He had been far too complacent.
He never imagined that Eto had been hiding her hunger on her own.
For a Ghoul, the time when "meat" became necessary began in infancy, when the first teeth started to grow in.
At first, a small amount of finely mashed meat, like baby food, was enough. From there, he increased the amount in step with Eto's growth.
The method had been simple: feed her the usual amount, then add more if Eto said she was hungry.
Based on the knowledge about Ghoul children he had once gotten from his father, that was the proper way to do it.
But yesterday had shown him that even that method was not perfect. As she grew, the nutrients she needed had exceeded his expectations.
He had noticed that she had been asking for more meat less often lately, but to think she had been forcing herself to endure hunger... He felt pathetic for not noticing such a child's act all this time.
He knew why Eto had hidden her hunger. She had definitely done it for his sake.
She had begun to realize, little by little, what it meant for him to go out and obtain "meat."
He was grateful for her thoughtfulness, but it had been far too childish a judgment.
If Eto's hidden hunger had kept building until it finally burst, it would have led to an irreversible disaster.
He took all the "meat" he had been saving in the refrigerator and gave it to Eto.
He would need to procure more meat.
Beep-beep-beep-beep...
Click.
He silenced the phone alarm and got up earlier than usual.
It was 3 a.m. Even if summer days were long, dawn was still a long way off.
When he looked outside, a hazy wall was hiding the city's scenery. So this was the light mist they had forecast for this morning. Good weather for moving around.
Eto was still asleep. After pulling the blanket back over her when she had kicked it off in her sleep, he grabbed the backpack and large guitar case he had prepared the night before.
"..."
Before leaving, he looked at the small cylindrical case sitting on the shelf. It was tiny enough to fit in a pocket.
He hesitated over whether to take it. If possible, he wanted to solve this without using it, but... this time, he could not afford to fail. Better take it.
He slipped the case into his pocket and quietly left the apartment, careful not to wake Eto.
He went down to the first floor of the villa building, took out the bicycle parked in the storage area, set the backpack on the cargo rack, and strapped the guitar case tightly to his shoulder so it would not shake.
"Huuuu..."
Smack!
He took a deep breath and slapped both cheeks hard.
The ripple that spread from his face jolted his still half-asleep brain awake and sharpened his eyes.
"All right. Let's go."
As if speaking to himself, he muttered the words and pedaled into the night streets that had not yet woken.
Ghoul ate human flesh. If they did not eat, they could not live.
That applied to Eto as well, even though she was only half Ghoul.
It was not as though she could not eat human food at all. Unlike ordinary Ghouls, who supposedly tasted a horrifying parade of flavors beyond anything of this world the moment they put anything other than human flesh into their mouths, Eto could eat human food.
That was all.
She could certainly eat it, but she could not gain nutrition from it, and she also could not taste it. According to Eto, it felt like chewing some strange, shapeless thing with no flavor at all.
At least she would not be suspected for being unable to eat in front of other people.
After all, one of the main ways a Ghoul Investigator judged whether a suspect was a Ghoul was by confirming whether they ate human food.
Eto needed human flesh.
That said, did that mean he should just grab any human and kill them? He was the one raising a Ghoul, so it felt ridiculous to say this, but he did not have that kind of nerve.
In the worst case, maybe he would have no choice, but he did not even want to imagine that. He could not commit murder.
There had been a time when he thought maybe he could go to the yakuza and ask for some, since he had heard they cut off a member's finger when they left the organization. But if he asked something like that, they would probably cut off his own finger with a sashimi knife on the spot, so that was impossible.
In the end, what he had come up with was obtaining the flesh of people who had "thrown away their own bodies."
Well, it was not really his idea. He was just following through on something he had heard before: that Mister Kuzen, who had fallen in love with Ukina, had become reluctant to kill humans and instead ate the flesh of suicides.
Flap.
He unfolded the map.
The red circles marked on it were suicide spots he had found by searching websites for people seeking death.
Three of them were places he could reach by bicycle, and four required long-distance transportation like the train. There were more than he had expected. Or maybe there were just that many people in the world so fed up with life that they chose death.
He planned to check the places he could reach by bicycle first, and if there were no bodies there, he would take the train once daylight came and visit the rest.
The first place was a steel bridge spanning a large river.
He was now at the downstream bank where the whole bridge could be seen clearly.
At this downstream stretch, bodies that fell from the railway bridge were carried along by the current and usually washed up on one bank or another.
When he went to that bank, he quickly pinched his nose and frowned.
"...This won't do."
There was a body. It was just far too old.
The decomposition was so severe that it was hard to tell what kind of person it had originally been.
Judging by the clothes, it might have been a woman. The water around the rotten corpse had been polluted into a murky stain. Just taking a few steps closer made nausea rise in his throat.
Apparently, sanitation workers sometimes came around here and found bodies, but this time they had been late.
"...!"
Whether birds had pecked at it or fish had eaten it, the empty sockets where the eyes should have been were filled only with darkness. It felt as if a gaze containing nothing but death was turned on him, and a chill ran through him.
He left that spot immediately and got back on the bicycle.
That corpse would not do.
Just as humans cared about the freshness of their food, freshness mattered to Ghouls too. That corpse would probably give Eto stomach trouble even if she ate it.
With the first location ending in failure, he headed straight for the second.
The second was a small abandoned house in a district lined with slums. It was full of holes and looked like it would collapse the moment a typhoon blew through.
Whether the land was cursed or the place was haunted, bad things had apparently happened there for a long time. It was famous as a place where suicide hopefuls gathered for mass suicide.
Apparently, there was a meeting there today too. He knew that because...
"You can't do that here!!"
"Let go of me!! I'm going to die here!!"
"That's right! We'll die and be saved by Lord Arkarma, the god of death!"
"Don't just die in a residential area! You're being a nuisance to the neighbors!"
"I don't care what happens to this rotten world!!"
"Just let us die!!"
"You people doing this here are the reason the property owner keeps calling us, saying the land value is dropping!!"
...the police were already dragging out the suicide hopefuls who had prepared to die by charcoal-briquette gas.
He suddenly made eye contact with a policeman staring at him as if he were strange. The look seemed to ask, "Are you a suicide hopeful too?"
"Good work."
He greeted them as if he were a completely unrelated bystander and fled while furiously pedaling the bicycle.
"...There it is."
The third place was a hit.
He had obtained meat here before too, so it seemed he had some kind of connection with this place.
On top of a sheer cliff, he hurried down the path after spotting a single car parked in an empty parking lot.
And then he found it. A man dressed in a stylish suit, probably because he had wanted to look presentable even in death.
He could not tell the man's age. The face needed to determine that simply did not exist.
Whether he had fallen headfirst or not, the entire area above the neck was gone. Instead, brain matter, bone fragments, hair, teeth, tongue, crushed eyeballs... various parts that had made up the face were scattered everywhere, forming a grotesque abstract painting.
Even after smashing his head, the impact of the fall had still remained, twisting his spine and contorting his limbs into a bizarre shape. Beside the body, bent at a right angle, his innards had spilled out as if someone were pulling out a sausage.
He could see blood that had not yet dried. The man had died not long ago, probably still alive until the moment he crossed the railway bridge.
"Ugh..."
If he had not come out with an empty stomach to procure meat, he would have added his own vomit to this horrific scene. The last one had been a man with only his organs burst open; this one looked so much worse that the previous corpse seemed almost intact by comparison.
Even though he had seen corpses many times while procuring meat for Eto, he still could not get used to death turned into a visual form. He did not want to get used to it either, but...
He swallowed the stomach acid threatening to surge up. The smell of the corpse was already awful; if he added the smell of stomach acid, it would become even more hellish.
He had suppressed the acid, but his dizzy head still refused to come back from its wandering. Even though he had not run, his breathing grew ragged as if he had just finished a marathon. As the world's colors began to warp into something grotesque, he hurriedly ran.
"Ah, this is bad."
He instinctively realized that the abnormal state of his body had crossed a certain threshold.
He rushed back to the bicycle, took out the bottled water from his backpack, then pulled out the round case he had put in his pocket, took out two pills, and tossed them into his mouth.
Gulp, gulp!
Anyone watching would probably think he was some madman torturing himself with water. Well, thanks to the corpse, he did feel half-mad.
Only after pouring it down so hard he could not tell whether the water was going into his mouth or his nose did he finally manage to swallow the pills.
"Hah...! Hah...!"
Leaning back against the bicycle and sitting there for a while, his breathing gradually settled.
The first time he had tried to obtain meat from a corpse, it had been even worse than this. He had given up and gone home more than once. If he had not seen Eto suffering from hunger, he would never have succeeded.
"Phew... That's enough."
Feeling the dizziness fade, he steadied himself again and set down the guitar case.
When he opened it, there was no guitar inside. Instead, there was a transparent plastic raincoat that could cover him from head to toe, a mask, rubber gloves... and a double-edged saw.
They were all his work tools.
The raincoat and rubber gloves kept blood from splattering onto the clothes he would wear home, and the mask blocked the stench of blood and the various foul odors given off by a corpse.
As for the double-edged saw... there was no need to explain that, was there.
"...Shall we begin?"
After putting on all his work gear, he let the double-edged saw hang at his side and walked back toward the corpse.