Loud Enough to Make You Mad
It had become unbearably loud, really.
Even after my body had turned into that of a monster, I had always kept a regular routine.
If I wanted to stay in peak condition, I needed sleep that satisfied both quality and quantity, so I had always gone to bed on time.
If anyone wondered how I could sleep on a schedule without a clock, I would have said that nothing was more accurate than the body’s own clock.
Besides, there were no smartphones here, and not a single piece of entertainment equipment I could use to kill time.
Honestly, aside from work or talking with other people, there was nothing worth spending time on.
If I got sleepy, I’d just lie down and go glug-glug-glug.
So I had no choice but to keep a regular life.
Later, I’d have to make something I could actually enjoy during my free time.
I looked around the dim interior of the cave.
I’d need lighting, a desk, a chair, and maybe even a bed.
There had been so many chaotic things lately that I’d paid less attention to it, but in the end, I planned to turn this cave into a place that felt lived in.
A place for a human to live, or a monster, or whatever—I had a lot to do.
First, I should eat before I started working.
I shuffled over to the storage area.
“What the hell. Damn it, give it back.”
Staring at the empty storage space, I made a blank, shattered face.
I had definitely stocked the food I’d gathered here, so where in the world had it gone?
And the answer came quickly.
Lately, I had been dealing with one thing after another, and all I’d done was eat; I hadn’t replenished anything.
I patted the cold, empty storage container.
I’m sorry.
I’d made you useless.
“Hah. What am I supposed to do about this?”
My stomach growled.
And yet I felt as though I were stuffed to bursting.
What did that mean, you ask?
I don’t want to hunt or fish anymore. I’d rather starve to death.
Up until now, I had only eaten protein.
At first it had been fish, then pork, then fish again, then venison…
I wasn’t a bodybuilder or anything, no, and bodybuilders ate a certain amount of carbohydrates too.
Even when I tried to twist my whole body into something different with herbs and salt fruit, all I ended up with was “well-cooked meat dishes.”
I was sick of it.
I was so sick of the smell of cooked meat that it made me nauseous.
A life without the ability to eat meat was miserable, yes, but so was a life where you ate nothing but meat every single day.
“I need carbohydrates…”
I went to seek salvation.
“Do you want bread or rice?”
“I want it so badly I could scream…”
Lucy poked her head out through the window.
When I was pleading in the yard, Lucy told me to wait a moment.
“Here you go.”
Lucy held out a bag.
Inside it was bread, and the rich, savory smell pricked at my nose.
Even so, the reason I made an odd face was…
“This won’t fill me up…”
The bread was about the size of Lucy’s right hand.
It was so small it wouldn’t even count as a proper snack.
To me, it was little more than a piece of candy.
“Then, would you mind waiting three hours?”
“Oh?”
“If I use up all the flour in the house, I can probably manage something…”
“N-no, it’s fine! I’m not that desperate!”
If she went that far, it would be like confiscating the acorn a squirrel had already stuffed into its mouth….
“This is enough.”
“You just said you weren’t full…”
“A taste is enough.”
I gave Lucy a thumbs-up.
Lucy stuck her own thumb up right back at me.
“Are you feeling a little better?”
“You’ve been asking me that a lot lately.”
“Of course I have. I’m worried about you…”
Lucy smiled, her cheeks dimpling.
“Friend. I have something I want to ask you.”
“Yeah?”
“How did you know there was a shackle on my heart?”
“A shackle? Oh, Satania told me.”
That must have been around the time right after I brought Lucy to the hut.
I had hurried to Satania and asked for her help nursing Lucy, and the moment she checked Lucy’s condition, she desperately tried to tell me something.
Lucy. Pain. You. Heal. Possible.
So I healed her.
The method was simple.
All I had to do was maintain physical contact with Lucy.
Thanks to that, Lucy was able to get back on her feet without issue.
I was so relieved.
Satania seemed to have knowledge in that area.
She also had a high level of language intelligence and was, in many ways, an educated friend.
“Next time, just say you need help. Don’t force yourself to endure it like some idiot. We’re friends, aren’t we?”
“Hehe, I understand. Oh, that reminds me…”
Hm?
“I visited Satania’s house yesterday, and it was huge. Did your friend build it herself?”
“Ah, no. I asked the beastfolk to build it for her. I paid them for it, too.”
“I see.”
Lucy touched her chin with her index finger and tilted her head.
“What is it?”
“There was this enormous snack? Bread? Something with a really savory smell there. If you have time, why don’t you go ask about it?”
“Huh.”
I’d obtained some interesting information.
An enormous snack, or bread—maybe it could satisfy my craving for carbohydrates.
“Thanks for telling me.”
I was just about to head toward the hut that looked like a temple.
“Friend.”
“Yeah?”
Lucy held her palm out through the window.
“You don’t need it anymore, do you…?”
The shackle that caused Lucy so much pain should have already disappeared.
The reason Lucy had wanted my hand all this time was probably because of that shackle.
After all, I had the power to neutralize magic.
“I do need it. And besides, didn’t you say I could ask for help whenever I needed a friend?”
“That’s true…”
Lucy and I pressed our hands together.
I could feel a small, comforting warmth very clearly.
“See you next time.”
Lucy waved at me with a satisfied expression.
I said goodbye to Lucy and headed straight for Satania’s house.
Crunch, crunch!
Satania was clinging to some unidentified brown, round object.
The round thing gave off a savory smell, and it was bigger than one of those giant exercise balls at the gym.
I popped the bread Lucy had given me into my mouth and greeted her.
“Hey.”
Satania, who had been gnawing furiously at the round thing larger than her own body, froze in place.
“Ah.”
She hurriedly sprang off the round object.
Then she coughed awkwardly, cheeks red, shaking crumbs all over herself like a clumsy child.
***
“Good grief…”
I looked up at the enormous trees around Satania’s house.
Dangling from the branches were the huge round things Satania had been eating earlier, as if they were fruit growing from the tree.
“A Ppangdu tree.”
“Its name is Ppangdu tree?”
“Yeah. That thing, name, Ppangdu.”
So the fruit’s name was Ppangdu.
Satania brushed the Ppangdu crumbs off her body.
“Eat one.”
“You want me to eat it?”
“Yeah.”
I walked over and picked one of the fruits.
Then I shoved it into my mouth.
Crunch, crunch.
Munch, munch.
Gulp.
“Whoa, damn.”
Ppangdu was crispy on the outside and chewy inside.
The savory flavor of carbohydrates, followed by a sweet note at the end, was excellent.
Inside were hard little kernels, like walnuts, and they gave the whole thing a pleasantly playful texture.
It felt like eating a nicely fried glutinous rice donut, one without sugar or red bean paste.
So this world had fruits like this too.
“Delicio?”
“It really is delicious.”
I couldn’t stop myself from reaching for more.
They were fairly large, too, big enough that I could actually fill my stomach with them alone.
As I kept snatching the Ppangdu from the tree and stuffing them in my face, Satania slapped my tail.
“No! Mine! Leave some!”
“Aww…”
I was full of regret, but the fruits were already down to about half their original number, and I was a monster with at least some conscience, so I held back.
As I smacked my lips, Satania said to me, “The one before.”
“Huh?”
“The one you gave before.”
Ah, so that pumpkin-sized walnut I’d given her last time had been the seed of the Ppangdu tree?
“Plant it in ground.”
“I just have to plant it in the ground?”
“Feed it.”
“I have to feed it too?”
Wasn’t the whole point of plants that you just gave them sunlight and water?
At worst, if the soil was poor, I thought you’d need fertilizer rich in nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus—that was common sense, as far as I knew.
“Yeah. Nibble on corpse.”
“Corpse…?”
“That thing, hell, tree, corpse, nibble.”
Several terrifying words had been lined up in a row.
After hearing the explanation, I felt uneasy in all sorts of ways, but now that I knew how ridiculously good Ppangdu tasted, it was worth trying.
I said goodbye to Satania.
Then I started looking for a place to plant the Ppangdu tree.
The area around the cave would be best, of course.
Maybe I’ll plant it right in front of the house.
Anything was best when it was close to home.
That way, it would be easier to manage, and I could respond quickly if anything happened.
“All right, let’s get to work.”
The cave was in the forest.
In other words, there were trees and grass all around the entrance.
To manage the Ppangdu tree more efficiently, I started clearing out the front of the house.
Crack-crack—boom!
I used brute strength to tear out the trees, and with a single sweep of my foot I scraped the ground clean of weeds.
Under my power, which surpassed even modern heavy machinery, the plants vanished from the forest in no time, and I smiled with satisfaction at the barren stretch of land.
I tossed the grass aside without much care, and the trees I had pulled from the ground were laid to rest by the river.
Later, I could use them if I needed them, or give them to Lucy or Satania—or maybe some other beastfolk—as gifts.
I carefully leveled the ruined ground.
“All I had to do was plant it in the ground, right…”
I planted the Ppangdu seeds I’d stored in the cave.
Now I should get some rest.
Just as I was about to head to the river to wash off the dirt, something happened.
Boing—!
The moment I turned around, something sprang out of the ground in an instant.
It looked almost like a plant, except for the fact that it was about the size of a person and had what looked like an animal’s mouth between two split leaves.
“That looks fucking disgusting.”
The moment I said it, the Ppangdu sprout started chattering its teeth as if reacting to my insult. It did so at a furious pace, and very loudly, too.
Clack-clack-clack-clack!
And that bullshit continued even after I had gone to bathe.
When I lay down on the cave floor, pulled the blanket over me, and closed my eyes, the clattering noise came through even more clearly.
At last, I felt like I understood the feelings of people who got sensitive to noise from the floor above them, or to construction right outside their house.
It was as if it was resenting the fact that I was lying comfortably inside the cave and rolling around in peace, because it just kept clattering without stopping.
“Let me fucking rest, you bastards!”
Clack-clack-clack-clack!
What were they, woodpeckers? And why the hell were they growing faster than a scolding onion?
I threw off the blanket I’d been wrapped in and let out a long sigh.
“I’m going to bring you something to eat. So when I bring it, you’d better shut the hell up, all right?”
I left the area around the cave, where the clattering noises echoed.
The journey to find an animal corpse wasn’t very long.
There was a monster not far from home.
The monster was dead.
Judging by the maggots swarming all over it, it had been dead for quite some time.
Why am I only seeing this now?
It was a route I passed often.
Of course it was—this was one of the roads that led to Lucy’s hut.
I’d definitely walked past here yesterday too, but do living things really rot this quickly once they die?
“Hmm.”
There were bite marks on the corpse, so it seemed monsters had fought here.
“Well, whatever.”
I’d have to tell Lucy and Satania to be careful later.
With that, I gathered up the corpse and went to feed the Ppangdu sprouts.