Canta wakes up.

It hurts.

A mass of bodies lay on top of him. Soggy, damp flesh presses itself against his own, their dead-weight pressing down onto him. Their unmoving mouths are still full of the constantly regenerating flesh that they were tearing from him while he slept. They tore through his clothes, tore through his meat. Maggots crawl over them all, over the flesh that is both inside and outside of his body. Maggots crawl inside of his organs that are in their hands, inside of his eyes, inside of his mouth. Canta screams, it hurts, but nothing comes out of his throat. There are too many maggots.

His level up window appears, somewhere on the other side of the bodies. He hears it, but he can’t see it.

A moment later, something grabs him and pulls him out of the pile. But as he’s removed out from under the weight of his crushing grave, Canta, in the tiny glimmer of light that he sees through the things crawling over his eyes and nibbling at them, sees that his legs are left behind, his upper half and lower connected only by a string of wiggling entrails. He vomits, maggots pouring out of his mouth, as the light in his eyes leaves him and the world goes dark.

When Canta finally opens his eyes again an uncertain amount of time later, the first thing that he notices, apart from the star-filled sky coating the entire world above them, is the fact that they’re moving. He can sense them moving, his limbs, fingers, toes, feet, all of his appendages and torn ligaments and ripped sinew have regenerated in the time he was asleep. The ache isn’t present in his body anymore and neither are any of the thousands of critters that had befouled his flesh. But as he hangs there, limply, he can still feel the sensation of them inside of himself.

It was like when he was reborn, back down in the dungeon. The worms. It’s always worms. Are maggots worms? Whatever, they’re close enough.

Canta blinks, staring up at the stars, listening to the familiar heartbeat of the person holding him.

He thinks that he really hates worms now.

“Alleluia?” asks Canta. She immediately stops, setting him down onto his two wobbly feet. Her glassy eyes fall onto his and the two of them stare at each other for a while. He notices that she isn’t blinking. But to his surprise, she simply grabs him in a not-too-tight hug and the two of them just stand there, surrounded by the noises of the night-song festivities of the crickets. Not really sure what to do, he places a hand onto her back and then his other hand follows a moment after.

The two of them stay there, just like that, for a while. “Are you alright?” he asks, pulling back to talk to her, but she holds him there and he is unable to retreat.

“I was scared you weren’t going to wake up again,” she explains.

“Oh,” says Canta. “What happened? The last thing I remember, I woke up in that house, surrounded by bodies and then a distorted showed up and…” he shakes his head. “It was all really weird.” He looks at her. “You were gone when I woke up.”

Alleluia looks him over, pulling back now. She squeezes open one of his eyelids and then pulls his lips to the side to look into his mouth. He has the feeling that she doesn’t know what she’s doing or looking for, perhaps she’s imitating something she had read in a book. “You got really sick,” she explains. “You were lying in bed and wouldn’t wake up. Paw told me that there was some medicine in our goblin spot,” explains Alleluia in her chiming voice. Canta notices that her crank is starting to slow down. He gestures with his head and she turns around to let him rewind it. “But it was really weird. Every time I saw a familiar place and I thought I was close, the wheat felt like it moved and I was even further away. I was scared.”

“Huh?” he asks. He notices that she’s tied her hair up.

“I was scared I wouldn’t find my way back and we’d be separated forever.”

“That’s going to happen anyways one day, when one of us dies,” explains Canta, trying to lighten the mood and clearly failing.

She lifts her nose. “Don’t say that.”

“Sorry,” he relents.

“Anyway. I don’t know what happened, but the wheat stopped being weird and I saw your menu in the distance, so I came and got you and…”

He cuts her off. “Wheat-worms. It was a distorted.”

“Huh?”

“The wheat was fucky,” explains Canta. “It controlled Paw and the others. I think they were probably already dead by the time we got here.” He lets go of her crank and grabs her hand. The two of them keep walking. He looks down at himself, noticing that his clothes are completely shredded and tattered, covered in blood and rips. He thinks for a moment. “Because of my regeneration, the parasite probably couldn’t spread to me.” The obvious statement to come is that it couldn’t get her, because she doesn’t have a ‘normal’ body. But he presses that one down, remembering that it’s a sensitive issue as it has been, since their very first physical encounter.

His hand runs along the outside of his stomach as he recalls the feeling of teeth sinking into it, the feeling of bodies crushing him down, trapping him beneath their weight. “Thanks for not leaving me behind. I guess it makes us even.”

She squeezes his hand. “I’ll always come for you, Can-ta.”

“Gross.” He rolls his eyes. “Don’t phrase it like that, it’s creepy.”

Alleluia lifts her nose into the air, looking away. “Only if you have a filthy mind.”

“You’re one to talk!” he snaps at her. The two of them stare at each other for a second. But then they both start laughing. After that, the two of them keep walking, hand in hand. They make a deal that if they ever get separated from each other, that they’ll meet up in the dungeon that they met in, even if both of them are unsure of how to find it right away again. Canta isn’t really sure where it is that they’re going and she obviously has no idea either. The two of them just walk, following the brightest star that they can for now. They don’t encounter any other great sins on the way. But there are a lot of slimes.

Goblins seem to have vanished entirely from the menu, which causes Canta to think about the wheat. It was obviously controlling the goblins then too. Hundreds of them and it was sending them his way, handful by manageable handful.

Why?

Was it lulling him into a false sense of security? Or was it the same as in the cathedral? Are they so deeply ensnared in the demon-king’s world, even out here, that the goal is still to just fatten him up, like he’s some free-range animal, soon to be slaughtered? He tells Alleluia about these worries, but she has no answers to offer him either on the matter.

The two of them walk for another few days. The landscape changes from the flat-plain, covered in rolling yellow-grass, to the same thing, but more hilly. Soon, between the hills, small channels began to form. Creeks and shallow pools and the further they go, the steeper the terrain gets, slowly shifting into something much more rugged. The yellow grass gives way to a greenish-blue counterpart, which grows up the many straight, brown rock-faces that begin to jut out of the landscape.

The monsters shift again too, becoming more wild. The slimes stay a constant part of the landscape, but now come in different variations of color and size. However, now there are several odd mushroom-creatures that look like they’re from a forgotten era. The caps of their bodies, which reach to half of his height, are covered on the top in a spiky layer of needle-like protrusions and they fill the air with poison spores as they hop around.

These are Canta’s favorite kinds of monsters. They aren’t horrible, grisly, blood-coated entities made out of shadows and twisting flesh. They’re just creatures. They belong to the natural world and to the natural order of things. Alleluia takes a special liking to them too, despite their attempts to eat her. She doesn’t seem to notice and instead thinks that they’re playing with her.

“Honey! Look!” she calls over to him in delight as one of them stands there, its soft, squishy mouth wrapped around her forearm. “It likes me! AH!” she yelps as Canta lunges at the creature, sinking his teeth into it. “Honeeey!” she cries. “Don’t eat it! It’s cute!”

He eats it anyway and gets an upset stomach.

☠️ Poison mush-mush ☠️ ~100g Calories: 22 Protein: 3.1 g Fat: 0.3 g *Carbs: 3.3 g Fiber: 1 g Sugars: 2 g

For another week, the two of them make their way across the strange place. There aren’t any roads here and there aren’t any houses or settlements. It’s like a place that time seems to have forgotten and nature seems to have overgrown.

Canta is starting to feel a tinge of hunger for that particular taste of his again, but he fights it down. He might be the sin-eater, but that doesn’t mean he wants to eat sins. These last few haven’t felt very rewarding to eat, making him sadder than anything else. Being a sin-eater kind of blows, actually.

Then, after another week of nothing but killing mushrooms, walking and making increasingly creative use of each other’s muddy, dirty bodies, they break through the half-primeval-jungle, standing high atop one of the sheer cliffs, as they look out over the expanse below them.

“What’s that?” asks Alleluia.

Canta stares out at the thing that she's pointing out. Ancient, overgrown ruins of what looks to have once been a city. A mighty, massive gate stands at the front of the area, its half-crumbled form covered in vines and foliage. The two giant statues that stand before it, broken and collapsed. Ruins of grand structures and houses and all manner of buildings are visible from here, the sharp angles of their stone surfaces visible beneath the foliage and in the back, behind all of the rubble and the ruins and the trees, is a second, giant gate.

Visible even from here, it stands there, towering above the jungle. Its inner form is filled with a gray fog.

And in the air is a smell, a smell akin to a sin, but not really. It’s… different. It triggers something in him, something like his hunger. But it’s not a hunger like he would have for meat or for something like that. It’s that special kind of hunger you get when you smell the food that a loved one has made for you, the smell of fresh bread on a cold morning, the smell of a fresh stew on a winter’s day. It’s more than a smell of just food, it’s a smell of the intent behind the food.

It’s the opposite of a sin. He smells… a virtue, for a lack of a better word.

“It’s a dungeon,” explains Canta, remembering them from his old life. “One that still works. I think?”

“Really?!” asks Alleluia.

“Yeah, but we should be carefu- Hey!” he yelps as she drags him off and away, running straight towards the abandoned city that they had found in the far north of the world.