Chapter 387 Wild Survival

While sitting beneath the downpour in the colossal jungle, a gargantuan creature passed across the clearing in front of him, moving but a couple meters across from him. It resembled a rhino with a brown-and-black hide, stomping forth.

The massive, singular horned creature chewed on grass for a few minutes before continuing on its way, moving with weight that caused small tremors through the mud.

"—" He silently watched.

His heart was a contradiction; it felt empty yet filled with dense emotions of regret and anguish as the painfully fresh memories repeated in his mind alongside past times with his parents.

As hours passed and the darkness of night shrouded any sense of direction, he managed to sit there throughout the entirety of the night, not budging even a muscle as he lost in his own guilty thoughts.

"Chrrrp! Chrrp! Chrrp!"

Signaling the arrival of dawn as the fresh sunlight began dipping through the leaves above were the calls of birds amidst the branches. There was constant noise in the faraway jungle, between the howls of predators, the scurrying of prey, or the calls of avians.

"—"

A growl of his stomach seemed to bring him out of the swamp of grief that was his mind, bringing him to look down at his stomach before tiredly sitting up. Tapping his own abdomen, the thought of food only made him recall the home cooking from his mother that he loved so dearly.

'I can feel it nipping its way back into my mind: that downward spiral of self-pity that I fell into in my old life. A pit so deep without anything to hold onto, keeping you down there as it only gets deeper and deeper. Am I destined for this sort of thing? It feels like wherever I go...tragedy follows. At some point, I have to wonder if my existence is unneeded–no, if the world would be better off with me dead,' he considered.

Even if such thoughts fell onto his mind heavily with a veil of emptiness, there was something that kept him moving forward as he tiredly moved one foot in front of another, aimless, but moving.

Hours and hours went by as he slowly walked the jungle floor, finding himself reaching no signs of anything and unable to bring himself to eat as the thought of it simply was rejected from his guilt-ridden mind.

Another day had passed as he found himself lying on a canopy of leaves and vines, arriving there somehow, but not remembering as he only partly paid any mind to his surroundings.

"--"

Raindrops fell past his lips as he looked up, causing him to instinctively gulp as his dry lips sought hydration.

That question struck him like an arrow through the heart, revealing to him a singular moment in his memory that through his spiral of self-pity and guilt he had buried away.

It was that dreadful scenery of ash and snow when he held her in his arms, those faint words that were left to him: "It's not your fault."

As soon as he remembered that final utterance, a light shined through that abyss sitting in his heart, bringing his eyes to inhabit life once more as the spirit vanished from before him with her task being fulfilled.

'This is...This feeling,' he thought, slowly placing his hand over his heart.

It was love; a love that was embedded into his very soul. One that he may believe he didn't deserve after what he had done, but one that guided him nonetheless through the memories that constantly played in his mind. This was the unconditional love of his mother; the thought that, if nothing else, she would want him to live.

'...She never let me go hungry, not even for a second. Father told me she came from a low born household. My Grandpa on her side worked as a courier, making scraps, while my Grandma made knittings, but it hardly brought much in. There were days they'd go without meals, but what they always made sure to tell me was...whenever there was food, Grandma and Grandpa would always make sure she ate, even if they ended up starving in the process. I think it's because of that, she always cooked so much–almost too much, making sure I was always full and healthy,' he recalled.

Perhaps even heavier than the guilt that clouded him, another burden sat upon his shoulders; a will that manifested itself through the warmth of his dearly missed maternal figure: "Live".

Even if it wasn't pretty, even if he had to force his legs to move, he had to live. That was the one request he felt laid onto him.

'...What is there to eat around here?' He thought.

Leaves and branches crunched beneath his boots as he marched over puddles of mud, pushing past dense foliage as he delved into the depths of the rainy jungle.

What was found abundantly around him were vibrant, colorful fruits, though he was wary of even so much as grazing any of them. Some were obviously questionable from their appearance alone; spiky, gooey fruit, but some were more unassuming, resembling simple, enticing berries.

Though he knew more than enough through reading some journal entries of explorers in the wildlands of Ennage than to trust fruit he wasn't familiar with.

'I remember reading that the single most important rule to remember above all is: "Assuming everything in Ennage wants to kill you"--that's true even for the fruit that grows here,' he thought.

As his stomach growled just at the mere sight of anything remotely edible, he had to keep himself moving forward and ignoring the pains in his completely calorie-deprived stomach as he walked past the dangerous fruit.

"Uuugh..."

Standing by a tree, he watched a lengthy, skin-crawling millipede wriggling against the light-orange bark of the tall, natural structure, knowing full-well what must be done. He easily caught the giant insect, holding it by the tail end of its body as he watched it wiggle creepily in the air as its thousands of legs waved around frantically.

'...Insects are the protein of the wild, right?' He thought.