Chapter 15.

“Like I said before, it’s really not poisonous. The potency of the venom decreases greatly once you heat it at a high enough temperature for long enough. It breaks down. I also added ingredients that reacted with the detoxified poison which gives it a very good flavor. Just try it and you’ll see I’m being honest.”

“You’re really not lying about that?”

“Really.”

“...”

“Tch. Just search it online if you’re that skeptical.”

I warily pulled out the phone she gave me and seriously gave it a search. It didn’t take long before I found a paper on box jellyfish poison and testing the potency of the poison relative to different temperatures and lengths of exposure.

“Well, what did you find?”

“It says box jellyfish stinger venom in nematocysts become non lethal when exposed to temperatures of 58°C, the equivalent to 136°F, for two minutes. But it also says if the temperature is below 39°C there is no noticeable loss in lethality even after 20 minutes.”

“Oh, is that how it works? See, I told you. With the additional ingredients I added in, I can assure that not even you would die if you ate it… probably.”

“What the hell do you mean probably! This is my life we’re talking about! And what the hell was with that ‘Oh, is that how it works?’ at the start? Were you just assuming that was the case?”

“Well, it was only through repeated trial and error that I found out it worked like this. I didn’t really know the science or specifics behind it. I suffered quite a few losses to this venom while experimenting with it as an ingredient when I was younger. Hehe, there were a couple of times I almost died. Thankfully, I survived through it though.”

Should I even be surprised? Was there even a point in me repeating myself again by saying she’s absolutely insane?

“I refuse. I absolutely refuse to eat this. Not even if you threaten my life with death would I ever willingly eat this.”

“I’ll smash that stupid pile of junk you worked so hard on that got me busted last time.”

My eyes shrunk when she casually revealed my greatest trump card to deal with her. “Adele, why do you know about that?”

“Of course I knew about it last time as well, but I didn’t have the heart to completely destroy it at the time because I knew it was something you put a lot of effort into. If I knew you were ungrateful enough to take my little act of kindness for granted like that, I would have burnt it to the ground without a second thought before you woke up. Also, if you try to remotely connect to it through the wifi here to pull off anything sneaky like last time, I already rigged it with explosives. It will detonate the instant a remote connection is made to it.”

The one lifeline I’d spent my life building had already been rendered useless by Adele.

I let out a dry laugh, “haha... I’d never use that thing against my beloved Adele like that. The last time when you showed up, I used it to call a friend to brag about my awesome girlfriend. That friend was the one that actually called the cops. It was just a misunderstanding. A big misunderstanding was all that happened back in my old apartment Adele. I never called the cops myself, it was really just a stupid friend that did it. I boasted about how I’d at long last reunited with the love of my life and he got a bit jealous, so he swatted me to try and cockblock me. I was truly heartbroken when my precious Adele was taken away right before my eyes.”

“Oh? Is that really true? Darling, I’m so happy. I’m so happy I could just kill you right now. Now enough small talk.” Her tone and expression took a complete 180 from flowerly to that of a cold blooded devil without a shred of remorse. “Eat,” she said with immense bloodthirst that only I could feel. Her unspoken words, visible only through our eyes, were naturally, ‘or die.’

“Don’t even think of wasting precious food either. These jellyfish died to extend our own lives. You can’t waste even a single scrap.”

Spoken like a woman who truly knew the horrors of starvation. Somewhere within her insanity was still an earnest respect towards the things that kept her fed.

I reluctantly looked down at the tentacles and I was reminded of the scene where a little girl, desperately, against her own conscious will, bit into the flesh of her own dog who’d accompanied her for years. I closed my eyes and saw her fight off rats and cockroaches, eating them, instead of being eaten by them.

Yes, if that girl grew up, I could only picture her as being the splitting image of Adele in front of me. If it really were Adele’s past, and not something I constructed in my head for my own convenience, everything made sense.

That little girl’s desperation when cornered and starved. I felt a bit of courage well up inside me. If she could survive through that, what was a little chewy tentacle with a crunch to it in comparison?

“Darling, could it be you want me to feed you?”

“No need.”

I opened my eyes intent to dig in, but I was greeted by Adele’s face, her nose almost touching mine.

“Opwen wide.”

“What are you- mmmpph!”

The strange stretchy substance between my lips was undoubtedly the tentacle. What followed was Adele’s tongue shoving the tentacle further inside my mouth. Before I knew it, an entire tentacle was inside my mouth. Adele suddenly backed away with a cheeky grin on her face.

“To think Darling’s reason for being so against it was that he wanted to be fed like a baby by his mother.”

I placed my right hand over my eyes and massaged my forehead with my open palm while I chewed at the tentacle in my mouth. The worst part about it was the tentacle actually tasted really good. Far from disgusting like the appearance suggested.

There was a strange occasional tingly popping sensation inside my mouth whenever the tentacle came into contact with the flesh inside my mouth, but to my surprise, it didn’t hurt like I expected it would 

When the tingly popping sensation ceased, I swallowed.