Away, away from this creepy , Yoongi thought. His limbs were still busy figuring themselves out as he was nervously walking away from the hut, but he was moving as fast as he could, snow creaking under his feet, lungs full of frosty air.

Suddenly the thought of Tae bleeding out on that bed made Yoongi go slower. This creature, whoever he was, was definitely dying out there and Yoongi was about to let it happen. He almost wanted it. But did he, really?

Yoongi stopped. “I’m a ing doctor!” He cursed, and then turned around. In a second he was strolling back to the evil hut, to face the monster once again, totally willingly this time.

“I’ll be ing dead!” Yoongi murmured opening the heavy wooden door and falling into the hut.

Tae was still there, on the bed, lying flat on his stomach, face down, few inched beside the pillow. The bed covers were all soaked in monster’s black blood, dipping on the floor. No sign of deadly tentacles on his back. Yoongi was frozen for a minute, trying to figure how the hell he was gonna help the creature.

“Okay okay let’s do something” Yoongi said to cheer himself up, and started to unpack the herbs and oils stucked in his backpack. “This is wrong… This is not gonna work, too. What the hell is this? Oh I see… Oh this might…”

Yoongi held a little oil bottle in his hand, the liquid inside was dark brown and thick. “Yeah let’s try this”. He took a book out of his pocket – his little book of spells – and a black chalk pencil. To cast a spell he’d chosen – the one that stops heavy bleeding – Yoongi needed to draw a circle around the object of the spell, write the sacred symbols in it, and burn some tashmire oil inside the circle.

“Oh King Cypher help me!” Yoongi walked to the bed and started to slowly detach unconscious Tae from it. To his happiness, Tae looked like he’d lost enough blood to be nearly dead, which meant, unable to wake up – which was a good thing in Yoongi’s situation.

Yoongi dragged the creature to the middle of the room, Tae’s body leaving a black thick blood trace on the wooden floor, and it was absorbing fast. When Tae’s body was in best position to start working on the spell, Yoongi started to draw the circle around him with chalk, his hands shaky after the effort he put into carrying heavy unconscious creature. Chalk was making lights scrubbing noises as the black circle was appearing, and its sound mixed with one of fire in the fireplace and Yoongi’s heavy breathing.

When the circle was done, Yoongi sat on the floor right next to Tae’s head, and started to write symbols on the floor only he could understand. Then Yoongi took the little bottle with dark thick oil in it, opened it and put few drops on the floor around Tae, inside the circle. Then, muttering something undistinguishable, Yoongi walked to the table and took a burning candle from it. It took Yoongi few seconds to set drops of oil afire. The spell was it full spelling when the little burning drops of oil started to produce lot more black smoke than fire, but Yoongi didn’t stop saying the sacred words out loud. When the smoke was too much, Yoongi had to close his eyes.

The smoke intensified. When Yoongi peeked to see what was happening there were almost nothing to see except thick greyish-black smoke, which had already invaded Yoongi’s lungs as well.
This doesn’t go as it has to go, Yoongi thought. It wasn’t the first time he casted that particular spell, and it never went like this. It might’ve had something to do with the nature of Yoongi’s patient, given to the fact it was sure not human.

Standing in front of the smoke cloud that was previously Tae’s body, Yoongi thought he saw some movement. Then he definitely felt the actual cold wind blowing hard inside of the hut, like a hurricane.
“What the f-“ Was the only thing Yoongi could let out before he was knocked down on the floor. The last thing he saw was flames of fire around him and maybe Tae’s face, but he was not sure about the last one.

Epilogue

Yoongi woke up in the morning on somewhat that used to be the hut, or, shall we put it, what was left of it. The hut was burned to the ground, only black and gray wooden ashes surrounded Yoongi, and the misfigured bricks of the fireplace. Ashes were slightly covered in snow, and so was Yoongi. Surprisingly, there was no trace of fire, no burns on him, he was cold from sleeping under the falling snow, but that was it. Yoongi stood up. What happened at night seemed like a dream, and it was now taken by the strange fire, along with the hut. Tae wasn’t anywhere around. With shaky bare hands Yoongi started to remove the mixture of snow and ashes from the ground around him, to see if there was anything left of the creature. There wasn’t. He must’ve escaped or… burned to literally nothing.

Yoongi took a deep breath and looked around. To his surprise he could clearly see a thin pathway, starting right from the hut and into the woods. Yoongi could’ve sworn the path wasn’t there at night. But he had nothing left to do but to walk on it, because, what other choices did he have?

Twenty minutes or so of walking down the pathway and Yoongi reached Baepsae Village. It was that easy. He wasn’t surprised anymore, he was tired and drained and wanted to see no one. Good thing his house was close.

As he was walking out of the wood and into the outskirts of the village, he saw a group of woodcutters doing their thing. As Yoongi was walking past them, someone had noticed him.

“Hey Yoongi!” It was Namjoon, one of the few people in village that Yoongi became kind of friends with. “What you doing walking out of the woods at this early hour?”

“I’ve been collecting the herbs” Yoongi answered, not slowing his steps.

“Well alright. Just so you know, the headman’s been looking the whole night for you, one of our shepherd’s been feeling bad”

“Sorry, I lost track of time…” Yoongi stopped. “Is he still bad? Where is he?”

“Ugh, don’t worry, he’s alright! Turned out he drank too much”.

“Oh… Good. See you then” Yoongi continued walking.

“Alright, go get some sleep, doctor, you look pale as hell” Namjoon laughed. “We were worried, you know. Thought a gut-eater took you”.

Yoongi stopped.

“What’s a gut-eater?”

“Come on Joon, you’ll scare another doc off!” one of the other woodcutters said. “It’s all bull, doc, there’s no such thing as gut-eaters”.

“My grandma believed there are, don’t shut me up!” Namjoon looked offended. “Anywasys, Yoongi, I was kidding, all I meant was we were worried, that’s it”.

“But… A gut-eater… Is this a legendary creature of something?”

“I ain’t know legends, but people say this things find lost people in the woods and eat their gut. And also…” Namjoon looked at his friends and they all were holding their laughs. “Do other things”.

Now everyone except Yoongi was laughing.

“Wait, what things?” Yoongi asked.

“I ain’t no expert!” Namjoon was poorly holding his laughter. “Go get an encyclopedia at the library, there are actual science stuff written about every creature”.

So Yoongi left Namjoon and his woodcutters crews and went straight to the old library house, right next to his own. She had a strange feeling gut-eaters had something to do with what happened to him last night.
No one was inside, so he went to one the few shelves and soon found an old foliant called “The Complete Encyclopedia of Unhuman Creatures of Cypherland”. There was, indeed a whole article about gut-eaters.

“The gut-eaters are commonly believed to be the symbiosis of a) a human soul who killed their lover when was alive and b) a gut-eating demon who successfully occupied such soul after it had detached from its dead body. So technically a gut-eater is a human soul corrupted by a demon. This symbiosis serves two good purposes: 1) it helps the demon feed; 2) it helps the soul to go through a solid punishment of being corrupted and therefore purify itself from a sin it has commited (it usually takes few thousand years of being possessed by a demon to get fully purified and ready to be born in a new human body). A gut-eater looks like human, except for black blood and other typically demonic physical features. Gut-eaters make their victim mute so that they do not make any noise and are unable to draw any attention. A wounded gut-eater recovers fully if eats guts, it has a good regeneration ability. In order to eat the victim’s guts, a gut-eater uses its tentacles of demonic nature to tear a victim’s stomach open.

Gut-eaters are known for not just eating their victim’s guts, they are making, shall we put it, an evening of it. They’re known to feed their victim a single Amor Flos (or “the love flower”, a mystical weed witches are believed to use for strong love magic spells). It’s also commonly known, that a gut-eater performs an act of ual nature with its victim before eating their guts. There has been a very long debate in spiritual & scientific community regarding the nature of a gut-eater’s motivation for the said ual performance. Some magicians think, that they do that only to make the guts they’re about to eat warmer and, well, happier. They explain, that positive ual experience before death turn the victim’s mental vibrations from fearful to joyful, which is better for a gut-eater’s health (anyone who ever eaten a scared chicken noticed, that their aura becomes noticeably darker for some time, and that is the effect that gut-eaters are trying to ovoid). The opposite party of magicians believes that gut-eaters only give ual pleasure to their victims for the actual sake if it, which is to make them experience pure ic joy before the death. There is an yet unproved thesis, that when a lover murderer’s soul is being possessed by a gut-eating demon, they make a contract that the soul has to eat guts (which it genuinely would rather not do, of course), but in return the soul gets to make every yet-to-be-eaten person happy by means of ual pleasure, kind of making up for them in some way.
No one has survived a meeting with a gut-eater. To be precise, some people did, but their mental stability was broken forever and, so that the survivors could barely be called “alive”. There is a legend about a woman who has escaped from a gut-eater right after it performed the said act of ual nature on her. When she was found by her villagers, they testified that she “was not herself” and could only speak about how beautiful the gut-eater was, and begged to put her back into the woods so that they could be together. This wasn’t done, of course, so the woman spent the rest of her life not talking to anyone, barely eating, and making strange random noises at night.

The last proven record of a person being taken by a gut-eater dates back to the 503rd After The Cypher”.
Yoongi shut the book closed, feeling the hair move on his head. Tae was definitely the creature he’d just read about. He also remembered, that no one, who escaped a gut-eater could stay sane.
“But that’s not my case, right?” He said to himself.

***
It was almost midnight when Yoongi left his house later that day. He was going to the woods again.