I stare at him, more confused than anything. “Simel, what the heck are you doing?”

His chest spasms up and down, anxious little breaths hopping out of his throat. His eyes tremble, never leaving me for a moment. Somehow, it doesn’t even feel like he’s looking at me, but rather at something that just happens to be where I am.

Frowning at him, I put my hands on my hips. “I’m not entirely sure what you’re trying to pull here, but when you snap out of it, I’ll be over here making you food and water, okay? And I’m not trying to stress you here or anything, but I suggest you get your marbles in order pretty soon or the food will go cold.”

Still basically gasping, he keeps watching me even as I turn around to go get the food in order. Maybe, when this is all over, he might actually appreciate all of this? Ahh, who knows.

Grumbling to myself, I pull a few clean bones from my inventory and lay them atop the perfect goblin grill coals. After shuffling them around a little, I remove the tarantula legs from my inventory. I usually crack these things open and slurp out the meat raw, but since I’ll be cooking them, I’ve elected to keep the meat in the legs, only altering them by shearing off the thick bristles covering them. Now, how many of these might Simel reasonably eat?...

I glance over at where he sits in the back of the cave, head in hands, breathing sharply.

—He’s a growing boy. He should be able to eat a couple, right?

I put three tarantula legs on the grill. Hmm. Now that I think about it, I actually have no idea how old Simel is. How old do goblins get, anyways? In games and stuff, goblins are usually shown as fast-ageing things, but that doesn’t necessarily hold true for the real-life variants. Really, since this seems to be a completely different kind of situation, these goblins might actually age even slower than humans. Going by that logic, there’s actually a chance that Simel is way older than me, maybe even by hundreds of years.

I glance back at Simel where he sits hyperventilating.

…Yeah, no. He’s probably around my age at most. Maybe even—

POP!

I whirl around to look at the tarantula legs. One has literally exploded. Oo—kay.

Removing a clean bit of tarantula hide from my inventory, I put the other legs on top of it. They look a little dangerous, but I’m sure it’s fine. Carrying the plate, I reenter the cave. Simel is still deep inside, curled up and everything. Geez. Since he might inadvertently use magic on the plate, I stop a fair bit away, putting down the food in his field of vision. “Here you go,” I say, standing back up. “Cooked tarantula legs, just for you.”

He doesn’t look up from where he sits. Alright.

Leaning down again, I crack open the legs, scalding my hands as I do. The inside is filled with rich steam, and it honestly doesn’t smell all that bad. “There. How’s that? I know it isn’t gourmet, and I didn’t exactly have anything to season it with, but it’s better than starving by far.” I stare at him for a moment. He doesn’t budge. I sigh. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

I wander back to the grill. There’s still some tarantula splattered here and there. I take a piece and taste it. Very bland, but it is food. Personally, I prefer the texture of the raw variant, but this is fine, too.

While the grill is still hot, I start operating my latest and greatest plan.

For this, you’ll need four items: an empty vodka bottle, a cleaned-out small intestine, a few pieces of hair, and a snake fang.

Step one is to grab the small intestine, and if it isn’t clean, you clean it using your mouth. Once you can’t taste any flavour on it, you loop one end over the mouth of the empty vodka bottle, securing it in place with some long hairs. Then, you secure the other end of the intestine around the snake fang, making sure that the pointy tip is pointing outwards. And just like that, you’ve got yourself an impromptu blood letter!

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With that done, you just take the snake fang part, find yourself a good vein, and pop it right on in. I decided to go with that one vein in your armpit that all the druggies use in the movies. I had to dig around a bit to find it, but once I got the vein, the blood went into the snake fang and through the intestine and into the vodka bottle. Success!

It takes around half an hour for the entire bottle to be filled up, at which point I’ve already started considering using my jugular vein next time. That might actually kill me though, so I think I’ll abstain.

I repeat the process for a few more bottles until I’ve got a total of eight bottles of both my own blood and animal blood. I feel a little woozy, but that’ll pass soon enough.

Now, I can move on to the true science part of this.

First, though, I need to make sure the grill is still going strong, which it thankfully is. Great. Okay, so, now, we’ll do something a little funky. Taking the used small intestine, we clean out the blood first before fastening one end to a bottle of blood and the other to an empty bottle of vodka. And then, we just put the bottle of blood over the fire and watch the magic happen!

…Any time now. Aaaaaaany time now. Any… time… now…

I sit and stare at the bottle of blood. Did I mess up somewhere?...

As I watch the two bottles with due suspicion, the whole thing being a caveman’s science experiment at best, a change suddenly occurs. A little bit of steam seems to be rising from the blood! Scooching closer, I watch with interest as the tawny bit of steam crawls upwards in little white wisps of oxidised water, trailing through the smaller intestine to condense in the uppermost bendy part before turning into just the smallest droplets of water. The teeny tiny droplets slowly inch down the throat of the bottle before sliding down the sides and gathering at the bottom.

…Success! Hah, and my biology teacher always told me I’d never become anything worthwhile! Well, not that he was wrong, but he was absolutely incorrect to fail me in science, that’s for sure.

Giddy, I watch the little experiment take form. Soon, the blood is bubblin’ and the steam is flowin’. I take a deep whiff. Ahhh, is this the scent of victory? Technically speaking, if it’s a battlefield victory, then it should logically follow that said victory would smell like blood. But this is a different type of victory, so the scent isn’t as set in stone.

One thing that worries me a little, though, is that the small intestine is sort of, I don’t know… ballooning? I don’t know how else to describe it, but it’s simultaneously being cooked while also getting filled up with steam. Right now, it’s starting to look an awful lot like a snake being inflated. You know, like that one scene in the animated hit movie Shre—

POP!

With an almost melodious pop, the small intestine finally gave out, the middle part of it rupturing and the steam held within flying out in a big white puff.

H—hey, wait, no! My steam!!

Grabbing hold of the intestine, I wedge it shut, ignoring the way it scalds my hands. Okay, okay, I forgot the basics of how steam engines work, but that’s fine, we can still make this work, I just need to—

POP!

The intestine had other plans, as the part I held shut popped once more, startling me enough to not care to grab the loosened end again. And for just a moment, I stare at the bottle where it sits atop the perfect barbecue coals silently steaming, wondering where my life went wrong.

I look over at the vodka bottle with water in it. There’s maybe a decilitre or so of water in there. Closing my eyes I take a measured breath. If I replace the small intestine every now and again… it’s doable. It’ll take a lot of patience—something I don’t exactly have in spades—but I can do it.

For Simel’s sake.

So, even though it hurts, I keep going. I put more stuff on the fire to keep it going all throughout the night. I learn how to make the process more effective by lengthening the intestine and letting the steam cool down every now and again. And by the end of it all, I was able to distil the blood into three bottles of water. The water is kind of murky and I should probably try to refine it somehow but I don’t trust my process—if you can even call it that—to be anywhere near good enough to do so properly.

I’ve even tasted it, and although it wasn’t exactly tasteless, it didn’t give me any levels in any tolerances or resistances, which means it’s good enough. Better than dying, at least.

<03:01:54

Day 377>

18:20:58:6>

It’s early in the morning, but my excitement is too great to stop myself. Sneaking inside the depths of the cave, I shake Simel awake. “Simel, Simel,” I shout-whisper. “Hey, Simel, wake up, I got you something!”

He awakens with a startle, drawing back in fear at seeing me so close. I hold up my hands placatingly, simultaneously presenting one of the bottles. The two other bottles are in my inventory, corked and safe. “Look!” I say, boastfully shoving the bottle towards him. “I did it, Simel! I got you water!”

He looks at the bottle in my hands as though he expects it to contain nothing but 100% pure distilled snake venom. I chuckle at him. “Yeah, it doesn’t look too good, but it’ll keep you alive. I mean, when was the last time you drank proper water?” He doesn’t really answer that one, so I can assume it’s been a while. I push the bottle closer to him. “Here, drink. Drink as much as you’d like!” But, for some reason, he draws back further. My smile feels strained. “Come on, Simel, don’t be like that. It’s not unsafe, I promise! No more than drying out, that’s for sure.”

He still doesn’t seem keen on so much as having a taste.

Unfortunately, at this moment, I can tell that he needs this water more than basically anything. His cheeks and eyes are far more sunken in than they were before our travels. The skin around his ears is dry and cracking in places. He needs water. Knowing my inventory and the state of this water, I can’t be certain that this water won’t spoil.

So, even though I hate to do it, I force him to drink. It’s true—I do. I had to. You understand, don’t you? I didn’t have any choice!

The taste made him puke a few times, but I still made him drink. Until he no longer puked and he still had water in his stomach, I forced him. I didn’t like doing it. It hurt. But it had to be done.

I didn’t have any choice.