John woke up lethargic. He couldn’t move. His limbs felt too heavy, too foreign.

The potion as he was learning had quite a lethal aftereffect. Thank god the trials only had one monster. He would be dead if there were more. But then again, according to video game logic, he wouldn’t have met the boss monster until he had killed its minions. He would have been safe nonetheless, just in a more precarious position… health-wise.

Could he fight anything in his condition? A monster could kill him with a flick in his situation.

What about a human; did he have the strength to dance with an adult? 

 He stood a chance... against a dead body. Even kids are ruthless when they are given free rein to act.

John snickered at the amusing thought. It was not like he had anything better to do other than to make fun of himself. Laying on his back in the golden sand, he stared at the ceiling. So he tried, but the ceiling was too far away, too high up for his eyes to see in the darkness. The sand wasn’t bright-bright. It produced a dim glow, a firefly in the darkness. John thought about raising his hand to fire a homing missile toward the ceiling. That would create enough light for him to see what was going up there. He might find a bat perched up there or an insect.

“Anything would do at this point…”

Was he dreaming? If only he was. Truthfully, John didn’t want to move on.

Yes, he was in pain, but it was only a potion away from being healed. For which, he would need to enter the safe zone because the empty potion bottle could only fulfill one wish for a potion in every room/chamber/zone.

Call it whatever you’d like, but he had already asked a wish while completing the challenge of the desert monster.

He simply didn’t want to face the darkness of the safe zone. He was calling it a safe zone, but it was anything but that. The mural, the hole, especially what had conspired the last time he was there... he had barely escaped. He knew he would have to go there eventually; for now, he simply wanted to relax, enjoy a few days of calm serenity and stay away from that sticky darkness until he found a way through.

And the best thing about staying in the trial zone was that it was that he wouldn’t have to starve or feed on a potion to fill his satiety. Here, he had enough food to last him a lifetime.

John glanced toward the worm that lay in the distance. It was a small hill in his sight. His improved digestion should be able to digest it, right? He would know when in a few days when he would go to have a bite of its filthy flesh. He wasn’t much worried about the taste and the like of the worm meat. He might not have eaten a worm before but his teacher, Bear grills, had mastery in this obscure field.

If the guy, with his normal human stomach, could go about in the wild and eat raw worms freshly procured from a rotten tree or forest undergrowth, then he with his enhanced digestion should have no problem eating a monster worm either.

That was the lie John used to convince himself that he didn’t need to enter the safe zone. It’s amazing the things people can do to hide away from a challenge.

Food wasn’t a problem in John’s eyes, it was the shimmering barrier covering the exit, that shone like a light bulb in the middle of the dimly lit desert, which scared him. Whether it would be able to hold the darkness back or not was a heavier burden on his mind than anything else.

Anything that a wish from the empty potion bottle could solve was no problem in his eyes.

The day passed.

John didn’t have to find shelter as there was neither any wind in the place nor any temperature change. The temperature had remained relatively cold throughout the day, and it had been a panacea to his aches and sores.

However, coming evening, John had a choice to make. He could either enter the next zone or he could eat the worm. He was famished. His body desperately wanted nutrition to heal him and his stomach growled to be fed. If his organs could speak, they would be signing a petition to force him to fill their demands or they cancel him.

So staggering and stumbling, John got to his feet and started shuffling toward the worm. He would have liked to have an earth spike to use as a walking stick. Fuck that. He would have liked to have a full-course meal with a dessert, but he could only have what was available. A full course meal consisting of worm meat and he could only have it raw.

Both, a delicious meal and useful magic were not available for him at this moment.

He had tried using magic yesterday. It had not ended up well for him. The nerves of his dominant hand still tingled now and then.  

John walked slowly. He wasn’t particularly interested in eating the worm meat. Perhaps, his hesitation was one of the bigger reasons behind his slow walking speed beside his aches and pains.

One could say that John had given up.

He knew he had to eat to regain his strength, but the thought of consuming the raw slimy flesh of a worm made his stomach turn. However, he also knew that he had no other options, and he couldn't afford to waste any part of the worm.

He examined the worm's body on the way and decided to take a piece from the hole he had opened in its back. By the time he got there his whole body was shaking from weakness and hunger. He could have persevered for another day before he started walking, but now he had lost that luxury. Now eating the worm flesh was not a matter of choice for him but of need.

John carefully cut a slice of the flesh with his wand and took a bite. Slimy fibrous threads connected the flesh to the worm when he separated them. The sight made his heart fall to his stomach. He couldn’t help groaning. He closed his eye and took a few breaths to calm his trembling hands and then bite into the piece of flesh he had torn from the worm.

Oh, it tasted exactly how John had imagined. The raw worm tasted slimy and fishy; behind the smell and the taste, it was like he was biting into a piece of hard salty leather. He had to fight to keep the piece of flesh down as he swallowed it, but he knew he had to continue eating to survive.

Despite the unpleasant taste, John continued to eat the raw flesh until he had consumed as much as he could. He made a mental note to search for a way to start a fire and cook his food in the future. But for now, he had to make do with what he had.

His enhanced digestion didn’t forget to give John a surprise. He felt the enzymes in his stomach working double-time, breaking down the tough flesh of the worm into easily absorbable nutrients. He had never felt his body work so efficiently before.

As he continued to eat, energy returned to his limbs. The aches receded slowly. The deep heaviness on his chest lifted enough to ease his breathing. With time he got used to the earthy, sandy flavor of the worm in much greater detail than before. It wasn't a particularly pleasant taste, but he found that he didn't mind it as much as he thought he would.

As he finished the last bite, he felt a wave of contentment wash over him. His body was fully nourished and energized, and he felt a sense of clarity that he hadn't experienced in a long time.

That wasn’t all, he felt a heat traveling to his skin. It poured into his epidermis. He couldn’t understand what it did, but by the time it was done, he almost felt like something was crawling all over his body. Perhaps it changed his skin he thought, but that wasn’t it. He pinched and flicked his arm. He felt the pain that he should have felt and a red welt developed where he pinched.

However, it was also true that the sensation wasn’t his imagination. He panicked somewhat at first, thinking he had gotten sick. He had eaten the worm's eggs and they were growing under his skin. The paranoia remained until he saw his arm hair standing up and his feelings getting influenced by them. They stood up straight like antennae and when that happened, and this is true, John could feel the sandworm's presence with them. This knowledge opened his eyes in astonishment. He understood that eating the sandworm had changed his hair into feelers of some kind, exactly like the monster!

He could feel the tiny changes in his surroundings.

He found himself stepping back in excitement and realized that once he was three steps away from the sandworm his arm hair fell, and he stopped sensing the sandworm. The sensation of something crawling over his body though remained.

“Can I only sense other's presence in a meter radius? What good is that?” John clicked his tongue. Then a light bulb glowed in his mind. “What if…”

  He didn’t waste time wondering and directly cut another piece of the sandworm with his wand to experiment. The flesh hadn’t changed. It looked as unappetizing as before. Only, now John had a motive behind eating it other than fulfilling his primal hunger.

Greed and gluttony are sins for a reason.

John soon finished eating the vomit-inducing atrocity of a meal, and he was ready to see if his hair had changed any further. He waited for the flesh to digest and spread its warmth to his body and his skin. This time when he stood back two meters, he could still feel the sandworm.

“Fuck!” Was the only reaction he could give.

It brought back memories of his teenage years when he was less calm and more intuitive. ‘Fuck’ used to be his go-to word to voice his thoughts whenever something interesting happened around him. Old habits die hard they say. And they are right. Now John finally after forgetting about his teenage mannerism for well over a decade was starting to embrace his teenage simplicity with the gusto of a young adult.   

John was stunned by the prospectus that there was a giant sandworm lying dead in front of him and he could be eating it for days, considering it would start rotting after that and by that time he might not just have two meters of this precious new sense. By then he might not even need eyes to see, if only he didn’t go crazy by the sudden stimulation provided by this new sense, which was already starting to make him jumpy.

John looked around… at the vast-vast expanse of the cold glowing desert frozen in eternal night and then back at the worm. He knew exactly what he would be doing for the next few days at least.

John didn’t admit it, the ability to sense his surroundings elevated John’s heartbeat. Deep down in his heart, he knew he would eventually have to enter the safe zone but now he didn’t need to fear the darkness. It could grow and swallow him whole and he would still be able to find his way around the world.