CHAPTER 9: THE BLOODLINE EVOLUTION
Watching from a safe distance, Subject 198 closed five of his eyes, leaving only the three front eyes open. By reducing his field of vision to focus on a single point, combined with his brain's automatic simulation of the blurred pixels within the dark crimson, brownish shadow, he was finally able to clearly discern the interior of this creature's horrific anatomy.
The monster was a chaotic conglomeration of several long, spindly hands fused together, bearing a dull gray coloration that made it incredibly difficult to see against the bark of the trees. It appeared these limbs could only maintain a bent posture at a strict ninety-degree angle relative to the forearms. Most repulsive of all, right in the center of each palm woven into the fleshy sphere, a massive opening gaped, consuming nearly the entire surface area of the hand.
He could confidently assert that this was a mouth. Yet, unlike a human mouth, it resembled the oral structure of a leatherback sea turtle (Dermochelys coriacea) [1.4]—an image somewhat difficult to visualize—but it precisely mirrored the jaws of the entity IT from the movie IT, an ancient story from the 2100s, or the grotesque, ribbed maw of a goose. Though he didn't know what it truly was, according to his archives, the roof of the monster's mouth shared a striking similarity with a goose's palate.
It made perfect sense. The trees in this world were as rigid as solid stone; its oral structure had to be this bizarre and razor-sharp just to gnaw through the fossilized roots. The lower half of the monster’s body was burrowed deep into the blood grass terrain to feed, while dozens of warped, gray hands on its upper half contracted, emitting silent, grinding crunches from the fanged mouths resting inside its palms.
And how did Subject 198 deduce it was sleeping? Simply because its eyes were closed. Though it was hard to see clearly from afar, his specialized eyes, capable of gathering fractured fragments of light, clearly noticed the faint ridges of a closed eye appearing on the flesh of each individual arm, highly reminiscent of the eye-like patterns on the trees in the central region.
Having located his prey, he now needed to decipher its daily patterns to formulate an ambush. Patiently lurking and staking it out, time flew by like a weaver's shuttle, and his sharp mind eventually secured three essential pieces of data along with some highly intriguing facts about the creature.
First, regarding its diet, this monster consumed both glass-tree roots and dense glass fruits. Upon waking, it would wander at an incredibly rapid pace, continuously scrambling across the stone trees to forage for fruits. Its climbing speed on the trees was actually slightly superior to that of a jaguar.
Second, this monster grew at an astonishing rate, its development occurring in short, rapid cycles. Once bloated with food, it would collapse into a state where it slept and ate simultaneously, and upon waking, it would search for fruits again. One full cycle lasted roughly an hour and a half, consisting of one hour of sleeping-while-eating, and a brief five minutes to scavenge for glass fruits. If it failed to find any fruit, it would revert to its cycle of collapsing at the base of a tree to gnaw on roots. Its size shifted impressively; measuring only the size of a bowling ball in the morning, it had ballooned to the proportions of a wild boar by the end of the day.
Third, its rapid physical growth was entirely inversely proportional to its stamina. To verify this data, Subject 198 had tested the monster several times by hurling glass stones at it. During its smaller stage, it ran with terrifying agility, but once it grew bloated and heavy, its speed slowed down drastically. From this, he deduced that it only expanded in external mass while its base strength remained unchanged. This was excellent news; if it were that massive and its strength increased as well, he wouldn't stand a chance. During the process of baiting and testing the beast, it was honestly quite amusing—and it would have been even more amusing if he hadn't nearly died a few times when the monster narrowly missed him.
Most notably, toward the end of the night when the moons hung high, this monster would begin to crawl deep into the central region of the black forest. Watching it retreat, Subject 198 was fairly certain it would simply die; despite its bulk, compared to the horrors lurking within the core zone, this creature possessed no real capability to resist. He feared he had lost his only prey, but immediately afterward, another monster crawled out from the black forest to the outer ring. Not just one, but a monster and a half!
Yes, a monster and a half. A fully intact monster dragged out half of a mangled corpse belonging to another of its kind. The living monster started out merely as a small, isolated hand, but as it began to ravenously devour its dead kin, its body instantly sprouted new limb branches at a terrifying speed. Witnessing this cannibalistic display, Subject 198 initially wanted to rush out and steal the corpse, but he realized it was unwise to act recklessly. This creature grew rapidly by eating meat, but its baseline power remained constant, implying that the smaller versions were the ones with terrifying pouncing force and agility. He wasn't sure if he would be killed instantly if it flew straight at his body; it wasn't clumsy and lumbering like the bloated version at the start. After finishing the corpse, as if beginning a new cycle, it burrowed its lower half into the soil near a tree to resume gnawing on the roots.
Having recorded all his target's habits, Subject 198 returned to camp, ate a meal of moss soup to line his stomach, and sank into thought to draft a concrete hunting strategy. He decided he would wait until dusk, precisely when the monster had fed to its absolute maximum and grew as large as a wild boar. Full of liquid-like fat, its limbs appeared bloated and heavy like the water-logged hands of an obese human. He would hurl stones from a distance to infuriate it, baiting it into a chase until its lumbering frame was completely exhausted, and only then would he move in to execute it with his flexible spear.
On the thirty-third day, the hunting plan was officially set into motion. Exactly as calculated, when the monster's body became bloated and clumsy, Subject 198 began hammering it with stones to provoke it, then bolted into a frantic run, propping himself up with the spear wedged under his flank. The monster roared in fury, emitting terrifying, click-clack rasps, throwing itself forward as it dragged its heavily braided mass in pursuit.
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He continuously kited the beast, drawing out the chase over a long distance until the prey's massive frame was entirely depleted of stamina, its speed visibly plunging. Right at that split second, Subject 198 spun around, channeled every ounce of force into his single functioning auxiliary hand, and lunged forward, thrusting the sharpened wooden spear straight into the core flesh of the monster. He did not throw it, for the throwing power of a deformed limb would never be enough to pierce the densely braided epidermis.
Thwack!
The sharpened tip plunged deep into the gray, braided flesh. But the wild thrash of the massive creature was too violent; the plain-dwelling wood snapped completely in half with a sharp crack. Stripped of his range advantage, the monster reversed the situation, lunging directly onto Subject 198. In the brutal, claustrophobic clash of close quarters, the creature clamped its jaws down, completely chewing and crushing one of the withered arms on his back into bloody pulp.
The excruciating agony shot straight to his nervous system, obliterating his remaining sanity and triggering a peak of madness within Subject 198’s brain. But this time, the residual echoes of his bio-CPU past allowed him to awaken his awareness much faster. His fracturing mind unleashed a forced surge of neural energy, completely numbing the sensation of pain and allowing him to tap into one hundred percent of his Outcast anatomy’s muscular efficiency. Transforming into a pure machine of hatred and slaughter, Subject 198 did not let out a single scream. He fluidly thrived through a lethal swipe from the beast, twisted his frame, and used his remaining working hand to grip his heavy mallet, maniacally crushing one hand after another on the opponent's sphere.
Driven by pure frenzy, he swung the hammer madly, brutally smashing. The madness consumed his consciousness; he struck relentlessly, over and over. Even when all the hands on the prey's body had been pulverized into paste, he refused to stop. It was only when the bloated, heavy sphere of braided flesh had been reduced to a mangled, unrecognizable heap and its life fully ceased that Subject 198 collapsed onto the glass-stone ground, his sanity returning in the quiet aftermath.
With the battle over, his single functioning auxiliary hand was also pushed to the brink of ruin, its raw red flesh torn open and exposed. Lying thoi thóp from severe blood loss, a belated, resentful thought flashed through his mind before he drifted out: Close quarters combat with a spear in this godforsaken world is still too wretched and dangerous... I should have found a way to craft a ranged throwing weapon from the very start. His vision collapsed into pitch black.
When Subject 198’s eight eyes opened again, the anomalous sun was already tilting toward evening. His body was freezing and broken, but he knew he had won. He limped back to his old crevice, dragging the wild boar-sized prize behind him. He did not cast aside his physical trauma; instead, he gathered sharp glass shards that were as long and thin as needles from the surroundings to perform crude medical treatment. He drove the needle-like glass shards through the chitinous skin on both ends of the torn wound on his left hand, pulling the two edges of skin toward the center. The rough, uneven surface of the glass shards caused them to jam tightly within the muscle fibers, clamping the laceration shut to stem the bleeding. He closed his eyes to nurse his spirit, gritting his teeth against the bone-deep agony.
Afterward, he proceeded to process his food. The meat of this monster was incredibly tough; pounding and grinding it was an absolute nightmare. As he sliced into the flesh, Subject 198 discovered an entirely bizarre muscular anatomy: the arm bone was a hollow, circular tube that led straight to the mouth in the palm, and surrounding this circular bone tube were tightly braided cords of muscle and fat.
He continued cooking, tossing an amount of meat equivalent to one of the monster's hands into the blood-moss soup he had prepared earlier. This time, the standard blood grass extract was completely replaced by the thick, viscous blood of the very monster he had slaughtered. Gazing into the chaotic, greenish-black sludge of the soup, a faint, ominous intuition rippled through Subject 198's mind.
He began to drink. The soup, heavily laced with the fibrous meat, slipped through his six chest vents and drained down into his respiratory tract. However, the moment it cleared his bronchial passages, the stubborn, coarse chunks of meat instantly snagged and hooked themselves tightly into his lung lining, inducing a horrific sensation of suffocation. A bizarre, searing pain akin to the burn of concentrated stomach acid exploded within him, dragging back the torturous memories of his first excretion cycle and the suffocating terror of his first time swallowing rêu paste. Subject 198 locked his frame, forcefully compressing his chest cavity, using every shred of his remaining strength to force his airways to spasm and swallow hard.
The moment the meat soup finally plunged down into his stomach, a monstrous explosion of dense energy erupted within his core. The scalding nourishment coursed violently out of his belly, radiating through his entire body. As if to prove the supreme efficacy of animal protein, his external lacerations and bleeding wounds began to stitch themselves shut at a visible pace, the closing of the epidermal edges discernible to the naked eye.
Simultaneously, from the two remaining withered arms on his back, a violent sensation of swelling, burning pain, and intense itching flared up uncontrollably. Driven by biological overload, Subject 198 instinctively bashed his two paralyzed arms against the adjacent stone tree. He hammered them repeatedly and brutally until both bone and flesh within the two vestigial limbs were completely shattered.
Yet, following destruction came restructuring. Both hands were instantly regenerated, as if downloading an entirely new biological blueprint. He perceived a strange, freshly awakened tri giác (sensory awareness) rippling from the two limbs that had remained dead and numb for a whole month. He tried curling and clenching his hands; they were truly functioning again. Though still somewhat weak, his motor control over them was entirely fluid.
Smiling with his eyes, Subject 198 lay down upon the blood-red soil of his camp, a grim grin fading as he drifted into a heavy sleep to restore his vitality after a night of horrific transformation.
The next morning, waking beneath the early sunlight, a sudden, piercing stab of pain shot up from his abdomen. Subject 198 looked down at his body in absolute horror. He saw a long, jagged laceration carved across his bloated belly; protruding from the opening was his own stomach, crudely and unevenly stitched together with needle-like glass shards.
And infinitely more horrific, fused directly into that stomach laceration was the gray, mangled hand of the monster, its braided tissues tightly jammed and knotted into his abdominal wall.
Subject 198 froze in dead silence, able only to mutter a single, bewildered question within his mind: What the absolute hell is this?