The Speed Problem

Dvushak's porridge had taken an entire night to rot. Twelve hours, at least, in a warm kitchen — and even then, it had only partially decomposed. Solid lumps still floated in the brownish liquid.

Crivsola's body processed a meal far more quickly than that.

Timing as Evidence

She began paying attention to the timing of her own digestion. She ate the morning porridge and noted when she felt the characteristic fullness in her midsection. By evening, the fullness was gone. By the next morning, waste had been produced. The entire process — from food entering the mouth to waste being expelled — seemed to take less than a day. Sometimes considerably less.

The body dissolves food many times faster than food rots on its own.

This was not a minor discrepancy. Rot, even in warm conditions, was a slow, gradual process. The body accomplished a comparable transformation in hours. Whatever was happening inside the tube was far more aggressive than simple rotting.

Warmth Is Not Enough

Crivsola's first thought was that the body's warmth might account for the speed. The body was warmer than a kitchen counter — she could feel her own heat by placing a hand on her stomach. Perhaps the higher temperature accelerated the breakdown.

But this did not hold up. Dvushak's kitchen was also warm — hot, even, from the cooking fires. And the porridge had still taken all night. The body's warmth might help, but it could not explain the dramatic difference in speed.

Something else was at work.

The Strong Liquid

Crivsola returned to her earlier intuition. The mouth produced saliva — a mild liquid that softened food during chewing. What if the tube, further down, produced a much more potent liquid? Something that attacked food aggressively, dissolving it in hours rather than days?

She thought of the strongest dissolving liquid she knew: concentrated vinegar. Tanners in the Sonhlagot markets used it to break down animal hides. It worked far faster than rot, though it still took some time.

The body must produce a dissolving liquid — something at least as strong as the harshest vinegar — and release it directly onto the food inside the tube.

The Revised Model

Crivsola updated her picture. The tube was not a passive passage. Somewhere along its length — probably in the wider section she imagined below the one-way valve — the body produced a powerful dissolving liquid. Food arriving in this section was bathed in the liquid and broken down rapidly, not by mechanical grinding but by chemical attack.

Her model of the dissolving liquid was wrong in the details — she imagined something like strong vinegar, when the actual substance was far more complex. But from where she stood, this was the best model available, and it explained the evidence.

A new problem, however, presented itself almost immediately.

"If the body produces a liquid that can dissolve food in hours," Lomytguya said from her cot, staring at the ceiling, "why does it not dissolve the body itself?"

Crivsola had no answer. But Lomytguya, it turned out, did.