That White, Viscous, Warm Thing Filled Her Mouth
That White, Viscous, Warm Thing Filled Her Mouth
What's the best thing you can feed someone who's been shipwrecked and starved for days?
Anyone with sense knows the answer. If you're Korean, you hand them a bowl of plain rice gruel, barely seasoned.
A warm bone broth is famously tender, too — but the heavy fat suspended in the liquid can actually disrupt digestion. Counterintuitive as it sounds, that richness can make someone sicker.
What a long-starved body really needs is something minimally salted, non-irritating, and gentle enough to wake the stomach back up.
There are two ways to make rice gruel.
One: boil raw rice from scratch.
Two: take already-cooked rice, add water, and bring it to a rolling boil.
There's no difference in flavor between the two methods.
Some people insist that gruel made from raw rice keeps the individual grains more distinct, but if you press and stir with your rice paddle as it boils, you can produce something just as silky-soft as the cooked-rice version.
The only real distinction is that using leftover rice cuts the cooking time down considerably.
Convenient. I've got leftover rice.
I scooped the rice out of the cooker, dumped it into a pot with water, and set it to boil.
Bubble and steam.
I kept the flame at medium so nothing would scorch on the bottom, then stirred the milky water with a mana-infused paddle. I made sure to press and crush the grains between strokes.
"What's the atmosphere in the capital these days?"
I kept stirring as I spoke to Amelia, who was clutching her hollow stomach.
"Lately the princes have been keeping everyone busy with the succession struggle. The nobles are agonizing over which faction to back, and the common folk are abuzz waiting for a new heir to emerge."
"So it's practically a festival, then."
"For now, yes."
"What led you to throw your support behind the princess, Saintess?"
"You follow imperial politics more closely than I would have expected, Sir Lucas."
"For commoners like us, a great deal hinges on the empire's direction."
Bubble and steam.
The gruel burbled placidly through the conversation.
"I suppose I can confide in you."
She clasped her hands in prayer.
"When Diana proved herself before God, a white halo shone over her. Just as it once did for the first emperor."
"..."
That caught me off guard.
Given everything I knew, I'd have expected a red halo — or maybe a yellow one, the color that signaled she'd destroy the empire.
"White, then. The color that holds every possibility."
"Precisely. The color that can produce a sage ruler or a tyrant. But it also means that with the right guidance, she could bring the empire a prosperity it has never known."
Bubble and steam.
A thought surfaced: maybe there had always been a path where Diana didn't become a tyrant.
That future was never certain.
The novel itself must have shown that white halo above her head. Why else would Saint Amelia have declared for her?
And yet she still became the empire's worst tyrant.
But if Amelia survived — if the future sketched out a version where she didn't spiral out of control — then perhaps.
Maybe she becomes a sage instead.
Sending Amelia back alive was the first spark of that divergence.
The pot burbled on.
First things first: fill her stomach and get her strength back.
I looked down at the white gruel, now thickened to a soft, slurry consistency.
Pure white gruel — no seasoning whatsoever. Mi-eum.
I emptied the warm water from the bowl I'd been heating and filled it to the brim with the finished gruel.
Nothing but boiled-down rice, unseasoned. Beside it, a cup of warm water.
Right now, priority one was getting something into that long-starved stomach. Flavor came second.
I lifted the tray — white steam curling gently off the bowl — and approached Amelia.
"You've been without food for days. Start with this."
When I set the gruel before her, Amelia opened her eyes mid-prayer and looked at the tray.
"Kyaah!"
Her eyes flew wide.
"Wh-what — what is this? This pale, blobby, quivery, gloppy..."
"It's gruel. You're familiar with cooked rice, I assume. This is that same rice boiled in water. In my homeland, we feed it to people who've been unable to eat or who are sick."
"...You feed this to sick people?"
She looked back and forth between me and the bowl, visibly flustered.
"Yes. Is there a problem?"
"N-no, that's not... it's just..."
"There's nothing strange about it. It's simply rice, boiled down."
I lifted the spoon and scooped up a mouthful of gruel.
Parts of it had been crushed into a smooth paste, but the starch-thickened liquid still plainly held visible white grains of rice.
"I... I see."
"You're on pilgrimage and you've been stranded for a long while. I kept it as bland as possible — not a trace of meat. You can eat it without worry."
"..."
Face reddening, she stared at the gruel for a long moment.
"Are you not going to eat?"
"You... you truly mean for me to eat this?"
"Yes. It should be quite soft. Let it cool a little and it'll go down easily."
"G-go down... this will enter my mouth... Hyeuut!"
What exactly was this saintess imagining?
"S-so you mean I'm to take this white, sticky substance you've prepared, Sir Lucas, and... and put it into my mouth?"
"That's right."
"How could something so profane..."
"..."
She flinched, hands trembling.
"Shall I bring you something else?"
"N-no! I-it's fine! I'll eat it. This — this is what I'll have. I honestly can't hold out any longer."
Lifting the spoon with quivering fingers, she scooped up a spoonful of gruel.
***
What Lucas had set before her was something suspended between liquid and solid — pale and thick with viscosity.
Too glutinous to call water, yet too elastic to call mere liquid.
Amelia had encountered something resembling it once before, in a book.
A certain kind of novel no sister of the Order should ever read.
She'd stumbled across it by chance — a book someone had smuggled in.
A love story about a commoner man who seduces a noblewoman and overcomes every barrier of station.
A novel that depicted, in lavish detail, two people not only falling in love but hungrily exploring each other's bodies.
After reading that story — which rendered emotion, physicality, and perspective with such intimate precision — Amelia's life had changed.
That was also when she'd started keeping her distance from meat.
The novel had described a man's seed — the substance that impregnates a woman — with frank, graphic clarity.
- A white fluid, viscous, radiating heat and brimming with vital essence.
- So full of passion it seemed alive, nearly in motion, as if it could spark new life into being at any moment.
- She felt this man's seed within her...
Amelia realized, with dawning mortification, that the description from that novel matched the bowl in front of her almost word for word.
The viscous white liquid sliding off the spoon.
The soft curls of steam rising from it, so vivid you could almost mistake the food for something living.
H-he expects me to eat this...
And to make it worse: a man had prepared it.
A white, thick fluid prepared by a man's hands.
A man urging her to put that warmth into her mouth.
Th-this is exactly like that scene in the novel.
She could practically hear the male lead's voice in her ear, coaxing her to take it.
"Nnnngh..."
Her face burned scarlet.
Far more mortifying than the moment she'd had to explain why she couldn't eat meat.
She knew, of course, that this wasn't that. Her mind understood. But the situation's peculiar, suggestive charge was impossible to hide from.
Lucas — who already knew why she avoided meat — might even have done this on purpose.
He's exploiting the fact that I'm starving to...
Suddenly Lucas looked different to her.
Was that a shadow of lewd appetite lurking behind his kindly smile, or was she imagining things?
Outwardly, Lucas was every inch the proper gentleman. But he was still a man.
The novel had a word for men like that.
- Beast in gentleman's clothing.
A creature of base instinct.
Wh-what am I supposed to do? O God, tell me how to escape this.
Her breathing grew rough.
A shiver ran through her whole body — a sensation utterly foreign to her.
Physiologically, it repulsed her. But this was an offer she could not refuse.
She hadn't eaten properly in days, and this warm bowl of gruel was the first real food she'd been offered since the ordeal began.
Lucas was watching her, smiling.
As if to say: hurry up and eat.
Ah, Mother God. Drive out the demons that have sprung up in my head.
"I-I'll eat it."
She lifted the spoon and stared into the gruel it held.
Tears welled up.
She released her bitten lip, squeezed her eyes shut, and forced the spoon into her mouth.
In the time she'd been wavering, it had cooled just enough. The warm gruel spread through her mouth and gently coated it.
"Nnnngh..."
It glided softly down her esophagus and lapped tenderly at the walls of her stomach.
The sensation of her empty insides being warmed made Amelia shiver before she could stop herself.
The long, lonely chill that had wracked her body vanished in an instant, replaced by a snug, embracing warmth.
Without realizing it, the corners of her mouth lifted.
The mild heat in the gruel — maybe it was a kind of dense vitality — began to spread through the hollow inside her.
It feels good.
She'd never known something so simple — warmth filling your belly — could feel this wonderful.
Had it always been this vivid, the sensation of flooding your hollow body with overflowing life?
She felt like she finally understood why the heroine of that sensual novel had loved the moment of climax so desperately.
This vivid sensation of warm life filling you from within — it was the very feeling of being alive, reawakening you to your own existence.
"Take it slowly."
At Lucas's words, she scooped up another spoonful.
The gruel slipped down her throat before she even had to swallow, gliding down her esophagus in a smooth stream.
With each spoonful, she felt herself alive.
"Haa."
"It won't taste like much. I haven't added even a pinch of salt. Fill your stomach modestly, and once your insides settle, I'll bring out something more substantial."
"...It's perfectly fine as it is."
A slight flush on her face, she lifted the spoon again.
The gruel he had made for her was delicious in an entirely different sense.
Each mouthful brought something new.
First, the almost violent stirring of life rekindling inside her.
Then, gratitude for the food that was filling her body.
Then, gratitude toward the cook who had made it — toward Lucas.
And finally, gratitude and guilt toward the many people who had sacrificed and helped so that she could make it here at all.
The more keenly she felt the preciousness of life, the deeper her gratitude toward them grew.
Had this been the point all along? All those prohibitions on food during pilgrimage — endure the people's hardships, they'd said, go hungry — was it meant to teach her exactly this: the weight and value of being alive?
Tears streamed down her face as the realization settled over her.
She clasped her hands and lifted a prayer of thanks for them.
Let them still be alive.
Let her see them again.
When the prayer ended, she emptied the remaining gruel to the last spoonful.
Wiping her stomach with a slow stroke, she spoke.
"My belly... is full of your essence, Sir Lucas."
Before she could stop herself, the line from the novel had slipped out.
The line she'd never once spoken aloud — the line she'd held back, hiding her desires.
It was mortifying, but nobody would know. No one here would recognize that she'd just quoted a line from erotic fiction.
"I'm glad you enjoyed it."
Thankfully, Lucas showed no sign of recognition.
"I could feel the care you put into it."
She gave the novel's line a slight twist.
- I could feel you.
As if she had become the heroine from that story she'd once read.
"Fu-fufufu."
If her smile seemed to have drifted a long way from anything saintly — well, that probably wasn't just her imagination.