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FB | Ch. 4 - Mashed Peas

Added 2025-05-21 16:28:30 +0000 UTC

For a while, all I did was go from snack to snack like a wedding guest who’s been starving for hours and just saw the buffet open. Don't tell me you can't relate. I once saw a fight break out at a wedding over the last piece of cheese on a table. Back when I was human, of course.

Once my stomach stopped trying to turn itself inside out, I finally had a chance to breathe—and think.

That’s when I began to notice just how different this new body was from my old one.

First: taste. Things that would've made me gag an hour ago now tasted like five-star cuisine. Wood shavings? Absolute chef’s kiss. And if they were moldy? Even better!

Next was smell. My sense of it had cranked up to eleven. I could sniff out shavings buried beneath a thin layer of dirt like a truffle pig on a mission. Back on Earth, I once lost a chocolate bar in my couch for three weeks and never smelled a thing.

But the biggest change? Appetite.

When I first saw the quest—Eat your weight in food—I thought it was a joke. But now? I couldn’t stop. My stomach felt like a black hole with snack cravings.

It was like that popcorn feeling. You just keep munching—munch, munch, munch—and somehow you're never full. Except it wasn’t popcorn. It was wood. Wood!

Oddly enough, I wasn’t going for the bark of branches, wood, or towering alien trees. I was going for the half-decomposed stuff buried underground.

Why was I so fixated on decomposing wood?

I didn’t know then. I do now.

Turns out, decomposing material is easier to digest. The Giants had helpfully installed some baby beetle instincts to steer me toward the bug equivalent of mashed peas. Training wheels for my new digestive system.

Could’ve been organic waste too—but there wasn’t much of that around where I landed. Honestly, I count myself lucky. I could’ve landed in a pile of roojeek dung and ended up like Steve.

Steve’s a dung beetle. Sweet guy, awful smell. Once gave me his top 10 list of best-tasting poo. It was disturbingly detailed. He doesn’t even care where it comes from anymore. Just rolls with it. Literally.

Or worse, I could’ve landed next to a corpse. Might’ve developed a taste for rotting meat. (Yes, I’m calling it rotting. If it’s dead meat, it deserves the full horror.) Maybe then I’d have become a predatory beetle.

Thank goodness none of that happened. To me, at least.

Anyway, as I munched on my gourmet bark chips, a little bar appeared in the corner of my vision. XP was ticking up fast. I had no idea what would happen when I leveled up, and honestly? I wasn’t that worried.

I had more pressing concerns:

Where was everyone? Why hadn’t I seen a single other person? Had we all been scattered across this massive planet?

More importantly...

As I mentioned before, I’ve got a strong stomach. I used to binge documentaries about parasites and diseases over dinner. Occupational hazard. I knew just how nasty some predatory larvae could get.

There are beetle larvae that burrow into live flesh and eat their hosts from the inside out. Parasites that hijack their hosts and make them their puppets. And don’t even get me started on botflies.

And if I—a former human—was scarfing down decomposing wood like it was kettle corn, what about the folks who picked predators?

What if their instincts kicked in just like mine had?

What if they were just as hungry?

What if they looked at me the way I looked at bark?

If that was the case, I wasn’t exactly eager to make new friends.

After gnawing through enough wood shavings to clog a lumber mill, my progress bar finally filled up. Incidentally, I finished my first quest at the same time.

Ding!

Congratulations! You're now a Level 2 Beetle.

+1 Skill Point. Skill Tree Unlocked.

Quest Complete: [Eat Your Own Weight]

Reward: +50 XP, +1 Skill Point.

I still remember that first level-up. What a letdown. I didn’t feel stronger. I didn’t glow. No dramatic transformation. Just... a skill point.

Turns out, leveling doesn’t make you stronger. It gives you permission to become stronger. You have to earn it through skills.

As I wondered what a skill tree even looked like, a system window popped open—apparently, thinking about it was enough to trigger it.

At that moment, my curiosity wrestled with irritation. How could a species smart enough to create this tech be dumb enough to destroy their ecosystem? How can you be brilliant and idiotic at the same time?

Anyway, the skill tree was mostly blurred out. Only a few branches at the bottom were visible. One for food specialization. Another for defense.

Under food, I saw: