Hello. I Hate You. Let Me Eat Your Glowing Bits

  They will hate me for this. Professor Ragnel thought as he moved on to the next part of the presentation. It’s his memories. Not my fault he’s insane.

  John stayed hidden and watched his glowing bits slowly returning long after the human left. Getting a good idea, John went over to the basin and dipped a tentacle into the water. Nothing happened. Well the tentacle slowly began to absorb essence, but that wasn’t what John had hoped for. So John hollowed out the tentacle and the water filled it. However, the water filled with glowing bits did not enter his body.

  Lifting his puddle/body up to the side of the basin and he attempted a modified pancake maneuver where he hollowed out the middle of his puddle into a makeshift mouth. All that accomplished was splashing the water out of the basin and filling it with his body. Laying there in the basin with water running down onto his puddlehead, John experimented with his glowing bits. He gathered a bunch of them up close to the edge of his puddleskin, then pulled them apart. Didn’t work. Whirlpool, nope. Then John looked at the wall and had an idea. He copied the framework crystalline shape of the wall's outer essence, then modified it so he could split it into two identical crystals. That didn’t work, but he felt he was getting close.

  Finally after a few minutes of fooling around, he mentally squeezed the two ends of his duplicate crystal framework together and it popped open. Water and the beautiful yummy glowing bits poured in. Yes. I shall drink all the glowing bits in the entire world!!!!

  After a few minutes John began feeling full and frustrated. He had the glowing bits, but they weren’t all his yet. He could tell they were slowly becoming his, but he couldn’t do anything with his newly acquired glowing bits. Also, he began to feel like he might explode, so he mentally pulled on the ends of what he now thought of as his ziploc glowing bits device. The hole in his puddle closed and John reached out a tentacle to pull himself out of the basin.

  However, there was one small problem. He couldn’t budge his bloated body. He gathered up a bunch of glowing bits and rushed them to one side of his puddle, but he didn’t budge. Four tentacles and he still couldn’t move. I guess I should have known better than to eat that much fast food.

  After a little more trial and error, John discovered he could slowly roll his puddle forward by rotating his essence around the inside edge of his puddle skin. Not Ideal. Once John plopped out of the basin and moved to the opposite corner, he began trying to convert the glowing bits faster. Ramming one of his glowing bits into one of the not his glowing bits resulted in the destruction of both glowing bits. Rotating his glowing bits around the not his glowing bits seemed to help but not much. Encasing a not his glowing bit in a shell of his glowing bits helped more. He hit the jackpot when he stretched his glowing bits into threads and weaved a net around a not his glowing bit.

  Annoyed with himself, John double checked his camouflage pattern and settled in to do a lot of stretching and weaving.

  John pushed himself until the essence-enriched water would barely return any stamina, but he finally got his vitality, strength,and agility to 20 with the help of the 110% bonuses from his titles. Sitting down in the room nearest the training area, he mentally opened up his dimensional storage and was surprised to see only two items. One was a dull gray staff. He pulled it out

  Emperor’s Armory

  +5 Damage

  +5 to all stats

  More abilities to unlock.

  Indestructible essence absorbing growth item. Soulbound.

  Essence absorbing could mean a few things. It could mean the weapon passively absorbed essence to be used on the abilities he had not unlocked yet. It could mean it passively absorbed essence to improve itself. Or it could mean both.

  Growth item meant that the weapon would level up with him.

  Soulbound meant if he became separated from his weapon, it would return to his dimensional storage. Overall a very nice weapon. Possibly even a great weapon depending on its abilities. Next John pulled out his other item.

  Emperor’s Wardrobe

  +10 to armor

  +5 to all stats

  +5 to all resists

  More abilities to unlock.

  Self repairing essence absorbing growth item. Soulbound

  Cannot be worn with other armor.

  The black spandex looking outfit was light on the armor stat considering he couldn’t wear any other pieces of armor with it. However, overall, not bad starting equipment. John leaned his head back and started thinking about how he….could…zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

  Jerking awake, John realized he had fallen asleep before being able to set up any kind of alarm or anything to protect or hide him from that slime from earlier or any other unfriendly types. Picking up his staff, he went back to the gym and picked up his dungeon from beneath the control crystal.

  He then walked back down the hallway. He noticed one of the rooms had water splashed everywhere. With a lightning bolt at the ready, he moved in and checked to see if the slime was in the basin. It wasn’t. So he continued back down the hallway and grabbed the pedestal from beneath the plaque and made his way down the hall towards the suspected essence vein.

  John was able to make it much closer to the vein this time before he began taking damage from essence burn. Deciding to go for it, he ran the rest of the way down the hall and set the pedestal down as soon as he entered the room, and placed the dungeon core on it. Before he ran out of the room, he was shocked to see that one wall was a single enormous essence crystal.

  John didn’t have time to investigate, he ran back out of the room and down the hall until his health stopped dropping. John walked into one of the rooms and took a couple deep drinks of water to speed his recovery. He headed back down the hallway to the gym and started working on leveling lightning bolt, so he’d have at least one subclass active when he started earning leveling essence.

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  It was a slow process. With his intelligence and wisdom so low, he could only go a few minutes before his mana reserve was emptied. Not wanting to sit there and wait for it to refill, John decided to start rebuilding his skill repertoire by working with his staff. He had more stamina (essence reserve designated for physical use) than he did mana (essence reserve designated for spellcasting use), but it was still depressingly low. But John was stubborn. When he was low on both, instead of just sitting there watching his body slowly convert essence into mana and stamina reserves, he’d sit there and trigger lightning bolt without actually casting it. This allowed him to watch the essence move from his mana reserve and form a connection with the target and assemble the components of the spell. He couldn’t really see anything yet, but he knew he would learn essence sight soon enough if he kept watching.

  Once John had relearned a basic set of staff skills, he had already picked up a couple subclasses from those skills. He had only raised lightning bolt to level 3 by the time he felt he needed to sleep again and his mana reserve had grown, so things would only speed up from here.

  John had continued to get evolutions from passive absorption of essence, but he estimated they were more than a day apart now as his cells became more developed. During his next training session John alternated improving his basic staff skills with working on lightning bolt and congratulated himself when he earned his first elemental casting subclass ever. Once he had the electromancer subclass, he found viewing his essence much easier and soon picked up Essence Sight.

  After his third break to sleep, John returned to the Gymnasium to find an odd little obstacle course set up, but no one in the room. John carefully searched the training hall and what he now thought of as the barracks, but found nothing so he returned to his training.

  During his sixth sleep break, John was woken up by an annoying system alert. Sleepily opening it up he saw:

  Unnamed Slime has captured your dungeon core.

  Unnamed slime will become dungeon master in 30 minutes.

  John jumped to his feet and started moving towards the hallway to fry some slime, but stopped when he received another alert:

  Unnamed slime has declined capturing your dungeon core.

  John then scrolled down and saw this had happened several times. Further down he found a prompt for him to name the dungeon and access the dungeon master’s menu, but John felt he could deal with that later after he figured out what was going on with the slime and his core.

  Keeping close to the wall, John moved down the hall towards his dungeon core. When he was a few rooms away from the room, he could see the pedestal his core was on and the slime on the floor a few feet away. In between the pedestal and the slime were small formations of ants. They seemed to be playing a game. The core would either create another ant or move an ant forward. Then John noticed the slime had camouflage tentacles stretching towards the pedestal. On its turn the slime would either create a new tentacle and camouflage it by blending his essence to match the floor or extend one of his tentacles by a small amount then adjust its essence.

  Apparently the tentacles could easily swallow a single ant which would quickly turn to dust inside the slime tentacle before disappearing or become a small piece of ore or ant chitin that would then disappear. However, his core was maneuvering its ants into position around the tentacles so two or more could engage at the same time. If the tentacle attacked an ant and other ants were properly positioned, the other ants would attack and bite off the end of the tentacle.

  The game also seemed to be played in three dimensions as John saw one tentacle grow vertically and the core responded by having the ants form a ladder. After a few minutes, the slime proved to be the victor as it maneuvered a tentacle into a position with too few ants able to block it before the tentacle was able to touch the core and John received another alert.

  Apparently his core didn’t enjoy losing because it immediately sent all its ants over to swarm the slime who then created several tentacles to fight them off. However, in its brief skirmish the slime had moved a couple steps closer to John. As soon as the last ant was defeated, the slime disappeared and John could just barely follow its essence as it rapidly pulled itself up the wall and down the hall past him.

  Puddle John wasn’t sure how long he had spent weaving glowing bits and absorbing glowing bits, but he knew he had leveled up 3 times since he began. Once he had finished weaving his essence around all of the not his essence he had been bored. He began looking closer at the glowing bits formation of the stone. He realized the glowing bits were organized in 3 dimensions, not just the two he used in his camouflage technique. Having an idea of what this meant, he copied the 3 dimensional shape onto the end of one of his tentacles and tapped on the wall. He was rewarded with a sound that he felt with his entire body. Assuming this meant he had successfully physically copied the stone, he began practicing turning larger and larger parts of his body to stone.

  Once John no longer felt bloated, he attempted to move himself by shooting out tentacles and pulling himself. He wasn’t back to full speed, but he was happy to be able to move without relying on the painfully slow rolling technique he had developed. He did suspect if he ever acquired enough glowing bits to swirl around that rolling technique might become reasonably fast.

  Happy to be moving again, Puddle John went exploring. Seeing a warm glow at the end of the hall, John headed that direction while mentally smacking his lips at the idea of a room completely filled with tightly packed glowing bits. However, John soon began to feel a burning sensation and instead of slowly gaining glowing bits, he began losing glowing bits, so John decided to check out the other direction first.

  Before he reached the door at the other end, John felt the human in one of the side rooms. Instinctively knowing he wasn’t strong enough yet to eat the man and his glowing bits, he slowly crept up to the ceiling and bypassed the room the man was in.

  When he entered through the door, puddle John saw the glowing crystal above his head, he reached a tentacle up and touched it. Hey. Give me those back…oh… A couple of John’s glowing bits had been stolen, but a screen popped up in John’s vision.

  Welcome to the World Wonder Destiny’s Amphitheatre

  Would you like to train:

  Power

  Control

  Toughness

  Puddle John chose Toughness. Two blocks of stone rose up on each side of him and smashed together. What the heck? John felt like he had been squeezed to the point that his glowing bits were about to shoot out of him. The pressure then released but the blocks then formed blades cutting him to pieces that John quickly pulled back together before getting smashed again. Over time John became convinced the pressure was slightly increasing each time. After what felt like an eternity, the block’s disappeared and John examined himself. His glowing bits seemed larger and after arranging a few shapes he was convinced his glowing bit shapes were stronger. He did a puddle shrug and assumed he was tougher. Mission complete.

  Not wanting to be smashed any more, John decided to work on control. A small scale obstacle course formed in front of him with glowing pieces of stone flying around the obstacles. In his mind, he saw a glowing puddle using its tentacles to maneuver through the obstacle course and capture the flying bits of stone. Now this is what I’m talking about. This should be a lot more fun than being squished between stones.

  And Puddle John was right. It was. Until that stupid human showed up and he had to hide before the jerk decided to steal more of his glowing bits. The one and only person on Puddle John’s Eat all their glowing bits list stayed in there forever shooting lightning or waving his stick around. Puddle John got bored and snuck out of the gym to partake in some delicious glowing bits water.

  After a few more training sessions, sneaking out of the room when that annoying human would show up, Puddle John decided to try reaching the often dreamed about room packed with glowing bits. As he approached it he felt more and more tingly, but he didn’t see any glowing bits disappearing, so he continued.

  Just before he entered the room he received a notification that he had entered a level 1 unnamed dungeon. John Drake was listed as his master. John Drake…is he some kind of pirate? Should have known he was a John. John’s are always jerks. I ought to know. Ants suddenly appeared in front of him made up of very yummy looking glowing bits. Puddle John began to snatch the ants and once he wrapped them in weaves of his own glowing bits they would quickly disappear and he’d be rewarded with a lump of ore or a piece of chitin or something called a credit. After a couple minutes, John began examining the ants for a bit before he would absorb them. Their pincers looked like something that might be very useful.

  After about 15 minutes, the ants stopped appearing. Moving into the room, John saw a wall so tightly packed with complicated formations of glowing bits that it was almost painful to look at. Closer to him, he saw a tight little bundle of glowing bits sitting on a stone pedestal. He reached up and touched it. A screen popped up in his mind awarding him 25 essence for conquering the dungeon and asking if he wanted to take control of the dungeon, warning that the current master would have 30 minutes to respond. Afraid that he might not be able to fight any more ants with delicious glowing bits, Puddle John declined.

  John then waited. A few minutes later a couple of ants showed up between him and the core. John extended a tentacle towards them. The core formed a couple more ants, so John created another tentacle. The dungeon responded by moving an ant closer. Cool. A game. Let’s see. I need to get her ants out of position, so I can go up and over and reach the core. This is actually fun. Why do I know she is a her…Puddle Shrug… The game continued, but John was only a little disappointed to discover the dungeon was most definitely a sore loser and would swarm him with ants whenever he won, but no big deal. More delicious ants and more ore and chitin and whatever credits are.

  Unfortunately they only got a few games in before that annoying human…John Drake…showed up and puddle John made a hasty exit.