CHAPTER 7: THE TOOL OF A MADMAN
Subject 198 dragged the four flexible branches he had just obtained toward a sheltered obsidian crevice located at the outer ring of the forest.
The thirtieth night had passed. Thanks to the meager scraps of moss he had painstakingly scavenged earlier, his stomach temporarily possessed a bit of energy, and his body recovered some strength. Fortunately, it seemed he had not yet crossed the hunger threshold. And because he had just eaten, the entirety of the raw nutrient fluid was accumulating inside his abdomen to restore a portion of his atrophied muscles and regain his vitality.
Bringing these four wooden branches back had been utterly miserable. The fact that he could only use one hand made it exponentially more inconvenient; he had to clamp the wood tightly against his body just to transport it. Not only that, but they were incredibly heavy. Despite their small appearance, they felt monstrously heavy, or perhaps it was a limitation of his own failing anatomy.
Inwardly sighing, now that he had secured the basic raw materials, he needed to think about what kind of tools to fashion out of them. Currently, he faced three highly essential problems.
First, his immediate problem: he needed something to crush the glass-moss and shatter the boulders so he could dig out the small shards of moss hidden deep within the corners. Although his body had adapted to feeding, the adaptation was far from perfect; chunks of glass-moss that were too large could still slice his lungs apart. This was a physical flaw that adaptation alone could not resolve. Perhaps he required a hammer.
Second, for the near future: he could not continue eating moss forever like this. There were two reasons. First, moss could only provide a bare minimum of nutrition, and his muscles were still wasting away, just at a slower rate; he needed to find a new source of food, and to acquire it, he would need to hunt. Second was self-defense. From the beginning until now, he had never been attacked once, but eventually, he would need it. He had seen the handprint on the tree on his first day in this forest—it represented a terrifying magnitude of power. He could not compare to it; the disparity was immense.
He needed a weapon that was easy to use, easy to familiarize himself with, and especially easy to craft: a spear. Unlike swords or sabers, a spear was an intuitive weapon—one that almost anyone could pick up and instantly understand. All it required was a thrust. Unlike a sword, it required no training. And its primary advantage was length; with a spear, he could minimize the damage he received. Attack range was critical. The final reason for choosing a spear was that it was vastly easier to make. To fashion a sword, he would need iron to melt, cast, and forge. For a spear, he simply needed to sharpen a long wooden shaft.
Third, for the distant future: he wanted to cultivate moss himself to eat, which meant farming. To accomplish that, he would need a massive amount of blood grass. Therefore, he likely required a small knife. In short, this was a rough outline he wished to execute.
Having defined his goals, he decided to begin with the spear first, as it was the easiest of the three to craft.
Reaching out to grab a sharp glass stone nearby, he began to shave the wooden branch that was the straightest and longest of the four. He started shaving the outermost bark of the spear shaft. The plain-dwelling wood was flexible on the outside, but its internal structure was incredibly brittle and stubborn. If he shaved even slightly too hard, the branch would instantly develop deep fractures, risking splitting in half and becoming completely useless.
Gripping the glass stone tightly, blood began to flow from his hand, the pain shooting straight to his brain. He paid it no mind, continuing to shave gently, utterly focused. This process of carving required immense precision and patience. His hands, already battered after a night of breaking branches, were constantly embedded with microscopic shards of glass. Fresh, dark crimson blood poured out, soaking into the wood fibers.
The pain did not vanish; it merely accumulated slowly within his mind. The exhaustion piled up rapidly, and the torn wounds on his hands and his emaciated frame from the previous night's falls began to spasm, torturing Subject 198’s nervous system. The physical suffering from this prolonged ordeal gradually breached the maximum threshold of a living entity.
Ầm... Xoạt...
Subject 198’s mind suddenly collapsed into a pitch-black void.
When his eyes opened once more, the three moons in the sky had shifted to an entirely different angle. Subject 198 realized in bewilderment that he was no longer sitting in the original crevice; instead, he was curled up on the blood grass plains.
His emaciated frame throbbed with severe pain across his entire body. Yet, his mind felt strangely peaceful and comfortable. His eight eyes looked down at his body. His entire frame, especially his bloated abdomen and pale, chitinous muscles, was crisscrossed with deep, violent claw marks, with blackish-green blood seeping out and soaking the soil. There were marks that were incredibly deep, but fortunately, they had only penetrated the outermost chitin layer. To him, this was barely a problem; it did not make him significantly weaker or cause substantial damage.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
If compared to his hands, where the muscle tissues had begun to suffer severe trauma, these claw marks on his abdomen actually brought a sense of relief. Perhaps he was truly starting to lose his mind.
Laughing within his mind as if a block of memory had unlocked, the terrifying recollections of his missing time suddenly flooded back into his brain like a fractured film reel.
He had gone mad. The prolonged physical torture of his flesh had forced his brain to activate a ruthless biological self-defense mechanism: severing his rationality entirely to plunge into a state of pure madness. This, in part, allowed his mind to rest away from the crushing psychological pressure.
During that single hour of losing total control to escape the pain, he had laughed hysterically in absolute silence, frantically clawing and tearing at his own flesh, muttering nonsensical streams of data before dragging his vessel into this thicket and blacking out.
Subject 198 dragged his wounded frame and the pool of chaotic blood backward, crawling back toward his old crevice. His mind was filled with a strange, eerie peace. Noting this abnormality in his own psyche, he began to analyze it based on his old habits. Whenever he endured a peak of absolute physical trauma, his mind would automatically shatter and trigger an episode to vent the pressure, causing his brain to frantically secrete endorphins, adrenaline, and norepinephrine.
Well, looking at the positive side, this significantly reduced his mental burden. He only feared that during the next episode of madness, he might end up killing himself.
Resuming the crafting of his spear, he needed to shift to a new method. It was as if the lingering chemical triggers in his brain were still active; his mind was processing thoughts at an incredibly rapid pace. He realized he could grind the spear tip against a tree trunk. The difference in hardness was immense, and the surfaces of the surrounding stone trees perfectly met his requirements. Though they were hard as stone, their bark was rough and abrasive.
He decided to take the half-shaved wooden shaft and grind it against the stone tree, rotating and changing angles continuously in a circular motion like sharpening a knife. This action exerted far less pressure on his arm and was vastly faster than his previous carving method. The pain from the grueling labor was now focused entirely on his palm, where the exposed muscle fibers clashed against the wood. He no longer had to endure the constant agony of glass shards embedding into his flesh every few moments.
Perhaps he was too deeply absorbed, for it took him a long while to realize that because he possessed only one functional hand and was using it continuously, the skin of his palm had completely peeled off. Yet, he did not care. He kept working. An ordinary person would have given up long ago facing such agony, but he did not. Aside from his obsession with proving himself against his fate, perhaps he had truly gone insane.
By the time he finished the spear, the iron-hued moons had receded to let the sun rise.
He moved on to crafting the hammer, but a critical problem arose: he had no idea how to connect the pieces. Realizing that his stomach acid might solve the problem, a wave of dread flared within Subject 198's heart. The thought of once again enduring the searing burn of that scalding, putrid fluid melting through his respiratory tract made his six chest vents contract in visceral rejection. A deep disgust and shudder rippled through his nervous system, yet his eyes held absolutely no hesitation. His supreme rationality and ruthless desire to survive instantly crushed his biological fear.
He decisively thrust a finger from his auxiliary arm down his chest, gouging deep into his bronchial passage to force his diaphragm to violently contract.
"Oẹ... Khẹc... Ảk!"
A brutal regurgitation erupted, racking Subject 198's chest as he spewed the scalding pH 0.5 acid onto the ground. He quickly mixed the corrosive fluid with the soil and smeared it onto the thickest wooden shaft and the fist-sized glass fruit. The terrifying erosion of the acid instantly melted and mutated the contact surfaces of both the stick and the glass fruit, allowing him to push the two pieces together to fuse them.
Because the acid only melted the surfaces rather than acting as an adhesive upon cooling, Subject 198 immediately used his auxiliary hand to rip a handful of sharp blood grass. This was a deduction based on his own logic—whenever he consumed the moss soup mixed with blood grass, the overwhelming, metallic scent of rust indicated that the grass contained a trace of biological iron.
He hammered the grass into shreds and stuffed the residue directly into the melting joint between the glass fruit and the stick. The biological iron within the grass began to dissolve under the acid's reaction, transforming into a thick, sludgy metallic weld that solidified the weapon's joint. Repeating this routine, he continuously packed more blood grass into the socket until the acid's melting properties completely ceased and the fluid cooled into a rust-like solid bond. The joint of his hammer was completely stable and secure. He had his hammer—a heavy mallet utilizing a rounded glass fruit to shatter glass-moss beforehand, minimizing his internal injuries and solving his immediate nutritional crisis.
He repeated the exact same process to fashion the small knife. Unlike the hammer which required a heavy, rounded glass fruit, for the knife, he only embedded a sharp shard of glass stone into a small piece of wood that served as a handle. After all, he only intended to use it for the distant future to cut blood grass for his farming plans. Repeating the routine, he secured an additional small dagger.
Finally, after a night that was both manic and miserable—voluntarily enduring the agony of acid searing his lungs and clawing his own flesh apart—Subject 198 stared at the completed set of tools organized inside the crevice. He possessed his weapons.