🙡 Chapter 3.1 🙣

Bloody meal

You idiot! Why didn’t you think to be careful around mystical artefacts? Is dying once not enough to cure your stupidity? Not that I can remember much about the kind of person I was before, but still!

… Actually, why the hell do I mostly remember the times I fudged up? Does the memory of peeing myself in pre-school really need to stay with me even after death?! Am I going to have random flashbacks to them before falling asleep even now?! MUST KILL ALL HUMANS BEFORE THEY FIND OUT!...

I tried touching the stone, wanting to die from the memory... I mean to see if it's also protected, and thankfully, a zap delivered me of cringing about my past self.

Well, at least the trap was on this side as well, so I might get some fish.

...

Wait a moment.. if fish can swim through, maybe I can get through by going underwater!

I looked at my squid-like body—its shape seemingly fit for nautical exploits… Yeah, not happening. This stream looks shallow, and safe for a human sized person, not for a foot-tall me! Also, what if I lose consciousness due to the shock?

… Just in case, I tried extending one of my tentacles as deep as I could into the water, and testing the mana-fence…

Bzzzt! -

I’m not doing this because I like it, I promise!

As I was going around thinking about my possibilities, I noticed that finally a small fish swam into my little oasis! I quickly blocked off the exit using the pre-prepared stone!

Now, the only thing I have to do is to catch it! I tried following the fish with my tentacles, left, right, upper, lower… but it slipped away every time, finding a gap in between my appendages. “JUST ACCEPT YOUR FATE!”—it didn’t. My frustration grew…

And as time went on, I started feeling something new with my tentacles. Or rather, I felt it before, but only now did I recognise what it is—like a child slowly learning to recognise the sensory input from its eyes—I could feel the heartbeat of the little fish, its stress when it saw me coming closer, and joy when it avoided being my dinner. Damn it!

I tried again, and again, and again… and at the same time as my frustration grew, another feeling started arising inside... the type of feeling one has when, during a long, boring meeting. Your turn finally comes, and you know that you’ve got this! I literally felt goosebumps on my tentacle-tips! Except this wasn’t just a feeling, suction pads appeared on the underside as well…

And with these instincts, I stopped all my movement. And the fish, for whatever reason, also stopped moving, and yet, a little drum inside it was now betting faster than ever before. It knew... it could feel like I was coming.

And then, it saw the sun for the last time. Tentacles now swarmed it—left, right, up, down; no escape, they started moving together at once, even though I found moving 4 difficult before, this time I managed to give them very simple orders—just grab…

And even though it did wake up from its stupor, the fate of the poor fish was sealed. Becoming points and food for me.

+20 specks of destruction (red)

I woke up from my trance, only fish tail sticking out of my mouth. Honestly... it didn’t taste as much. It didn’t taste at all, actually. Was this a sense I don’t have? One of the greatest joys of life and traveling, food, forever lost?! Noooo!

🕷

Actually... isn’t the sense of taste an evolved adaptation for being able to differentiate between edible and poisonous food...? Also, it's weird I can smell things even though I can’t taste anything.

But still, that was not enough to satiate the hunger of a growing squid. I once again opened the gates to the small pond, hoping to find another fish resting there. In the meantime, I tried climbing up the nearby tree.

Only when comparing them closely, did I realise they weren’t “exactly” trees. It seems this shape is evolutionary advantageous even in this world, though there were differences in the “wood” itself. The bark more... stone-like. And when touching it, I could feel something pulsing inside. At the beginning, I thought it might have been some pest inside the tree, but no, it was coming from within the plant itself.

Fortunately, with my newly discovered ability of “suction cups”, I found climbing very easy! Like most babies, it seems I’m better at climbing than at walking! Now that I think about it, human babies are super lame, just lying around, unable to do anything—being able to do stuff immediately after being born rocks!

And so, I climbed.. And climbed .. and climbed…

Without noticing it, I got to a height of over 6m. Well, time to float!

… I looked down…

Yeah, you know what, the last time it happened by accident.. Maybe it’s a good idea to try a lower height first... just in case.

I climbed down a bit (for this bizarre body harder than going up), to below 1m, barely above my standard height, and... Here it goes!

Floatfloatfloat! It’s working, it’s working! ... Bam. I hit the ground. Fortunately, I didn’t seem to hurt myself (though the pain from being bitten earlier still pulsated through some of my tentacles).

A ball of tentacles with a less than amused expression suddenly stood up from the moss. Damn it! I could feel the floating ability starting, but it seems I need more time to activate it. However unappealing the thought of hitting the ground again from higher height might be, I have to do it.

So, I climbed again, this time about three times my height (about the original idea of 1m). This time, trying to start floating while still hanging to the tree…

And yeah. It worked. Stupid me, I didn’t have to jump at all, I just had to be above ground. I suspect I could start even at the ground level, it's just that I couldn’t float, then.

Still holding to the stone bark of the tree with some of my tentacles, I started to slowly increase my elevation to discover something interesting—above a certain height, the “floating” power started to no longer be as easy as standing, it actually required a lot of effort and tentacle movement to keep my altitude. And even with that, at some point I just couldn’t keep up, as if I couldn’t float at all! It seems about 4m is my absolute limit, though 2m seems more realistic for passive floating.

Brgrrrrroannn

Suddenly, one of the burls I used as a support for my tentacle holding moved, vibrations making me lose footing. Not that I was in danger, but still. I floated away a bit, expecting some kind of an insect to pop out from the bark. What I saw instead was... An eyeball? It wasn’t a nice sphere, but it did seem to be some kind of gelatinous substance, with what I have to assume was a flower shaped iris, slowly rolling in from its resting space, somewhere on the back.