Michael’s brown irises started to turn crimson, as his headache and rage grew more intense. Not only that, but the mice and birds seemed to be getting louder. The thunder reverberated throughout the skies above the city, as violet lightning streaked down and struck the nearby houses.

The sudden noise snapped the infuriated man out of his trance-like blood-lust. A moment after the deafening roar that resounded in his mind, the entire house was completely silent. Even his computer-fan quieted down a bit, and the storm-clouds outside were swiftly dispersing.

He muttered “Damn, that one was really close… Thank god our power didn’t go out, cause I need to masturbate.” Then he turned towards the large mirror to his left and noticed that there was a lump above his right eyebrow.

It seemed like it was pulsating for a second, but then he blinked and it was gone. However, there ‘was’ a boil on his right temple, which was bleeding profusely and dripping down the side of his face.

Once the pressure was relieved, he let out a long sigh and snickered; his headache had finally subsided. He casually used his white t-shirt to wipe the copious amounts of blood away. By that time, his crimson irises had returned to their usual, dark-brown and inconspicuous luster.

After yawning and stretching a bit, he started reading one of the thirty-five webnovels he hadn’t been able to catch-up on lately. There was a wry smile on his lips, as he murmured “I should probably get back to writing… Breaks are for pussies. But first, I need to cum, like fifty times…”

It didn’t matter what kind of porn he watched or hentai manga he read, all Michael could think about were those six beautiful and amazing women: Inari, Sarah, Elina, Jasmine, Alice and Talia. However, he could only remember certain parts of that dream vividly; every time he ejaculated, he would see one of their faces for a moment and hear their voices for an instant.

A few hours, and he yelled “Goddamn it! I’ve achieved the level of loneliness when ya start having visual and auditory hallucinations of fictional characters! Ugh, I’m starving but I’m too lazy to go make food…”

Then he reached down into one of his desk drawers and pulled out a bottle of vitamin C chew-able tablets. He poured a seven of them into the lid and was about to pick two of the ‘orange’ flavored ones, when he shrugged and just shoved all seven into his mouth.

Once he had eaten them, he continued to do the same thing three more times, before he felt slightly ‘satisfied’. It wasn’t until his stomach started feeling a terrible, sharp, stinging pain, that he grumbled “Why the fucking fuck did I just do that?! Sigh~, now I need to-daw~, kittens in boxes~! Aw~, that puppy looks so angry, hahaha~! Damn it! There are too many memes! I… can’t… stop~… scrolling down~?! It must be some sort of magical enchantment… Okay, now I’m bored; time to read more xianxia~!”

 

Before he realized it, he had already been awake for six hours and he still hadn’t eaten anything but half a bottle of vitamin C tablets. Thus, Michael decided that it was finally time to prepare a suitable meal.

It wasn’t very cold for early November in Maryland, but it also wasn’t warm either. As he walked into the kitchen, he felt a surprisingly large amount of heat. A large pot of water was boiling on the stove and there was also a small space heater on the floor in the kitchen. “I’m in here!” A loud, high-pitched voice was coming from the bathroom, near the back door.

He groaned, yelling “Daddy, I’m not deaf for fuck’s sake!” After hearing his father say the same exact thing enough times, Michael couldn’t help but become annoyed.

There was a radio on in the bathroom, but the door was closed, so he couldn’t make out what was being said. All he could hear was white noises and the parrots squawking upstairs, along with his mother screaming at the birds to “Stop it!”

Aside from cracking his head open in the bathtub and nearly dying, that day didn’t seem to be any different than ‘usual’. He squinted his eyes and stared at the two adorable black cats that were looking inside the window near his stove; they meowed constantly, begging for food, but his parents were always the ones that fed them.

Michael whispered to himself, “I’ve got a really~ bad feeling… and not just because I probably overdosed on vitamin C.”

However, even though his intuition was almost always right about natural disasters, he still thought that the world was probably going to end three years ago: It obviously didn’t. Thus, he started to doubt his instincts and eventually completely ignored them. Even when he had ‘realistic’ dreams of future events, it was rare for those things to ever actually affect him. Plenty of random people, thousands of miles away, usually ended up dying from various horrible catastrophes, but he didn’t really care unless he knew someone in the area.

As he looked through the refrigerator, he saw a plastic container of raw chicken livers and muttered “I should really make these now, or I’ll have to put em in the freezer…” After he grabbed the two-pounds of meat, he walked over to the table and opened it up.

The moment he saw the raw livers and blood, he had a flashback to his ‘near-death experience’. There were literally thousands of times when he witnessed all kinds of carnage and on several occasions, feasted upon the bodies of his ‘living’ Companions. Every time he had sex with Sarah, there was usually plenty of gore, vampirism and pseudo-cannibalism.

He sighed dramatically, but then shook his head and stared at the steel fork in his right hand. There was a weird texture and taste in his mouth, as he noticed that the two pounds of meat was gone.

Michael had unconsciously eaten a container of cold, raw chicken, and he actually felt great. Normally, he would thoroughly wash vegetables with soap, before cutting them up and then cooking them for quite some time.

That was his ‘normal’ level of food preparation safety; yet, even after realizing what he had just done, he didn’t freak out. “Huh… that’s weird. I’m just gonna pretend like that didn’t happen… I’m sure that fifty-grams of vitamin C is enough to keep me from getting salmonella, right? Ugh, why do I still feel so damn hungry? I’ll make some tilapia fillets…”

Minutes passed by and he eventually finished cooking the heavily seasoned, three pounds of fish, along with a can of corn and a ridiculous amount of rice. He mixed everything together into a giant salad bowl and went down into his room, eating at his desk.

There was plenty of hot-sauce poured all over the food, along with powdered cayenne pepper, so it was sufficiently ‘spicy’. By the time he finished watching an episode of an anime called “I Can’t Believe My Little Sister Is a Hentai Bondage Fairy, but I Still Love Her Anyway,” he had completely devoured his entire meal.

It was then that he heard a faint squeaking noise, coming from the ‘back’ of the basement. It was a place where his closet was, along with the hot-water heater and oil furnace; there was also copious amounts of random junk, including three bicycles that no one ever used anymore and other miscellaneous things.

However, instead of checking the noise, which he knew was a mouse stuck to a sticky-pad, he decided to go upstairs to put his empty bowl in the sink and use the bathroom. After urinating, he returned back to his room and sat down in his broken chair. He had only been awake for seven hours, but he felt incredibly exhausted.

“Ugh, fuck my life~… I should just go to sleep, I’m starting to feel kinda sketchy anyway. Maybe I’ll be able to see those girls again, in my dreams…” Michael took off his shirt, threw it onto the chair and carefully laid down onto the right side of the bed. There were creaking noises and he could feel the old wooden boards beneath his thin mattress bending; the other side of the bedframe was literally broken, so he needed to make sure that he didn’t accidentally roll over too far. He was feeling so strange that he had even forgotten to turn the fan on, at the foot of his bed, yet it still didn’t take long for him to fall unconscious.

In the back of the basement, near the hot-water heater, that mouse continued frantically squeaking and attempting to remove itself from the sticky pad. Under normal circumstances, it would have been impossible, since the tiny baby was so weak and stuck near the center.

The more it struggled, the worse its situation was becoming. Finally, it moved the wrong way and severed its own spinal cord. Death wasn’t instantaneous, but there was certainly nothing that it could possibly do to survive at that point.

A few seconds passed, and a small white wisp left the rodent’s body. Typically, it would search for a pregnant mouse or rat in the vicinity and find a new vessel to occupy; yet, it was strangely ‘pulled’ towards the unconscious human, in the western part of the basement.

There was a pitch-black, ball of pure darkness, hovering over-top of the man’s forehead. However, the spirit ignored that terrifyingly powerful soul and continued to be drawn towards Michael. He was laying on his left side and his back would normally have been covered up by a blanket, but he didn’t turn the fan on, so it wasn’t cold enough for him to use it.

Typically, there would have been a thousand horrible acne scars, along with plenty of new cysts… but his skin was amazingly completely clear. As the white wisp approached his spine, hundreds of shadowy, illusory tendrils, reached out and engulfed it instantaneously.