World of Hunger

Yes. This had to be hell—or at the very least, the imagined torment of those who had committed the gravest of sins. Nemo stood atop a fleshy, undulating hill, his bare feet sinking into a surface that looked vaguely like moss but felt all wrong.

Moss, he remembered, was supposed to be green, delicate, and soft. This was none of those things. It was a pale, putrid pink with unsettling undertones of grey. It squelched beneath his toes, slimy and spongy, as though it were still alive—or perhaps, recently dead. Then the smell hit him.

It was the stench of a feast gone rotten, the sour stink of fish gutted improperly, and the sickly-sweet miasma of decay. It was worse than anything he had smelled on the docks, worse than bilge rot, worse than bloated corpses brought in by sea. It was the unmistakable odor of the inside of something. Something alive. Something enormous.

Nemo bent down, hesitantly brushing the strange growth. It clung slightly to his skin, and he recoiled, gagging. These weren't plants. These were stomach cilia—organic fibers tasked with pulling nutrients from whatever had been consumed. The realization sent a tremor through him.

He scanned the horizon. Behind him stretched a vast expanse of fleshy hills, rolling endlessly toward a towering anomaly in the far distance. It pierced the ceiling of this nauseating world—an enormous tree of flesh, meat, and sinew. It burst through the curved lining of the stomach like a tumor erupting from an organ. At the point where the tree met the ground, there was no seam. No transition. Just one continuous, grotesque body.

He shuddered. The tree seemed both familiar and utterly alien. Like the World Trees he had encountered before, but twisted—consumed by gluttony. And this stomach… this world… it felt like the lowest part of something even greater. A hidden organ buried deep within a primordial being.

There had been no section in the Guide on hunger. No entries, no testimonies. No one had returned to describe this place. Nemo's body reacted accordingly, trembling with visceral rejection. Still, he knew what he had to do. He had to walk. He had to reach that monstrous tree.

And so he walked—naked, barefoot, unprotected—through a stomach.

The cilia tore slightly underfoot, slicking his soles with warm blood. Tiny rivers of it flowed between the hills, collecting in valleys. The deeper he walked, the deeper the crimson puddles. His feet were soaked, sloshing with every step, and more than once he had to wring out congealed fluid from between his toes.

The air was thick and heavy, humid with vapor that smelled of bile, meat, and something sour-sweet that coated the back of his throat like spoiled fruit. At one point, he passed what he thought was a forest of shriveled tendrils—only to realize they were the curled, partially digested remnants of something organic, twisted into a grotesque canopy.

And yet, oddly, it wasn't as harrowing as the Metal Dream. There was pain, yes. But not the cutting, burning pain of blades. This was more… revolting than agonizing. A twisted comfort surrounded him. The blood, warm and viscous, almost cradled his feet, numbing small wounds as quickly as they opened.

Sometimes it rained. Not water. Blood. A thin red mist fell from unseen glands above, coating him from head to toe. The droplets clung like sweat, slowly running down into the corners of his mouth, salty and thick with iron. Occasionally, a hard object would crunch beneath him—a shard of bone, smooth but sharp. The first time he stepped on one, it sliced into his heel. He cried out and fell to his knees. But the blood, once again, seemed to stitch him back together, leaving behind only a dull ache.

He was beginning to acclimate. The nausea dulled. The stink faded into the background. Even the warmth of the blood began to feel oddly soothing. He still hated it—every squelch, every slick sound—but his body had stopped rejecting it outright.

That's when the voice came.

"Don't be too happy just yet."

Nemo flinched and whirled around—too quickly. His foot slipped on a wet patch, and he fell hard onto a cluster of bone shards. Pain flared in his shoulder as a sharp piece drove into his skin.

He groaned and looked up. Standing a short distance away on the undulating hillside was a youth.

He was… breathtaking.

Alabaster skin, pristine and luminous, untouched by blood or filth. Hair like molten gold fell past his shoulders, and his eyes glowed with a light too pure to be natural. He, too, was naked, yet his body radiated a kind of untouched grace, like a statue given life. No blemish marked him, no blood clung to his feet. He looked like something that should not exist here—an ethereal visitor in a world of rot.

"The creature is just observing you," the youth said, voice as soft as silk. "Testing your reaction to its insides. The real trial has yet to begin."

Nemo scrambled upright, careful this time not to slip again.

"Who are you?" he asked.

No answer came. But something in the youth's golden eyes told him the question was futile. Some truths were not yet allowed to be spoken.

"What do you mean by 'creature'?"

"This is its stomach," the youth replied calmly. "The lowest part of it. The rootbed. This is where its Tree of Hunger anchors itself."

Nemo turned slowly, following the tree's towering form from its monstrous base to where it disappeared beyond the stomach's walls. The closer he looked, the more he saw—muscles twitching beneath bark-like flesh, pulsing veins as thick as tree roots, and the entire structure breathing.

It was alive. Fully. Horribly.

"It seems bigger than the others," Nemo murmured.

The youth stepped beside him, barefoot on the blood-slick hill, yet not a drop clung to him. He looked up at the tree with serene contempt.

"Don't be fooled. Size is a trick. It wants to be seen as vast, unknowable. But it is no different from anything else that feeds without restraint. It has no principles. No honor. It is bound, crippled by its own hunger."

Nemo glanced sideways. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you're part of my escape," the youth said simply. "And that means I need you alive."

Suspicion prickled Nemo's skin. The youth's appearance, his knowledge, his strange purity—none of it felt like coincidence. "Why are you here?" he asked, voice tight.