Chapter 7: A New Tab

  Sky looked at the crumpled remains of his wallet, keys, and phone. They had been with him the whole time, like an anchor to his past. They still had dried purple blood from the first bites of Abomination he stuffed in his pockets. After that, they had just become a wadded up ball of wet newspaper; except they were metal and leather. He tossed them to the ground and took one last look at them before kicking some dirt over the last evidence of his Earth origins.

  Skylar was extremely hesitant to take another bite of the hunk of flesh, but he needed to gain power. He knew that the first bite of flesh or of a new creature was the worst it could get, and so he got up from his spot on the ground where he had writhed in pain to continue. It took him about a week to consume the flesh of just the bottom of the foot of the enormous thing, and another week again of constant eating until he felt no affect from it. It helped that this one tasted like deer. He couldn’t have asked for a better flavor. If he hadn’t gained such significant density and strength from a single bite, the pain wouldn’t be nearly worth it.

  Between times when his jaw was too tired to continue the feast, he experimented with the energy in his Soul Orb. Turns out, after you’ve got a few skills, its not that easy to make another one. If he had known that, he may have been a little more careful with what he was doing. The Light Glyph was great, and useful, but he could think of magic that was a little more fun than that. It’s almost like his magic was more pliable and flexible before he set down the current path. He couldn’t know for sure though until he had someone knowledgeable to ask.

  He tried chewing on the chitinous shell, and managed to take a single bite of it after some serious bashing with a sharp rock. That was a full day with searing pain in his chest, and he didn’t want to repeat the process. The first bite always did the most, and he really wanted to climb on top of the massive thing and see what else he could find. He decided to at least take a few more bites of the shell, just to make sure he wasn’t leaving any gains on the table. Then he set off, his curiosity leading him by the nose.

  Sure enough, the sight of its torn open mid section was more insane than he could have imagined. An entire lake of dark red blood sat at the bottom of a chasm of open wounds, jagged broken bones, and fleshy tissue torn everywhere. If he had to imagine hell, he would think of something that looked like this things chest wound. The warmth that radiated from it made him think it could all the sudden take a deep breath in and start standing up.

  "Wow that is disgusting." The smell of blood was so thick he had to wrinkle his nose.

  He wanted to get himself some better clothes and figured with his new Stitching Glyph so that he might be able to make something work. If he scraped clean a piece of the flexible shell, and used a pointy rock to drill some holes, he was pretty sure he could put together a set of armor with it. So that’s what he started to do in between stuffing as much of the flesh as he could into his gullet without making himself too sickly.

  He smoked a few of the pieces like he had planned, but it took far too long and didn’t increase the magical benefit. If the viscera he ate actually ended up in his stomach, he would have puked it back up immediately. Even though it tasted like the game his Uncle Jerry used to hunt, it was still raw meat. He had zero clues about where all that mass was going though. Because it certainly wasn’t starting the process of biological digestion. He wouldn’t have been able to eat even 1% of what he had by this point.

  He fumbled with the Stitching Glyph on a pair of thick hide. It was like using a third hand or operating a tentacle you grew in your sleep suddenly. The feeling was bizarre, but eventually he was able to conjure an appropriately sized needle and get a threading action happening in the way that he wanted. His skill with the conjured needle was already leaps and bounds better than what he could do with his own hands.

  A couple weeks of work later, and he had fashioned some leather armor in the shape of a pair of pants. They clasped together with big nodules along the sides. When he was looking for bone fragments, he noticed the inner most bones were blackened and far harder to bend or shift. Except that some of them had been chipped or shaved off in the battle.

  He slipped on the bloody flesh surface of the beast's innards and slid down like he was on a sled going down a snowbank. When he reached the bottom of the slope he cursed. He was about to enter a pool of blood inside an enormous monster. This was going to be a nightmare to get clean. The thick and warm blood gurgled and splashed up his nose, but it ended up only being a couple feet deep at the spot he landed.

  In the deepest part of the gaping wound, at the bottom of the blood lake, there was a chip of bone. He thanked his luck and optimism for making him check literally everywhere he could for anything of value. The black splinter was the perfect short sword.

  "No freaking way! There is no way I just found a sword in here!" He grinned, covered entirely in blood, like a total maniac.

  The bone chip held a single jagged razor sharp edge on the outside curve, just like a scimitar. Its handle was the perfect size for his human fingers to grasp, and he couldn’t have been happier with the find. It even had a sword guard above the handle, like it was perfectly made for him. He realized that with this sword and his Empowered Strike Glyph, he could harvest nearly any part of this beast with a few swings.

  After harvesting he sat down in a comfortable position with chunks of shell that were far too thick to be armor, and a pile of ligament strings. It was gross, but he thanked his luck or whatever was responsible that it didn’t smell like a dead animal yet. He inspected the first chitin plate, from the outside to the inside, its material composition shifted. It seamlessly transitioned from hardened exterior to the strange beast's equivalent of a thick hide, then to its base muscle tissue after several inches. He decided to keep the first half inch of the material so he could retain some flexibility. He didn’t need to be bulletproof. Actually, he put his hand on his chin and thought about that. He might be bulletproof by the end of the day if his body kept getting tougher due to You Are What You Eat.

  The chitinous shell needed a lot of processing. His newest weapon was perfect for shaving off the inside bits of the material and making it into a solid workable piece. He had no idea how to tan leather into a supple fabric. His Uncle Jerry had shown him what happens to a raw hide when left out, and it just hardens into a brittle mass. But, a hard plate was exactly what he was going for.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  The individual pieces didn’t need to flex. He used the muscle sinew and ligament strings to tie together the plates on his armor in a way that would be able to rotate like paper in a three ring binder. None of the parts of a binder with paper in it are able to stretch at all. If paper stretches, it immediately rips. So when his body moved, and the parts don’t stretch at all, he would be stuck due to their durability. But this wouldn’t be the case if the parts had some wiggle room between the stitching, and places to slide.

  When he was done with the full set, he checked his reflection in a small pond with the gear on. He looked like an adventurer now. Plink. With a bright young smiling face, and sparkling bright hair, he admired his remade body and aesthetic in the reflection. He was finally ready to move on to civilization and Quest number two.

  “You have unlocked a New Tab: Gear.”

  He immediately selected the Gear tab in his interface to see what he found.

  “Abomination Flesh Carapace Set. Plus [redacted]. Plus [redacted]. [Redacted]. Due to crafting proficiency and quality of materials, this item has retained its durability as if the creature was still alive.

  Spirit Bone Scimitar: This base item has been identified as the perfect weapon. This item has retained its durability as if the creature was still alive.”

  The redacted was a little odd, but he guessed they were Stat bonuses considering the Stats tab was still locked out. He wondered if his Quest to reach the exit waypoint was enough to unlock that. He also considered that there might be other hidden tabs that suddenly appear just like the Gear tab did. But there was no way to know yet.

  Before setting out, he had to at least make an attempt to eat some more Chitin Shell. After that realization, he decided to also eat some of its bones, and some of its organs for any other benefits they might have. It took a day of carving into a stone with other stones to make a large soup bowl he could cook with. He wanted it to be a sort of celebration. He could just gnaw on the bone or directly eat scrapings, but since this beast tasted like deer he figured he would make an actual meal with it.

  He went all out, and found another blackened chunk of bone with some marrow still in it just small enough to fit into the bowl. He plopped it into the dense water from a nearby creek, and went back for another harvest. When he got to the eye to hopefully gain some better eyesight, he was disappointed to find that it was not a substance he could carry. The eye was more liquid than anything else. Because the eyes were about twenty miles away, he decided to drink the inner fluids of it, and carry back the outer eye shell to boil down into the stew. On his way back, he used the eye shell like a sack to get a big chunk of heart meat, cartilage, ligaments, nerve bundles, and other pieces he couldn’t identify. As long as it didn’t smell like waste, he would give it a try. He ended up dragging back enough material to make stew for an army.

  His Skill You Are What You Eat was great. However, it was one thing for your muscles to seize up and convulse for a day, but it would be a different story if his superhuman body had to function with all of his organs and nervous system doing that. Due to that, he took a tiny nibble from each of the exotic materials and suffered through the consequences one by one until he was ready to combine them. That was one of the most miserable weeks of his entire life. Several times he thought to himself that he wouldn’t ever recover and just sit there paralyzed on the ground for days and days until something finally came along and killed him. Due to not needing to drink water for such long durations from his improved body, he could be paralyzed and left for dead for an excruciatingly long time. Luckily, the bite of nerve bundle he swallowed wore off eventually, and he was on to the next piece.

  He used his Glyph of Light to make an infrared laser and light a fire underneath the stone bowl with the bits in it. After it was brought to a boil and simmered for a few hours, the bone marrow had released. The meat wasn’t red anymore, which actually looked wrong to him after eating so much raw meat. He was convinced the Skill that allowed him to gain power from this was affecting his mind somehow.

  He picked up his tablespoon he carved out of a stick, and got ready to try the bone and organ stew. The idea of it was disgusting, but it was probably the first actually edible thing he had tried to eat since he was on this planet. Before the first spoonful could make it to his mouth, his scientific Earth brain stopped him. What if the nerves and brain tissues of this creature had the equivalent of Prion Disease? You can’t cook that out. Misfolded proteins were almost a sure death. Although, he had already eaten a big chunk of nerve tissue so it was too late. He shrugged, and took a bite.

  “Uh oh,” was all he got out before feeling like he was struck by lightning continuously. When he woke up, it was dark again. But this time, it was normal dark. The dim moonlight of this world was enough to now illuminate the ground just enough to see his immediate surroundings, if only barely. He had drank the inner fluids of the eye earlier, but all that seemed to help with was to make his vision better than twenty-twenty. He felt more powerful inside though, and that made him immediately take another bite as soon as he woke. This time, he was fully awake to experience the suffering of what essentially amounted to a bone and organ tempering potion. If it didn’t make him so much stronger, there would be no way he would have done this. The first bite of that Godzilla thing was such an equalizer. He went from a wet dish rag to a normal human in a single painful bite. He wished his Stats were unlocked so he could see what was happening.

  It was remarkable that the corpse or its parts didn’t start to rot or anything. Nothing was feeding on it, at least not yet. Down in the center of it, the thing was still hot blooded like it was alive even after what was at least a month. Nevertheless, it was definitely going to be a rotting corpse soon, and he had reached a point of diminishing returns on consuming its flesh. He briefly wondered if there would be a title for eating the whole thing, but that would literally take a few decades to accomplish.

  Even if there were small gains that he would miss out on, he was done going at this alone. He had his Quest to reach civilization, and now he had more power to actually get there in one piece. He put great care into one final project. His sword needed a scabbard. This was by far the most difficult project he had attempted.

  The tight angle that the scabbard needed to be required him to re-cut each piece of the holster more than once. Once the pieces were shaved down and oriented together, he was able to bind it together using ligament with the Glyph of Stitching, which acted as a conjured needle that did whatever he wanted. The problem was that if the scabbard was too loose, the blade could easily fly out. He was thinking about making some kind of loop to go over the handle and actually hold it down into the scabbard, but that would be foolish if he needed to draw the weapon quickly. It’s not like drawing faster would help him against an Abomination, but he was trying to leave this place as soon as possible.

  He intuitively felt the finished scabbard click into the Abomination Flesh Carapace Set as part of it intrinsically inside his Gear tab.

  He was starting to get impatient with the system about not showing him his Stats. It was important to him to know his starting point, and how far he had come. He would have to extrapolate from his memories and just do some math on it to figure it out. If there were exponential curves to the number values though, it may become very hard to do.

  He took one more look at his Gear tab, and the monstrosity that he had thoroughly looted, and set off.