that was all.
Upon realizing that his current self possessed no mouth, a faint but freezing fear began to surface from the bottom of his heart.
Will I die? Die of hunger, or die of thirst?
His mind and his brilliant brain instantly shifted all focus onto this single problem. It was directly tied to survival. From calculating how much time he had left before death, to figuring out how to stay alive, he slumped over, collapsing onto the glass boulder and sinking into deep thought.
After a period of time—which would have been very short if measured by the minutes and hours of the old world, perhaps less than twenty minutes—to someone experiencing emotions for the first time, this train of thought felt immensely long, as if hours and months had passed.
Thinking it through carefully, he realized the structure of his body was entirely bizarre. Leaving aside the cumbersome extra limbs of his arms and legs, he possessed two hearts.
According to the medical theories from the memories of his past life, he could not survive. These two hearts beat alternately in a rhythmic pattern: the moment one finished a beat, the other immediately followed. Both functioned perfectly normally.
But theoretically, the blood pressure generated by two continuous beating sources would be too massive, instantly rupturing blood vessels and causing death.
Even if the blood vessels of this Outcast vessel were superior and more flexible, how would blood even transport when subjected to two continuous pressures beating from two different directions? How could blood circulate?
From this biological impossibility, Subject 198 deduced a new logic: I am a grotesque, deformed, and illogical monstrosity. An entity that defies the laws of nature shouldn't even exist. Yet, I am alive, and I am breathing.
Clinging tightly to that tiny but manic sliver of hope, he thought: Perhaps this body does not need to eat at all, and I certainly will not die of starvation!
Wandering around to dissipate the heavy anxiety pressing on his chest while trying to understand his surroundings, Subject 198 dragged himself up. He took limping steps, venturing deeper into the forest.
Everything around him became increasingly strange. At the outer edge, although the trees soared high, they possessed absolutely no leaves.
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But the further inside he went, the trees remained colossal yet overflowed with a bizarre vitality, their foliage thick and dense. Some trees bore leaves that were transparent and sharp like glass; others had leaves with rough, wood-grain textures. It was deeply peculiar.
He limped toward the nearest tree, raising his single functional auxiliary hand to test its trunk. Instead of the expected texture of rough wood bark, what he felt was the freezing, unyielding cold of stone. This was not a metaphorical comparison; the composition of the trunk was literally stone.
Pure curiosity flared within him, and he continued to wander, touching everything he encountered. He picked up several fruits that had fallen from the glass canopies. They were far harder than ordinary glass stones, dense and solid inside like jade, but other than that, they held nothing too special.
After wandering for a while longer, his two hearts began to beat frantically as Subject 198’s eight eyes suddenly locked onto a strange impression in the dirt. It looked like the mark of a massive pillar slamming down. These craters appeared in perfect, consistent intervals, trailing one after another like the footprints of some colossal beast.
Driven by curiosity, he followed the tracks, venturing deeper into the core of the forest.
Suddenly, he arrived at a bizarre boundary. At this threshold, the lines of leaves were no longer glass; instead, they shifted into a solid patch of darkness shaped like a leaf. Upon the stone tree trunks, twisted wood grain patterns appeared, looking exactly like human eyes blinking open and shut.
A strange, horrifying shudder instantly rippled across Subject 198’s entire body. This sensation of fear erupted like an ancient survival instinct—he was facing the most primal horror: the Uncanny Valley effect, the fear of something that looked deeply human, yet was absolutely not human.
In that ultimate split second, a dreadful psychological premonition from the shadows suddenly assaulted him. No concrete dark figure jumped out, yet the sheer, mutated presence of that "humanoid entity" felt as though it frantically accelerated, flying straight into his face.
That invisible mental pressure magnified directly in front of Subject 198’s eyeballs, bringing a suffocating brutality that threatened to tear his mind apart and forcibly assimilate him into one of their hideous kind.
Terrified to his core by this psychological onslaught, Subject 198 turned around, using his four crab legs to run at full speed away from the pitch-black deeper forest. He fled in a frantic, limping panic.
A long while later, when the shuddering sensation finally subsided and the boundary of darkness had receded, he dared to stop, leaning against a stone tree trunk while panting heavily. Even though breathing through six tiny chest vents was deeply unnatural, through some passive physical distortion mechanism, it still provided sufficient oxygen.
He lay down on the cold dirt to rest, forcing himself to regain composure. He did not understand what that trembling sensation of fear was, but his analytical mind instantly recorded a rule: Until I am strong enough, I will absolutely never return to that boundary.
But immediately after, another question flashed in Subject 198’s mind: What do I mean by "until I am strong enough"? Can I get stronger? How???? This vessel was a bottom-tier Outcast; how could it even evolve?
He lay flat on his back, forcing his thoughts toward random, idle matters to keep his brain from thinking about starvation. Suddenly, from the stone branch directly above his head, a sharp Whoosh! sliced through the air.
Startled, his eight eyes snapped upward in unison. Upon that rigid, solid stone branch, a deep, hollow indentation shaped like a human hand had been carved into the surface.
How is that even possible? he wondered in astonishment. The trees here were clearly as hard as boulders, and what the hell was that dark blur that had just vanished at such a terrifying speed?
Lost in thought, the curiosity of his newly filled soul was satisfied once more. In that moment, Subject 198 felt genuinely happy. His desire to explore the world made him forget his suffering.
But that naive child had no way of knowing that, during this week, and for all the long, agonizing weeks to come, this would be his very last day of happiness. A fleeting joy born of curiosity, right before a chain of brutal misfortunes and ultimate agony was about to rain down upon his head.