Alec's first reaction was fuzzy. His mind was tired from everything that had happened before he passed out. But it wasn't just that. His mind was hazy like someone had draped a veil of fog over it.
But the sunshine rays of lucidity cleared the fog and laid bare the crimson reality before him.
That was his first impression.
Red.
Everything was so red.
He didn't know what it was at first. His thoughts were as viscous as the thick blood slowly dripping down from his arms onto his soaked legs.
Slowly, the edges of his vision broadened.
Other colors surrounded him and the explosion of red. Green and brown. The colors of the forest.
The scarlet explosion was a stain on the otherwise beautiful nature.
'What is…?'
Alec turned his hands over and looked at them. They were covered in blood. As were the rest of his arms. His legs. Sickeningly, he could feel the same warm sticky feeling on his face.
Quick realization flashed through Alec before he actually understood, and he threw up on the spot, adding back a splash of color to the dark red spectacle.
No matter how hard Basra pushed Alec's body, his body refused to give up what precious nutrients he had consumed. But his disgust and repulsion overloaded everything else, and he emptied his guts as best as he could on the sheep monster's mutilated corpse.
He tried to, at least.
"Ulghk!"
Heat rose through Alec's chest and throat as he tried to squeeze out everything hiding in the bottom of his stomach.
Like a cat, he retched and retched, the urge to vomit only growing.
Still, it refused to leave his body. Like a parasite, the monster's raw remains clung to his insides.
Worst of all, he could feel it like a lump deep down.
The urge—the need to puke rose, and his throat, chest, and whatever other tubes he had down there worked hard to reverse the usual progression of digestion to force the monster out.
Eventually, finally, it was close enough to the surface that he could stick a hand into his mouth and pinch it with his fingers to pull it out.
It was the most disgusting thing he had ever experienced.
Alec had the unfortunate experience of accidentally taking a bite of food with a hair in it. Pulling a strand out of his mouth, the hair pulled taut and sliding through the food and his lips and cutting through his tongue evoked visceral feelings of disgust. It was a bone-deep feeling that always made him lose his appetite.
This was a hundred times worse.
What he managed to push out of his stomach wasn't monster meat. It was what came before the meat.
The similarity with a cat coughing up a hairball didn't end with the repeated retching.
Alec pulled a lump of wool out of his throat, each strand cozily tickling his soft flesh and the tiny punching back in the back of his gullet. And when he yanked it out of his mouth, the bristly, soaking wet hair brushed against his tongue, the roof of his mouth, and his teeth like it was trying to leave a mark.
Alec threw it away and continued retching until a squirt of bile dribbled out of his mouth.
He wasn't getting more than that.
Alec turned away from the monster corpse and collapsed on the ground with tears in his eyes, bile and spit blending with the blood around his mouth.
'Whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuck…?!'
The last he knew, he had collapsed after killing the sheep monster.
Why had he woken up seemingly in the middle of eating it like a wild beast?!
'System…? What happened while I was passed out?' Alec desperately needed to distract himself from what had just happened, and the taste of dirt and sensation of grass in his mouth wasn't helping.
[You…experienced the side effect of one of your skills. Or so it would seem.]
Alec's brow was wound in a tighter knot than one used to secure a boat.
'One of my skills?' He asked, the nature of thoughts dulling the sharpness of his question.
The System didn't respond with words. Instead, it pulled up his status window.
[Alec Lanterns]
[No Title Available]
[Stats:
[Strength -Wood]
[Dexterity - Mud]
[Agility - Mud]
[Durability - Wood]
[Resistance - Mud]
[Intelligence - Mud]
[Energy - Wood]
[Skill Energy - Wood]
[Skills:
[Reader]
[Seed of ???
[Registered Keywords:
[???????????]
[???????????]
[?????????????]
[????????]
[???????]
[????? ?????? ????:
[?????]
[?????]
[????]
[????]
[?????]
[?????]
[Gluttony]
"..."
[...]
"Well…shit."
Alec didn't know what else to say. It wasn't his worst fear, but it was pretty high up on the list.
It didn't take a genius to figure out what the revealed part of his [Seed of ???] skill meant.
[Gluttony] was one of the seven subcategories of one of [Seed of ???]'s subcategories, which happened to have a name of three words. Alec counted the number of question marks just to make sure. The result made him sigh, which he regretted, as the foul smell of the monster's insides crept up his nose.
One of the registered keywords for his [Seed of ???] was most likely [Seven Deadly Sins], and he had just unlocked the Deadly Sin of Gluttony.
He had most likely started poking the skill awake every time he experienced hunger or a desire for a lot of food. The skill had made him hungrier than he should have been.
Of course, it wasn't all bad. It had digested any excess flab on his body and perfectly transformed the nutrients he consumed into building blocks to strengthen his body. Over the course of a couple of weeks, his body had undergone a—it wasn't a drastic, but a noticeable transformation, at least. It was quicker than expected.
Alec had simply chalked it up to it being a fantasy world where the innate limits of the human body were supposedly removed, and where Aether was a thing. That wasn't all.
A dormant Sin had helped out.
"Shit."
He cursed again.
The skill increased his metabolism and the conversion of food into strength.
It probably did more than that. No, Alec could say with certainty that the skill wouldn't be just limited to that.
It had to be an overpowered skill.
It was just that it came with the downside of turning him into a ravenous beast, blinded by hunger, if he didn't eat enough.