Deep underground, in an undiscovered dungeon, there lied a man with dark brown hair, 187 cm in height, dressed in a leaf skirt. Quietly, the surrounding wildlife was watching him, a couple of caterpillars and some birds. The birds were very interested, having not seen this sort of creature before, they just considered of it as a big caterpillar, and as birds usually do they decided to eat this weirdly shaped caterpillar.
3 birds flew down from the trees around the man, got close to him and started pecking his leg viciously.
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There was stinging pain coming from my right leg, I opened my eyes and saw 3 crow sized shoebill bird looking creatures trying to devour my precious right leg. I swung my wounded leg up and hit one of the birds right in the head, it got disoriented, and I went in for the kill, quickly snapping its neck. The other crowbills flew away, I know real imaginative name, but can't really think well when my stomach trying to eat its way out of my body.
Fortunately, I had survived my insect caused fever, unfortunately I was starving and thirsty. I had to eat the bird! But I wasn't dumb enough to repeat yesterday's incident, I needed a fire. You might be thinking, "how can you start a fire with no tool?" well, my friend, you haven't watched enough primitive survival videos on the tube. For a fire you require two sticks, some stuff that can easily light on fire and a lot of elbow grease.
I got the sticks, plucked the bird as good as I could, and started rubbing the wood pieces against each other. After a while a puff of smoke started coming off of the stick that was on the ground, i chad accumulated enough hot ash, I quickly transferred the ash to the bundle of broken up bark. After a few minutes of blowing on it, I had successfully made a fire, which felt very good. I put the bird on my broken spear and roasted it over the fire, It was the most delicious thing I had ever eaten. My hunger might have affected my taste buds, but that's beside the point.
After eating, I started thinking if I should continue to look for water or rest up and try to set up a temporary camp. A bit of deliberating later I chose to stay here, I didn't feel thirsty because the bird was very juicy. I could still survive for a bit without some water, and maybe it could rain while I rested up and looked over my body.
The fever had done something to me, normally I would have felt lethargic, but now I felt good, better than before eating the centipede. It was very weird, I had no wounds on my body except the leg. The fever caused no physically changes, well, no changes on the outside at least.
While thinking about my body, I lied down on the leaf bed, that's when I felt a peculiar warmth in my abdomen area, below the belly button. That's when it hit me, I wasn't in a normal world any more, there had to be something here that was able to support this big ass bugs. It could be the higher percentage of oxygen here, but that wouldn't explain the warmth.
I had to experiment, firstly, the corpses of my prey. I picked up a part of the centipede, it was quite thick, about 5 mm, but I didn't know much about the insect so that info wasn't really helpful. Next I looked at the bones of the bird, now this was fascinating, it did look like normal bird bones, but were bigger and definitely stronger. I had confirmed that there was something different about this place.
Now I had to see if that thing was also affecting me. I lied down again and took a big breath and stopped breathing, the heat undoubtedly got a bit warmer just then, it was very, very miniscule, but I could feel it.
Now I knew that the thing was in the air and probably in the bodies of the animals living here, that's probably why I had the fever after eating the centipede my body was rejecting the substance. I probably got used to it after the fever, that's why nothing happened to me after eating the bird.
Now that I had figured out what was going on here a bit, I could prioritize making my camp, also I had to give the substance a name.
I buried the bird bones further away from my sleeping spot. I kept the centipede chitin. First I had to make a new spear, I reignited the fire, gathered some sap and wood fibres. My plan was to put the centipedes mandible on my spear. I found a long stick that was thicker on one end, I cut out a line on that side and poured heated sap there and put the mandible on, I wrapped it with fibres.
Tadaaa I had my makeshift centipede spear. Also, I kept the acid sack, I hung it a bit further away from my sleeping spot on a branch.
After that I started gathering sticks and leaves, my plan was to make a small stick wall behind the fire to rebound the heat. Also, I wanted to pile sticks around the bed, sadly not too high but better than nothing, I guess. I also wrapped my leg wound with some wood fibres, fortunately it was just some gouges in my skin, nothing too bad.
It got dark pretty quickly, I barely finished piling the stick and sat down on my leaf bed with the spear in my hand. I did kill the centipede pretty easily, but I don't know what might be out there.
I'm going to stay awake as long as I can.
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In the giant forest, there was a man sleeping peacefully while leaning on a tree, with a weird spear resting in his lap.