Chapter 9: A Spoonful of Nightmare

But just then, I heard the others in the room crying.

Wah, wah, wah…

More than one, and soon everyone in the room was sobbing.

‘Hmph, what’s there to cry about?’

I knew perfectly well why, but I still conducted this internal dialogue with myself.

I’m a person who cares a lot about face.

Crying in front of so many people was never my style. And seeing everyone else cry made me feel that crying myself would be pointless.

‘I simply can’t understand why seeing others cry makes me not want to cry. Though I’m not sure if ordinary people are like this…’

In any case, I held back the tears that had just reached the brim of my eyes.

‘Hmph, I’m not going to waste my energy on crying.’ I consoled myself. ‘I’m already weak from my condition, and after all this, I’m not about to waste my strength!’

So, listening to their sobs, I dipped my finger in the soup again.

‘Ugh!’ I let out a tiny gag.

It was disgusting! It had all five vile tastes: sour, astringent, bitter, fishy, and putrid!

Back in the day, I used to dwell on past hardships to appreciate present sweetness, but those wild vegetables and coarse grains at most had one or two of those flavors—either bitter or sour-astringent.

But the soup I was licking now… it tasted like hell itself!

I even suspected it might taste like sludgy sewage!

‘Pfft! And that’s with vinegar added!’

‘Says the guy who’s actually tasted it!’

‘Haha.’

I laughed at my own internal banter.

I lifted the bowl of bug soup, a doubt creeping into my mind: ‘What if after eating this, I end up like that guy earlier… eating cockroaches and all?’

I was torn, terrified. But if I didn’t eat, I’d surely die!

So I steeled myself and deployed my signature technique for choking down Chinese medicine: hold my breath and force it down. (By ‘hold my breath and force it down,’ I mean closing off my nasal passages, sucking the liquid into my mouth fast, and then swallowing it straight into my stomach. That was my habit when drinking Chinese medicine.) In the dark corner, I hesitated again, then lifted the bowl of bug soup, held my breath, and took a quick gulp of the ‘black surface,’ swallowing it immediately.

The moment it went down, I realized: this was nothing like Chinese medicine!

Though I hadn’t smelled the fishiness, the soup, carrying some insect remains, slid from my tongue to its root, and an indescribable stench made my stomach lurch upward. I almost threw up the soup in my stomach.

If I vomited, I’d have to endure that nastiness a second time. So I forced it down.

I gasped, not having thrown up. That filled me with confidence! At the same time, I could feel the fishy stench filling my mouth.

‘Yosh! Time to chow down on the meat in this soup!’ An inexplicable confidence surged into my mind.

With my tiny little hands, I grabbed something hard in the soup. (I’d set the bowl on the floor again.) Why ‘tiny little hands’? Because the hard thing I grabbed was as long as one of my fingers, making my hands look particularly short.

‘I know. My fingers are really short now, only about three or four centimeters. But if this is the length of the bug…’

Trembling, I brought the rod-shaped insect to my mouth.

But before that, I felt a particularly sour and rancid taste spreading in my mouth.

‘OK, OK. All according to plan. At least it’s sour.’

Right then, I was like a little kid eating a sour plum for the first time, my arms and legs stiff, suspended in the air.

I endured, chewed a bit, then swallowed quickly.

Immediately, an intense fishiness spread through my mouth, traveling up through the walls of my oral cavity into my nasal passages.

‘Whoa! Disgusting! But I ate it! Mmm, tastes like chicken!’

‘Screw your “tastes like chicken”!’

‘Phew.’ I let out a breath, still in that oddly mesmerizing loli voice.

Heh… though I didn’t want to admit it, hearing my own cute voice did give me a slight sense of satisfaction!

Mood +0.1. I dipped my finger in the soup again. Still disgusting, but I seemed to be getting a little used to it.

‘It’s just constant self-hypnosis,’ another personality chimed in to finish my thought.

I often liked to hypnotize myself, especially when it came to eating unpalatable food.

And this time, I used it again.

Gritting my teeth, I ate the remaining half of the bug.

‘Ahhh!’

‘I’m gonna die! But I can do this!’

I struggled not to throw up.

And so I went on: one mouthful of meat! Hypnosis! One mouthful of soup! Hypnosis! Repeating over and over.

It didn’t take long before I’d finished the entire bowl of soup.

‘Ah, that was super nasty…’

I kept repeating this sentence in my mind, but honestly, I felt that this bug soup couldn’t even be called ‘nasty’ anymore.

It was like no one eats a wrench, no one drinks petroleum.

This bowl of bug soup was simply ‘inedible.’

I felt awful, but at least my stomach wasn’t empty anymore.

I was exhausted, but I had no time to waste.

I didn’t know what might happen tomorrow, or even in a little while.

What I needed now was to conserve my strength.

I forced myself to stay alert, placed the empty bowl on the rickety wooden table, and then walked back.

As I set the bowl down, I could feel the twenty-two people over there staring at me with bewildered expressions.

They might have been watching me since I started eating, but I’d been lost in my own world, not looking at them.

Ah, forget it! I’m tired. Time to sleep.

I didn’t want to fight for a bed. They were all big and likely strong, while I was so small and weak… Tsk, sigh…

I returned to the innermost part of the room, leaned against the farthest corner, wrapped my clothes a bit around my bare bottom, and sat down.

I hugged my knees tightly and buried my head deep in them.

Now I was completely relaxed. I had no energy left to think about whether this would cause any problems.

My body and mind were on the verge of collapse and unconsciousness. To survive, what I needed most was sleep.

‘That line seems familiar. Bear Grylls said something like it.’

My current state was exactly like a wilderness survival scenario…

I quickly fell asleep.

I slept for who knows how long, then stirred awake.

‘Initiating self-check.’

Location: other world, castle, s*ave room.

Time: unknown.

My name… unknown.

Family, knowledge, school progress, memories from childhood to now—all quickly reviewed. (Since I recalled these memories every day, the self-check was especially fast.) ‘I was an adopted child, so my parents didn’t give me their surname. Instead, they gave me a special name, one I really liked—five characters long!’

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