Early Version Story - Chapter 2 (Patreon)

[New Passive] {Wormblood}

Your body constantly regenerates itself at a rapid pace through an extremely intensive, calorically expensive process.

[New Passive] {Blue Shimmer}

Thanks to the mold in your eyes, they are particularly strong in dark environments and allow you to see what others do not.

He lurches forward, clawing himself free from the heap of ancient debris and mildew that buries him alive. The man falls down on all fours, as his trembling legs buckle beneath the meager weight of his own shivering body. Looking down at himself in abject disgust, he looks at his grotesque form, at the body covered in lichen and fuzzy overgrowth. As he realizes what it all is, he grabs fistfuls of it, tearing it off of his body with rabid shrieks. The deeply set roots, which have long since started digging into this strange, new gestalt, come out, ripping pieces of his meat out along with them as they go. Red flesh dangles off of the rot in his hands, like dirt clinging to the roots of an overturned tree.

Blood drips out of the raw, freely hanging skin next to the freshly gaping wound on his breast. He watches in horror as a latticework of sinew strings itself together, pulling the hole just above his core back together, as if an expert seamstress were patching it. It’s a slow process. The outer layer of skin seems to close itself off first. Tenderly lowering a shaking finger with his other hand, he presses against the soft spot and feels that it is still hollow beneath the skin. As his finger presses against the flap covering the hole in his body, he can feel the empty space beneath it filling and pressing itself back together, growing new meat. New him.

Something squiggles on the bottom corner of his vision and he looks at his arms. It’s covering him. The growth, the mold, the worms. They’re all covering him. Frantically, He rips and claws and screams, pulling everything off of himself, out of himself. He isn’t sure how long it takes to peel off the layer from his exterior, to peel off the biofilm that clings to his body like a thick mucus. He isn’t sure how many fistfuls of fungus he pulls off of his living flesh, their mycelium roots tickling his insides as he yanks them free, undoing their bind around his organs. A series of disgustingly wet popping noises can be heard, as he tears it all out. He isn’t sure how many pale, wiggly white worms he pulls out of his body, out of his gums, out of his eyes. But eventually, there is nothing left except for a mound of wriggling, fuzzy afterbirth surrounding him on all sides as he falls back down onto his hands and knees. The man heaves, retching, and for the first time since he has awakened, he stops screaming as the muscles in his throat clench themselves together.

“Hey! Are you okay?” asks the voice in the distance, certainly not for the first time now. The chiming continues along with it. He listens to the sound of a chain winding up, being pulled back taut again. The noise is only barely audible over the sounds of his violently beating heart that seems to slam into his ears over and over, but he hears it nonetheless. “Hello?” calls the voice, worried. He ignores it. His vision trembles as he stares down at his hands. It hurts. It all hurts. His hole-ridden body hurts. His bones, still busy snapping back into place, hurt. His shaking fingers, clawing into the gunk beneath him, hurt. But most of all -

The man’s hand goes to his empty gut, squeezing it tightly. His stomach is apparently back where it should be as far as he can tell.

- But most of all, it hurts. He’s so hungry. He’s so hungry. Why is he so hungry?! His stomach growls, his fingers pressing firmly into his soft meat as he keels over, his form falling against the stones as he clutches himself in agony. It hurts. It hurts so much. He’s starving. He’s famished. He’s empty.

- Empty.

His eyes go wide. His body is empty. His soul is empty. He needs to eat. He needs to consume. He needs to fill this… this void inside of himself. This chasm. Before it grows so large that it can swallow him entirely. His eyes wander all around the area around him, stopping only at the heaps of bloody, chunky mold with the little silver worms still crawling through them.

Not thinking with anything other than a feral hunger, the starving creature crawls forward and claws at the fetid mounds, tearing at them, ripping them into pieces and shoveling them greedily into his mouth. Fistful by fistful, he scoops the grime that he had just tore from his own flesh, back into himself like a mother eating its own cannibalistic young. Consuming that which had tried to do the same to him.

The thing that he is doesn’t bother chewing, it doesn’t bother breathing except for those few instances when his lungs burn with a fire too hot to ignore. Then and only then does he stop gorging himself for a moment, only to breathe once or twice before smashing more fistfuls of the putrid rot into himself.

“It’s disgusting. It’s disgusting. It’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever eaten,” is all he manages to think in human thoughts as he crams another mouthful of it into his maw. He can feel the little worms wiggling on top of his tongue, tickling the back of his throat. He can feel them dancing around between the gaps of his teeth. But he ignores the sensations and swallows them, as something deeper, something more animalistic, something feral and hungry overtakes his sense of reason.

[Unique Class: SIN-EATER]

A chosen of the sin of gluttony. The sin-eater is all but a memory of the past. Originating from a forgotten age, it is an avatar of a yearning, spiritual hunger with a desperate need to fill itself with anything and everything.

A sin-eater is born only in the deepest dead-wombs of the dungeons of the world, where compressive magical forces collide with a desperate hunger of a lost soul. The nature of a sin-eater is simply to consume anything and everything whether physical or spiritual in order to cleanse the world. Their bodies and spirits have adapted to fulfill this purpose. They yearn to fill the deep-hunger with ever more potent nourishment.

Despite being creatures of endless consumption, sin-eaters are held in high-regard by the holy church, given their ability to cleanse the souls of the wicked by eating their sins, through which they earn their name-sake.

[New Passive] {Gluttony}

Your stomach acids become incredibly potent and you digest at an incredible pace, making you resistant to harmful effects of poison-meat. Additionally, you become hyper-efficient at absorbing carbohydrates, fats and proteins from all sources.

[New Auto-Active Ability] {Eat the Wicked}

When biting another creature or eating food that they have confessed over, you begin to eat the darkness of their hearts, making its sins your own, thereby absolving them of their transgressions.

[New Passive] {You are what you eat}

Eating a sin will transfer some of its forebearer's essence to you.

He doesn’t bother lifting his head to look at the menus that have appeared before him as he keeps shoveling more and more of the bile of the dungeon into his mouth. He only lifts his eyes towards them for a brief moment, before his vision falls back down to the putrid goo in his hands. A class? He already has a class. He’s a…

A…

He looks around, stopping his feast for a moment, the worms in his fists crawling away through the gaps between his fingers as they make a daring escape. “Didn’t I have a class?” he mumbles to himself. Not sure anymore. He’s sure he did. Didn’t he? “Huh…” says the man, lost in his own foggy thoughts for a moment.

Cave Moss   ~400g   Calories: 200   Protein: 10 g   Fat: 0 g   *Carbs: 60 g   Fiber: 10 g   Sugars: 16 g

Corpse Worms   ~100g   Calories: 223   *Protein: 20 g   Fat: 12 g   Carbs: 6 g   Fiber: 2.5 g   Sugars: 0 g

Looking down at his hands, he looks at the fistfuls of mold, covered in his own chunks of red meat. Watching, he sees dozens of the little silver worms wriggling their way out and with a sudden, disgusted screech, he tosses it all down, falling backwards in revolt as he sees the tiny, silver creatures wiggling around in his grasp, still covering his hands. He flails and kicks out, throwing as many of them off of himself as possible. He feels his gut clench together as his body gets ready to purge, as he comes back to himself and realizes what he has just done. His stomach compresses, his chest heaves. But nothing comes up, save for a slight burning in his esophagus. Why did he eat that?! He’s disgusted with himself beyond words. Lowering his shaking hands, he looks at his palms, realizing now for the first time in coherent, human thoughts - “I’m alive…” mutters the man quietly to himself.

He died. He’s sure of it. He fell. He…

He looks at his shaking, filthy palms. He was pushed. They pushed him. They killed him. His own party. The longer that he stares at his fingers, the more he realizes how alien they appear to him. His hands are sleeker and smoother than he recalls them being. The skin darker and tanned. His entire frame is differently built than he remembered it being. Smaller. Meeker. Frailer. This isn’t his body. This is… this is something else. Someone else. “What is this?” he whispers in quiet horror. He looks further down. At least he’s still a man, even though everything he sees is disturbingly smooth and fish-like in its featurelessness.

Sort of.

The man looks around himself. “Where am I…? Is this the dungeon?” he asks, not quite sure who it is that he's asking, if anyone at all.

The sound of a chain being pulled comes back to his ears and his gaze continues to wander as he searches for its origin, following the sound as best as he can in the dimly lit space, until his eyes finally land on the source of the tone. A long, bronze pipe. Just next to where he woke up. He crawls forward towards it, pressing his ear down against its open end and listens.

“Yes,” rings out the chiming voice, the sound of it echoing as it comes down through the horizontally laid pipe that juts out of the cave wall. “Did you get hurt? You screamed a lot there,” remarks the person, their voice taking some time to travel towards him by the sound of it.

He bends his fingers, wrapping them around the rough surface of the rusted, timeworn pipe. “I… uh…” He looks around the dark space that he finds himself inside of. A small, damp chamber. His mind, slowly coming up to speed, races as it tries to process the events that led him to this point. “- I think I died.”

“You don’t sound dead,” says the voice quietly a moment later, after it travels up to him through the pipe. Its tone almost sounds a little insulted.

“Yeah…” is all that he manages to answer as he rubs his head, which is pounding with a sore ache. Was the world always this… big? He looks at his new body again. He's pretty sure that it’s smaller than his old one. It looks slender and lacks any real definition. He rubs his arms, feeling the weird, damp skin. A moment later, he realizes that he doesn’t have any clothes. Thankfully, nobody is around to see him, apart from the voice that is coming through the pipe. A crank winds itself back up again. “Hey, I’ll be right back,” calls the man, knocking on the tube twice as he walks away to look down at a pool of water nearby.

“Wait! Don’t go!” calls the voice somewhat desperately out from behind him. But he ignores it and bends over, looking into the pool of old water, running his fingers over his face to pull on it and he watches as the stranger in the reflection mimics his movements. His fingers run up through his hair, feeling it. It’s white, but not an aged, refined white. Rather it’s like the kind of hair he saw so many people get in his old life when they saw too much, too quickly. When they became deeply shocked and traumatized. Unkempt, wild, pale like a ghost’s.

His lips smack as he realizes how dry they are and a second later, before he even thinks about it, his entire head is pressed down into the pool of stagnant cave water. His stomach presses in and out as he takes in gulp after gulp, filling himself with the foul water, stopping only when the burning in his lungs becomes too much to ignore once again.

With a sharp gasp, the man wrenches his head back out, his wet hair dripping down his shoulders as he lets out a deeply satisfied sigh, despite how loudly his stomach growls in immediate discomfort and pain. But it stops a short moment later, as if a hand had come to muzzle its mouth and silence it.

Stagnant Water
  ~800mL
  Tainted   - Make Up -   Trace Minerals: 1.00%   Water: 91.00%   Other 8.00%

“Hello…?” asks the timid voice from the pipe again, still sounding somewhat unsure and unconfident.

“I’m still here,” he calls out across the small cavern. He looks back down at the face in the disturbed water that stares back up at him. Something about it makes him feel uneasy and he quickly averts his gaze, turning his eyes from his own as he gets back up, walking back over to the broken section of pipe. “Sorry, I got thirst-” The man stops mid-sentence, sparing a moment to look over at the side as he sees something that is impossible to miss. There is running water right over there. Not a lot. But a tiny stream that leads up to a hole in the wall. Maybe that would have been smarter to drink?

“Are you near a fountain?” asks the voice, having understood him nonetheless.

“Uh…” he turns back towards the stagnant pool of brackish water. “Not really.”

It’s quiet for a moment. “You didn’t drink the cave-water, did you? It’s really bad for you,” chimes the soft voice with a hint of worried judgment, which they seem to pick up on themselves and then try to play down before finishing their sentence.

His fist strikes against his chest as he feels his gut begin to argue with him again, but it subsides a moment later. “I’m fine.” He looks up, staring at the gaping void that leads upwards towards the distant surface. “- I think?”

“I need your help,” says the voice, repeating itself again. “I’m stuck.”

His fingers run along the back of his neck as he rubs his sore, dewy body. The man flinches as he feels something fuzzy beneath his fingers and quickly rips off a piece of mold that he had missed earlier. This one he doesn’t eat, throwing it far, far away in disgust. It hits the wall with a wet flop. “Stuck where?” he asks a moment later, shuddering as the nausea returns to his senses once again.

“I…” They’re quiet for a moment. “I don’t know. There are a lot of pipes. There’s a big door. But I can’t open it.”

“I don’t know where anything like that is,” says the man plainly, looking around and trying to recall what he remembers of the dungeon. A room with pipes? Were there ever even pipes here to begin with? He closes his eyes, trying to think better. But no images of his old life seem to return to him. Only vague feelings and senses of things having been this way or that way. But no pipes.

Then again, they never got too deep. “I suppose I’m the first one to reach the bottom,” he mutters to himself.

“Huh?” chimes the voice.

“Oh, nothing. Uh… What’s your name?” he asks, calling down into the hole.

“Alleluia,” says the voice ringing back to him a moment later. Something mechanical whirs along with it, like a turning of gears as a crank winds itself up again. “- It’s nice to meet you.”