Just Another Beginning After the End | TBATE

Ready? ...No? I Don't Care! Go! (2)

But what was really killing me wasn't the boredom but a need for sustenance. In other words, I was hungry. I was so hungry that I needed to use all of my brainpower to hold myself back from crying about it.

Was this one of the traits of a baby? An uncontrollable desire for food?

"...Ah! You're probably hungry, right?"

Strangely, the girl understood my needs as though she read my mind.

She wiped her tears.

"I'll make sure to get you something."

Thank the lord.

"Though I'm not sure what human babies eat..."

I retract my earlier gratitude and what do you mean human baby? Is that not obvious that I'm human? Was I born as some kind of weird talking monkey?

It was then I finally noticed an oddity.

This girl had long ears.

Not like her ear lobes were long, but the entire shape of the ear was different. Her ears were long and pointed. I wasn't sure why, but I suddenly had an urge to play with it.

Unfortunately, as a newborn baby, I had extremely little motor control. I could only aimlessly fumble my hands in the air.

Eventually, we arrived at a portal of some kind. I felt myself being twisted up and out, along with a sudden hit of nausea. If I were a normal baby, I probably wouldn't have been able to handle that.

But this sickening feeling soon disappeared like smoke.

My eyes widened as I looked at the sprawling sight before me. We were in a city of some kind, and it appeared we had directly teleported right past the gates. What I saw before me were buildings that seemed to be built out of a jade-like material. These jade buildings were so flawless and smooth that each seemed to be carved from a single, huge stone.

Making this place look even more awe-inspiring were the huge trees that intertwined with the buildings, filling this whole city with a more distinctive and organic ambience. Looking up, I see homes built on unnaturally thick branches extending out of the massive trunks even larger than the buildings with smoke drifting out of their chimneys.

The entire ground inside this city was covered in a lush field of soft moss, with only the narrow sidewalks and the main road paved with smooth stone. The dense array of branches that fanned out from the trees covered most of the city in a canopy of shade, but there was a warm, luminescent glow throughout the city thanks to numerous floating orbs of light situated in every corner and street.

While I stared, my tiny baby mouth slack-jawed, still processing the world around me, the girl snickered.

"Huhu, look at you."

She poked my nose.

...I was a teenager mentally, so normally, this kind of thing would be embarrassing but being starved of affectionate acts for the entirety of my life until now, I couldn't say I didn't like it.

In any case, we soon arrived in what appeared to be the girl's house.

It was relatively small and shaped like a studio apartment. While the only furniture consisted of a couch, table, chairs, bed, bookshelf, and dresser, along with a couple other things, they all fit together perfectly. Whoever put this room together had a good sense for this sort of thing.

The room's state was a bit of a mess, but it looked like the mess was methodical.

In any case, the following couple of weeks after my journey out of the tunnel was pretty much pain. I had little to no motor control over my limbs except being able to wave them around like an idiot, and even that got tiring quickly.