The floating mother creature pressed against the far side of her tube as the glass fractured and burst open. Green fluid sprayed and rolled across the floor, rapidly evaporating into mist and leaving a mossy stain on the floor.
I kept myself clear of the splash and helped the mother out of the broken tube without cutting her on the jagged glass.
Her limbs were thin, and her body crooked, but she had the strength to stand. She bowed to me before scampering off toward the altars. The children growing out of her back blinked at me, their wet hair draped across their mother’s flanks as they took in their new environment.
I waved, but they didn’t wave back.
The mother quickly worked the altar controls, and the arrays hummed. A sense of pressure built in the air, and the tubes trembled before each started draining. The green liquid drained away, and the formation on the ground glowed like emerald veins before fading.
Once emptied, the tubes slid into the ground and exposed the creatures to the air. They were all of different proportions, as though someone had taken wax dolls and stretched them out in the sun. They flopped and crawled into the center of the room, where they embraced and gibbered wordlessly.
It was heartwarming, and I wiped away a tear.
After a few minutes, I deemed it was a good enough moment to interrupt.
“Excuse me?” I asked. “Do any of you know how to open the door?”
As one, the eight creatures turned to face me. A few dozen eyes blinked at me, solid black, wet, staring.
“The door that leads outside,” I clarified.
“...”
“It’s sealed,” I said. “And I can’t use any of the controls for some reason...”
I was doing my best to be polite, but my body yearned to see the sky and feel the breath of the wind.
One creature tottered forward, her waist split in the middle to become two women who licked their lips as they approached.
“You smell delicious,” she said. “Be our food?”
“Wait, you can talk?”
Her heads nodded one by one.
“Be our food, delicious-smelling cousin.”
“That isn’t happening.”
“You ate one of us… Now we eat one of you!”
Her lips peeled back and her teeth protruded as she dropped to all fours, her heads snarling and chomping at the air. The other seven shuddered and twitched as their teeth elongated and they crawled toward me.
I started backing away toward the door.
“I’m sorry for interrupting your hug,” I said. “But nobody’s eating me.”
They sprinted towards me, long limbs moving like spiders over the flat ground.
I ran away, but when I stepped beyond the doorway and reached the stairs, I stopped.
I stood and waited.
I had a plan.
Even though it felt like a terrible idea as they charged toward me.
Right as they charged through the door, I leaped to the side. My body hit the steps hard, but the creatures rushed out over the thin ledge and plummeted down into the depths of the shaft.
One by one, they splattered on the ground, the wet crunches of impact echoing through the tall chamber.
“Idiots,” I said with a chuckle.
The last out the door was the mother. She saw the others fall and scrabbled on the narrow stairs, trying to back up. As she flailed, she grabbed my ankle and dragged me off the edge of the stairs.
My arms pinwheeled as I grabbed at the rocky wall rushing past my face. Blood roared in my veins as my fingertips struck at a crack in the wall. My body jerked to a stop, and kept jerking as I tried to shake off the weight of the mother creature hanging from my ankle.
As we hung there, she worked her jaw closer to my leg and bit me.
“Ah!” I said as I kicked. “Get off!”
She bit down again, shaking at the muscles and jerking my grip loose.
One hand slipped, tearing open the fingers, and my roaring blood poured out of the wounds. I concentrated on gripping, and the blood dug into the rock. It was only a few inches extended from my fingers, and so firmly in the range I could control. My blood formed a sort of glove that drastically increased my grip strength.
I laughed at the ease with which I could hang on and focused on kicking the mother in the face until she let go.
Her head jerked back with each stomp, but she held on for dear life — or for the life of her children.
As she hung there, her spawn bawled and wriggled, their tiny hands pulling at their mother’s hair as they hauled themselves out of her flesh like it was pallid mud.
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It almost made me gag, but I was too busy trying to shake her loose.
The babies crawled up their mother and onto me right as I jerked my leg and shook her away. Her teeth ripped through the flesh of my calf, and she fell, eyes wide with surprise, her mouth full of my leg.
She hit the ground and burst like a cheap wineskin.
My flowing blood gloves increased my strength, and with the weight of the mother gone, I hauled myself up easily enough. I stumbled on the steps, almost falling, when I tried to put weight on my injured leg. It didn’t hurt so much as feel incredibly wrong. Blood manipulation helped me regain my balance.
Three babies still gnawed on me, but I plucked them off one by one and hurled them into the pit of the shaft.
I might have eaten them in retaliation, but I wasn’t hungry.
After the last splat, I had some blessed peace. So, I sat on the ledge, letting my breathing settle as my legs dangled and my torn calf regrew. My regeneration was quicker now, and I surmised it was because of my full belly. As my flesh returned, I felt my hunger grow ever so slightly.
I examined the blood flowing around my hands. My practice making the blood loop around my fingers had paid off. I could weave ribbons into gloves that I could manipulate as though they were my flesh. With an effort of will, I expanded the gloves, but as they grew larger, my control grew sloppy. It effectively maxed out at one inch longer than my fingers before it lost form and function.
Still, it was useful.
My blood slipped back inside my hands, and my torn fingertips healed.
Some creatures down below me stirred, and I got hungrier as my torn calf muscles replaced themselves, so I ventured down the stairs to the bottom of the shaft.
They lay on the stone floor, battered and shattered. Fluids pooled, limbs twitched, bloodied eyes roamed sightlessly. All but two were dead, and they weren’t far off. I sat on the stomach of the largest one, and a foul wheeze escaped rubbery lips.
“I had some sympathy for you lot when I first saw you. Fellow prisoners, you know? But now? Forget about it.”
“You… ate… our… friend…”
I glanced down at the creature I sat on.
“He was dead.”
It stared back at me.
“You…”
“Ah, I’m done with you,” I said.
“Wait! I can… show you how to open…”
“Too late for that,” I said as I lifted my foot above his head.
I stomped down hard and crushed the head against the stone. The same treatment killed the other survivor.
Part of me feared I just doomed myself to an eternity in this place.
But I was confident this would work out.
I could feel the trembling grey shards inside their heads. It was like a subtle tug inside my head, and I thought nothing of cracking open their skulls like eggs to find the stones.
I collected all eight shards using the skin of one creature’s oversized hands as makeshift gloves and laid them down on the ground. The stones ranged in size from a plump cherry to a small cherry pit. They were all the same dull grey, and they trembled and pointed at me.
“None of you get any ideas,” I told them.
Absentmindedly, I gnawed on the mother creature’s calf as I stared at the little grey rocks. The fresh meat tasted delightful, packed full of juice and flavor, and it quelled that hungry little voice scratching my mind like a cat in heat.
“What to do, what to do…”
I could take all the rocks at once, or I could take them one by one. Hopefully — no, certainly — one of them contained information on opening the doors out of this place. Was it dangerous to use them all at once?
I wanted to ask Drippy, but going back after saying goodbye so recently would just be awkward, so I persevered in my loneliness.
I eyed the dark doors above and shuddered. I needed to get out of here, so I scooped up the eight stones in my hand. Heat pumped through my arm, and I fell back as my mind went black.
###
A great fat rock was hauled into the laboratory. It sat suspended in numerous arrays before being chipped away by cultivators using intense, air-buckling qi.
###
They sewed the rocks into humans — old, young, newborn — and the flesh spasmed. Lungs failed, hearts exploded, until the green mist contained them.
###
Cultivators came and went as the rocks floated in the flesh. Years passed, the motions on the arrays becoming routine — food, pain, pleasure, all preceded by motions on the arrays. The sequence before a new cultivator’s arrival, before one left, before new rocks were brought in for study. Unending repetition.
###
Finally, freedom and prey! A gangly creature so weak and stupid, simply standing there as fangs extended…
###
I woke on the dark stone floor, retching at the foul taste in the back of my throat. The last memory had been of eight minds looking at me, and it definitely gave me a sense of vertigo.
The surrounding corpses remained still, their blood long congealed. I wasn’t hungry, and so I stood and walked back up the stairs as I parsed out the overlapping memories. So much time in the tubes, those poor bastards must have gone insane. It explained why they tried to eat me like that.
I found the altars and used them with practised ease. The first stone had only given me a partial understanding, but now I knew it like I’d built it myself. The problem was that the roots growing through the walls and ceiling had left many of the formations barely functional.
To top it off, I had no qi.
I circumvented that problem by dragging a creature up the stairs and using its blood to activate the array. For whatever reason, their flesh held qi while mine didn’t. Maybe one day I would find out why, but right now I couldn’t care less.
Experimenting with gore and formations was time-consuming, but eventually I found a pattern that would open everything.
The lights in the room flickered, and the walls groaned.
My heart leaped in my chest as I heard the squeal of distant hinges.
I hurried out onto the spiralling staircase.
My jaw dropped.
The doors in the ceiling were slowly opening, revealing a crack of sky… but so too were all the closed doors lining the staircase.
From each of those doors, green light spilled.
I heard skittering and slathering, and then the gangly, distorted creatures emerged.
Their dark eyes swam in their heads, their nostrils puckered and sniffed, and when they spotted me, their teeth grew long and pointed as they charged.
They poured down the stairs, long limbs and fingers slapping the steps, their jaws distending like snakes chasing a rodent. The closest creature wasn’t more than a dozen paces away, and so I leaped away across the shaft.
With blood pumping fast through my muscles, and my bloody gloves tearing themselves out of my hands, I easily grasped a hold of the cracks in the far stone wall. The creature that was going to leap on me instead slid to a stop and hissed at me from across the shaft.
I’d avoided being chomped, but my next problem was larger.
The staircase spiralled all the way up the shaft, and by jumping to one side, I’d only brought myself closer to the enemies over there.
All the gangly creatures leaned over the edge of the stairs, judging the distance towards me, and seeing the mass of meat I’d left at the bottom of the stairs.
“See!” I shouted and pointed while hanging with one hand. “You don’t need to eat me, just look at all the food down there!”
The creatures shrieked and leaped down from the stairs towards the broken bodies of the first room’s test subjects.
