Subject 198 stared into the blood-red mixture reflecting his eight blurred eyes on the polished surface of the glass stone.
There was no bowl here. It was merely a hollow indentation in a shattered piece of obsidian, holding the crushed glass-moss blended with the thick crimson blood grass extract and the fresh, dark droplets leaking from his own ruined hands.
This mixture was not just liquid; it was filled with coarse, raw residue. Though mixed with the grass extract to keep it from becoming bone-dry like a rag, it had now thickened into a paste of muddy glass—viscous, metallic, and packed with jagged edges. His chest heaved violently.
Subject 198 suddenly froze. His single functioning auxiliary hand, trembling with what little strength remained, lifted the stone shard containing the muddy paste, but he did not pour it in immediately. He hesitated. That hesitation stemmed from the absolute exhaustion of his physical form, and above all, he was afraid.
He did not fear this world; he feared this very action would end his own life. He wanted to live, but manually shoving this glass-mud paste filled with tiny blades into his breathing vents felt like a direct act of suicide—terminating himself rather than dying of starvation.
Yet the hunger and his near-bursting blood vessels drove him into a corner. Gambling on the anatomical hypothesis of his brilliant mind, Subject 198 gritted his teeth and slowly shoved the muddy glass paste directly into the six ventilation holes on his chest.
"Khẹc... Ực... Ặc!"
Instantly, a violent explosion of agony erupted. The muddy paste flooded his respiratory tract, embedding itself deeply and slicing through his bio-bronchial tubes. He suffocated entirely. His Outcast vessel writhed on the dirt, his four crab legs contracting violently.
Driven by the fierce instinct of his desire to live, Subject 198 convulsed his entire body, using pure madness to force his diaphragm to contract, compelling his lungs to push the muddy paste toward his throat. During this brutal process, Subject 198 came mere seconds from suffocating to death, his consciousness brushing against the eternal dark.
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Yet, the moment the first few fragments of the muddy paste reached his stomach and began to digest, a miraculous anomaly of his Outcast biology occurred. The raw nutrients processed instantly activated an illogical force within his body.
That invisible, passive distortion energy surged, creating an unnatural pressure that pulled the entire remaining mass of glass-mud trapped in his lungs straight up into his throat, dragging it down into his stomach.
"Ực..."
The suffocating spasms in his chest suddenly released. The heart on his back, which had previously stopped beating, jerked violently and began to pump once more. The fracturing sensation in his blood vessels ceased and gradually began to stabilize.
Subject 198 lay spent on the cold ground, greedily inhaling the sulfurous air through his six bleeding vents. He had survived the first gamble.
However, after feeding, Subject 198’s body did not grow stronger; instead, it fell into a state of profound exhaustion. The reason was that the meager energy from the moss paste had to be directed entirely toward repairing the severe, shredded trauma inside his lungs caused by the feeding process. Only a minuscule amount of energy remained to sustain his core life functions.
Consequently, throughout the adaptation period that followed, Subject 198 completely lost his capacity for cohesive thought. He drifted into a semi-conscious state, fainting and waking up repeatedly on the cold dirt.
Whenever he awakened from the torment of hunger, he acted entirely on raw survival instinct: dragging himself to find glass stones, scraping moss, squeezing blood grass, enduring the suffocating torment of his shredded chest, and then losing consciousness again. He fainted from pain and woke from hunger, a relentless, merciless cycle.
It wasn't until the end of the second week that his illogical Outcast body fully adapted to this deformed method of feeding. The passage through his diaphragm had stabilized permanently; his lungs no longer suffered internal damage or bled. Only now, when his body no longer wasted energy on healing internal trauma, did Subject 198 truly absorb the majority of the nutrients from his food.
The agonizing pain vanished, the muscles across his body stopped trembling, his mind cleared, and his analytical brain could finally think cohesively once more.
He sat up, re-evaluating his condition. Throughout the two weeks of self-torture and constant fainting to adapt, his vessel had severely atrophied. His already deformed frame had become emaciated, reduced to skin and bone; though his limbs remained functional, his overall vitality was visibly depleted.
He had temporarily solved his survival crisis through raw instinct, but his newly cleared brain knew all too well: the scarce glass-moss resources nearby were running dry, and he needed to find a greater evolutionary path to escape this emaciated, wasting vessel