./00_The_Hunger

My name is Giiyose. A long time ago, I was one amongst many Lopmon. We were a happy, peaceful community, but we lived in an unforgiving land, and over the epochs, the winters grew increasingly longer and harsher. First it only spanned a partition or two, but eventually, five or six partitions would go by before the ice even began to thaw.

Initially, we had enough to survive. But as the frost encroached, fear took root. I began to hoard. I called it pragmatism then, but I know now it was simply greed. Before the longest winter hit, I had stashed away a mountain of food, entirely unbeknownst to my kin. I had watched as they stressed and suffered. And when that winter finally came and went, none of my kin had survived.

But I did. When the thaw finally came, I emerged from my hideout, fat on stolen survival, only to step into a graveyard. Corpses of my kin were everywhere, absolutely emaciated, frozen so completely that they had not even started dissipating into data.

It was all my fault. I could have saved them, but I decided to ensure my survival at the expense of every single one of my kin. Every. Single. One.

For many cycles, I wept. As the sun shone for longer and longer each cycle, and my kin finally defrosted and turned into phase electrons, I continued to weep. Cycle upon cycle, unfed, unsleeping, until I myself had become emaciated.

By the time the tears stopped and I finally looked at my reflection in a meltwater puddle, I did not recognize myself. My arms had lengthened grotesquely. My skin was pulled tight over protruding bones, turned a dull, deathly grey. Staring back at me was a twisted, warped caricature of the Lopmon I once was.

I had Digivolved, into a form that could only be described as a punishment for my greed. I was hungry, yet when I came back to the food I had stashed, I could no longer even accept its taste in my mouth. Just holding the food up caused the faces of my dead kin to flash across my eyes, and the moment my lips touched the food, I would fall onto my knees, nauseous, my heart beating fast, the faces of my dead kin all the more clearer, mocking me, taunting me, tormenting me. Rightfully.

I do not know when the wandering began, or how many cycles I lost to it. The Weave is immense, and Beta-17 is vast. I drifted from one end of the node to the other, driven only by the hollow ache in my chest. Everything was a blur. I have a vague, fractured memory of countless settlements, and the terrified faces of locals staring at the grey phantom that shuffled mindlessly through their streets.

Yet here, finally, at the end of this node, something was clarifying my mind. Where I had arrived was close to one of the exits of a node, a mountainous region known as the Blistering Ranges. The node was already cold enough, but this mountain range was particularly so, perpetually shrouded by snow and wind. I have been here before - we Lopmon were gatherers, and thus naturally nomadic. This region was known to be home to some dangerous Digimon, but for the most part they kept to themselves amongst the mountains. Rarely do they ever come down from the mountains - in fact as long as I remember, only one was ever known of - a furry Digimon that would come down and steal from the locals. That was it.

What finally snapped me from my trance was the downdraft of the mountain mist. It carried a scent. To anyone else, it might have been just the biting chill of the Blistering Ranges. But to me, it was an olfactory assault. It was intense. Pungent. It smelled of stagnant data, rotting excess, and absolute, suffocating selfishness. Something familiar.

Like me.