CHAPTER 35: RESTORING ILLOGICAL ENERGY (PART 1)
As mentioned, porridge is an easy-to-digest dish, made by boiling rice in water — generally delicious. People usually scoop from the rim of the bowl first, to avoid the heat. But did you know there's an unwritten rule about eating porridge?
Once you're done, you should never leave the spoon sitting in the bowl. Set it aside, or rest it on the edge whenever you pause to do something else — or if you simply eat too slowly.
The result otherwise is that the porridge gradually shifts from thick and dense to thin and watery. For Subject 198, that actually made it taste better. For an ordinary person, though, it ruined the dish entirely.
The reason was simple enough: when you eat, you bring the spoon to your mouth, and it's not just porridge that gets taken away — a bit of saliva gets left behind on the spoon. Back in the bowl, those enzymes start breaking down the starch molecules, gradually liquefying it — since saliva had already done part of the stomach's job, that portion became easier to digest than the rest.
The principle behind the thing sitting in front of Subject 198 worked exactly the same way: a bowl of porridge, where the "meat" was his own severed limbs, the "starch" standing in for rice was ground-up blood-glass moss mixed with blood grass liquid, all boiled over fire to break down the structures — the meat portion had been pre-roasted — and finally, stomach acid played the role of the enzyme.
In theory, this thing would pre-digest the food into substances the body could absorb directly — he'd just need to swallow and let it absorb, skipping the digestion step entirely, achieving the same net effect as eating normally.
But what Subject 198 had created still carried one major unanswered question: would he only absorb a pile of protein and standard energy, or would he also absorb the illogical energy hidden within it? There was no real reason to assume this process would make illogical energy vanish — after all, the thing in front of him was functionally nothing more than a second stomach. But instinct said otherwise.
I really should have tested this before making a pot this huge.
Damn it, I really should have run a test first.
But it's probably fine. Worst case, I just get burned by the acid while eating it.
Right???
Ignoring the fact that his own brain was sitting there, analyzing every piece of information it had, only to arrive at one single conclusion: don't eat it.
Ignoring instinct screaming at him to stop, Subject 198 pressed forward by sheer logic, raising Silas, the hand at his belly, and lowering it into the trunk-pot of porridge.
Even that hand itself seemed deeply reluctant to dip in.
For reasons he couldn't quite pin down, both body and mind seemed to be working together to stop him. He ignored it anyway, and kept going.
The moment Silas plunged deep into the sludgy mixture, the first sensation that registered was its sheer sliminess.
It had turned liquid thanks to the acid, sure, but unlike his own stomach acid, locked at a pH of 0.5, this mixture sat lower still — exactly how much lower, he couldn't say, since the ratio had been mixed entirely by gut feeling, leaving the exact pH anyone's guess.
Clearly, though, it hadn't managed to break down the bone fragments completely, leaving behind a gritty residue. Beyond the grainy texture, there was also a wave of excruciating pain, spreading across his whole body, crawling straight down his spine.
Ignoring the pain, sharing the sensation with Noci, Subject 198 pressed on with the task at hand — namely, eating. Silas began to contract, drawing the liquid mixture up through the throat lining his palm, straight down into the stomach.
Before he could even register the sensation of his stomach filling with that thick, syrupy liquid, before his body had shown any reaction at all — what did this soup actually taste like?
...
...
Not as bad as he'd first expected. The first thing hitting him, and the most overwhelming by far, was a massive wave of umami flooding the entire cavity of his throat — hard to describe umami precisely, since it was difficult to tie to any prior taste memory, but that was undeniably what it was — layered with a deep, explosive saltiness spreading across every taste receptor at once.
His head went slightly dizzy from the sheer volume of information his salt receptors were firing straight up to his brain. He staggered, nearly toppling over.
It wasn't just umami or a saltiness like a ton of salt dumped into a single cup of water — it also came with a brutally sharp sourness, and a metallic, fishy tang running through the whole thing.
What the hell flavor is this? Like a whole jar of vinegar?
The urge to vomit surged up, but he forced Silas's mouth shut by sheer will, making absolutely sure not a single drop came back up.
Not that there was nothing redeeming about it, actually. Somehow — probably because the starch in the blood-glass moss had been broken down to such an extreme degree — it had produced a faint, bland sweetness. Still far from good, but noticeably better than it could've been.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Judged on the culinary scale of someone who'd already tasted hand-monster flesh, his own flesh, and crustacean-tentacle monster meat, this thing scored a negative number.
Absolutely negative. Negative one hundred, out of a ten-thousand-point scale.
Fortunately, the terrifying bitterness that usually defined blood-glass moss had vanished entirely, converted into sweetness instead. If that bitterness had stuck around, he probably would've given up right then and there. At least, that's what the current Subject 198 thought — from the perspective of his past self, the one who hadn't yet learned how to eat at all, he probably could've gritted through it anyway.
There was one problem, though: nearly thirty seconds had passed, and absolutely nothing was happening.
Damn it, don't tell me the whole plan failed.
Looking back at the massive remaining pot of porridge in the trunk-pot, Subject 198 shuddered instinctively, fully aware that he'd now have to force himself through the entire thing to avoid wasting it.
Suddenly, a sensation washed over his entire body — illogical energy being pulled out of his gut, spreading outward through the rest of him.
Heh. Slower than the old method — usually, food going in meant energy getting extracted instantly — but this still beats digesting like a normal creature, like before.
His whole body felt saturated with illogical energy. Strangely, though, instead of converging back toward the core like it usually did, this time it stayed confined to his limbs.
Haha, good. It's working.
Then it happened. Subject 198's heart began pounding relentlessly, faster and faster, driving him down onto both knees. A bizarre sensation swept through him — his pupils began dilating rapidly, spreading wide enough to swallow even the whites of his eyes.
Thump, thump, thump.
Not the clash of any weapon — this was the sound of his own heart, hammering in a frenzy.
His vision started blurring in a way that made no sense, as though he'd suddenly developed astigmatism. One eye, turned toward the sun, straining to focus, felt like its cornea was burning alive.
AAAAAH!
Damn it, what the hell is this?
He squeezed nearly every eye shut, leaving only three in front open, and did everything he could to avoid the sunlight.
What the hell is this, some kind of pain collection event? Damn it??
It didn't stop at the burning eyes, either — a wave of oxygen deprivation and dizziness followed close behind. His lungs were currently pulling air at a rate that could only be called overloaded.
Damn it, what the hell is going on, damn it, damn it.
Wait — calm down. Calm down.
Think. Think.
What the hell is actually happening here. Analyze it.
Analyze it.
First — the issue of his heart pounding relentlessly.
Think.
Think.
...
...
Damn it, I can't figure out a single thing.
But I don't think I'm actually dying or anything. Calm down. Calm down.
Shrugging off that bizarre sense of urgency, his analytical mode kicked back in.
Heart racing — not just one of them, but both — and the lungs too. This definitely wasn't just a set of isolated symptoms. They had to be connected somehow.
Is this just a trait of this biological body?
No, no — I shouldn't think that way. That doesn't solve anything. There has to be a reason behind it. I can't just blame this deformed body of mine. There has to be a cause. There has to be logic to it.
What did it mean, the heart and lungs behaving like this? What did it mean?
Metabolism. That's it — metabolism. I've got it.
The amount of food he'd just swallowed, by volume, came to roughly six liters of liquid — plenty to swell his stomach to a grotesque, oversized bulge.
Especially with this particular kind of porridge he'd just invented.
It's way too nutrient-dense. Think about it — the amount of meat I threw into that pot was about a hundred kilograms. Nearly the weight of a full-grown cow.
The total protein content across the whole batch was probably somewhere around thirty thousand grams of pure protein, plus forty kilograms of ground blood-glass moss powder.
Converted into rice flour terms — rice flour, of course, held a much higher carbohydrate concentration than glass-moss powder — that'd come out to roughly thirty-two kilograms of carbohydrate; for glass-moss, cut that down by about a third, to around twelve kilograms of carbohydrate — not even counting that it had already broken down into something resembling sugar.
Overall, a massive quantity of energy and protein, probably with a good deal of salt mixed in too, going by the saltiness he'd just tasted.
Overall, this is insanely nutrient-dense. My body's probably ramping up metabolism just to process all of it.
The racing heart was there to boost metabolic rate. The labored breathing was there to pull in more oxygen. The burning in his eyes was probably his pupils dilating from a blood sugar spike that high.
Meaning the current state was entirely the result of his body working at full capacity — nothing to do with illogical energy at all.
He could feel his body recovering at an astonishing rate. Not quite the same as the regeneration illogical energy normally produced, sure, but this was genuine recovery, not conjuring new tissue from thin air.
Worth celebrating — a new discovery. Maybe this means I can rely less on illogical energy for routine regeneration, and save it for actual emergencies instead.
As it turned out, the upper limit of human metabolic rate topped out around fifty times normal — but only for a few seconds at most, impossible to sustain for long.
By comparison, Subject 198 was currently running at around eighty times normal — surpassing even the genetically engineered super-soldiers from his previous life's military, who'd only ever managed fifty times a baseline human's rate.
To put it in concrete terms: a standard hand laceration normally needed one to two weeks to fully heal.
At this rate, the wound would close up in just two to three hours, complete with fresh new skin — genuine new skin, not scar tissue.
If it weren't for the fact that this kind of genetic enhancement cut lifespan down by a factor of fifty, those body-worship cultists from his past life probably would've modified themselves like this ages ago.
Damn it — getting off track again. A standard bone fracture, which normally took two months to heal, would only take a single day at this rate.
Overall, this has enormous potential. Enormous.
He vomited out a thick, pitch-black sludge of fully digested material. It had been about two minutes since he'd started eating. His metabolic rate was still holding steady at its elevated pace. He understood clearly: he had to keep eating, or he risked dying of exhaustion.
No idea whether this state will hold, or fade away like the regeneration state does — at its absolute limit, that one only lasted three minutes, after all.
Looking at his own vomit, then over at the massive trunk-pot of porridge still mostly untouched — he'd only digested one mouthful's worth, and already this was the result. If he digested the entire pot, what then? What would happen to his body? And beyond the body, what about the illogical energy itself — would anything about it change, especially his physical form?
He moved toward it again. This time, no hesitation left at all. It seemed even his instincts had finally come around to agree.
(End of Chapter)