Strictly speaking, by pure logic, making fire this late in the game was fairly absurd — this should have been one of the very first things Subject 198 crafted. But the truth was, he didn't have much use for fire to begin with.
For humans, fire mattered enormously: it cooked food, breaking down its structure to make digestion easier. In other words, fire did part of the intestines' job for them, freeing up the body's energy to fuel brain development instead.
In case you didn't know, the gut and the brain are the two biggest energy hogs in the human body. And that wasn't all — fire also provided warmth, along with countless other uses.
But Subject 198 didn't really need any of that. You know how it goes — a normal stomach just churns and mixes food, uses acid to liquefy it, and passes the rest along for the small intestine to digest. The stomach itself only absorbs a small portion.
But Subject 198 was fairly confident his own stomach could handle the small intestine's job as well — probably because his gastric acid was concentrated to an almost absurd extreme.
What's the pH, anyway? Probably under 1. Definitely lower than a human's.
On par with a scavenger species, strong enough to break food down aggressively.
Wait, does that mean I could eat rotten carcasses too? Eh, whatever.
All in all, the benefits of improved digestion meant next to nothing to Subject 198. The real reason he'd decided to make fire was for crafting purposes.
That's right — besides cooking, fire could also be used for firing and tempering materials. That could turn into a genuine upgrade for his weapons.
Though Subject 198 wasn't entirely sure about that either, since the weapons he'd already made were harder than iron to begin with.
Body parts, materials, everything in this world already defied logic in the first place — if he really thought about it, it was the illogical energy source that pushed them into such an extreme state to begin with.
But the fact that these materials retained their rigid structure even after being severed from the living body suggested that the illogical energy had actually altered the underlying structure itself, permanently.
Just like his own bones.
Still, if it didn't work out, no great loss. He wasn't expecting much from this anyway — making fire had just been a passing thought, a way to make use of the leftover blood grass pulp.
And honestly, Subject 198 was curious what food would taste like cooked over fire. Probably pretty good.
Using his new tool, Subject 198 began pulling out the rectangular blocks of blood pulp one by one.
Looking over the tightly compressed blocks, cut and pried loose from his crude machine — of course, this extraction method wasn't perfect, so some residue always got left behind, meaning it wasn't completely clean. But overall, most of the pulp had come out in usable bar form.
I'll probably need to give this a proper deep-clean at some point. That's going to be unpleasant.
Looking over the bars he'd pulled out, he picked one up to feel its texture. Compressed as it was, it had turned genuinely hard — though not quite as hard as real charcoal. By rough estimate, it was maybe forty-six percent of the way there.
Still, that was promising. Natural charcoal, formed over millions of years of sedimentation, couldn't hold a candle to grass pulp compressed this tightly. And the harder the charcoal, the longer it burned and the more heat it put out.
That part done, all that remained was drying out the moisture. Even though the water had been pressed out of the blood grass, it hadn't come out completely — there was still dampness lingering inside.
Evidence of that was right in his hand: a faint, cool sensation still clung to his palm. Curious, he gave it a squeeze — and the block deformed instantly.
Ah, damn it, squeezed too hard.
This looks a lot like that mud paste I used to eat back at the very beginning, doesn't it. A bit thick, still holding some water.
Focus. He carried the tightly compressed blocks of blood grass pulp, one by one, out of the forest, toward the barren stretch of the plains, laying each one out to dry. Each trip he could only manage three at a time — it took three round trips to finish.
Watching the pile of pulp sitting under the sunlight, Subject 198 considered it: in theory, the heat radiating down from the sun would gradually dry out the compressed blocks, driving the moisture off.
Is there a way to speed this up?
An idea surfaced. What if I boosted the light intensity? I'm surrounded by glass out here — I could turn some of it into magnifying lenses to concentrate the sunlight.
But the glass stones, transparent as they were, had completely flat surfaces — no curvature at all.
Maybe I can reshape one. After all, it's called "glass stone" for a reason — not just glass, but stone too. Reshaping it shouldn't shatter it.
Thinking was doing. Subject 198 gathered a few large glass stones, hauled them back with three hands, then struck the center of one with his war hammer, cracking off a chunk of the surface. He swept the fragments away with his hand, leaving a shallow depression behind. He repeated the process over and over, until the center was thick and the edges tapered thin.
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A quick mental tally suggested he'd need about nine of these for regular use.
Though, will I actually need to dry things out regularly? Once I've got fire, I can just hold things over it to burn off the moisture, can't I.
Just enough would do — exactly twelve blocks of pulp needed drying, so roughly four lenses would cover it. Still, he made three more just to be safe. As you'd expect, crude concave lenses like these could never be perfect — no way to concentrate light into a single precise point.
That would require absolute uniformity and an exact curvature, neither of which Subject 198 currently had access to. But that was fine — his goal wasn't a focal point anyway, just a zone of concentrated light to boost overall intensity.
The current setup was more than sufficient. He even deliberately scratched the surfaces up a little, scattering the light passing through just slightly off-axis. For focusing to a single point, that would be a defect — but for spreading intensified light evenly across a wider area without losing total brightness, it actually worked in his favor.
He grabbed two long branches, one in each hand, and dragged them over to the open patch of ground where the drying pulp was laid out. He set the two branches down parallel to each other, leaving a gap between them, then packed the tightly compressed blocks of pulp into that gap — all twelve of them.
Then he took the four converging lens surfaces he'd made and set them across the two branches. Raised up like that, the lenses didn't touch the pulp directly, letting the concentrated light fall denser across the whole batch.
His projection: drying time should drop from roughly four days down to two — doubling the efficiency. Not bad at all.
Chuckling to himself, feeling a spark of genuine excitement, an analytical voice suddenly rang out in his head.
Fairly interesting.
Said with the tone of someone stroking their chin thoughtfully.
Noci, what's going on???
Noci answered back, still sounding distracted.
Nothing much, Dad. Don't worry about it, I just spotted something interesting.
Ummm... okay.
Ignoring her, Subject 198 turned back to his work. At this point, the charcoal — or more accurately, dried peat coal — was done. It still carried a deep reddish tint. Whatever, didn't matter.
Now for the special part: building a bow drill to create fire.
You might be wondering — why not just use the converging lenses like a magnifying glass and burn something directly? Simple: this handmade lens wasn't perfect, and couldn't focus all the light down onto a single point.
If it could, that'd be so much easier. This bow drill's going to take a while.
First, the bow itself. He needed a short branch shaped roughly like a real bow — slightly curved, flexible enough to carve. Which meant heading back out to the plains to find a branch that hadn't petrified yet, one that already had the right curve. Then carve it into a proper bow shape, drill a hole at each end, and thread a cord through.
The bowstring was straightforward enough — monster tendon would do the job. Since the tendon was fairly thick, it needed to be split into strands and rewound together into something smaller. Unlike an archery bow, where the string has to stay taut, the bow drill's cord needed a bit of slack — just enough to be pulled gently back and forth, spinning the drill shaft in place.
The drill shaft itself was simple — a monster tooth would work, since it was already straight and pointed. All that was left was finding a stone, or carving a block of wood, to serve as the socket.
Plan settled, Subject 198 looked back over his camp, asked Noci to keep half an eye on the surrounding trail, then stood up on all four legs, grabbed his hammer and axe along with a small chunk of energy bar as a snack, and headed off in a new direction to search for a suitable branch.
As he walked, he split his attention across all eight eyes — four scanning every direction, letting Noci memorize the terrain features of the plains so they wouldn't get lost in a landscape where everything looked the same, while he personally directed the rest to search for trees and branches that met the criteria.
He kept heading in one direction, checking tree after tree, until he finally found one that qualified.
This time, instead of flipping upside down and hooking with his legs, he simply used the axe to chop a series of notches into the trunk, forming a makeshift ladder, and climbed up that way.
Fairly comical, really — climbing with only two legs meant his back two just dangled uselessly in midair. Once he'd cut the branch free, he headed home.
Along the way back, following Noci's directions:
Wrong, Dad. Adjust about thirty-seven degrees to the left, you're off course.
Why do I keep drifting off? I've heard that about ten times already.
Can't help it, how am I supposed to know? I'm just going off feel.
You and I share the same memory, you know. There's clearly a ton of detail there, I swear — how do you not see it?
Subject 198 muttered to himself. Hmm, why isn't there anything else out here? Like another forest, maybe?
Might be that I just haven't gone far enough. Or maybe there's simply nowhere around here with the right conditions for trees to grow into a proper forest.
The sun kept doing its job. By the time Subject 198 made it back to camp, evening had already settled in — nightfall wasn't far off.
Working as fast as he could, he got straight to building the bow drill.
He carved the branch into a bow. Twisted the small tendon strands he'd cut into something thicker — smaller than the original tendon, but just enough for the bow. Then he set the monster tooth — the drill shaft — onto the bowstring and flipped it once, wrapping the cord around the shaft into a single S-shaped loop.
He used a wooden plank as the base, pressed a stone down on top of the drill shaft to hold it steady and apply pressure, then used his two remaining hands to saw the cord back and forth, spinning the shaft. The point of contact with the wooden base had been coated with a thin layer of dried grass pulp to catch the spark.
Friction after friction. Time passed, and still not a single spark — just a faint burnt smell drifting straight into his lungs. The sun sank lower, the light dimming by the minute. No real pressure driving him, and yet Subject 198 worked faster with every passing moment, as if racing the sunset itself.
The effort finally paid off just as the sun dipped below the horizon — the friction caught, and the thin layer of blood grass beneath ignited.
Fire. He held it in his hand, then lowered it onto the compressed block of blood grass pulp — which by now looked like little more than dried grass-corpse mud.
Slowly, the flame crept into the mud, catching hold, beginning to burn.
Subject 198 officially had fire.
His first thought wasn't about what to craft with it, or how to use it for warmth, or anything of the sort. His first thought was: I really should roast my own leg.
He grabbed three branches, tied them together, and spread them out into the ground in three directions — a tripod. Leaning on the principle that any three points define a stable plane, this stand wouldn't tip over. He built two such tripods, set one on each side of the fire, then skewered one of his own old legs onto a spear and rested it across the two stands.
And just like that, roasted meat was born.
He sat down on the ground near the fire, gazing up at the sky, breathing in the rich aroma of roasting meat mixed with the smoke of burning grass-corpse mud — something toxic, not unlike cigarette smoke, lungs be damned.
Looking up, fat began dripping from the leg beside him, hissing into the flames and flaring them brighter. He tilted his head back further, taking in a sky blanketed in stars, with all three moons hanging above.
So comfortable.
He drew in a deep breath, his breathing slowing gradually, and closed each of his eyes, one by one.
Subject 198's mind, right now, was at peace. Without a single ripple.