Night.
Dafflin discovered that Anty was also raising a child, but that child never showed himself, not even at mealtimes. Layton brought food to him.
He also discovered something terrifying: in the eyes of Layton, the little boy, and Phil, the little girl, people who had died were pigs.
This was not merely a conceptual belief. What they actually saw with their own eyes was the image of pigs.
He had discovered this because Phil had drawn a picture of her latest hunt.
The two dead people in the picture were depicted as two Wild Boars.
Living people looked like people to them, but once dead, they became pigs, cattle, and sheep in their eyes.
"What do you usually live on?" Dafflin asked.
For some reason, he wanted to care about Anty, even though she had never told him his original name.
"We pick up scrap iron, books, and plastic from the ruins and sell them to people who collect that stuff," Layton answered, gnawing on his left hand.
His left hand was green, and a fruit had already grown from it...
Well then, it was a plant parasitizing his body. As long as it was given water and mineral salts and exposed to sunlight every day, he could eat himself.
But that could clearly only count as a snack. The law of energy transfer was there, after all. The sunlight one hand could receive was simply too limited.
So they made their living collecting scrap.
That made sense. Miken had once been too wealthy. Even after becoming a wasteland, it would take a century or two before its remaining social wealth was exhausted.
Steel, plastic, and paper were all things that could be preserved for a long time.
And they could easily be processed into all sorts of daily