Strangely enough, the taste was better than that chunk of meat he had swallowed to scare off the fennecs. But even so—it was disgusting. Aris could probably tolerate it only because he hadn't eaten in four days. His stomach demanded he swallow whatever he could find.
The red lump wasn't tough at all. It was soft, almost squishy, with a vile taste of blood and... something else. Something he really didn't want to identify. The combination was nauseating. But what choice did he have? For all he knew, it wasn't even edible.
Aris swallowed it whole and sighed. There was no way to wash it down—not without water. What a mess. He glanced around, searching for a small puddle that might have formed on the rock above him. He spotted one. At least water wasn't scarce in the Western Lands.
Aris drank the little puddle dry. The strange taste of the lump didn't go away. Worse, he started to feel a weird sensation spreading through his body.
He turned back to the rest of his so-called meal. The second red ball would go down easy, but the little pink organ, oozing dark blood, would need to be chewed. His stomach reminded him that he didn't really have a choice.
Feeling resigned, Aris grabbed the second lump and swallowed it in one go. Without wasting a second, he circled the rock, desperately searching for another pocket of water in the cracks or depressions.
He was still hungry. But that was all he could do for now.
He returned to the shelter under the rock and began the second part of his plan.
"I have nothing. No weapons, no supplies, no bag, no clothes. If I want to survive here for months, I'll have to make everything myself. With the skin from these things—which is surprisingly tough—I'll start making a bag. I'll store whatever food I can find in it. If one day I find something dry enough to make fire... then maybe I'll be able to eat properly. Until then, I'll just have to swallow small pieces whenever I can."
Aris looked down at the ground, his eyes full of bitterness.
"Like... those damn balls."
Aris sat down and began his work. Truth be told, sewing wasn't something he was bad at. The real problem was that the threads were so thin they were nearly invisible. It was obvious that the bag he was making wouldn't look very pretty.
On top of that, he didn't have much skin to work with. If the threads snapped, his bag would shrink even more—and it wasn't that big to begin with.
"What a miserable situation."
With a blank, tired stare, Aris dove into his masterpiece. The threads were painfully thin and nearly impossible to grip. And his hands—after four days of struggle—were in no shape for this kind of work. Nothing was in his favor, but he pressed on anyway.
The hardest part was figuring out where the separations were. Sometimes it was hard to even tell if what he held was one thread or two. So he started grabbing them in sets of three, just to be sure.
Thread by thread, trio by trio, the fennec's skin began to look less like a flattened rug and more like something pliable. Before long, Aris managed to shape one side of the bag.
"Yes."
His voice held a flicker of joy. Fueled by that spark, he kept going. Of course, things didn't always go smoothly. At one point, he left a section too fragile, and the whole thing unraveled instantly.
He swore—but didn't stop.
It was possible.
He resumed his work, this time reinforcing the weaker areas to prevent collapse, and extending the stronger ones to increase the bag's size. Before long, he had two sides completed.
Encouraged by progress, Aris continued. He quickly noticed that once the threads were detached, they lost their original orange hue and turned dark. Almost black. Maybe the little animal would've had a better chance of surviving if its color had been like that from the start.
Then his thoughts drifted—to the virus that had swept through the human world. It, too, turned dark after being killed. After a few days, it would lose its glow, and its endless threads seemed to wither, as if they no longer held life—not just life, but energy.
But where did that energy come from? Was it the heart? Did these beasts even have hearts?
Aris had slain many creatures in his time. None of them had hearts. Instead, they had cores. The stronger the beast, the more radiant its core. Not bigger—just brighter.
Cores weren't necessarily in the heart's place. In fact, they were often—almost always—scattered, and almost always multicolored, like pieces of a rainbow.
The strangest thing was that some massive beasts didn't just have one or two. They could have hundreds, even thousands of tiny cores, each the size of an ant—making them nearly impossible to kill.
That was the case for a terrifying beast that lived in the river between Koran and Arkis. A water creature that eventually came to be known as: Genomia.
Genomia was large. Very large. If its core had been proportional, there would have been no problem killing it. Although the creature was obviously deadly, if it had a core, it could be defeated.
However, it was with horror that the expedition sent to destroy it noticed that it had several hundred tiny cores all over its body. The mission was obviously a failure. Genomia had too many strange abilities, and without the certainty of being able to destroy all of its cores, it was impossible to win.
Nevertheless, a powerful and direct area attack could do the trick. Arkis and Koran had that kind of weapon. But it would destroy the entire area and cause other damage that might be irreparable.
Aris had to launch an expedition. Rather, a reconnaissance mission to defeat the monster, but the fall came first.
"Damn it."
Aris continued his work. The threads were becoming increasingly scarce, and the bag was not finished.
He was about to give up and go hunt more fennecs to finish it when he noticed the creature's first core.