‘Nice’ Dei thought after completing his message to his mom while walking. ‘It's a lot easier to engrave a whole bunch of information into a single point of Kindness when I compress it. It actually uses thirty six Kindness mana, I suppose, but thirty six unconcentrated mana wouldn’t be that easily readable. I’ll probably stick to either MP or six-times concentrated mana for regular messages though.’
It would be quite some time before he could reach Amaya because his [Growing Pains] Skill was disabled, and he couldn’t just flat out sprint everywhere.
‘Actually, now would be a good time to test something out.’
“Hey Fendrascora” Dei said “are you able to carry me and run really quickly?”
“Carry you… yes… Run quickly? Not at all. My body is very heavy, and I tire quickly.”
That was about what Dei thought she would say. Previously, when he had to slow down, it was because Fendrascora was tired. She tried frequently to put as much weight on Dei as possible in order to lighten her own load, but her main body was still far too large to move anywhere quickly. It wasn’t the garden either, all those plants, rocks, and bugs had to be maybe three or four percent of her total weight.
“Okay, well I want to move faster but my soul is too strained to do so right now. Let's find a way to get you mobile. I have a Skill that lets me grant others one of my Skills, let me give you the one that usually heals my muscles and see if it works. You okay with that?” He almost just gave her the Skill immediately, but realized it would be better to check with her first.
“Yes of course! I’m always happy to help.”
“Alright, here we go.” Mentally selecting his first Outer Skill ever: [How About a Demonstration?], Dei pushed his [Growing Pains] Skill towards Fendrascora.
The process felt similar to his [Astral Projection], where the Skill wiggled around in his soul for a while before a mobile “portal” of it was sent somewhere else. Off, towards Fendrascora.
The main part of the spell still resided in his soul, but the gateway to it was gone. He could no longer access it for the duration of it being somewhere else, but he could always recall it.
“Alright” he told Fendrascora “Its a passive, so unless you turn it off, it should just be working. Pick me up and try to carry us forward, I’ll give you the instructions as we go.”
Following his orders, Dei was lifted off the ground. It felt like his entire body had become lighter, as the weight of her was perfectly distributed around every part of him.
Next, the five legs that carried Fendrascora’s peripheral body had a short burst of speed, before she wobbled and quickly stopped.
“Sadly, no. I feel the Skill trying to work, but it's not compatible with my body. Its doing something similar to what I do to you, and giving me organic energy. Because I don't need organic energy and organic healing doesn't work on me, the Skill fails”
Dei was pretty sure she was talking about ATP or something, but it didn’t really matter. All that mattered was the failure. Still, there were other options to go through.
Recanting his [Growing Pains] Skill, Dei was more hopeful for the second option: [Homeostasis].
It wasn’t a Skill that was as immediately useful as Growing Pains, but it was shown to be much more adaptable.
He sent her his copy of Homeostasis, and gave her a moment to activate it.
“Alright” he said “let's try this again. Don't immediately give yourself a burst of speed, but slowly increase how fast you’re going.”
He was still in the air, so he didn’t need to be picked up again. He swung around repeatedly though, and he soon felt her accelerating. Clever latched onto his shoulder almost painfully.
“It’s working! Just a little bit, but it’s working!” she exclaimed.
“Okay, good! Now we need to work on your form. If you’re carrying me, Fang, and Clever, we can't keep swaying like this. Do you know what a millipede is?”
“No?”
“Okay, this is a millipede and how it moves” he said as he sent her a mental image of millipedes.
“Oh! Like the legs of a Riverbed Skitterer!” she said and immediately started changing shape.
Rather than be a big orb, she turned into a red worm with hundreds of legs on each side. The innermost part of her was still clear as it was filled with water, while her outer shell and legs were all red as his blood.
She placed him on the front part of her body, right around where the millipedes head would be, then began to move. He stood up on her head so he could put his feet on the ground in order to sense vibrations, but was struggling to read it through her legs. Instead, he had her form two “stilts” so to speak under his legs. It was two tubes of blood directly beneath him that perpetually connected to the ground, that way the vibrations would go up through the blood for him to read. Because her body was liquid as well, it constantly shifted to the terrain it sat on, giving him an almost perfect view of the vibrations around, that way he could still direct them.
The ride was now much more stable, and he noticed it was faster than the way she was walking before. This was a more efficient way to move. While she wasn’t as fast as he would be normally if he were carrying them at his top-sprinting speed, it was only a matter of time until his [Homeostasis] Skill really gave her the oomph in energy recovery and balance she needed to go quicker.
With her longer strides, she would probably be faster than even him, unless his Physical stat was higher than hers.
Actually, that was a good question: did they share stats? They were very well attuned to each other, so he’d have to check. Perhaps he didn’t notice because when they first attuned to each other, she had absurdly low stats. Now though, he quickly checked her level.
[Corrupted Damaged Crippled Embodiment of the Flow - Level 72]
The ordeal with Lani gave her a ton of experience, so she’d shot up in levels again.
He did want to know her stats though, so sent out a request with Identify for permission, and she granted it to him.
[Physical: 22
Mental: 25
Spiritual: 37
Magical: 28]
For her level, those stats were… not good. Nonetheless, they weren’t as bad as before. He was also pretty sure she wasn’t “allocating” stats right now, just rediscovering how she’d allocated them before. He asked her, and she confirmed that her stats were just coming back in the same order she’d earned them previously.
What was interesting to Dei was that Mental wasn't her highest stat. He knew that in her previous form, as an elemental, she was a lot smarter than her brothers. Mental built on what was already there though, so she was perhaps born with a much higher intelligence than the average elemental, which was interesting to see.
Physical was less necessary because it was harder to deal physical damage to a water elemental, if he had to guess. Instead, she had to protect against magical damage, so she had a high Spiritual stat, and had to face off against other magically intangible beings, so she had a high Magical stat.
“Hey Fendrascora, did you get a boost to your stats when we were attuning to each other?”
“Umm, yes I think so? I thought I was regaining my Physical stats faster than expected, but my stats weren’t actually going up, was that you?”
“I’m not sure, thats what I’m trying to figure out. You said it was only Physical?”
This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
“Yep! Just Physical.”
“How much did you gain?”
“I’m not sure, I didn’t really measure it at the time and my stats have changed since. Maybe ten to twenty though?”
“Thank you, that’s all I wanted to know” he told her, then went back to directing her movements. Despite her lower Physical stat, she was absolutely faster than him by this point because of her much wider gait. He did notice her slowing down at times, but she would speed back up after several minutes.
He wanted to see if he gained any Physical stats from her, but wasn’t sure how to tell. If she earned ten to twenty, and the rate of conversion was the same, then he’d earn three to seven. Not much at all, but important in verifying that he earned stats. While continuing to direct Fendrascora, he gently sent a small piece of his mind to scan his soul. Actively using High Mind strained him a bit, but as long as he went slowly, it wasn’t terrible.
Back when he first earned a [Meditation] Skill, it involved balancing out his soul and covering his weaknesses. He no longer had the Skill, but he still remembered the visions it gave him of the different parts of his soul. Physical, Mental, and Magical in balance, with his Spiritual stat to tie it all together
It was harder to find now that the different sections weren’t highlighted to him, but not impossible. His soul was not a tangibly visible thing after all, it was all about visualization, and he shifted his view around a few times to help enunciate the different sections.
When he could comfortably pick out the Physical aspect of his soul, he studied it closely and compared it to the other parts. What he found was that it was just a bit more efficient than the others. When his stats were unbalanced, one part was larger than the other. Right now, it seemed to Dei that his Physical aspect had not grown in proportion to the donated Physical stat points, but started… glowing? Or something along those lines.
He might be imagining the effect though. The only way to check was to check on his soul during a fight. His [Cruelty of the Slaughter] achievement granted him an eighty percent boost to his Physical stat effectiveness when he was in combat, and Dei thought that’s what this was too. Not necessarily extra stats, but his and Fendrascora’s souls were helping each other become more efficient.
After figuring that out, he was about to merge his minds back together in order to decrease the strain on his soul, when he had a bit of a nagging sensation somewhere else in his soul. He let the view of his soul fall back into the way he normally saw it, as a collection of all his experiences, and searched where the irritant came from.
He found it at the familiar anchor point of his [Pandora’s Box]. Ever since it’d become [(Sealed)] rather than [(Contained)], it was a bit harder to find it, because it no longer glowed with mana. Instead, he had to go to its anchor point and follow the tether to the full Skill itself.
He appeared before it now, that familiar wooden chest with the latch on the top. There were four latches on the side, three with Null mana and one with a sectioned off portion of Wrath mana that he was trying to turn into Null mana.
Willing himself to look into the box, he was met with a concerning sight. The curse was still violently slamming itself against the walls, completely tireless, but it wasn’t even even leaving scratches. That wasn’t the concerning part, no, it was the reaction it played with other mana types. He found that it was attacking everything else at the same time as slamming into the wall, and he found that they were transforming into the curse-type Wrath mana. All the other Wrath mana, the stuff that he’d had in his box before, had easily fallen in line with the curse, becoming imbued with its meaning, but opposing mana types were resisting to varying degrees.
Soul wasn’t putting up a real fight, so it was the fastest to go. Fortitude on the other hand resisted hard, digging in its heels and pressing back against the Wrath as Kindness hid behind it, but it was being chipped away. Kindness didn’t just stand idly by though, striking out whenever it found the chance to. The Wrath mana recoiled with every strike, but he never really saw Wrath mana convert to Kindness mana, just everything else was converted to Wrath.
He was so fascinated and horrified at the process that he didn’t stop it right away. When he got his wits about him though, he quickly set up walls using Sectioning to cut the Wrath mana off from the rest of the box, and checked how much was left of everything else. When he first sealed the curse away, his box looked like this:
[Pandora’s Box:
8250/10920 Wrath
981/10920 Kindness
532/10920 Soul
824/10920 Fortitude
300/10920 [NULL] ]
Now though, it looked like this:
[Pandora’s Box:
8321/10920 Wrath
968/10920 Kindness
494/10920 Soul
801/10920 Fortitude
300/10920 [NULL] ]
It wasn’t a huge difference, but that was only in like, an hour? Or thereabouts.
Once the Wrath was fully sectioned off, the other mana types unraveled from each other. It was incredible to see the latent will behind affinities like that in play, showing that these mana types weren’t just unthinking forces of nature. They were thinking forces of nature.
Checking on the hundred points of Wrath mana that were sectioned off previously, he was sad to see that even it was infected with the curse. It seemed that any Wrath mana contained within the box, even if it was in a different part, wanted to be imbued with the curses meaning. The other mana types gave at least token resistance, so they could easily fight its influence even through the walls of the box, but for now all of his Wrath mana would be cursed, until he fully expended it. He didn’t know what that would change, but now was the best time he had to check.
Bringing his mind fully back together, he opened his eyes and asked Fendrascora to get him a bug of some kind, not from her garden.
Using the lowest powered Wrath Identify he could, he hit the spider… beetle… thing.
Immediately he noticed an internal difference. As the Wrath mana flowed out of his box, his mind stuttered, and he was hit with the overwhelming feeling of hatred towards the world around him. The bug that was hit by the Wrath had its Spiritual defenses obliterated, probably more from the thirty six concentration of the Wrath mana than the curse though.
He wasn’t really interested in the bug, so he didn’t scan it for any information. He just wanted to see if it would change the bugs' behavior. It squirmed around a bit in Fendrascora’s hands, but nothing came of it. The bug wasn’t of the camouflage or stealth variety, so his Identify wasn’t very aggressive with its soul. It just slowly repaired its own defenses, and nothing else came of it.
If he wanted to check whether other things would change their behavior in response to the cursed mana, he’d have to either hit something smarter with it, like the Praerel, or one of his allies, which he wasn’t willing to do. Even if they were fine with it, he didn’t want to attack his friends with a new and unknown effect that could potentially be harmful long term.
Telling Fendrascora to release the bug back into one of the mini microbiomes similar to the one they’d pulled it from, they continued running towards Amaya.
* * *
It was a long journey, and Dei’s thoughts drifted to an oddity he’d noticed. His [Call for Help] Skill had leveled up after he saved Lani, but it didn’t notify him of Lani’s plight in the first place. Now that he thought about it, shouldn’t he be receiving signals frequently, from all over the cave systems? Nature was brutal, and he’d noticed how animals were smarter here. They would understand when death was coming for them, so his [Call for Help] should be going haywire perpetually.
While he was grateful that desperation wasn’t constantly flooding his mind, why wasn’t it? Dei could only imagine that there was some further criteria that dictated whether someone was “worthy” of his help, a criteria that the System either couldn’t or wouldn’t show him.
Looking back though, he couldn’t find it. The reasoning behind it all. At first he thought the other criteria for sensing somethings cry for help was whether it wanted his help or not, essentially: whether it would be grateful. After all, Clever and Fendriscora were both good friends now, not bitter monsters. But that couldn’t be the case, as he was able to sense the Lorpee’s desperation, and he knew they wanted him dead.
It was like there was something guiding him down a path it wanted him to go… and there was only one culprit.
The affinity Kindness itself.
If he was right, then Kindness was intentionally manipulating his path to guide him in a certain direction, and he scowled at the thought.
Were there others? Other creatures along his path that he could have helped, but Kindness deemed them unnecessary? Why?
He wanted answers immediately, but didn’t know how to get them. Even if he could, his soul was still too strained to withstand the presence of an affinity. When he was better though, he would try and meet with Kindness once more. How, he didn’t know, but it might be as simple as thinking about it and meditating, or something similar.
He tried to reason out why Kindness would do such a selfish thing, borderline angry at its intrusion on his path, but Kindness must have a reason. It was the embodiment of Kindness, he was almost positive that it would represent those values above all else, so how was it kind to ignore those in need? Perhaps that wasn’t what it was going for though. Perhaps the affinity was trying to protect him from things above his paygrade, in turn being kind to him. Looking back, [Call for Help] didn’t warn him of the [Nightstalking Devourer], Kindness didn’t even tell him where the monster was when it had taken one of the people from his village. It didn’t give him a warning of the wife's desperation at seeing her husband grabbed by the monster and losing sight of it.
Kindness… didn’t want him to find the monster. It didn’t want him to pursue it, and perhaps it didn’t want him to out himself as intelligent. Wouldn’t that have led to his party getting killed though? If he had not found it, would they all have died?
[Profession Leveled Up: Pondering Sage (Level 7) -> (Level 8)]
[+5 Spiritual]
Despite the amazing notification, he couldn’t rejoice in it. An uneasy churning persisted in his gut, knowing that he was actively being manipulated by something he considered a core part of his being.
If he wanted answers, he could only wait.
