Chapter 2451
What Pine remembered most clearly from those early days of his existence was the hunger.
Hunger that scraped to release, to vocalize. Hunger that would cut off slivers of his insides, so demanding it consumed him simply to house it.
His first, massive cry, which he later learned had been enough to split open the fabric of space, had been a plea for sustenance. The second cry had come only a moment later, cradled in the arms of Yystrix and Elhume, fueled by panic as he belated realized that the act of crying required energy.
Every act only deepened his hunger.
So he boomed out a second, even as an existential dread had risen in Pine’s barely formed consciousness.
One detail was abundantly clear, even to Pine as a child: the food he wished for did not abundantly exist in the multiverse. At least not here. He was a broken existence, one not meant to live for long.
But Pine was like every other living being; he came equipped from birth with a powerful urge to survive. So when Elhume used the echoing cries of Pine to create an isolated universe, he did not resist. He even allowed his father’s experimentations to determine the sort of energy his physiology naturally craved. He watched as the father built a grand working to process the energy Pine released and returned it to him in a partially consumable state. It was not a simple process, and his father would stay up late most nights, cursing and scratching his head.
Those were the happiest times, despite the horrifying newness of it all. His father and mother built him a small home, a little cabin in an isolated pocket of the dimension. His mother carried him around, propped up on her hip, and whispered stories that had been passed down from generation to generation.
“Do these stories matter?” Pine had once asked. He wanted her to say yes, dreaded she would say no. “The people you talk about… they are not like me.”