The Cave Man - Ch. 19 - The Cradle

[MangaDex]

 

[libermn]

Smart move. I wonder if they're gonna succeed.

 

[KuhaKenuvo]

Well that's pretty sexist.

 

[nikipa]

Well that's pretty sexist.
View attachment 30599

Sexist to both, even.
But the killings are more fucked up, honestly. And now we know (some of) the villagers are in on it.

 

[JackdawMinuet]

I’m really looking forward to the explanation for all this. Inbreeding? Disease? Experimentation? Or truly supernatural?

 

[Zero13]

Baiting the troglodyte with sweets is not very nice.

 

[zawarudo]

I’m really looking forward to the explanation for all this. Inbreeding? Disease? Experimentation? Or truly supernatural?

my guess is: the cave is a giant alien or some cosmic horror being. the gollums are all of the townspeople who went missing, specifically the male ones. they are converted into gollums by the slime thing, perhaps. the hallucinations the slime causes are part of the conversion ritual by completely destroying their sense of self before the cave's powers take over which also changes their appearance. this "god" is well known to the town's leaders, that's why they keep things on the down low. perhaps in ancient times, the being's powers causes the soil be more fertile etc as a trade-off, and along the way the town leadership kept the tradition of sacrificing some men and women periodically to keep the being from just consuming everything. i think the conversion ritual involves the hole that Gen and Hajime are kept in, the diary's final lines can be taken to imply that the author realized he was turning into one of them.

meanwhile women are just seen as "food" for the cave, like Ayane and the streamer. the big fat gollum which Umi killed was likely an abomination, the result of a failed human to gollum conversion ritual.