"This is ridiculous…"
Ke Ming clutched his head and curled up in the corner of the room.
"In my last life I was just an ordinary wage slave who didn't even go to college."
"How the hell is a liberal-arts kid supposed to understand any of this?"
Complex muscle groups. Blood vessels and nerves tangled together. Unfamiliar technical terms everywhere.
"Three days… even a med student with the right specialization probably couldn't pull this off."
He clicked his tongue and stretched his arms.
"Whatever. I'll start by putting the frame together first."
The thighs had been cut clean from the root—stripped apart, perfectly separated.
"Femoral head… fibular head…"
Ke Ming groped through the pile of bones, comparing them against the anatomical diagram as he identified each piece.
"Tibia… fibula…"
"At least the skeleton isn't that complicated. And as much as I hate that psycho… his technique is insane. Everything's separated cleanly. You can tell what's what at a glance."
Muttering to himself, he picked up the femur.
"Huh? Where's my patella? Don't tell me my patella's gone?"
Holding one end of the femur, he absentmindedly tapped the other end against the floor in a steady rhythm.
A moment later, he froze—then jolted as if waking from a trance and smacked his forehead.
"This is my leg bone. I can't just knock it around and break it."
He cradled the femur in both hands like something sacred and set it down beside him with exaggerated care.
"Forget the patella for now. I'll just assemble what I can and deal with it later."
Before long, the shape of a human thigh skeleton took form—surprisingly decent, considering the circumstances.
"Alright. The general structure is fixed. Next step is stuffing in the muscle."
Ke Ming crawled, inch by inch, toward the heap of flesh, propping his chin in his hand as he studied it.
"It wasn't cut along muscle groups… it's just neatly diced into blocky chunks."
"That makes this a lot harder."
He grabbed the corner of the anatomical sheet and flicked it back and forth in the air.
"Try matching the direction of the muscle fibers?"
Pinching his nose in disgust, he cautiously lifted a lumpy chunk of meat with his other hand.
The blood vessels had been separated with uncanny finesse, leaving shallow grooves etched into the meat's surface.
The piece was barely stained—soft pink, almost translucent, like it was glowing faintly.
A thin layer of fat lay over the muscle, dusting it in a pale yellow sheen.
"It's… a work of art," he murmured, genuinely impressed.
With his sense of "normal" already sliding off the rails, Ke Ming lowered the hand that had been pinching his nose, picked up a smaller piece, and held it in his palm.
"Just looking at it makes me kind of hungry. It's weirdly appetizing."
After a brief hesitation, he carefully dragged the bone frame closer to the meat pile and began pressing pieces together.
The grooves and contours fit snugly—seam to seam, as if they had never been separated in the first place.
Even more strangely, the chunks bonded—like they were naturally fusing back into one body.
"…And it still doesn't hurt," Ke Ming muttered.
No time to think. He sped up, matching patterns and stitching the meat together by texture and grain.
Soon, a pair of legs—muscle definition and all—lay in front of him.
But something was clearly wrong: parts of the musculature weren't tight and springy. Deep channels marked where vessels should have been, leaving visible hollows.
"No. A lot of the blood vessels run between the muscle layers."
His gaze drifted to the short knife at his side. He hesitated.
"…Do I cut it open?"
Riiip.
The blade sank into flesh with an unpleasant, teeth-aching sound.
Following the grain, he split the meat easily. Long, clean muscle shapes emerged.
"Blood vessels… nerves… this is a nightmare."
He gripped the knife in his right hand and used its spine to lift an intact blood vessel. His brow knotted tight.
"The femoral artery runs right along the sartorius?"
The vivid red vessel clung to muscle. The blood that should have flowed from the cut didn't spill—thick like gel, trapped and sluggish inside the narrow tube.
"No—if I connect it like this, it won't align with the femoral nerve."
Sweat beaded on his forehead, trembling on the fine hairs.
"How much time do I even have left? I'm running out."
There was nothing in the room to tell time. In all these days, the only timepiece he'd ever seen was the pocket watch the Head Chef kept tucked into his inner chest pocket.
Ke Ming tried to measure time by his heartbeat—pressing two fingers together against the vessel at his wrist.
Nothing.
No pulse.
It was as quiet as if his heart had stopped entirely.
"No—no, that's not right."
He'd messed it up again.
By habit, he looked up as if time might be written on the ceiling—only to find emptiness.
"Still not working… Even the capillaries under the skin were separated this finely…?"
In his panic, he nicked a vessel. A thin smear of blood crept along the surface like a thread.
"Again," he whispered. "One more try."
…
Time crawled forward, second by second.
Three days.
Three days that should have felt endless, agonizing—slipped by without him noticing at all.
Ke Ming slumped against the icy wall, eyes wide and unblinking, staring at the meat on the floor that had been assembled into the shape of human legs.
The door opened.
The Head Chef strode in.
He lifted the assembled "legs," glanced at Ke Ming, and gave them a weighing bounce.
"Not bad," he said. "Better than I expected."
A flash of silver light—blade-shine—stabbed Ke Ming's eyes.
In a blink, the legs he'd painstakingly assembled were sliced apart again—clean, neat, orderly.
"Watch," the Head Chef said coldly. "Learn properly."
His hands moved with an agility that didn't match his bulky frame, flipping and turning pieces in midair. A human leg shape formed almost instantly.
Bone. Muscle. Blood vessels. Nerves.
No pauses. No hesitation. Smooth and effortless—like breathing.
"Brat," he asked, "did you see it clearly?"
He gave Ke Ming a light kick, grabbed him by the collar, and tossed him into the center of the room.
The cut surface at the waist met the cut surface at the legs. Nerves and vessels aligned. Fine thread and tiny stitches sealed everything together.
The Head Chef produced several rolls of bandages from nowhere and wrapped them tightly around Ke Ming's upper thighs—rough, brutal, and fast.
"Done," he said, nodding to himself. "Sleep it off. When you wake up, the legs will be attached."
He hoisted Ke Ming onto his shoulder and carried him out.
The instant they crossed the doorway, pain slammed into Ke Ming like a tidal wave—crashing through every cell in his body.
He screamed.
"It hurts—AAAHHHHH!"
"Shut up," the Head Chef snapped. "You're loud as hell."
With irritated efficiency, he stuffed a chunk of meat into Ke Ming's mouth.
Sound died instantly.
"Mmph—MMMPH!"
Ke Ming's eyes rolled back.
He blacked out again.
-------
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