“This is bad! This is really bad!” The lanky man muttered as he manipulated the air to levitate forward.

“Hox! What’s gotten into you? What’s bad?” Cried out Orsley as he and the rest of the party started chasing after the mage.

He turned towards them as he continued his flight. “The mana I sensed earlier had disturbing levels of Nul energy traces. You all know what this means, don’t you?”

When they all heard Hox’s reply, their expressions turned grim and foreboding.

“Oh, wot in the hells ‘ave we gotten ourselves into? First, a suspicious merchant escort mission inta Faelands and now a bloody Outrealm disturbance!” Gern spat to the side as he continued to run in frustration. “Give us a fokken break! This was only supposed ta be some blasted treasure hunt!”

“Suck it up, Gern.” Called out the hooded little figure half his size running past him. “Rivald just gave us a bad roll today. How were we supposed to know the fatty was a heretic?”

“You halflings and your bloody trickster god! If I ‘ad a coin for every time your god has a bad roll, I wouldn’t be a bloody sellsword!” cursed Gern as he swung his sword cutting down the greenery around him while he ran.

Delleen let out a loud sigh and scrunched her brows while moving through the trees keeping up with the others. “Guys! Enough! None of us had ever had to deal with an Accursed! As long we get rid of him, we should be in the clear.”

The two men quieted upon Delleen’s words, but the three were forced to stop when they saw the mage standing still in their path forward.

Seeing him standing there and staring onto the ground, the midget called out to him as the others caught their breath.

“Hox? What’s up?”

The man slowly turned, his face pale and sweaty all over. He looked towards the others with a slight shiver as he spoke with a hint of dread.

“The… the path ahead… i-it’s polluted with red crystals growing b-black vines that are s-slowly encroaching and causing d-decay.”

Almost a whisper, his voice strained to let the words out as the others turned pale; praying internally that the words their friend would say next wouldn’t be as they feared.

“… s-scarlet corruption… Niskari.”

***

The little plant Fae was in tears as its steps grew shaky when it neared a massive hollow of a large tree.

Each step it took caused its body to seemingly turn slightly brown and wither as more red crystals with a blood-like glow dotted the ground before it.

Threadlike black tendrils snaked their way out of the crystals and all matter they touch seemed to darken and slowly break apart like ash.

There was not much more the little Fae could do to move forward.

It didn’t understand how the fleshling was able to easily enter the hollow that housed the sleeping evil, but it knew that it could only turn back and ask the elders for help.

It didn’t hesitate as it turned and left, pulling itself into the trees; not noticing that it barely avoided the creeping black vines that seemed to grow out of the red crystals and reached out to it.

Deep within the hollow where the light of day does not reach, a portly man covered in cuts and wounds knelt before a mass of entwined vines over three times his size.

Within the vines, a rhythmic beating sound echoed out as a scarlet glow pulsed with each beat.

The man, with his head continually touching the gnarled wood floor, mumbled with broken words and garbled sounds as the blood coming off his body appeared to be drawn to a depression on the wood before the writhing vines.

When the amount of blood appeared to be enough to fill a cup, the depression raised itself forming a bowl that was attached to and pushed upward by a branch.

With the bowl now only an inch close to the pulsating mass, something long and black emerged from it reaching towards the blood.

It was a tendril barely larger than a piece of cotton string that seemed incapable of reflecting light, like a shadow that manifested into something physical.

The tip of the tendril dipped into the red liquid and while it seemed that nothing was occurring, the blood in the bowl continued to diminish. In the time it took to take two breaths, the bowl became empty.

The tendril twitched and turned towards the man. It moved in a snaking fashion as it inched closer and raised its tip to his face, barely a foot away from his head.

The man stopped his mumbling and looked up to face the tendril; his eyes red and appearing out of focus while his mouth hung open with drool dribbling.

The tendril moved closer towards the man’s eyes slowly turning to the left, then to the right.

It then raised itself higher as it pointed towards an area above his eyebrows and between his eyes.

In a flash, the tendril’s tip disappeared from its spot and pierced onto the man’s forehead.

No reaction came from the man despite being pierced, but soon the tendril began to pulsate as something moved within it entering into the man’s head.

The sound of churning fluids, the tearing of muscle, and the crunching of bone can be heard as the man’s flesh bubbled and boiled as if something writhing and living was trying tear through his skin.

The man didn’t voice what he felt, but blood poured out of his eyelids as he shut them tight while baring his teeth. His fingers raked the wood, tearing his fingernails off.

Soon the bubbling of his flesh subsided, but then his skin grew taught with his limbs growing longer with a snap of bone.

All the hairs fell off his body as his skin shriveled and hugged his skeleton, hardening and yellowing until it looked something like bone.

His spine extended; his torso pulling upwards until it hunched from the weight. Several red spines erupted out of his shoulders and back appearing like some rough-hewn red crystal.

The legs extended while the toes combined and expanded until three-toed reptilian claws were formed. The fingers followed and extended into claws, but only the two in the middle of each hand morphed together to form a bladed talon the length of its forearm.

And finally, the head; the skull restructuring into something shaped like a horizontal diamond while his ears, eyes, and nose fell off his face like discarded meat and his lower jaws finally splitting with rows of jagged needle-like teeth.

The creature stood; no longer a man, but something new altogether. The crystals on its back glowed blood-red as it turned towards the hollow’s exit.

Its jaws twitching, the creature raised its head to let out a roar; a shrill sound echoing like hundreds of birds screeching all at once.

***

On the shore of a spring, there a little creature laid on its back seemingly dead.

Whenever the water brushed up to its leg, the body would suddenly twitch and tremble as if it was jolted.

Soon, its limbs stirred as it forced itself to unsteadily stand up. Shaking its head as if to remove the last vestiges of grogginess, it looked at its surroundings.

Seeing that a few corpses of the rotund creatures remained, the little creature sighed in relief as it didn’t want to go in another hunting excursion.

The new drawback to absorbing genetic data was indeed a troubling one for it. The neural feedback caused by the forceful insertion of information payloads into its head was paralyzing.

It didn’t know how to bypass such a problem since cutting off its pain receptors didn’t work. So far, the only method that seemed to work was filtering the information and organizing it, but this method took too much time.

It can try and withstand the pain and forcefully integrate the information, but the process was exhausting and mostly unnecessary since filtering the information causes the pain to diminish anyway.

For now, it needed to be careful when taking in new genetic information and should only do so when it was in a safe place.

This meant the added inconvenience of bringing corpses, but it didn't make much of a different since it needed to do it anyway for the pups. The real challenge is when it manages to take down some big prey. A really big one.

Morphing some plates on its back into several arm-thick tendrils, it wrapped them around the remaining Potamid corpses like it was carrying them in a net sack on its back.

Moving like an ape with an unwieldly sized backpack, the little changeling left the spring to return to the nest.

– - –

The journey back couldn’t really be called uneventful as the mass of corpses on its back had grown in number.

Some insectoid creatures larger than itself and some much larger than even bears had attacked it on several occasions.

There were even flying creatures that looked like bats but had lizard-like legs and four-eyed faces that opened up four ways that revealed rows of tiny needle-like teeth.

The journey seemed similar to when it first arrived into this world, but this time it was much stronger and was easily able to fend off the creatures that though of it as an easy mark. A stark difference over its poor jelly days.

The creature strut with confidence seeing how far it had come, but soon it slowed and stared blankly at the scene before it when it had arrived.

The pups weren’t missing this time, but seeing as the cover it had created over the nest’s entrance was torn apart, it could only assume they got out.

This reason why it wasn’t in a panic and was rather dumbfounded was that both wolf pups were still there, but the black pup; if it could still be considered as one, was no longer so little.

Sharing with its little white sibling a meal composed of multiple slaughtered horned rabbits and foxlike creatures matching its own size, was the black pup.

…or what it used to be as it was now larger than a full-grown wolf.

Looking at how much it had grown, it could only think of one reason why it had changed.

Noticing that the little changeling had returned, the two wolf siblings barked merrily and ran towards it.

The little white wolf was happily rubbing and playing around its feet, while the large black one got on top of its shoulder to nibble at its ears.

This was a bizarre situation for it. It could have sworn that it didn’t alter any of its genetic makeup when it healed the pup, and yet somehow it had not only turned black but had grown much too quickly.

Not only that, it exhibited a strength that was very much unlike that of regular wolves. With its previous observations, a small group of those foxlike creatures were generally much stronger than even the wolf pack it fought before.

It needed to study this absurd change, but first things first, it lifted the little white pup in its arms.

If the same or similar results could be met, then it was the other little one’s turn.

***