CHAPTER 3: THE FLESH OF THE RESENTFUL (PART 2)
Memories of his past life abruptly flooded Subject 198’s fading mind. When he was a mindless clone, eating and drinking were of little importance.
After all, a vast portion of his previous body was mechanical, including his stomach, liver, kidneys, and various other expensive components. He existed solely to serve, and every day, a sterile tube would directly pump nutrients into him. He didn’t quite understand how it worked, but at least, in his past life, he had never known the sensation of near-starvation like now.
His initial deduction—that because he was an illogical creature with two hearts, a mess of useless limbs, and a bizarre anatomy, he wouldn't need to eat to survive—was a complete and utter failure.
This world had granted him emotions. At first, he found it fascinating, but now, those emotions were nothing short of hell. Hunger, day by day, systematically eroded the very residue of his vitality.
Subject 198’s Survivor Log — Day 1:
He limped around the glass boulders to familiarize himself with his body. Controlling four crab legs splayed in four different directions caused him to repeatedly trip and fall.
The three withered, useless arms on his back twitched erratically, making a clicking sound whenever they struck the surrounding stones. He was forced to use his single functional auxiliary hand at his ribs to pin them down, forcing them into submission in utter helplessness.
Subject 198’s Survivor Log — Day 3:
Subject 198 could still cheerfully wander around the forest edge to experiment and categorize various things. He recorded two rather intriguing pieces of information.
First, the trees at the edge were barren because their leaves were too sharp. They were so razor-sharp that they literally sliced through their own stems, falling to the earth and turning into glass stones.
While sitting idly under a tree, Subject 198 personally witnessed a leaf fall. After spending a single night on the ground without contact with sunlight or the tree, the leaf froze solid and hardened into a dense, solid chunk of glass stone.
The second piece of information, fortunately, was good news: he had discovered a species of moss growing at the boundary of the blood grass and the barren trees. The bad news was that he couldn't eat it. This moss generated by clinging to the glass stones, and peculiarly, it only grew beneath the shadows of the blood grass.
According to his old memories, a human by the third day without food would already be starving to near-death. Yet Subject 198 was currently doing quite well. He still wandered around, getting used to his deformed limbs and testing things out at random, though he found nothing else of use besides the stone moss.
The only thing that changed was his body; a faint, weak hunger began to gnaw at his core. Along with it, the fear of death grew insidiously, proportional to the emptiness in his stomach.
Subject 198’s Survivor Log — Day 5:
Two days had passed, and he had not moved at all. Out of a fear of death and the shocking realization that he was wasting away, he chose to sit perfectly still beneath the tree canopy to conserve energy. At first, this method seemed effective; he felt less fatigued, and the hunger did not intensify.
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But the following day was truly bizarre. The day-night cycle here seemed different; a single day was likely longer than 24 hours, or perhaps the hunger itself was warping his perception of time.
As it turned out, the fact that his body only felt a faint hunger after three days of fasting did not last forever. After the fourth day, as if crossing a certain threshold, Subject 198’s body began to experience a monstrous hunger. It was an uncontrollable, insatiable, limitless starvation.
And his body gradually began to collapse. Subject 198 could feel every blood vessel within him tightening, unable to withstand the pressure, as if they were about to burst. At this point, besides the hunger eroding his mind, he had to battle the sheer agony of a circulatory system pushed to its absolute limit.
It seemed the energy required to sustain his biologically impossible existence was depleting, and his blood vessels could no longer hold their shape.
Subject 198’s Survivor Log — Day 7:
The maddening starvation continued to torture him. He felt that if he had a mouth right now, he would grab a handful of filthy dirt beneath his feet and shove it into his maw to devour it.
An interesting detail noted by Subject 198: his body was uniquely designed for survival. As long as he didn't cross the threshold, he wouldn't feel hunger, wouldn't lose focus, and wouldn't suffer typical adverse symptoms. But once that boundary was breached, the hunger and its brutal consequences escalated exponentially by the day.
The heart exposed on his back had officially stopped beating.
The consequences were immediate: profound lethargy, violent muscle cramps, and the remaining heart in his chest began to beat erratically. A throbbing headache tightened across his skull as if his brain were on the verge of exploding.
And along with it, a wave of irrational resentment toward the world suddenly erupted from nowhere, accompanied by absolute, utter despair. Why grant him a whole soul, fill him with a desperate urge to live, only to leave him to starve in a mouthless vessel?
Returning to the present, Subject 198 lay curled on the blood grass field. He ignored the razor-sharp blades slicing through his flesh, drawing cold streaks of pale green fluid. He lay there, reminiscing about his past life and his current one, resembling a wild beast waiting for death.
Yet, from within his exhausted brain, a fragment of old anatomical knowledge and a manic idea suddenly sparked: Lungs connect to the stomach via the throat and diaphragm. Just because I don't have a mouth doesn't mean I don't have a throat!
At this thought, he clung once more to a fragile sliver of hope. How ironic; earlier, he had hoped he wouldn't need to eat to live, and now he had to gamble his life just to find a way to swallow.
He dragged his ruined, broken body step by step toward the boundary between the forest and the blood grass. With every movement, he felt as if liquid mercury, heavy and toxic, was flowing through his veins. The comparison was entirely accurate, as the vessels in his body had already begun to rupture under the immense pressure. But this vessel wouldn't let him die quickly; it forced him to die slowly in agony.
Limping to the boundary, he used his single functioning right auxiliary hand to claw at the glass stones, searching for the glass-moss hidden beneath the shadows of the grass. At this point, this last working hand was weak, powerless, and on the verge of becoming paralyzed just like the other three withered limbs.
He knew he couldn't consume the glass-moss raw. If he swallowed those blade-like flakes directly into his six breathing holes, he would suffocate and tear his respiratory tract to shreds long before starvation could claim him.
Using the absolute last residue of his failing strength, Subject 198 tore a handful of sharp blood grass. He grabbed a dense, solid glass fruit from the ground and smashed it repeatedly against the grass to extract the fluid inside.
True to the name he had given it, the liquid wrung from the blood grass bore a horrific, crimson hue, looking exactly like human blood. At this moment, due to overexertion and his flesh being shredded by glass shards while crushing the grass, Subject 198’s hands bled profusely.
Fresh, dark crimson droplets of his own blood ran down, blending completely into the thick extract of the blood grass. He scooped up the pulverized glass-moss and dropped it into the blood-red mixture.
The blood-glass broth was complete. A repulsive, metallic liquid filled with jagged shards. Subject 198 stared into the soup, which reflected his eight blurred eyes, his chest heaving violently before this final game of life and death.