I lurched back, knocking over the table that I had put the rat leg on which then knocked away some of the chairs.

  My eyes were huge as I looked at my hand and the giant blister that sat on it. The little larvae squiggled as if it could see me watching it, and was giving me a little wave.

  I felt some vomit rise up in my throat, but I was so hungry nothing came up. My stomach was suddenly wracked with a deep pain while I was staring at the larvae.

  It forced me to double over and in a moment of panic I was worried the damn larva was about to burst out of my middle.

  A new notification was blinking in my HUD and when I focused in on it, I could see it was the sandwich. It was lined with an angry red color and an exclamation point was flashing over the top of it.

  You are now STARVING!

  “Fuck this shit,” I yelled, grabbing the leg off the floor with my left hand.

  In my right I grabbed a handful of fur and skin. With a blood curdling scream I pulled the two apart, ripping the skin free from the rat’s leg. Unable to think clearly I held the leg over the flame of one of the torches, letting it slowly cook.

  I rotated the leg around the flame, letting the meat grow brown with the heat. Fat and gristle caught fire here and there, causing the torch to burn brighter for a quick moment.

  All the while I felt my mouth watering more and more as I was wracked with hunger pangs.

  The pain no longer doubled me over but it tried too. The promise of food had me almost obsessed, and the ache felt surreal, almost distant.

  I didn’t let the thing cook long, but hoped it was long enough. With the barest of pauses I took a massive bite out of the rat fink leg, and then lost myself to feeding my hunger.

  Mindlessly I ate, barely chewing past the first few bites, until there was nothing but bone left. I mentally cursed myself for not saving some of it in the event I ended up going a while without food. Glancing at the remaining rat reminded me I still had an option for left overs.

  My bile rose again as the image of the two playing dice brought me back to reality and I became fully aware of what I had just eaten. I wasn’t sure that doing so made me a cannibal or anything but it certainly made me… something. Whatever it made me at least I wasn’t about to starve to death.

  “A survivor,” I said out loud to myself, only half believing it. “It made me a survivor.”

  The whole thing reminded me of one of those Faces of Death videos I had watched when I was like 13. There was a bunch of debate about whether they were real or not.

  There was one scene involving a monkey that came to mind. Remembering it made me throw up some of what I had just eaten.

  I got yet another achievement:

  Achievement Unlocked!

  You Gonna Eat Your Cornbread?

  You had your first… meal! Hey, we aren’t here to judge but that was pretty gross. Maybe next time you could find something a little more appropriate to eat instead of eating semi-intelligent beings.

  On one hand we understand, especially since they were trying to kill you and you were starving to death. On the OTHER hand that was really fucked up.

  (Not starving is its own reward)

  This broke me from my daze and I realized I wasn’t experiencing anymore hunger pangs. I looked at my HUD and the satiation icon was now back to fully green. Hovering over it gave me a timer that said ‘8 hours’ which was honestly longer than I expected.

  Either way I was so relieved that I finally had food in my stomach. There also didn’t seem to be any adverse statuses from eating the rat. I felt so grateful I slumped down into the closest chair and put my head in my hands.

  My body felt exhausted but energized, which was a weird feeling. I knew I wasn’t out of the woods yet - hell I wasn’t even down the street yet - but at least I had made it this far. This bought me enough time to move forward without being in a full-on state of panic and frenzy.

  I lowered my hands and looked around, coming up with something of a game plan. Somewhere between regarding my next move and rethinking my life choice I noticed that my hand no longer had a blister on it. Instead there was a concave wound in its place covering the majority of my hand.

  The wound, surprisingly, did not hurt, but it was definitely exposed to the world.

  The panic rose yet again.

  How had I been distracted enough to not see some kind of creature burst out of my hand? There wasn’t much but I still thought maybe it was something I would notice.

  Somewhere in the midst of curing myself of starving to death it appeared the larva had grown large enough to burst out of my body and go… somewhere.

  I screamed yet again as another achievement popped up into my field of vision.

  Achievement Unlocked!

  Daddy Issues!

  Look who’s going to be a new pappa! It should go without saying that this is not the best situation to bring new life into the world, but if it’s going to happen it may as well be demonic puss spawn!

  Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  Since you are the first player in this session to create a terrible and unholy crossbreed, we are upgrading your reward to gold. Aren’t you lucky?

  (Gold Reward)

  That is not exactly how I would describe my situation at all. I just sat there staring at my open wound, my breathing coming in gasps while my mind remained numb.

  Even though the wound was concave into my flesh it didn’t seem to be affecting my hand at all. Sinew and tendons were visible moving around under a membrane that had been left behind.

  When the larvae had burst from my flesh.

  I had to work double time to keep the new levels of anxiety at bay, but it felt like a losing battle. There was a sense of new panic coming on as I continued to stare at my hand.

  What had just burst out of me? Had there been more of these blisters and I just hadn’t noticed?

  Frantically I started feeling around my body, but didn’t find any new puss pockets. My heart was back to beating far too rapidly in my chest, and I was feeling faint.

  I absolutely refused to pass out with some unknown demon larvae wandering around. I shuddered at the possibility that it would somehow regain access to my body while I was unconscious.

  My thoughts were becoming cyclical and were snowballing as I felt myself spiraling further away from a sense of control. I closed my eyes and tried to take a deep breath but doing so just made the overwhelm loom larger.

  I opened my eyes and continued to breathe, trying to fully assess my situation. There was no sign of the larvae at all. No slime trail, no puss puddles, nothing. I figured there wasn’t anything more I could do about that at the moment.

  I tried to convince myself there was no need to spend any more time on it. If I didn’t start tabling some of these issues, then I was going to end up a babbling mess on the floor. The table for my issues was starting to get pretty overburdened, but I tried not to think about that either.

  It sure seemed a hell of a lot easier to stuff things when I was continually pouring alcohol on top of them. Now that that was gone, they were burbling their way to the surface easier.

  The new stuff was just churning away with the old like an emotionally broken washing machine. Shaking my head, I tried to clear my thoughts, to snap myself out of it. I slapped my face with my good hand until my eyes watered.

  Everything about all of this was totally fucked, but it wasn’t going to unfuck itself if I just stood around in the first dingy room I found. I tried to bounce on the balls of my feet, to shake the panic loose from me.

  “I mean it could be worse,” I said out loud, “I could be as bad off as ‘ol Sir Rasten over there.”

  I felt myself calming down a bit and my breathing started to come easier. More notices were populating in my HUD, but these didn’t appear to be for anything important. I didn’t want to add anything to my plate and ignored them for now.

  I retraced my steps and remembered that I was about to try to sharpen the knife. That seemed like hours ago at this point. I pulled the knife back out again, and moved towards the wall.

  Distracting myself would certainly be a good start in moving past whatever the fuck just happened. As I got closer something caught my eye on one of the bookshelves. It was a book that was pulled out a little further than the others.

  I was almost positive that it wasn’t like that before.

  After a brief consideration, I decided to leave it for now and focused on what I was doing. I needed to take things one at a time if I could. It took a second, but I found a spot on the wall that was a little uniform in grit and got to work.

  I was worried it was going to take me a while to find an edge on the little knife or worse, that it was going to break apart. Thankfully, neither of those things happened. Instead, I got an achievement when I had finished:

  Achievement Unlocked!

  Sharp as Attack!

  See what we did there? Well, we saw what you did THERE and we are impressed! It’s not every day someone has the wherewithal to improve on a shitty design.

  You managed to sharpen a butter knife and take it from dull to razor sharp! Or… less dull. Don’t cut yourself!

  (Bronze Reward)

  I was really starting to stack these rewards up, but I still had no idea how to make any use of them. I examined the knife and the description had changed:

  Goblin Rat Sticker

  Uncommon

  Crafting: Not Learned

  This basic butterknife has been upgraded from a useless and dull nuisance to an actual implement of eventual cutting! No Goblin could have done this, that’s for sure! Don’t get too carried away, though, this thing is still literally a butterknife after all.

  There didn’t seem to be a way to look at the weapon’s condition, so I didn't know how much durability the knives had left. Maybe that was just not a skill I had yet.

  I took the other knife out and gave it the same edge. Keeping one in my hand I put the other one in my quickbar. The process and success at making both of the knives sharper helped get me back to something of a calm state.

  Next was dealing with the corpse of Jeeds and I walked over to him. I wasn’t exactly excited about the idea of eating rat thighs for the next foreseeable future but it still sounded much better than the alternative.

  I really just wasn’t at a point where I could bring myself to trust the goblin stew, rancid or not.

  I knelt down and selected ‘Y’ when the field dressing menu popped up again. I did the same motions as before and this time it seemed to work. It was a much easier process than what I had done earlier.

  Instead of having to try and figure out how to actually skin the thing, the system seemed to do it for me. When I was done with the motions it auto generated a clean rat fink thigh and a small roll of fur for me. It plopped these onto the floor with a soft ‘pop’ and weird jingle.

  The thigh on the corpse just vanished as I finished out the animation. I pulled everything into my inventory. A very strange but very simple process.

  It was much easier repeating the process with its front legs, though these were obviously much smaller. I ended up with one thigh, two front legs, and two small bundles of fur in total.

  Before I could move on to the other rat I had to take care of my hand. It was now throbbing and the wound was starting to look worse with little bits of puss oozing out in areas.

  It still had the same, strange membrane over the more sensitive parts of my hand, but it was starting to look angry and red.

  I checked my HUD, but I didn’t see any new statuses. Of course, I wasn’t entirely sure it would show me all of my statuses or if it only showed me the most pressing. I pulled my book out and checked the more detailed page.

  Sure enough, there were two statuses there that weren’t on my HUD. It made me wonder what else I was missing that only the book would show me or if there was a way to make changes to my main display.

  There wasn’t anything obvious in the book that seemed like a way to make edits. It would be easy to look through the book more closely if I was in a safer place.

  There was some regret at leaving the starter area so soon. Of course, I probably would have ended up starving to death if I had stayed.

  Too many things kept coming at me rapid fire for me to feel like I could take that kind of time now that I was out in the game world. One of the new statuses was called ‘Gassy’ which was pretty obvious and one I wasn’t worried about.

  It did say it could give my position away if I let one rip at the wrong time so I guess that was something to consider. The other was more concerning:

  You are FEVERISH.

  The hits just kept on coming.