The Taste of a Brain
"Ughyaaat!? Gyaat!? Uheeheehit!?"
The beautiful woman in a business suit lay sprawled across the floor of her own home, kicking and clawing at the ground, utterly beside herself.
Her once-neat collar had come undone, and the lingerie beneath—the kind the men outside would have given anything to sneak a glance at—was now exposed without a shred of ceremony.
Her eyes darted in every direction, as though they had no idea where they were supposed to look, and drool pooled at the corner of her mouth.
The reason the woman was behaving in this incomprehensible way was simple: her brain was being sucked out of her skull, alive, at this very moment.
"You're noisy."
The monster, disguised as a beautiful university student, casually appraised the woman's pathetic state as its tentacle, extending from its body, pierced into her brain and was slurping down its contents.
With wet, undulating squelches, the tentacle moved rhythmically as the woman's brain was drawn into the monster in real time.
"Gweeeck!?"
The woman, who had been thrashing about, suddenly arched her back into a bridge as if overwhelmed by climax, spurting urine that soaked through her stockings and panties before her body went limp.
"Poo… pooh… heh…"
The tongue lolling out from her rolled-back eyes and slack mouth resembled the reflexive release of muscles in a human body after death.
Whether she did or not, the monster devoured and absorbed the woman's brain down to the very last piece, then sat on the floor with narrowed eyes, savoring what it had eaten.
…It tastes terrible.
Humans were its staple food, and of everything on them, the brain had always been its favorite part.
There had been a time, long ago, when it hunted and ate humans—and back then, brains especially delighted it.
But ever since it had changed its diet, and even more so since it had tasted Hyun-ok's semen, the brains it had once found so delicious now made it want to retch.
In the first place, it hadn't come here to devour the woman in front of it. It had come to satisfy Hyun-ok's desires.
Hyun-ok had seen this woman on the street and been stricken with lust, and so the monster had taken her form, intending to relieve that lust in her place.
To take in his semen of finer quality—to see him soaked in pleasure, panting like a beast as he ravished her body, to watch every expression cross his face.
"Poo… heh…"
Until half an hour ago, this woman had drawn stares on the street and in her office for her beauty and the respect she commanded. Now she was nothing but a vacuous shell that no one would spare a second glance.
She wasn't dead yet—and it had no intention of killing her.
If it killed this woman, or devoured her outright, the humans connected to her would inevitably come looking, and that could expose what it really was.
Part of the reason it had changed its diet in the first place was to avoid getting tangled up in such troublesome, dangerous affairs.
And so, from here on, it planned to implant a Fake Brain into the woman.
Thoop!
Squelch… squelch…
The tentacle pierced into the woman's head once more, and this time, in reverse, something from the monster's body began flowing into the woman's mind.
"Poo… phew…"
Her convulsions gradually subsided, and color slowly began to return to her face.
At some point the tentacle's movement ceased, and it withdrew back into the monster's body.
The woman's eyes were now fully back in place, but her gaze carried no focus, as if a hazy fog had settled over it.
Swish.
The woman pushed herself upright and simply stared blankly at the monster sitting beside her, eyes unfocused.
The Fake Brain the monster had implanted in the woman's skull was, in truth, hardly different from her original brain at all.
Even if humans dissected and measured it with all the science their civilization had produced, they would struggle to find a single biological difference from the brain it replaced.
It could say with certainty that once the monster disappeared, the woman would go about her daily life without the slightest sense that anything was wrong.
And yet it was called a Fake Brain because the range of her behavior would never, like an NPC, stray beyond a certain boundary.
A human's personality and character naturally shift, however slightly, with the passage of time.
But from this moment on, the woman before it would live out the rest of her days like a machine, frozen with the personality and character she had at this exact instant, never stepping outside the lines drawn for her.
Like a human whose creativity and capacity for change had been castrated.
Crack.
As the monster's body twisted this way and that, two perfectly identical human beings stood in the room—matching down to the last millimeter.
"I'll make good use of your body and your personality. And would you please take off your clothes? I'll need to wear them out. Your underwear and stockings are dirty, so I'll pick out fresh ones from your closet myself."
Grin.
The monster gave the businesslike smile it had absorbed from the woman's way of dealing with clients, and the woman nodded her head with that same expressionless face, stripped off her clothes, and handed them over.
"Thank you."
Moving through the room with the ease of someone in her own home, the monster found fresh underwear and stockings and put them all on, then finally slipped into the business suit the woman had handed her.
"Then, I'll be off."
"…Yes."
As the monster stepped out the door wearing the smile it had fashioned from the woman's face, the now-naked woman smiled the very same manufactured smile back at her.
Once she appeared in this newly assumed woman's body, knowing Hyun-ok's personality, he was certain to have questions.
She had no intention of lying to him, her boyfriend—so naturally, she would tell the truth.
But that truth would become a cunningly concealed truth, hovering a mere sheet of paper's thickness from being a lie.
In that sense, she hadn't lied at all.
The woman she had absorbed would go on living her daily life without any particular trouble, and biologically speaking, she was still a living being.
She could have spoken the pure, unvarnished truth. But doing so would make Hyun-ok worry—and, true to human nature, would quite likely make him stop liking her.
And so.
"I want to stay with you as long as I can. And… you're going to have to become my one and only staple food source."
Shhk.
For the first time, a smile—twisted, almost broken—crept across the monster's otherwise expressionless face.
I woke up.
After going through what could hardly be called lovemaking and eating the meal the monster had prepared for me, I must have drifted off naturally onto the bed without even realizing it.
Darkness still lay outside, so it seemed to be early dawn—still a while before morning would arrive.
A soft orange glow spilled from the lamp on the desk, illuminating the darkened room, and a woman sat before it, absorbed in something.
Watching the back of that figure—long, straight black hair spilling down to her waist—I realized it was Seongha. In other words, the monster.
"What are you doing?"
When I asked carefully, the monster, who had been hunched over something with her head down, turned her gaze toward me.
Wireless earbuds sat in both ears, and on the desk, a video was playing on her phone.
Not only that—dozens of books from the bookstore we'd stopped at that morning lay spread open across the desk.
Glrrk.
"Hiek!?"
When the bulging eyes across Seongha's skin suddenly opened and all fixed on me at once, I shrieked in shock.
"Sorry. Did I wake you?"
"N-no… it's, it's just… wh-what are you doing…?"
The monster apologized with a languid look in her eyes, and I steadied my rattled nerves before asking carefully.
"I was reading and watching videos to gather various kinds of information."
I'd known that much since the first time I'd seen it—but no ordinary human could watch a video and read dozens of books at the same time.
Still, looking at the abnormal eyeballs protruding from various parts of the monster's body, I quickly understood how it was possible.
She didn't seem to be up to anything suspicious, which put me at ease, but I couldn't help asking.
"Aren't you… sleeping?"
"I don't need to sleep."
"Oh. I see…"
The monster answered with an expression I couldn't read, and I decided that responding without showing too much shock at the abnormal situation was the best I could do.
"Is it hideous?"
She must have noticed where my eyes kept drifting—to the eyeballs jutting from her body—because the monster asked.
"Hmm… I mean, it does freak me out a little? But it's okay. The tentacles too—once I keep looking, I'll get used to it. That's what you really look like, after all."
"…I see… But if it's hard to look at right now, I'll hide them."
Swish.
All the eyeballs closed at once, and she returned to her usual, human-seeming appearance—looking at her alone, no one would ever guess she was a monster.
"Go back to sleep. It seems like I woke you, and I'm sorry for that. I'll turn off the light."
When the monster lowered her eyes with an apologetic air, I gave a weak smile, pushed back the covers, and moved over to her.
"It's fine. I don't think that's why I woke up. I'm fully awake anyway. More importantly, what are you reading? Can I look?"
"Go ahead."
The monster slid sideways off her chair, revealing the dozens of books sprawled across the desk, and I read through the titles one by one.
Humans, the Social Animal. Simple, Practical Cooking. What Is Sex?. You Too Can Satisfy a Man's Fetishistic Desires. How to Boost a Man's Stamina, and so on.
Mostly books about humans, cooking, and sex—titles that offered a glimpse of exactly what the monster's interests were at the moment.
"Through all my experience so far, I've learned that knowing something as information and experiencing it for real are different things. Even so, there is a clear difference between knowing and not knowing."
As I read each title, the monster spoke—and one part of what she said snagged on me.
All my experience so far, huh. Come to think of it, maybe this was a question I should have asked long ago—but there was something I needed to ask anyway.
"What… are you, exactly? I mean… how were you born?"
At my question, the monster remained seated in her chair, looking up at me as her eyes slowly narrowed.