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Eat, and be eaten. Spit it out, and be eaten. Vomit, and be eaten. What had been eaten was eaten again. What had been vomited was eaten again. What had been spat out ate in its turn.
Undigested dregs poured out, and something groveled over them, rooting through the filth as if it were precious feed. The shape of it was ugly—a dog with its head shoved into the trough. Yet the dregs did not lessen. They overflowed.
None of it reached the stomach. It climbed the esophagus and came right back out. Entrance and exit were the same. The cycle of eating had slipped its track, and fullness guttered away as fast as it came.
Chomp. Chomp.
The broken cycle repeated. Like a machine throwing error after error, the king of hell wanted a meal without end.
Eat, and eat, and eat, and eat, and eat, and eat, and eat…….
Hungry Ghost Hell.
Here was a hell of living because one could not eat.
“…….”
Scientist clapped a hand over his mouth at a sight far worse than the one he had seen before.
He had tested the limits of desire until he was sick of them. He had starved a person for more than a month. He had kept one from sleeping. He had driven one mad with lust. The ugliness, the pleading, the despair, the raw want that followed had been enough to satisfy an intellectual curiosity, and had brought him no interest at all.
Even so, in the Hungry Ghost Hell, Scientist could not hide an instinctive fear and disgust.
That thing was the end of appetite.
The aim of a life, and the whole of it. The only worth it could assign itself, and its reason for existing. It had been decided that way at birth, and it would be decided that way at death. As natural as a human learning to breathe. For that thing, hunger was an utterly natural act.
And this was the result of that act being stopped. The result of contracting an incurable disease called anorexia. It had arrived somewhere that could no longer be defined at all.
His boss had told him it was a psychological problem. Following that advice, Scientist had sent it a replica exceptional at psychotherapy. As anyone could see, the attempt had failed spectacularly. There was no improvement. Day by day, the condition grew worse.
Unable to fill its own existence, the flesh weakened. The flesh weakened, and so it could not control its appetite.
Every day, rotting. A tomorrow without hope. Effort without meaning. Despair piled upon despair.
And then the appointed ending came.
One day, it went mad.
Spewing a wretched fury, it devoured everything around it. It buried its comfortable nest under filth it had vomited up itself. It tore apart the gardener who had tended it, and killed him. The pot that had borne responsibility for it all its life became a garbage dump.
From the moment the Devil's Tree could not eat, it fell into an eternal wheel of rebirth. No death in it, and no life. A beginning identical to the end.
A chill.
Lost in the spectacle, Scientist swallowed a scream. Sweat poured down his forehead like a waterfall.
An eyeball. An eyeball made of nothing but a beast's teeth, heavy with a ferocious hunger, was looking at him.
It was the size of a person. Large enough that Scientist filled it completely and still spilled back out of it.
They appeared. One, then another. From the ceiling. From the floor. From the walls. From empty air. From the filth. From his own body.
Thump-thump-thump-thump.
His heart raced with terror. Scientist fought desperately to control his gaze. If he looked at his own body now, that steel reason of his might simply collapse.
Umbilical cords climbed his legs. Like a spider spinning its web, they wound round and round his whole body. Only his head poked out—an absurd little posture. Better this than the alternative. At least he could pin his mind to sight, hearing, and reason alone.
Rrrrrrrumble—!
At last it rose from the sea of filth it had made itself. Bark sloughed away like the teeth of a broken gear. Flesh gone past any gloss into something soft, rotten, furred with mold. Holes bored clean through it, as if snapped branches and squirrels had tunneled the trunk. Countless tooth marks left behind like the traces of some wretched struggle.
The Devil's Tree tilted its body and looked down at Scientist.
Drip. Drip.
Saliva fell from its mouth. Scientist went white at the nature of the drops striking beside his face. Demon blood—the raw material of the D-series. A little less luck, and he would have been drenched in it.
The Devil's Tree blinked a focus that would not clear. Scientist felt ten years drop off his life. Fortunately, it was still in a state where one could talk to it.
“Good to see you, Devil's Tree. You… don't seem to have been getting on.”
Tap. Tap.
An eyeball strung on an umbilical cord patted his cheek. Teeth pricked the skin.
Nothing…….
Too hungry…….
Scientist took back the thought he'd just had. Hold a conversation, his ass. The eyes hadn't merely rolled back. They had turned inside out.
The Absolute had prepared safeguards, but he was still human, and he could not ignore the chance of an accident.
“…It's all right. Nothing here will harm you. You are magnificent. You are great. No one will be able to interrupt your meal.”
“Just a moment. Only a moment. I have a proposal you're going to like very much.”
Click. Click.
The eyeball's teeth knocked together, left and right.
“Up above, there are things that taste wonderful.”
“Yes. Feel for them. You don't have to go far. Straight up.”
Every eyeball turned upward at once.
They stopped dead.
A silence, eerie and wrong, stained the space.
Scientist's intellect howled. This is badly wrong. Very badly wrong.
“…….”
I have to get out. But how?
The answer was not far off.
The Devil's Tree, frozen until then like the glacier outside, shuddered—and then it seized.
“KREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!”
“Guh—!”
The umbilical cords that had bound him fast hurled Scientist far away.
“Damn it. Alive, at least.”
BOOM! BOOM!
The pot shook. The colossus went berserk and slammed its head into the wall as if the pain were unbearable. Branches like limbs shriveled to threads. The umbilical cords withdrew into the body.
Even in the middle of that thrashing, Scientist was not caught up in it. The Absolute had trained the Devil's Tree too thoroughly for that. It could not direct a lethal attack at him.
Put the other way: if even a single blow landed, he would die on the spot.
“SKEEEEEEEEEEE!!!”
The Devil's Tree huddled in a corner and flailed its branches. It looked like a dog digging a bolt-hole under a fence. It looked like prey thrashing to escape a predator.
What could have made that thing afraid? Scientist could not imagine it. Was the being who had given it the incurable disease of anorexia among the intruders?
“Ha.”
A hollow laugh escaped him. The Devil's Tree was broken. There was no such thing as a chance of recovery. He had looked that ugliness in the face, and so he let go of any lingering attachment.
That, surely, was why the Absolute had permitted its use and ordered him to draw out everything.
“Open.”
Scientist spoke the pot's ignition word. The word he had meant, someday, to use when he released the Devil's Tree upon the world.
“The HELLGATE.”
KRRROOM.
Hell and the mortal world connected. The barrier that had held for thousands of years was, at last, released.
The devil that had been fleeing its fear flared its nostrils at a scent from beyond the world. A world it had only ever watched through a window. A utopia crammed with things to eat.
Grrrrgl.
The belly that had starved for so long cried out. Instinct, long eaten away by fear, yielded to a greater instinct and called back the devil it had originally been.
Clack-clack-clack-clack. Drool, drool, drool.
A discord of spit and teeth. Rapturous, the devil reached a hand toward the surface.
The ceiling was opening. But even that brief wait was a luxury for a devil. It jammed its head into the gap and thrashed its roots.
Scientist smiled a bitter smile and stepped onto the elevator. He still had somewhere to be.
The elevator doors closed. Hell widened its dominion.
This laboratory was the devil's nest now.
Rrrrrumble…….
“What is happening?”
Dan Miryu brushed at the gooseflesh rising along his arm. They had only just finished the grueling work of bringing down every last replica, and already something was stirring from deep below.
“It's coming,” Phantom said, his voice gone hard.
“What is….”
“What else? The same one Mr. Hwang Seokgu and I fought.”
Dan Miryu's face set.
“It's… coming now?”
“Yes. Insanely fast.”
Drool streaming behind it.
“Pele.”
“On it.”
Quick on the uptake, Pele lifted their exhausted companions into the air. Phantom stepped across empty space and waited for the ill-starred reunion on its way.
CRASH!
“GRAAAAAAH!!!”
Dan Miryong, transformed into a dragon, burst out with a massive dragon slung across his back. Sipsado and Alexei were plastered to his face.
“You succeeded!”
“Shut up! Just get outside already!”
A monster was coming. Just as Dan Miryong had warned, something huge and malicious writhed in the hole they had burst from.
First, the roots of a tree. Then the trunk. And last, an eye soaked in appetite.
From the warped seams of the floor, a sea of hunger overflowed.
“Oh.”
Phantom raised a hand in greeting, genuinely pleased.
“It's been a while. Devil's—”
CRUNCH!
The space where Phantom had been standing was bitten away whole. A branch stretched long and worked its teeth, chewing.
—————!!!
The Devil's Tree smashed through the last ceiling and roared at the sky.
The devil of hell, at last, had come out onto the Earth.
The devil shall come for you.
Until it makes even itself into food,
it will not stop.
No being, whatever it may be, can stop it.
No one.
—No one.
—No—one.
—N—$—^*(—^—$—)%$.
—o——ne——hide*%^!@—hi—ding—heh^&*heh————.
“The food I once ate so deliciously.”
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