Breathe in, breathe out — time slipped by like that. The cold night air stood in sharp contrast to the warmth radiating off the fire. Subject 198's skin soaked in every bit of that heat spreading across its surface.
Not quite as warm as he'd imagined, though. Maybe he'd pictured it like being wrapped in a blanket, but this was just fire — it only warmed whichever side of his body faced it. Everything else stayed just as cold as before.
He raised all three hands close to the flames, letting the warmth soak into his palms, and a thought surfaced: the human body ran on a fairly strange conservation mechanism.
Generally speaking, it selectively preserved certain parts over others — extremities like hands and feet were the first to be sacrificed, left to lose heat and potentially go necrotic, so the body could prioritize keeping warm blood flowing through the internal organs, preserving core temperature.
Made perfect sense, really — a hand going necrotic, a person could still survive that. But damage the internal organs, and survival odds dropped to essentially zero.
That was also the reason behind that strange phenomenon: at the absolute extreme of cold exposure, a person could suddenly feel an overwhelming rush of heat, so intense they'd start stripping off their clothes.
All that warm blood, hoarded around the organs, would suddenly flood back out across the whole body, triggering that burning sensation — because the blood vessels that had exhausted themselves keeping the heat contained finally gave out, no longer able to hold the line, letting the blood spill outward everywhere.
After that, the victim would feel a burning heat crawling across their entire body, as if they were on fire, driving them to tear their clothes off. Don't mistake it for stupidity — it happens because the brain has already sustained excessive damage by that point, slipping into delirium, and that's what drives the behavior.
Whether they stripped down or not, they'd only survive another few dozen minutes at most, maybe a couple hours — cycling from unbearable burning straight back into unbearable cold.
Either way, there was an old medical saying: a victim is only considered dead once their body has warmed back up.
Explaining my own behavior like this feels a bit strange, doesn't it. But that's how it works for humans — no telling if the same logic even applies to me.
That whole train of thought had really just been Subject 198 rationalizing why the warmth reaching his hands felt so comfortable.
He scooted a little closer to the fire, using one hand to rotate the skewer holding his own roasting leg, turning it to a fresh side so it would cook evenly.
The scent of charring protein flooded straight into his lungs.
Cough, cough.
He choked on the smoke — no surprise, really, breathing it straight into his lungs was no different from smoking a cigarette without the nicotine.
From what I remember, people don't just skewer meat and hold it over a fire, right? Seems like they rotate it too.
What's that for again? Ah, right — to make sure it cooks evenly.
Gripping one end of the skewer, he began turning it in slow circles, roasting every side.
Sitting there zoning out just now, that was maybe twenty minutes or so, right?
No — twenty-four minutes and thirty-six seconds, Noci answered.
Okay, got it. So that's about the time for one side to cook through, the rest still need work.
Seems like a full roast takes somewhere between fifteen and thirty minutes. Whatever.
Remind me when thirty minutes are up, alright? Got that, Noci?
Yes, sir. Got it.
He kept turning the skewer for a solid thirty minutes, watching the moon in the meantime. Everything was going pretty well, aside from the constant coughing fits from the smoke.
Damn, how did prehistoric humans manage to survive like this? Actually, seems like they didn't manage that well — probably ended up with lungs as black as a smoker's.
Alright, let's see — looks like the thigh's done. The outer skin's gone golden-brown now.
Only one particular side had turned an especially deeper gold. A faint whiff of charred skin drifted through the air. The fire below kept flaring up and dying down, fed by fat dripping off the leg, occasionally surging bright.
He grabbed a handful of dirt, tossed it onto the fire to smother it, then extended Silas toward the roasted meat and began to eat.
Silas's mouth stretched wide, tearing off a massive chunk, dragging it straight down the throat, past a row of sharp teeth that crushed it apart without a single chew needed — unbelievably tender.
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Not that unbelievable, really — it was roasted, of course it'd be softer than raw meat.
Each bite released juices that spread across the inside of his throat — rich, faintly fatty, an overwhelming sensation for a throat that had never once tasted cooked meat before.
Unlike the meat itself, which dissolved almost instantly, the skin was far tougher, needing a bit of actual chewing before it gave way, delivering a slightly crisp, crackling texture — a total contrast to the softness underneath. Along with it came a faint burning sensation, the meat fresh off the fire.
How do I even describe the flavor of this. It's like veal, I guess — to put it simply, the offspring of an animal found in Asia, sort of like a buffalo but without horns, usually brown-skinned. People call the adult one a cow. And a baby cow... they call that veal.
And veal happens to be the closest thing to human meat, according to what I know. So now I've got two kinds of "human meat" under my belt.
The hand-monster's meat carried a taste somewhere between human and cow or lamb; the other was his own meat, roasted, tasting like veal — another kind of "human meat" altogether.
Man, this is actually delicious.
He tore through his own leg meat ravenously, until he hit a snag — a still-raw, wrinkled patch of flesh deep inside.
?? Why is this happening ??
Ah, right — undercooked. Based on what he knew, a large chicken thigh usually took twenty to thirty minutes to cook through, but his leg was far bigger than that, meaning it'd take much longer, and the inside would still be underdone. Scaled up proportionally, his leg would probably need something like two to four hours to fully roast.
Ah well, still edible. It still carried that base pigeon flavor his leg always had. He liked rich, fatty things anyway — gnawing through the roast, some parts cooked, some not, probably buried deep inside the muscle, chewy as bubble gum.
Finishing off that single leg took a full two hours. His stomach filled up completely, bulging far past normal — nearly six times its usual size.
He collapsed flat on the ground, stuffed to the brim in every sense of the word, grabbed the nearby pillow out of habit, lay down, and drifted into sleep. His mind still lingered on food — and on other ways he could prepare it.
Not just thinking about it, either. He dreamed about food too.
He shot upright off the ground, the thought still lingering, the idea still intact.
I've got it.
I know how to restore the illogical energy inside my body.
Just as he'd speculated before: if he ate every scattered limb around him, he'd reclaim all the energy that had been spent on regeneration. There'd definitely be significant loss in the process, meaning he'd need to eat even more than that just to break even.
In short, recovering meant eating through the entire pile of severed limbs — but eating took time. Unlike before, when simply eating instantly drained the energy source, this time the digestion itself would take far longer, not even counting the time spent cooking and eating in the first place.
But what if I combined this with the concept of processed food?
What was processed food, exactly? Food treated in a way that made digestion easier.
Like roasting meat over fire — cooking it broke down the protein bonds, sparing the stomach the effort. Or cheese — medieval humans lost the ability to digest milk once they hit adulthood, so they let bacteria do it for them instead, turning milk into something the body could actually absorb.
Or Greenland shark — its blood was packed with ammonia, eating it raw would kill a person outright, but people in the Arctic buried it in the ground, letting the right bacteria break down all the toxins until it became edible.
The common thread running through all of it: digest it in the outside environment first, before it ever reaches the body for absorption.
So what happens if I push that external digestion to the absolute extreme?
He stopped, scratching runes into the dirt with the script from his previous life, to make sure the idea didn't slip away the same way his dreams usually did.
He picked up the axe and started chopping.
The tree had already fallen. He hollowed out the core along the side facing skyward, stripping away the bark to expose the hollow interior beneath.
He set both ends of the trunk onto two large blocks of wood, suspending it well off the ground.
The core inside had been torn out crudely, leaving it mangled — turning the whole hollowed-out length of trunk into something resembling a long, rectangular pot. From here on, he called it the trunk-pot.
He tossed a few pieces of pressed, dried blood grass down into the bottom. Standing atop one of the wooden blocks, he began vomiting stomach acid into his makeshift pot.
While waiting for his acid reserves to replenish, he turned another wood block into a cutting board, then began chopping through parts of his own body — not just chopping, but mincing it down into small chunks of meat — and dumped it all into the trunk-pot, then kept vomiting more acid on top.
Since he didn't need the acid concentration too extreme, he added blood grass liquid to dilute it — there was no way he could vomit enough to fill the whole trunk by himself. He kept the pH balanced around one to two, roughly the same as a human stomach.
It took three straight days without sleep or rest to finish. Not only did his own minced limbs go into the trunk-pot, but he also ground up blood-glass moss into dust, along with the flesh and bone of hand-monsters, minced and mixed in as well. He'd even considered adding limbs from the crustacean-tentacle monster at one point — but decided against it in the end.
He burned a pile of wood scraps along with dried, spent blood grass pulp underneath, letting it come to a rolling boil.
Looking over his creation — a giant vat of soup, or more accurately, a giant vat of porridge, the way rice porridge cooked over fire for a long time, submerged in plenty of water, ends up breaking its starch down so thoroughly that eating it spikes blood sugar almost instantly, turning a slow-digesting starch like rice into something practically resembling sugar.
His massive porridge pot operated on the exact same principle. Vomiting stomach acid out into the environment meant the food was already being digested externally, no longer needing to wait on his own stomach to process it — the digestion happened outside first.
That let him process food in bulk, hundreds of times over. The fire beneath burned weak, never roaring, but strangely persistent — probably fed by the pulp from that impossibly hard stone-tree wood — slow-cooking the acid mixture along with the mashed food above.
The result was a kind of porridge he could just swallow and let his stomach absorb directly, cutting his digestion time down to a fraction of what it used to be — exactly like real porridge.
Staring at the watery, porridge-like mixture inside the trunk-pot, dizzy from sleep deprivation, Subject 198 smiled.
Heh. Somehow this feels exactly like that moment I first tried eating glass moss. Kind of hilarious, honestly. Hahaha.
Same hesitation as back then, unsure whether or not to eat it — the only difference being, this time the fear wasn't about accidentally killing himself. It was just curiosity, wondering whether or not the idea would actually work.
Hahaha, why not just try it. Worst case, it doesn't pan out, and I just go back to eating blood-glass moss for a good while longer.
(End of Chapter)