Multiverse Gourmet Hunter

Suzuki Haruto stared grimly at the glowing doorway suspended in the middle of his living room.

It had all begun the previous morning.

He had woken up as usual, only for a flood of information to force its way into his mind without warning.

The sudden overload left him clutching his head in agony, feeling as though his skull might split apart.

When the pain finally subsided, several lines of text had been burned into his consciousness.

[Myriad Worlds House: This house can randomly establish connections with worlds across the multiverse. If the host enters a connected world and remains there for the required duration, its coordinates will be permanently anchored, allowing unrestricted travel between the two worlds.]

[Warning: Interworld travel carries a genuine risk of death. If the host dies in another world, that death is permanent.]

[Notice: If the host does not enter the connected world within three days, the coordinates will automatically be severed. The next connection time is unknown.]

[Current Status: Connection to an unknown world established. The World Gate is open.]

The messages were brief, but Haruto still spent nearly half an hour sitting there in a daze.

Once he finally recovered, he instinctively looked around.

Everything inside the familiar old house remained exactly as it had always been—the wooden table with peeling paint, the bamboo basket in the corner, and the old pagoda tree outside the window that had stood there for as long as he could remember.

Then he opened the front door and stepped outside.

The moment he did, an overwhelming sense that something was wrong washed over him.

The crowing roosters and barking dogs of his rural hometown were gone, along with the earthy smell of the fields. In their place came the endless honking of cars and rows of tightly packed Japanese buildings lining both sides of the street.

The signs were covered in clearly printed hiragana, while enormous billboards on distant high-rises displayed celebrities he had never seen before.

Even stranger, his old two-story tiled house and its small courtyard seemed to have been carefully inserted into the middle of the city.

It blended seamlessly with the surrounding apartment buildings, as though it had always belonged there.

...

"This isn’t home..." Haruto muttered.

He took a couple of unconscious steps forward and caught fragments of conversation from the people passing by.

They were speaking Japanese, yet he somehow understood every word perfectly.

It was strange enough to momentarily distract him from everything else.

He pulled out his phone.

The signal was full, but when he opened the map, the location displayed on the screen was Tokyo.

Somehow, he had ended up in Japan!

Haruto had no idea how to feel about that.

He had quit his job and returned to the countryside precisely because he was sick of concrete towers, crowded cities, and the brutal nine-to-nine, six-days-a-week grind.

All he had wanted was to spend a while living quietly, waking with the sunrise and resting when it set.

Instead, he had been thrown straight back into the city—and not even one in his own country.

The sheer absurdity of it made him wonder whether he was still dreaming.

After forcing down the turmoil in his chest, Haruto spent half the day exploring the surrounding area.

The rice balls in the convenience stores, the crowds flowing through the subway stations, the torii gates outside the local shrines... everything felt disturbingly real.

By evening, he had returned home and was once again staring at the glowing doorway—or rather, the World Gate—in his living room.

He did not enter immediately.

An unfamiliar city was unsettling, but whatever lay beyond that gate was far more frightening.

There was no way of knowing what awaited him on the other side.

It could be a paradise overflowing with gold, or a living hell where danger lurked around every corner.

More importantly, he had not forgotten the warning.

If he died in another world, he would also died in his own world.

He needed time to think.

More than that, he needed time to prepare!

...

Haruto barely slept that night.

He dug out an old backpack and stuffed it with anything that might prove useful: a freshly sharpened kitchen knife, several packets of compressed biscuits, plenty of drinking water, salt, a compact alcohol stove, and a lighter.

Haruto was no reckless thrill-seeker, but he understood that opportunity and danger often came hand in hand.

The three-day deadline was already counting down.

If he let this chance slip away, there was no telling whether another would come in a month, a year, or ever again.

Besides, that doorway held access to countless worlds and infinite possibilities.

The next morning, the first rays of sunlight streamed through the window and fell across the glowing gate.

Haruto drew a deep breath, and the last trace of hesitation disappeared from his eyes.

"Screw it. I’m doing this."

He tightened his grip on the kitchen knife, slung the backpack over his shoulders, and stepped into the doorway swirling with silver light.

There was none of the violent pulling he had expected, nor any dizziness from being hurled through space and time.

He only felt a brief moment of weightlessness, like missing a step on a staircase.

A second later, his feet landed on something soft.

The sight before him made his pupils contract.

The "ground" beneath him consisted of countless thick red and yellow cylinders woven across one another.

When he looked up, he found the entire area enclosed by a curved pink "wall."

Stranger still, numerous pink structures resembling Christmas trees were "growing" from the floor.

A peculiar sweet, metallic smell lingered in the air. It was unusual, but not entirely unpleasant.

"What the hell is this place?" Haruto whispered as his heart began pounding wildly.

He tightened his grip on the kitchen knife and scanned his surroundings, every muscle tense.

Then a faint rustling sound came from somewhere in the distance.

Haruto turned toward it and spotted something brown moving rapidly in his direction.

As it drew closer, its appearance became horrifyingly clear.

It was a monster nearly three meters tall, its entire body covered in countless long, slender brown tentacles.

It had no face, only two enormous bloodshot eyes fixed directly on him, both filled with naked hostility.

"..."

"A tentacle monster?"

Haruto’s scalp prickled as a chill shot from the soles of his feet to the top of his head.

There was something strangely familiar about the creature, but this was hardly the time to search his memory.

The moment his instincts caught up with what he was seeing, he turned and ran.

He did not dare to look back.

All he could hear was the rapid pattering behind him as the creature gave chase.

Fortunately, the tentacled monster was not especially fast. Even at a full sprint, it could only just keep pace with him.

Haruto ran until his lungs burned and the metallic taste of blood filled his throat.

He had no idea how long the chase lasted, but eventually he reached the edge of the pink wall and spotted an opening in its surface.

Without slowing down, he dashed straight inside.

After running farther down the passage, Haruto finally realized that the monster had stopped at the entrance.

Its huge eyes continued to glare at him, but it refused to take another step forward, merely releasing a series of low, guttural snarls from outside.

Only then did the crushing pressure in Haruto’s chest begin to ease.

His legs gave out beneath him, and he collapsed onto the ground, his back drenched in cold sweat.

It took him a while to catch his breath.

Once he had recovered enough to move, he used the wall for support and slowly pushed himself upright, taking his first proper look at the passage around him.

The environment inside was even stranger than the area outside.

Both the floor and the walls were uniformly pale red, with smooth, springy surfaces.

When he pressed a hand against the wall, it sank beneath his fingers before slowly returning to its original shape.

It felt warm and soft beneath his palm, almost like living flesh.

Haruto’s heartbeat quickened again as an absurd yet disturbingly plausible thought entered his mind.

"Don’t tell me... I’m inside some gigantic creature?"

Every hair on his body stood on end, yet the curiosity buried deep inside him pushed Haruto toward a reckless experiment.

He raised the kitchen knife, drew a steadying breath, and drove the blade hard into the wall.

It slid easily into the pale red surface.

No blood emerged from the wound, only a faintly sweet, metallic scent.

Twisting his wrist, Haruto cut away a piece roughly the size of his palm.

The chunk was surprisingly heavy, with the tender pink color of fresh meat.

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