Chapter 4: New Meeting

It had been half a year since I hatched from my egg.
Since a month had forty days and a year had ten months, I was around 200 days old.
My daily life hadn’t changed since I was born.
I spent my days in a harsh environment, adjusting to my surroundings and eating constantly, alternating between days of fighting various creatures.

I could never get used to this lifestyle as Georg made sure to keep things different every day….and the challenges became increasingly difficult.
Yesterday I was thrown into boiling lava, and the day before I was forced to fight countless enemies under various conditions.
As a result, my exoskeleton was covered in wounds.
I swore I’d kill that bastard Georg someday.

Despite the fact that I was put through grueling training, both I and my living environment were constantly changing.
Through repeated molting, I grew significantly larger.
When I stood naturally on the ground, the tip of my poisonous stinger reached Georg’s waist.
If I stretched out my body and measured the length from the tip of my pincers to the tip of my stinger, I might be even bigger than Georg.

Thanks to rigorous training and careful nutritional management, my heavy exoskeleton could withstand extreme temperatures, electricity, and other hazards.
The densely packed muscles within it were also incredibly strong, allowing me to exert tremendous physical strength without using my fighting spirit.
If I had been able to move freely, I would have escaped long ago.

Next, let me tell you about my living situation.
I had grown too big to fit in that comfortable sand-filled box, so I had to move.
Now, my bedroom was a gloomy cage designed for ferocious beasts in a dimly lit basement.
Not only that, but my pincers and legs were bound by multiple chains, leaving me unable to move freely.
It was an uncomfortable living situation, as I could not even relax in my own bedroom.

“Excuse me,” a frail voice interrupted.

It was a young Furu race child, dressed in tattered rags.
She was a female, terribly thin, with multiple layers of bandages covering the right half of her face, both arms, and right thigh.
The bandages were soaked in pus and far from clean.

I didn’t know this child’s name.
That’s because Georg called them “slaves,” referring to them by their status rather than their names.

The job of that female slave was to take care of me.
She would unlock the lock of the cage I was in and bring me my food, placing it in front of me.
Then, she would bring a bucket and a cloth and polish my exoskeleton thoroughly before cleaning up my excrement and urine and tidying the cage.
It was all thanks to her that my cage never became dirty, and I was truly grateful to her.

By the way, this female slave was the third person to take care of me.
The first was a male who became a slave due to his crimes.
He had come around the same time I was moved to this cage, but he had an unbelievably bad attitude.
After throwing the food at me, he left me alone and didn’t clean my exoskeleton or the cage at all.

Moreover, he even took advantage of my docile nature and struck me with a stick and threw away the meatballs in the food, making me starve.
While Georg was furious about the food incident and punished him, the violence against me increased.

Fed up with him, I finally decided to inject him with my poison and killed him.
The male slave seemed to have misunderstood something, but the fact was that only Georg and the young master had authority over me.
I had left him alone before just because I didn’t want to bother with him.
With the power of neither fighting spirit nor spiritual arts, the slave was unable to even scratch my well-trained exoskeleton.

The slave who had been getting carried away met a bitter end, as a poison needle caused him to rot from the inside out until he perished.
It goes without saying that I was restrained with chains from the following day onward.
Although I didn’t regret my actions.

The second one was a fully grown female of the Furu race.
However, on the first day, this female pierced my poison needle into her own neck and committed suicide.
She must have chosen death to escape being a slave.
It was an action that I, with my mission to live for a hundred years, could not understand.

And now, the third one was this female.
She was reserved and spoke very little, but she worked diligently and earnestly.
If I could speak, I would want to offer words of comfort, even if she may not want them.

“A~tsu……”

As the slave polished my exoskeleton, unfortunately, molting began at an inopportune time.
During the first hundred days of my life, molting occurred roughly once every ten days, but now it has settled into a pace of once a month.
It must be because my body has become that of an adult.

However, the slave seemed quite alarmed.
It seemed that she were not informed about the molting process.
Moreover, she began to tremble, thinking she may have had made a mistake.
This won’t do, I couldn’t have her commit suicide like the second slave did.
I wasn’t sure whether the next slave would take care of me properly.

I shook my body as much as I could to sift out the molting shell.
Perhaps startled by the sound of the chains rubbing against each other, the slave fell on her buttocks and trembled.
It’s okay; I am not angry.

I approached the fallen shell near my head and chewed on it with a crunching sound.
Apparently, my exoskeleton was the most ideal nourishment to strengthen my “exoskeleton”, and Georg mixed the shell with my food every time I molted.
Though this was the first time I’d eaten only my exoskeleton, but it didn’t matter.

The slave, who had been dumbfounded, suddenly regained composure and hastily gathered the shells that had fallen to the floor before bringing them closer to my mouth.
I carefully chewed on the shells, making sure not to hurt the slave’s hands.

As a scorpion, I was supposed to be a slow eater and shouldn’t be able to consume a lot of food, but as a larger specimen who was forced to eat and grow, I was a relatively fast eater.
I could eat up an amount that would fit in the palm of a Furu child in a little more than a minute.

Phew! I ate my fill today, including the food brought by the slave.
Although I was confident in my ability to eat quickly, I lacked confidence in my ability to eat in great quantity.
Georg just forced me to eat, but I was originally a light eater.
It was rather tough without the spiritual circuit in effect.
Currently, I was already full.

“Yo-heave-ho!… Yo-heave-ho!…”

The slave was struggling to pull out the fragments of shed exoskeleton that remained inside the chain binding my joints.
I couldn’t move because I might accidentally get my limbs stuck in the gap of the chain.
Ugh, it’s hard.

After a while, the slave gathered all the shed exoskeletons and piled them up in front of me.
Yet, there was no way I could eat all of them.
Hmm… Oh, I’ve got an idea to reduce the amount of shed exoskeletons.

“Kishikishi.”

“Huh? Are you giving them to me?”

I reached into the pile of discarded shells and pulled out a long, slender, transparent object that looked like a rapier blade.
It was my molted poisonous stinger.
Unlike other scorpions, my poisonous stinger falls off during my molting process.

As a gesture of gratitude for our shared bond as slaves, I decided to offer it to my fellow slave.
Although the poison on the stinger would dissipate once it had been shed, the lightweight and sturdy stinger could serve as a useful tool for self-defense in times of need.

The slave nervously accepted the gift and carefully wrapped it in a torn piece of cloth before placing it in her pocket.
Satisfied that my gift was appreciated, I folded my pincers and curled up on the ground as a sign that it was time to sleep.
This was a signal that the other slave understood, and she promptly collected the cleaning rags and dirty water bucket before bowing and leaving the room.

Now, I might as well take another nap until Georg arrives.
No matter what task I would be assigned to do, it was always best to conserve energy.
So, I closed my eyes and tried to fall into a light sleep as usual.

“……?”

At that moment, I sensed something small approaching me.
Due to my upbringing as a weak and small creature, and my mission to survive, I was very sensitive to any signs of an approaching presence.
No matter how skillfully one tries to conceal their presence, I always seem to notice it.

I feigned stillness and waited, grateful for my compound eyes that did not require blinking or moving my eyeballs, which was an advantage in these situations.
I have learned from experience that it was crucial to remain calm and suppress any emotions during a battle.

I remained motionless, pondering on the fact that it seemed to be a busy day with many visitors.
I waited for the approaching presence without making a sound.
Suddenly, from the crevices between Georg’s bookshelf and the floor, emerged a tiny human, small enough to ride on the back of a mouse, dressed in clothes made of leaves and plant vines.
It was a member of the mischievous and curious….Popi race.

The Popi race was known for their mischievous nature and their love of pranks.
They were troublesome creatures that appeared suddenly in the city or the mountains, performed their pranks, and then disappeared.
However, most of their pranks were mostly harmless and could be forgiven; they were not something to be fussed about.

However, there was a reason why capturing them and selling them could yield a fortune, and that was solely due to the unique ability possessed by the Popi race.

“Quietly, quietly… Whoa! This is amazing!”

The Popi with dark brown hair, who had approached me, was beaming as they looked at the mountain-like shell.
When they touched the shell, it bent and warped at the point of contact.
Then, they kneaded the softened shell like it was clay, and in an instant, a small figurine of myself was completed.

In this way, the Popi race could freely transform and sculpt anything that was not a living being, creating art as they pleased.
If captured and made into slaves, they could even produce intricately detailed art that no skilled artisan could replicate.
The value of such creations was incalculable.

And the Popi race was fully aware that they were being targeted, so they honed their skills in hiding.
As a result, although they rarely show themselves in public, their inherent curiosity and mischievous nature often lead them to appear in human settlements, which then becomes a big event to capture them.
That was the extent of my knowledge about the Popi race.

“Hmm… I don’t think I’m fully expressing the scorpion’s coolness! Let me adjust it a bit more!”

The Popi person, who apparently thought I was asleep, was tinkering with my miniature figure, debating about this and that.
While I didn’t mind them using my discarded shell to make a miniature figurine of me, this was Georg’s training facility, and if they were caught, they would be relentlessly pursued and forced to create figurines until their dying breath.

It was too pitiful.
I hoped they would escape while I pretended to be asleep.
However, my futile wish did not reach them, as some vibrations outside the basement were detected by my arthropod limbs.

“Oh no, what should I do!? My artwork was just coming together!”

At this time, the Popi person seemed to sense that someone was approaching, but they were scrambling to find a way to hide my miniature figurine.
There was no choice; I had to do something.
I extended my pincers and grabbed the figurine, then threw it into the gap between the cage and the wall, out of sight from the entrance.

The Popi person’s eyes widened in amazement, but now was not the time for that.
With lightning speed, even faster than my eyes could catch, they darted back into the crevice between the bookshelf and the floor.
Truly, they were the fastest of all humanoids.

Several tens of seconds later, as expected, Georg appeared in the basement.
His distinctive footsteps, dragging one foot due to an old injury, echoed through the room.

“Very well, it seems you have taken your meal.
Release.
Let’s go; follow me.”

Georg said as he lightly checked on my condition and then issued his command after unlocking my chains.
I obediently followed his orders.
The spiritual art used on me since birth, called “Soul binding,” makes its target unable to disobey any commands.
However, I have been subjected to this art multiple times over the past half year, which was a prudent measure on Georg’s part.

This only indicated how much stronger I have become, to the extent that Georg fears my rebellion.
However, my instincts told me that if I resisted even a little, I would suffer a shock so severe that it would be too fatal, even for me.
For now, I must endure and wait for an opportunity to escape while hoping that they do not discover my intentions.
With these thoughts in mind, I followed Georg out of the basement.