Fed on blood to mature

Homunculus

From that point the forming Homunculus is said to require regular feeding with the arcanum of human blood, kept at a steady, womb-like warmth, for a further period (accounts vary on the exact duration, with roughly forty weeks sometimes given), over which it is said to grow into a small human child, tiny in stature but reportedly capable of speech, movement, and even precocious intelligence.

Encerrados

The accounts are consistent and unpleasant, and there is no useful way to soften them: children abducted in the region, their orifices sewn shut by witches, kept in the dank underground and fed on the flesh of goats and of other child victims until they change into hairy grey cannibal creatures.