The feeling in the meadow was strange today.
There was a constant, soft, yet entirely unreasonable force gently tugging at his back. It felt like an invisible, giant hand was continuously trying to pull him backward, trying to force him into a massive, warm embrace. But he didn't want to lie down and rest just yet. He still had berries to pick.
Erika's fingers lightly touched a red berry.
The berry was round, plump, and scalding hot. Its skin was stretched taut, as if filled to bursting with the sweetest juice, ready to pop at any moment. It grew deep within that glossy, dark green expanse, tucked beside the ribs of a sheep that had long since stopped moving, its eyes pierced by its own horns. The berry pressed against his skin, so hot it felt exactly like a beating heart just ripped from a chest.
Sweetness. That fatal, tongue-numbing sweetness seeped from every line of the berry's skin, following Erika like a shadow into his nostrils. It was too sweet, as if all the sunlight of the entire meadow had been forcefully brewed into this one small piece of fruit.
Hunger. Craving. That gnawing ache in his stomach surged up from the depths, making his body tremble uncontrollably. His only good hand, his left, shakingly plucked that scalding berry from the gap between leaf and bone and cradled it in his palm. Its weight was just right—heavy, as if filled with something viscous that was about to overflow.
Slowly, inch by inch, he brought it to his lips.
Just one bite. Pop. That sweet juice would burst open, filling his mouth, sliding down his throat, trickling down his esophagus. Scalding. Sweet. Filling his empty stomach completely.
His lips had already touched the warm skin. The berry's surface dimpled slightly against his mouth, like a blood-filled bubble on the verge of bursting, ready to offer all its sweetness to him without reservation.
But in that instant, his movement froze.
"Good child..."
The voice drifted from very far away, yet also seemed to grow directly from his own brainstem. Cold. Rigid. Like a venom-coated steel needle, precisely piercing the sweetness-soaked chaos.
"Sela is waiting for you." "Warm water." "The prayer room."
Sela.
That name flickered like a faint lamp in the darkest depths of the abyss. He saw the hem of a white robe, saw a pair of hands—the hands that would wipe his face, warm, carrying the faint scent of cheap soap. He saw her eyes. Those eyes always held something that dodged, trembled, feared. But sometimes, when no one else was around, they would secretly, gently, fall upon his scar-covered body.
His anchor. His everything.
The only person in this icy hell who had ever given him "warm water" and gentle promises. The one who, when he looked up and asked, "Will the Father come to see me today?", would remain silent for a very long time, before saying in a hoarse whisper, "He will."
When she smiled, the corners of her mouth always strained. Like she was pulling at a crushing weight. Like she was smiling for someone else to see, yet constantly on the verge of weeping.
But Erika didn't care. As long as she smiled, it was enough.
He would take this sweetest, biggest, hottest berry back. For Sela.
She would surely be happy. She would surely smile a genuine, unburdened smile for once.
Erika carefully tucked the berry, like a fragile sacred relic, into his torn gray straitjacket. It pressed against his chest, transmitting its scalding heat through the thin, rough fabric into his skin, syncing with his heartbeat. Hot. Like a little sun tucked close to his heart.
There were more here.
He looked up.
There were more there.
As far as the eye could see, amidst that dark, lush grass, these red, melting giant berries dotted the landscape. Hanging in the shadows of leaves, hidden among the shattered ribs of sheep, piled in the blood-red folds of churning earth. One, two, countless. Each one radiated heat, each one beckoned to him.
Erika began to run across the meadow.
His feet sank deep into the soft earth that breathed like some colossal living entity, each step sinking in, only to be springily pushed back up. The earth pushed him, propelled him, urged him faster, faster.
He had only one arm, but he picked quickly. Bend down, grab a hot berry, stuff it in his shirt. Bend down, dig out another, stuff it in. Recklessly, he shoved handfuls of those intensely sweet, fragrant red berries into his shirt with desperate urgency.
His fingers were stained red with juice. His fingernails were packed with crushed pulp and some dark, viscous particles he couldn't identify. The straitjacket bulged, each berry seeping warm red juice, dyeing his gray clothes a vivid, dripping crimson.
Some berries were packed too tightly, bursting with a muffled pop against his chest. The hot, viscous juice ran down his stomach, soaking into his waistband, into his thighs, scalding him so much he shivered.
But he didn't care.
Getting dirty didn't matter.
Sela would wash him clean with warm water.
He ran faster. Past the sheep still chewing numbly, past the sheep that had stopped moving, past the sheep with deformed horns that had pierced their own eyes, now melting back into the soil.
His shirt grew heavier, hotter. The sticky red spread from his chest to his waist, from his waist to his legs, soaking him entirely in a glaring crimson.
But he felt full.
A pure, almost mad joy rose from deep within his chest, filling his whole being, tightening his throat, warming his eyes.
He finally had a gift.
Not blood, not mud, not those filthy, disgusting things that would earn him a brutal beating. It was berries. Sweet. Beautiful. A gift he could present cleanly.
Sela would like it.
HUMMMM—HUMMMM—
Suddenly. An extremely dull, overwhelmingly violent pulse exploded from all directions without warning.
The sound didn't enter through his ears—it detonated simultaneously in his bones, his organs, and every nerve ending.
The soft meadow beneath Erika's feet began to shake, twist, and roll violently. Like a great beast that had slumbered too long, finally awakened and impatiently rolling over to violently shake off the dense parasites on its back. The grass convulsed, the earth dry-heaved, the sheep were tossed high and slammed down hard, producing the sickening, muffled thud, thud of shattering bone and flesh.
Erika couldn't keep his balance.
His only good hand desperately tried to grab something—anything, a blade of grass, a stem, a clump of mud—but his shirt was too full of berries; he couldn't free his hand. Those heavy, scalding, pulsing berries pressed dead against his chest like a soft, melting wall of meat, separating him from the world.
The turf beneath his feet tilted violently.
Riiiip—
Erika's boot slipped on a patch of something viscous, indistinguishable between mud and pulp.
His foot slid.
It felt like stepping directly into a chewing abyssal maw. A soft, warm, wriggling tongue supported his sole, then pushed him violently away.
His body completely lost control.
Like a kite with a snapped string, he pitched backward. Under the terrifying pull of gravity, he fell straight toward the violently churning, pitch-black, sightless unknown abyss.
"Sela... the berries... my berries..."
In the moment before losing his balance and falling, the only thought in Erika's hollow mind was not the terror of being smashed to pieces. Not the darkness about to consume everything.
It was that the gifts stuffed in his shirt—would fly out, fall in the mud, get dirty, get ruined. She wouldn't receive them. She wouldn't see them. She would keep smiling that strained smile, like porcelain about to shatter.
No. He wouldn't allow it.
He wouldn't let anything take away the gift for Sela. Not even this hell that wanted to swallow him skin and bone.
Just as his back was about to crash into the unknown darkness, and the pile of red berries in his shirt was about to scatter from the violent impact—
Squelch. Squelch. Slurp. Slurp.
Erika looked down in shock.
The massive pile of red, scalding, round berries in his shirt hadn't scattered like he imagined. They hadn't shattered, hadn't splattered, hadn't turned into a pile of mush falling into darkness.
They had come alive.
They squirmed, churned, like a swarm of awakened blood parasites, desperately pressing into each other, burrowing frantically into his body.
They melted together.
Flesh fused with flesh, juice mixed with juice, skin stuck to skin. They became a terrifying substance, extremely viscous, extremely warm, hovering somewhere between solid and liquid—like half-coagulated blood clots, like freshly severed, madly spasming meat paste.
That thing stuck to his skin. No, not "stuck"—it grew onto him. Every inch of contact greedily seeped into his pores, crawled into his veins.
The juices didn't fall downward. They surged upward.
They flowed up Erika's torn straitjacket, along his ribs, his neck, his arms, even burrowing deep into his empty right sleeve. Like countless small, warm, blood-red water snakes coiling, climbing, and rooting viciously into those long-severed nerve endings.
Hot. Scalding.
That heat wasn't the temperature of fire—it was a living thing's body heat. The scalding fever of something extremely violent breathing, pulsing, and growing inside him. It carried an absolutely irresistible, parasitic erosiveness, instantly forging his skin and muscles together.
"Ugh…"
Erika made an extremely faint, chaotic sound.
Not a moan, not a sob, more like the harrowing resonance of a hollow container being forcibly stuffed full.
It wasn't comfortable. But it didn't hurt either. Like being wrapped in extremely volatile, extremely mad "warm water"—hotter than Sela's hand by a hundred times, darker than the prayer room's candlelight by ten thousand. It pushed inward, crawled deeper, filling those empty spaces in his mutilated body, one by one, with flesh and blood.
The instant the melted "berry juice" completely covered him, it burst outward.
Hissing violently, it stabbed into the soft wall behind his back.
Click. Click. Click.
In a fraction of a second, those red tissues calcified from liquid to solid. Cooled. Ossified. Grew.
Like tree roots forcefully splitting rock, like venomous vines in a death-grip around a high wall. They extended from Erika's body, stabbed into every fixed corner.
Nailing him, irreversibly.
Motionless. Absolutely fixed.
"...?"
Confusion. Bewilderment.
Erika blinked.
He hadn't fallen. His back hadn't shattered. His berries hadn't flown away. His gifts were still here.
They were inside his body, beneath his skin, in the gaps of his bones.
He was burning up. That "joy" surging from his chest seemed to have completely become part of his body. He didn't need to hug them with his only arm anymore. The berries were inside him. They pulsed with him. Burned with him. Breathed with him.
He was fixed in place.
But his perspective had changed.
Erika moved his eyes in a daze. In his current view, everything was inverted.
The meadow. The grass, the sheep, the soil they'd become, the berries he'd craved—now all hovered before his eyes, above his head, in the steel sky that was collapsing with mad force beneath his "feet."
They were melting.
Those green, white, brown, and red remnants, under terrifying water pressure, twisted, stretched, and ground together, like a giant invisible hand had tossed them into a blender.
The sweetness grew stronger. So strong it became a tangible, bloody stench, like thick syrup forced from his nostrils down his throat, backing up from his throat into his lungs, so sweet it suffocated, so sweet it sickened.
It was hell's funnel. The abyss's throat.
Everything—the broken grass, the crushed sheep, the churning soil, the burst berries, the light, the shadows—pulled by a terrifying gravitational vortex, merged, and churned.
It became a blood-red vortex, tens of meters across, bottomless, grinding with a teeth-aching, thunderous roar!
What is that… Erika, suspended upside-down on the assimilated wall, thought innocently.
That red vortex spun madly, incredibly fast. Those viscous slurp, slurp sounds came from within it.
Like chewing. Like swallowing. Like countless mouths at the bottom of the abyss, simultaneously crunching bone and soul.
Like a giant juicer.
The berries were inside. The sheep were inside. The grass was inside. The soil was inside. The light was inside. The darkness was inside.
Everyone, all melted together.