No matter how hard I try, I just can't remember how I ended up here, so it's better if I just tell you what happened from the moment I arrived. First, I opened my eyes. My body was the same, but when I looked around, I realized I was in some sticky, slimy cave. Enormous leaves and tiny—but hundreds of—larvae were everywhere.
I couldn't make sense of what I was seeing. I thought it was a nightmare—well, at least I hoped it was.
After a while, two massive bugs walked into the room—on four legs, holding spears and shields in their hands. They were almost my height. I was so terrified and disgusted that I threw up—and not in a normal way. I vomited until I couldn't breathe and passed out.
When I opened my eyes again, I realized I was actually inside an ant nest. In a gigantic cavern, hundreds of human-sized insects were crawling around. They'd put me on some kind of wooden throne-like thing, and from there I could see the entire cave. I lifted my head and looked up—then I saw it.
A colossal insect. So massive that even the others looked tiny next to it, and it was standing right in front of me.
The moment I saw that giant bug, I squeezed my eyes shut in pure terror, but my ears kept hearing the most disgusting sounds I've ever heard in my life—wet, sticky squelches, deafening insect clicks, the internal squirming noises coming from the giant's abdomen… and all of it echoed through the cavern.
I couldn't move; I was frozen. But my whole body was trembling so violently that it almost muffled the sounds.
I passed out again after a while.
This time I woke up in another leaf-covered room, but now there were massive mushrooms everywhere. In the middle of the room was the corpse of a bug—and inside it, hundreds of larvae were eating it. As revolting as it was, I had thrown up so much that if I didn't eat something, I was going to die.
Slowly, I approached the corpse. I grabbed its hand and brought it to my mouth. A dead insect's hand was between my teeth. I closed my eyes and bit down as hard as I could. It was indescribably horrible, but if I wanted to survive, I had to do it.
And that's how I lived for the next year. Dragged around by soldiers, going wherever they wanted me to go. Surviving on that disgusting bug meat. And slowly, I began to forget what it meant to be human.
After a year, the larvae I'd eaten meals with had grown and begun to form cocoons. But there was nothing I could do about that.
Well… except one thing.
A thought came to me—but could my stomach handle it?
If I couldn't form a cocoon myself, then I'd just take someone else's.
After all, in this place, killing your own siblings—if it was for strength—was perfectly acceptable.
I grabbed one of the spears from the big soldier bugs and started cutting into one of the cocoons. It was like a half-cooked egg—hard on the outside, but with dense patches of tissue and this weird, mud-like fluid inside. I prepared myself as much as I could and climbed inside.
The inside felt absolutely vile, but if I wanted to live and return to my world, I had no choice. After a while, exhaustion hit me so hard I couldn't keep my eyes open. Even though I was suffocating, choking, unable to breathe, sleep won.
My skin peeled, my bones melted, parts of me were breaking down while new ones were being rebuilt.
But the thing I thought about most while I was inside the cocoon…
was whether I was still human at all.