RAGNA POV...
What unsettled me the most was not simply that the peculiar scent carried a faint sweetness, but that beneath that sweetness lay something dense and intoxicating, something that made my throat tighten and my teeth ache with the inexplicable urge to tear into whatever produced it and savor it slowly, deliberately, until nothing remained.
I closed my eyes and forced myself to breathe in and out in steady rhythms, yet even as I did so, my mind betrayed me, conjuring fragmented scenes I could not fully comprehend—flashes of flesh parting under my fingers, warmth spreading across my tongue, the satisfaction of something vital being consumed—and each image came unbidden, as though it had always been there waiting for permission to surface.
It was not my first time eating human flesh.
But that had been different.
That had been a corpse—a normal human I had already killed, a necessity born of circumstance and survival.
Inside this carriage, surrounded by children under the watch of the Black Steel Knights, there was no chance a human child would be mistaken for a demon.
Which meant the scent did not belong to a human.
And what disturbed me further was the way my body reacted before my reasoning could catch up, as though something ancient within me had already identified the source and approved of it.
Ever since the system displayed that notification, everything felt instinctive, sharpened, raw; it was as if a layer of restraint had been peeled away, leaving only impulse and hunger beneath.
Perhaps my desire to kill the Holy Shrine and the Black Steel Knights had grown too intense, fermenting quietly inside me until it transformed into something far more primitive and dangerous.
The night eventually surrendered to dawn, and the desert brightened under the rising sun, the golden horizon stretching endlessly as if mocking the smallness of our caravan moving through it.
Inside the dim carriage, I sat alone.
The air carried a faint, unpleasant odor—a mixture of sweat, dirt, and stale breath accumulated from too many bodies confined for too long—and because of that, the knights would occasionally allow the children to step outside once they confirmed the area was temporarily safe, releasing them like restrained animals granted a brief illusion of freedom.
It had been over a month since we entered the Great Desert of Death.
In that time, although I had neither received nor completed any new quest from the system, my body and mind had not remained stagnant; my physique had grown tougher, more resilient, and my mental landscape felt denser, steadier, as though reinforced by unseen hands.
With each cycle of expanding and compressing my Mana core, the dull grey sphere within me brightened incrementally, and my control over natural elemental Mana deepened in ways that surpassed even my demon abilities.
As I refined my Meditation Technique and its Sub-Technique, my body and Mana core began to operate in synchrony, no longer feeling like separate components but parts of a single mechanism.
Mana infusion was not complicated in principle.
It was like breathing.
Just as oxygen entered the lungs and circulated through the bloodstream, natural Mana could be drawn in, filtered through my core, and merged directly with my body without wasting time shaping it into external constructs.
Instead of forcing Mana into form, I let it pass through me.
I let it become me.
Seated cross-legged in the dim interior of the carriage, I sank into deep meditation, and the air around me shifted subtly—first a mild warmth, then a faint current of wind brushing my skin, then a cool, pale sensation like diluted water, until finally a dark bronze heaviness gathered around me.
Wisps of that dark bronze essence clung to my skin before spreading across my entire body, thickening gradually until they hardened, and the rough wooden floor beneath me began to feel distant, muted, as though pain itself had been dulled.
Earth element infusion.
With it, my physique grew tenacious, resistant, capable of enduring impact without faltering quickly.
If I needed to fight, I could withstand more before breaking.
Water infusion was different.
I had begun to grasp its subtler properties, allowing it to accelerate my natural healing, though only in small degrees for now.
Through the Sub-Technique, I had grown increasingly attuned to various natural elements, each offering different effects when merged directly with my body.
Yet none of this progress erased the hunger.
No matter how steady my breathing became, no matter how controlled my Mana flow was, the excitement simmered beneath it all, coiling tighter.
After completing my meditation cycle, my eyelids trembled briefly before I opened my eyes.
The hunger was still there.
"My damn urge is becoming unbearable," I muttered inwardly. "Even if I suppress it with the Meditation Technique... how long can I really endure?"
This was not ordinary appetite.
Food did nothing.
It was a craving that food could not touch, a hollowness shaped specifically for flesh.
And I was beginning to question how long meditation alone could restrain it.
My thoughts drifted, unwillingly, toward my family.
"I wonder how Mother and my sisters are faring..."
The moment I thought of them, the hunger tangled with something heavier—depression, helplessness.
There were nights I wished desperately to see them again, to confirm they were alive, but I understood that for now those thoughts were little more than fragile fantasies.
Over the past months, our caravan had passed through several kingdoms, the Black Steel Knights announcing each one as though it were a proclamation of dominance, as if they wanted to make it clear that escape was nothing more than a foolish illusion.
Eventually, we entered deeper into the desert, where kingdoms ceased to matter and only survival remained relevant.
The landscape was merciless—an endless sea of golden sand, occasionally marked by the faint trails of vicious beasts or mounted bandits who lingered at the edges of death.
Since entering this region, we had encountered danger multiple times.
One or two people had died in the process.
And what disgusted me most was not the deaths themselves.
It was my reaction.
Instead of sympathy, I felt irritation.
Anger at the wasted flesh, at the loss of something that could have eased the gnawing void inside me.
The realization unsettled me more than the hunger ever could.
If the Black Steel Knights had not been present, if their vigilance had not restrained me, I was not entirely certain I would have remained still.
And that thought, more than anything else, forced me to confront a question I had been avoiding.
Was I still restraining my hunger—
—or was my hunger slowly becoming me?