About ten minutes later, I slunk back to the clinic door again.
I admit it. I chickened out.
I'd thought that as long as I dressed as raggedly as the locals and kept my head down, I could just barely blend in. At minimum, I could walk around, see if there was a way back up, or try to hear something about the Lady Inquisitor.
I was wrong. Spectacularly wrong.
The surroundings… were still the same. Sleeping here for two extra days hadn't made this place any friendlier. My pampered "upper-class" build, my posture that still looked out of place no matter how hard I hunched, and my eyes—darting around in terror behind the metal mesh of my respirator—everything about me was like lighting a candle in the night, clearly labeling me to every predator in this dark jungle:
I am a plump, tender, and harmless piece of prey.
I felt like a husky that had wandered into a wolf pack. Even if I tucked my tail and tried to howl like a wolf, it didn't change the aura coming off me from head to toe: I'm stupid, and I'm naïve.
In my ten-minute "expedition" (and I nearly got lost), aside from the ones who ignored me or were simply curious, I could feel at least five or six waves of malicious stares sticking to me like thick machine oil. A burly man with half his face missing, an artificial eye glowing as it pinned me in place, deliberately slammed the black-liquid-dripping length of pipe he was carrying into the ground right in front of me as I passed. The splatter nearly smeared my whole face. A few gang types in a corner, carving up and sharing some kind of roasted meat that no longer had a recognizable shape, whistled outright and beckoned me over with obscene gestures.
What made my spine go cold was a shop with a flickering "DENTIST" sign. The man sitting at the entrance was using pliers to trim his own nails. He looked up, bared his teeth, and grinned at me, revealing a mouthful of teeth replaced with screws and rivets of assorted sizes. In that moment, I had no doubt that if I stared at him one second longer, my nice white teeth would become his next collection piece. Or his next merchandise.
Fear—cold as mercury—flooded my limbs all over again. And I finally, miserably, accepted the truth: in a place this utterly unfamiliar, without someone's protection, I couldn't survive. I couldn't even find my way out, let alone find my way back. The little bits of cleverness I'd learned in modern society didn't mean a damn thing here.
So I fled back, scrambling and stumbling, as pathetic as a rabbit chased by hounds.
I stood before that familiar sheet-metal door, my feelings a tangled mess. Embarrassment. Shame. A trace of wanting to crawl into a crack in the ground and disappear. I suspected that if I hadn't been wearing the bracelet Marta had given me, I might not even have made it back. I raised my hand and hesitated for a long time before I finally knocked, lightly, with the kind of force a cat might use to scratch.
The door creaked open.
Marta's deeply furrowed face appeared behind it. Her cloudy eyes looked at me quietly, her expression not the slightest bit surprised—like my humiliating performance had been exactly what she expected.
"Back?" she rasped, shifting aside to let me in.
"Mm…" I kept my head down, my cheeks burning so hot I wished I could vanish.
She didn't say anything. She simply turned and went back into the inner room of the clinic, resuming her steady pounding of herbs.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
That natural, unforced attitude made it feel like I wasn't some down-on-my-luck lodger who'd just bounced off the wall of reality, but a kid who'd stayed out too late playing and come home sheepishly.
In that instant, the last scraps of dignity and luck I'd been clinging to were ground into powder by this cruel reality and her silent acceptance. Me—a modern man from a civilized world—formally began my life as a long-term squatter in a slum clinic in this dark world.
At dinner, I finally understood what "the wisdom of survival" really meant.
I held a bent iron spoon—someone had clearly snapped it crooked, then hammered it barely straight again—and stirred the food in the tin can in front of me with a tortured expression. Even though my shriveled gut was roaring in protest, viciously urging me to eat immediately, and even though I felt deep gratitude for Marta taking me in and caring for me, my modern, pampered palate and common sense were still resisting with stubborn pride in the face of this meal that shattered every lower boundary I thought existed.
In the tin can, a dark brown, paste-like sludge churned slowly, with oily fragments floating on top—shiny shell pieces that looked like cockroach wing cases.
"Ironcarapace soup." Marta named the bowl in a tone that brooked no argument. "It'll help you replenish strength and mend tissue. Best thing for a young man who's just getting over injuries."
…All right. Given the biodiversity of this world, I could believe it was protein-rich.
Before I could finish bracing myself, she pinched a small handful of fluorescent green powder from a little pouch and sprinkled it into my soup without asking, muttering as she did it.
"Adding a bit of seasoning. Gives it some bite."
The moment the powder hit the soup, it gave off a sharp, pungent odor—like mustard mixed with disinfectant. I later learned that this stuff was the spores of an anti-radiation fungus that had mutated in the sewers after a pipe leak from some upper-level pharmaceutical plant. Down here, its status was probably the same as pepper that once cost its weight in gold on eighteenth-century European tables.
"Try this too. Uppers don't get the pleasure." Marta peeled open an oil-paper packet and handed me something shaped like a black biscuit.
The "biscuit" was riddled with honeycomb pores, and inside those pores were tiny crushed seeds of unknown origin. It gave off an indescribable metallic smell. I hesitated, then shut my eyes and took a small bite. A violent blast of blood-and-rust flavor detonated across my mouth. As for the texture, it was like chewing a rusty iron chunk mixed with sand.
"Blood-boost biscuit." Marta looked at me like I'd hit the jackpot. "Mixed with blood meal and iron powder. You're weak. This'll put some strength back in you."
All right. That name was painfully accurate.
I stared at this "nutritional supplement" that could pass for a biochemical weapon, then looked at Marta's own food—one black block with the texture of cardboard and the color of ancient grime. She called it "civilian standard ration," the main staple for residents of Spirepeak City's Lower City.
She ate the worst rations herself, while pushing what she considered "good stuff" onto me—an unlucky fool who obviously used to live soft and had only just fallen into this hell.
Thinking about that made my chest ache in a complicated way. A person can't be this ungrateful. I clenched my teeth, shut my eyes, scooped up a huge spoonful of Ironcarapace soup—shell fragments included—and swallowed it down in one go.
"Crack…"
A hard metal granule in the soup caught on my tooth. Frowning, I spat it into my palm on instinct.
Marta's hand moved like lightning. With a pair of tweezers, she snatched the tiny metal fleck out of my palm, her face twisting with genuine pain.
"Hey, don't throw that away. That's good stuff. Zinc." She shook her head and carefully packed the fleck into a little medicine vial made from scrap copper pipe, chattering as she did. "Last week those lads from the Blackfire Gang hit a Clean Water Guild transfer point. They only managed to scrape together one little bottle like this from somebody's discarded filter…"
I silently watched her store the "zinc supplement" away as if it were treasure, then lowered my head and kept drinking my soup.
I can't say the meal was delicious, but I can promise it was warm in the belly, and warm in the heart.
Beneath these low-grade, strange, even disgusting surfaces, that plain, human care and kindness simply couldn't be hidden. I couldn't help remembering the "feast" I'd once seen in the canteen at Valmonda Fortress. That food had been just as revolting, but it carried a pure, nauseating malice.
And later, the life-sign maintenance meals the Lady Inquisitor provided… I could only say they were purely cold. They didn't treat a person as a person, only as a machine, and the meal as fuel. Nothing more.
Here, yes, food was still just for staying alive.
But in this food, there was the temperature of living.
(End of Chapter)
[Get +30 Extra Chapters On — P@tr3on "Zaelum"]
[Every 300 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter Drop]
[Thanks for Reading!]