Chapter 63.

This time the scene depicted was the girl and dead dog, but different to before, they were both surrounded by rats. The rats feasted upon the flesh of the dead dog and nibbled away at the girl’s legs.

Perhaps she had felt the pain when she was bitten, her eyelids trembled slightly. She weakly opened her eyes and discovered the rats who’d greedily bitten onto her legs. Startled, she used what little strength she had, she kicked them off her legs and swatted away the ones that feasted on the dead dog’s body.

When she looked at the dead dog’s open wounds, it triggered her survival instincts and overwrote the companionship she’d built up with the pitiful half eaten dog that only just recently met his demise. Like she’d just seen moments before, she learned by example and imitated the same actions the rats had taken. She bit into the dead dog the best she could then ripped and tore at its flesh. Her mental faculties had long been overridden by her hunger and she was unable to differentiate between food and her recently deceased companion at this time.

She chewed what she could and swallowed what she couldn’t. She nearly choked a few times, but she drank the dogs blood as a means to force it all down and stay hydrated.

I couldn’t help but wonder who this poor child was and what kind of events had transpired to push her into such a precarious state. I thought deeply over it, but in the end, I still didn’t remember anything before I entered this never ending darkness.

Once the child ate her full, she fell onto her back and remained there motionless. When she came to her senses she sobbed and weeped to herself when she realized what she’d just done. The only thing audible in the mansion were her cries of despair and self hatred. The scene continued for some time until she fell sick from the uncooked raw dog meat she’d eaten. She inevitably passed out from the pain caused by indigestion.

Similar to before, the bubble popped when the girl lost consciousness.

The next bubble showed the girl when she woke up again. Again, rats bit at her and ate away at the remains of the dead dog. She repeated the process again, but this time the blood had all dried up and spilled everywhere. She choked on a piece of the dog meat and passed out again. When she fell to the ground the shock from the fall dislodged the piece of dog meat stuck in her throat, but she still passed out due to the impact to her head.

Pop.

The next bubble showed when the girl regained consciousness for the third time. The rats were back, but this time, all that remained were bits and pieces of the dead dog’s bones. There was no longer anything for the girl to eat. She was now left starved, in a severely weakened state, and clearly fatally ill.

Instinctively to survive, the girl grabbed onto one of the rats that daringly nibbled away at her leg. The rat had certainly long noticed she’d regained consciousness, yet it still greedily devoured her flesh despite the rat’s better judgement on previous occasions. It likely believed the girl was incapable of any form of retaliation by this point and it naively thought of her as a free meal.

Unfortunately, against this pitiful rat’s expectations, the little girl savagely smashed it’s head against the ground after she grabbed it. The rat’s skull was instantly crushed under the force of the collision and it immediately died with one last anguished squeak. His fellow rats fled in all directions, terrified of the little girl who’d been pushed into a corner. Left with no other choice, the child, barbarically ripped into the rat’s flesh and tore a chunk of meat off and swallowed. Like a savage beast she chugged the rat’s blood directly from it’s carcass and forced the rancid rat meat down her throat with the assistance of the blood.

Depicted in several subsequent bubbles were many recurrences of this brutally grotesque scene. The longer I watched as she suffered through the pain that came with such unsanitary meals, the more I realized how her body at some point had gradually changed and adapted to it. With how lifeless her eyes were, I couldn’t understand what pushed her to struggle to survive in such precarious conditions.

After about a year of repeating the same pattern of eating and passing out, the little girl added another critter to her cuisine. Cockroaches and any other small insects that crawled about the mansion were by no means off limits to her. In fact, it seemed she preferred them over the tough rat meat.

It was truly miraculous how she’d somehow adapted to her environment the way she had. Eventually, the little girl ventured outside the mansion’s grounds into the surrounding forest where she found a source of clean water. No more blood at long last after an entire year. She broke down into tears when she finally found that supply of clean water.

The water and electricity to the mansion had long been cut off at some point before I’d started my observation of the little girl. Her discovery eliminated the necessity for rat blood with her meals and she was finally able to clean herself up as well.

Any injuries her body sustained healed rapidly, much faster than normal humans after everything she’d been through. Her body’s metabolism was far superior to your plain old average joe due to how often she’d been bitten and injured over the last year. I was truly flabbergasted by the incredible development of her immune system. How she’d survived all alone like this inside an abandoned mansion in the middle of nowhere left me awestruck and astonished.

When she finally had time to catch her breath after she’d grown accustomed to her harsh daily lifestyle she started reading through the countless books littered about the rooms of the mansion in her spare time. It was truly fortunate she knew how to read and she learned all sorts of different things by browsing through the various books available to her.

There were many nights where she suffered through the freezing cold, completely isolated from the outside world; but thanks to the knowledge she acquired in the books she read, she finally learned different methods to start a fire using the materials inside the mansion and forest. She read through many different survival books and cookbooks in her free time; a result of those efforts was she’d learned how to prepare all sorts of different dishes for herself to enjoy.

When her life grew more stable, to the point where survival wasn’t the only thought on her mind, I found her on several occasions blankly sitting by a window inside the mansion looking up into the night sky for hours on end all alone by herself. Her eyes which had regained some semblance of life often drowned in sorrow whenever she thought back to her past.

She often called out and pleaded for her mother, father and big sister to return. While on other occasions, she curled herself up into a ball and held her head with her hands while she repeatedly muttered to herself how everything was her fault. She was to blame. She killed them all. Over and over again. Day after day, night after night. When she wasn’t trying to survive, she was constantly haunted by her memories. Sometimes, she prostrated herself in front of three graves. She smashed her head against the ground while she weeped and shed countless tears; simultaneously, she apologized and begged them to come back.

She’d gained too much leeway and she now suffered through an endless spiral of guilt, self hatred and resentment.

The process continued on and on, countless times and I realized her mental state that had slightly recovered became gradually more twisted and warped, until it eventually drove her to the brink of insanity.