I stared up at the demon in shock as I was expecting an excuse or something. Not this. Apparently, when I didn’t say anything he started to mutter.

  “Of all the infru—” he began before I interrupted him.

  “Fine…. bite… me.” I told him. It took him a brief moment for what I meant to register properly and, when it did, I felt him relax.

  “Thank you, Samuel. I will try to make this as painless as possible.” He said before grabbing me by my neck and sinking his claws into my left hip to turn me over on to my side. It didn’t hurt this time, barely even a ‘pinch’ as they slid into my flesh unlike the last few times which meant he was trying to keep his word about making this as painless as he could for me.

  I thought things were going to be alright for me until he opened wide what I had come to think of his main mouth. Doing so nearly cut his head in half like a fleshy beach ball and past the ring of sharp saber teeth was a gullet far too wide to fit through his scrawny neck. It was horrifying but perhaps not quite as horrifying as I had imagined it to be. I think I was expecting there to be more teeth in there but there weren’t.

  Either way, I instinctively braced myself as his mouth enveloped my left shoulder and part of my chest before biting down on me. I felt them painlessly pierce my flesh like his claws had earlier and stopped. One of his free fingers tapped on my neck as he sought my attention.

  “Samuel, you need to let me have this if I am going to save you. Try remembering what you did with your answer.” He told me with the use of eye maw closest to my face.

  I did not need to know that he could do that.

  To push that bit of unwanted knowledge from the fore front of my mind, I decided to take his advice and focused on ‘letting’ him ‘have’ a chunk of me. It came with mixed results as it was hard to focus on the idea while feeling my bones break and flesh tear. It was painless for the most part except when I lost focus on him having a literal piece of me.

  Eventually, he succeeded with biting my arm and attached bits off. I felt a touch lighter for it, but it felt weird watching him eat my limb. Particularly since I could still feel the removed bits of myself, and I don’t mean I could feel him chewing on it either. I mean I could feel as if it had never been removed in the first place. Sure, it was a bit numb in that area but that was fading. When looked to it, I could see it regrowing in a way I didn’t want to know either.

  To keep that from my mind as well, I chose on focus on ‘letting’ him have chunks of me. He went for the rest of my rib cage once he was done with my arm and then he went for my abdomen. ‘Letting him have’ each bite that he took from me was easier than the last and I steadily felt better with each one.

  He eventually really got into it, making odd happy growling noises as he ate my body. He took bites from almost every part of my body as well, leaving only my head, right arm and the bits connecting them alone in his feasting. At one point, he even chewed me in half, out eating the disturbing regeneration I had in this place and biting through my spine with a very solid sounding crunch.

  That was fine as it was painless, and he had scooped out the majority of my internal organs, so nothing was really dangling out. What wasn’t fine, was that he dropped my upper half to focus on eating my legs. I landed on the relatively soft not-floor of this place with a grunt that drew his attention back to me.

  He let go of my legs to hold with one while the freed hand was held aloft and, with an upward flick of a finger, the surface rose up under me. I soon found myself laying on top of something flat and padded while my head and shoulders were propped up on some kind of pillow as the rest of me regenerated. Whatever I was laying on was about waist height for the hungry for the creature and it leaned on it as it finished it current mouthful.

  “Sorry about that. It has been a while since I have…. ‘eaten’ anything close to being real since I died. I have forgotten how good things tasted.” He apologized after swallowing and wiping mix of red blood and black ooze I had seen coming from my ‘injuries’ and severed limbs. There was much less of it than there had been which I hoped I could take as being a good thing and me feeling better reinforced that.

  “It’s fine.” I assured him before asking. “I take it, humans were on the menu for you then?”

  “Quite, as were all the rest of the many living creatures and races that existed in my time. That do not mean I was an indiscriminate eater. I have not had to eat an innocent person for centuries prior to my passing and I have worked hard to make that possible. As for the ‘people’ I have eaten, I have to admit a lot of them have been such. Especially, during the first few millennia after I was ‘born’.” He told me, using one of his eye mouths to speak while most of his other ones were either blocked or busy munching on me.

  “What happened?” I asked, and my question made him pause even his eating of me.

  “You mortals did.” he began after a long quiet moment and started munching again. “You see, we demons are born from the suffering of mortals and simply by existing, we ease it. It comes with a price as I am certain the system has explained to you. In my… ‘youth’ I had a hard time coping with it and wasn’t particularly picky about what or who I ate in an effort to assuage it.”

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  “Eventually I learned that it was the people going hungry that mostly effected my own. Fewer people starving meant less hunger for me, so I had taken to mainly eating monsters, ones that destroyed crops and other food sources you mortals needed to survive in particular. The other ‘food source’ I taken to relying on were, indeed people. Starving people but people none the less. I tried to keep to the ones suffering the most and were close death whenever I could. It was two of such people that truly changed the course of my life and perhaps that of all demon kind that have come after me.”

  “Another thing that comes into play here, as you have already learned we can do, is our ability to carry souls. What you do not know yet is that we can also hear and communicate with them while they are inside of us. That is also a very important factor when it came to my change.”

  “As for the pair, they were a mother and child who were close to starving to death due to a poor harvest that I could do nothing about. The mother was closer to it than the child so I swallowed down her first to ease her pain. That is what most would think was a mistake on my part as she was very adamant about her child not being harmed even when dead. However, knowing what I do now, I would not change a thing. If I had not, I would not be as I am now and demon kind would most likely deserve their reputation. But that doesn’t matter right now.”

  “What does is that I did not want to increase her duress which in turn would increase her burden. I did not want that. Even though I knew she would have no choice but to settle if I ate her child so it could join her, I chose not to. I do not know why I did that but when I promised to care for and protect her child, she settled down some and her burdens eased.”

  “This was a new thing for me and the woman seemed to understand that. She remained active throughout the child’s life and well into her adulthood. It wasn’t an easy thing for any of us but the mother taught and guided me as best as she could on how to care for the child. Clothing and feeding her… keeping her warm and safe. All these things were so new and foreign to me that I quickly enlisted the aid of a family that I thought I could trust to help me.”

  “And I truly did needed their help as the child – her name was Elyasa by the way – as she was blind and couldn’t really care for herself. In turn they needed mine at times to keep the area safe for them and to occasionally hunt and gather for them when their food ran low and the weather kept them from doing it themselves. I do not believe the parents ever truly trusted me though but I did not need them too. I only need the child to be safe and healthy.”

  “I watched her grow into a wonderful young woman with a kind and sensitive heart. I learned much about mortals while helping to raise her but I learned much more about myself and my existence once she was able to study such things. She was also able to discover away to free the souls I had been carrying at the time and I believe it was mainly to free her mother.”

  “She also taught people how to do the same and how to live in a way that would help ease the burden I carry for others. She taught them how to care for others much like how she did. She even had a religion spring up around her teachings and knowledge, dedicated to preserving and teaching it to others it when she finally passed away herself…. And I made certain it remained true to her ideals as well. I found that I didn’t care for the cults that started popping when more of us started popping up.”

  “More…? Does that mean that you were the first?” I asked him. Hearing the warmth in his voice as he talked about Eyasa as well as the pain that came with her passing and the anger these ‘cults’ invoked in him did more to make him seem more… ‘human’ than anything else he had done.

  “I believe so. If I was not, then I was very close to it. But enough of that. I can always tell you more later if you like. For now, I believe I have gotten all of the miasma I can with method.” He replied. The demon had been munching away at me the whole time he had been talking to me and took one last bite of my left hand before nodding. The blood that oozed from the severed end of my arm looked normal enough but apparently I wasn’t quite fully ‘cured’ of my affliction just yet, judging by what he said next.

  “I have gotten you down so you are only tainted by miasma rather than poisoned by it. It is a survivable condition but one that will not go away on its own and one that will make you sickly and weak for as long as you have it. I can passively absorb more of the miasma so long as you stay here but it won’t be quick or very effective. It would better for you to find a priest or the like to purify you of it than resting here.” He explained.