After the blood oath beneath the three mystical moons concluded, Subject 198 silently lowered his single functioning auxiliary hand.
The manic fury and the burning resentment toward his fate gradually subsided, yielding to the cold, supreme rationality of an analytical mind. He limped and dragged his emaciated frame toward a colossal stone tree, leaning his rough, tumor-ridden back against it as he sank into thought.
The light from the three moons—blood crimson, pitch black, and ash gray—filtered through the shards of glass-like leaves, casting mottled fragments of light onto his pale, skeletal skin. Subject 198 began to comb through the entirety of his knowledge from his past life, intertwining it with the torturous survival experiences of his current one.
In his previous life, he was a clone. His primary purpose back then was not manual labor, but to serve as a biological CPU for the AI system of the starship district he inhabited. Make no mistake, he held the role of merely one among thousands of living CPUs woven together to operate the ship's artificial intelligence.
Consider this: super-grade AI systems consumed an immense amount of electricity and water resources just to process data. In his era, when human civilization had advanced to Type 2.1 and mastered the entire solar system, water had become an exceedingly scarce and precious resource. They needed to ration every single drop.
And so, the clone biological CPU solution was born. They consumed very little electricity, required no complex cooling infrastructure, and all they needed was a sterile tube pumping nutrients directly into their bodies. The processing capacity of a clone’s brain was genetically altered specifically to run and handle massive torrents of data—a highly practical and utterly ruthless technological solution. As for cooling? No one bothered; when a human CPU burned out from overheating, they simply discarded it and recycled a new clone.
That, in part, explained his incredibly short lifespan in his past life.
However, during the process of running that starship AI, a few stray fragments of primitive historical data had inadvertently remained locked within the ridges of his brain. It was the memory of an era when humanity resided solely on the primordial Earth. To transcend the ecosystem and become the apex predator, primitive humans utilized a single weapon: Tools.
Far removed from the meticulously detailed technology involving hundreds of complex electronic components he dealt with in his past life, ancient tools were vastly simpler to craft. Though it was described merely as a faint piece of data within a history archive in his brain, Subject 198 could still visualize a few items. A stone fastened to a branch, a branch carved into a sharp tip, and a few other crude implements. He didn't know the exact details, as it was just one among hundreds of data points he handled daily.
He recognized that his current self desperately required a tool to survive, but how was he to manage? According to his memories, crude tools required wood. Yet the trees of this world were entirely nonsensical—they were rigid and solid like boulders, while the leaves were razor-sharp glass.
Subject 198 began to replay the memories since his awakening like a film reel, comparing the geographical data over and over. Suddenly, he recalled the stunted, deformed trees growing out on the blood grass plains beyond the forest line.
The branches out there were forced flat against the ground in a distorted fashion. It was a stark contrast to the colossal stone trees deep within the forest that soared straight into the sky. The branches on the plains were pulled downward, which proved their structure was neither frozen nor fossilized. It was highly possible that the branches out there possessed far more flexibility than he initially thought.
Subject 198 generated a resolve, beginning his journey into the freezing night. He limped away from the glass forest, advancing toward the plains while straining his gaze forward to orient himself.
Unlike the daytime, the night held three moons illuminating the land, yet their beams felt far more isolated and faint. Moreover, due to the blending of three distinct lunar hues, they cast a deeply unnatural color upon the earth: a dark, heavy crimson shifting into a muddy brown, making it exceedingly difficult to see. The light was minimal, and the coloration heavily distorted visual perception.
To counteract this, Subject 198 intended to close some of his eyes to focus his vision into a single path. At first, he tried shutting them all except for the two front eyes, mimicking the structure of his past human body. Immediately, however, his nervous system reported uneven blind spots and too many dangerous, obscured angles. He was forced to open a third, misaligned eye on his forehead. The coordination of these perspectives was somewhat chaotic and asymmetrical, but the image received was vastly clearer than before.
He limped across the blood grass field. Reducing his vision from eight eyes to three not only helped him focus his search but also allowed him to discern objects ahead more clearly. To say he "saw more clearly" wasn't entirely accurate. Precisely speaking, his brain was automatically gathering faint, fractured fragments of light from the distance and synthesizing them, generating a virtual construct of the object within his field of vision. It was a peculiar mechanism, as if his brain was modeling what should be visible based on blurred pixels within the dark crimson, brownish shadow.
Thirty days had passed since the moment he set foot in this anomalous forest. Though he lacked an exact track of time, by the end of this night, he would mark precisely one month of existence within this Outcast vessel. According to Subject 198’s calculations, the glass-moss resources around his immediate forest boundary were nearly depleted. He would likely have to scavenge painstakingly just to unearth a few meager scraps of moss. The pressure of the looming hunger threshold forced him to forge a new path on this very night.
Approaching the first stunted tree he encountered on the plains, Subject 198 discovered a brutal reality: its trunk remained rigid and freezing like solid stone, and the vast majority of its branches had completely fossilized. Bearing a faint trace of regret in his eyes, the thought of failure began to take root in his mind. Had he calculated incorrectly?
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Unwilling to accept defeat, he continued his search and eventually discovered a small branch at the outermost edge that felt slightly brittle and flexible. He realized that he absolutely had to find younger trees—living entities that had not yet been entirely assimilated by this world.
The journey to locate a young tree was a relentless sequence of disappointment after disappointment. There were trees that appeared small from a distance, but when Subject 198 crawled near to touch them, they had long since hardened into solid blocks of crystalline stone. His physical depletion caused his four crab legs to tremble violently, his chest heaving as he breathed laboriously through the six small vents.
After a period of crawling in near-hopelessness, his field of vision finally locked onto a small, isolated tree growing from a rocky crevice. He crawled close, pressing his auxiliary hand firmly against the trunk, and felt a soft, elastic feedback ripple through the chitin of his fingers. This was it. Subject 198 looked up; this young tree possessed exactly six branches that perfectly met his criteria for being straight, flexible, and suitable for crafting tools. Since only the highest, newly sprouted branches held any flexibility, he had to find a way to ascend.
The materials were right before him, but Subject 198 faced a barrier presented by his own deformed anatomy: he possessed four crab legs splayed in four directions, three withered, paralyzed auxiliary arms on his back, and only a single functional auxiliary hand at his side. These young, flexible branches grew at the absolute highest apex of the tree. He needed to find a way to ascend if he wanted to snap or harvest them.
Subject 198 slowly squatted beneath the young tree, repeating his process of deep thought to find a solution. Looking down at his four crab legs, he realized their structure did not function like human limbs; rather, they resembled a specialized type of hooking appendage.
He pressed his emaciated body flat against the trunk. Suddenly, Subject 198 inverted himself, using his single functional auxiliary hand to prop up the entire weight and pressure of his body. He hoisted his four hooking limbs into the air, latching them firmly onto the branch closest to his feet. Utilizing his unique asymmetrical limb length, he hooked his way up step by step, hanging upside down as he dragged his skeletal form toward the very top of the tree canopy—where the freshly sprouted, flexible branches were located.
To secure his balance, the three paralyzed arms on his back, driven by the forced commands of his nervous system, wrapped tightly around the trunk like a natural locking clamp. Once inverted in an advantageous position, Subject 198 used his single working auxiliary hand to exert all his force to snap the branches.
Yet to his dismay, though these new branches were more brittle and flexible, they still belonged to the anomalous trees of this bizarre world. The raw muscle force from a single hand was entirely insufficient to sever the fibers.
Hanging upside down in this arduous posture, Subject 198 paused to think. He recognized that the wood fibers were far tougher than anticipated; relying on hand strength alone was impossible. He required an auxiliary tool with a highly rigid composition to shatter the structure of the branches from the outside. He recalled the boulders within the forest. As he pondered, a data correlation surfaced: the hardest object at the outer ring of this forest wasn't the ordinary glass stones, but rather the fruits of the glass trees.
While distracted by his thoughts, perhaps due to sheer physical exhaustion or a sudden loss of balance in his asymmetrical limbs, Subject 198’s hooking feet slipped from the bark.
He plunged straight down from the tree canopy onto the rugged blood grass terrain below.
THUD!
The free fall sent a violent shockwave through his entire body. Subject 198 lay perfectly still, enduring a suffocating tightness in his chest, before forcing himself to rise. Somehow, the damage left behind wasn't severe; not a single bone had fractured.
Resuming his plan, he limped back toward the deep forest. He approached the base of a glass tree, and learning from his fall, he carefully scavenged until he retrieved a solid glass fruit. He had no grand understanding of its macro-properties; he simply knew from his prior interactions that this dense fruit was the hardest object at the outer ring of the forest, far harder than ordinary stones. He carried it back with him.
Clutching the fruit, he dragged himself back to the plains. His hooking appendages secured their grip, moving deliberately and slowly until he had once again reunited his upside-down body in the tree canopy.
Subject 198 used the solid glass fruit to repeatedly strike the base of the young branch, shattering and fracturing its exterior structure before using his auxiliary hand to pull the branch downward with immense force.
Thud! Clang!
Yet, reality was far from simple. Because the surface structure of the glass fruit was so smooth and polished, Subject 198’s striking force instantly slipped. The sudden loss of leverage caused him to lose his footing. Both his hooking appendages and his three withered arms anchoring him to the trunk gave way.
Subject 198 plummeted straight down from the tree canopy onto the rugged blood grass terrain below.
THUD!
The free fall sent a violent shockwave through his entire body. Subject 198 lay perfectly still, enduring a suffocating tightness in his chest, before forcing himself to rise. He did not accept defeat. Subject 198 once again scrambled up the tree, locked his body to the trunk, and hammered the branches with the glass fruit.
This grueling cycle of physical torture repeated relentlessly. Every time the glass fruit slipped on the polished surface, Subject 198 plummeted to the earth, his muscles aching with exhaustion, only to stubbornly climb back up.
After dozens of falls that sapped nearly all his remaining energy, Subject 198 finally succeeded in breaking off four straight branches of perfect thickness.
By this time, his body was in a state of severe depletion. His six chest vents heaved frantically as he gasped for air, and his three eyes blurred heavily, unable to maintain their focus.
The fifth and sixth branches at the absolute top were exceptional. They were far too flexible and tough, making them perfect for optimal weapons, but precisely because of this, the weak strikes from Subject 198's near-fainting frame could not bring them down. The fruit's polished skin merely slipped away, leaving shallow scores on the wood.
Subject 198 lay sprawled beneath the base, helplessly staring up at the remaining two optimal branches with deep regret. He had harvested only four.
The thirtieth night was nearing its close. The scarce glass-moss resources at the forest edge were virtually exhausted, leaving only tiny fragments embedded in the rock crevices.
Subject 198 dragged himself close, painstakingly scraping away the last remnants of the moss, mixing them with a trace of blood grass extract to swallow into his chest. His chest spasmed and choked in agony, but the meager energy from the depleted moss drained into his stomach, temporarily soothing his tightening blood vessels and saving him from the brink of collapse.
He had gathered just enough raw energy to endure the rest of the night. Lying flat beside the four harvested wooden branches, Subject 198 closed his eyes and drifted into a heavy, exhausted sleep to recover, preparing for the upcoming chapters where he would learn to fashion his tools.