A new day began.
Or at least, he woke up and began moving again.
It was hard to tell the time in a place where the sky never changed. The air always flowed in one direction and the beasts always acted the same.
It was hard to tell the time.
Maybe it had been the number of days he assumed it to be. Maybe it had been less.
He didn’t know.
He was slowly starting to forget about how time used to flow.
It was the fourth day by his books. He didn’t know how much he slept, but it wasn’t enough to cleanse his fatigue.
But he could do nothing but get up and hunt.
If there was one thing he could be excited about, it was the fact that his hunts had been getting better with the passing of time.
He was learning how to fight. A faint hope of survival welled up in his heart.
He looked at the wolf corpses on the floor below him. A smile inadvertently crept up his face.
Battle was a good distraction. When he was in battle, he didn’t have to think about the troubles that plagued him.
He was starting to fall in love with that feeling.
His gaze panned upward, and he saw something glint in the corner of his eye.
‘That is…’
He ran.
He ran with all his might.
If there was even a slight chance that things were as he saw them to be, it was worth expending all of his stamina.
So he ran.
And when he finally reached that spot, he almost jumped in joy.
His eyes weren’t fooling him.
Plants. Green plants. Green plants with assorted colors spread along their surface.
‘Food!’
It didn’t matter what the plants actually were, but if they were plants, it meant he could eat.
Even if it was the slightest sustenance, it was fine.
He was hungry.
So hungry that every time he saw a corpse on the ground, he wanted to dig his teeth into it and devour it.
But he couldn’t.
Because if he did, he’d turn into a mutated being that was neither beast nor human.
He had some ideas, some insane ideas that he didn’t want to entertain, but the situation wasn’t dire enough for him to put those ideas into motion.
That’s right.
Even as he thought of his current situation, the pain he had been going through, he still thought the situation wasn’t dire enough.
It was simply how deranged his ideas were.
Staying down here, his thoughts were becoming more bestial.
And it had only been a few days.
He put aside his thoughts and reached out to the plants in front of him.
His hands were skinnier than he remembered them to be. He could clearly see the outline of his bones through his skin.
He picked a plant from the ground. He didn’t hesitate to shove it into his mouth.
He was voracious.
He didn’t stop with just one plant. He grabbed every single one in the vicinity and devoured them.
“Ah…ah…ah…”
He could only make incomprehensible noises. The plants didn’t taste good at all.
They were muddy. They had grown in a musty dungeon, and the water source that fed them wasn’t anywhere close.
They had been trampled by beasts before. They carried a slight taste of the wastage those beasts left behind.
But at the same time, they tasted heavenly.
They were food. That was all that matters. To a body that had been on the verge of starvation, anything that could be classified as food would automatically taste amazing.
There was such a great food source here, so why would the beasts ignore it?
He couldn’t figure it out.
“Ah…ack…!”
He wanted to keep eating, but his body suddenly revolted.
He couldn’t move a muscle. He was paralyzed.
His insides were churning. His consciousness became weak.
A disgusting feeling spread through his body. Like a thick sludge was entering his bloodstream.
“Blegh…!”
He inadvertently vomited. He hadn’t eaten in three days, though, so it was mainly just stomach acids.
And blood.
Mouthful after mouthful of blood that were vomited from his mouth.
It was so violent that his body began to cramp. But he was paralyzed. He couldn’t even hunker down or scream in pain.
His eyes rolled back into his head. He began foaming at the mouth.
Bloody tears left his eyes. And soon after, trails of blood began leaking from the rest of his seven orifices.
He was seizing up.
“Blergh…!”
This time, chunks of meat were mixed in with his vomit.
But he hadn’t eaten anything in three days. That meat was pieces of his internal organs that were forced out of his body.
The sludge in his blood made his body feel disgusting. It was a feeling that somehow managed to stand out even in the pain he was going through.
It didn’t just spread, though.
Steam rose from his skin. His body started to heat up uncontrollably.
Sweating was good. It meant that his body was trying to expel the poison from his pores.
But the reason he was sweating was different.
His blood…it was boiling.
It was burning. Evaporating away and becoming steam that left his body through his pores.
The boiling blood was circulated through his body along with the disgusting sludge. It only amplified the horror of his current situation.
He had been reckless.
He had been too starved for any sort of sustenance.
The adrenaline rush helped him ignore the feeling. The thick mana in the atmosphere did the same.
But in the end, when he saw hope right in front of his eyes, he couldn’t resist.
He was desperate.
He was going to pass out again.
He couldn’t believe it.
How many times had he passed out from pain since he became stranded here?
It was embarrassing.
But his pride was slowly being whittled away.
After all, the poison he ingested just now was vile. His mouth wasn’t the only exit to his body that was being utilized to try and extract it. His intestines were also being affected by its spread.
He could feel a disgusting substance leaking through his pants.
He wasn’t at a level where he could ignore the urges of his body.
He just hadn’t eaten anything in three days, so his body had nothing to digest.
But now, everything he had digested even before he was stranded in the dungeon was being forced out of his body.
After this event, he would no longer be able to simply ignore his carnal desire for sustenance by ignoring it.
He wanted to stop such a situation from occurring at all costs.
But he was paralyzed. His blood was evaporating, leaving him even weaker. His body functions were in the process of shutting down.
He could only endure the humiliation he brought upon himself.
While also enduring the searing pain that wracked his body.
His consciousness was forced to hold on by the intense pain. Even if he wanted to pass out, he couldn’t.
But eventually, his mind wasn’t able to bear the torture anymore. It shut down.
And he passed out again. In a puddle of his own blood and excrement.
