I spent a long time with Mister Tortoise. We were inseparable, after all.

His maw dissolved half my body, leaving me with a chronic case of broken heart. My mind was in an even worse state, as I couldn’t think clearly at all. I needed quite some time to recover.

I could still hear the song of the wind in nonexistent ears. It was a song that surrounded me, the only comfort to my nameless existence.

With all the free time I had, I grew curious.

Where had the wind come from? When I called upon the song, I could produce the smallest of winds. Though it wasn’t enough to dislodge me from my resting place, it was easily reproducible.

Though I had lost a great majority of my Soul, the stuff that seemed to make up my consciousness, I could still recall memories of a different place that seemed to be the catalyst for the wind.

I saw a windswept field by the ocean, a village sitting underneath a starry night sky. But in every scene I could recall, I felt the presence of that damned woman. She was always there, just out of frame, tainting beautiful vistas of nature with that stupid smile.

That smile mocked me. She was always there, smiling at my misery. I despised it — I despised being watched by somebody like her.

The song dulled her presence. There was nothing else to do, so I practiced to my heart’s content and tried to ignore the existence of that person.

While I strummed idle chords, I turned my attention to the surrounding Ether. What wasn’t stored in the tortoise's shell and extremities slowly leaked out of its body, absorbed by the environment until it was no longer perceptible.

So Ether was only visible when it was in a sufficient concentration, like water in the air, or atoms to material. Interesting.

Soul was one of the strongest attractors of Ether. I discovered this with a simple experiment: merely trying to reach out and grab it didn’t work. When I stopped exerting myself, it slowly filled the area around my core.

An empty vessel for the world to flow within. A simple technique to remember in the future. Each clump I collected allowed me to further expand out my inner reservoirs, which filled me with an embarrassing amount of glee.

I was a kid collecting strange berries, for the lack of a better comparison. A magpie collecting shiny objects. Progress was progress though, so I couldn’t disparage myself too much with unflattering parallels.

I had the luxury of observing the smallest particles of visible Ether during my wait. Deciding to make an attempt to categorize all this information, I recorded it in my mind and determined I had seven-hundred fifty-three units of Ether after sucking the tortoise’s corpse clean.

Any good measurement system needed a baseline. I drew an imaginary circle around myself and engrained it in stone; that would be one EX, or existence, named after yours truly. It was something to use as a reference if I were to continue formulating this world.

By the time I finished my observations, I could muster a respectable draft if I concentrated. I was getting used to using it; an additional application of force allowed me to break out of my fleshy prison and enter the world once more.

As it turns out, Mister Tortoise had taken quite a fall after his demise and decay.

I was at the bottom of an underground jungle-like ravine. There was an entire ecosystem down here, a world of vegetation, vines, and the occasional waterfall. Not a single ray of light reached this place, but life seemed to flourish nonetheless.

Given my experience with Mister Tortoise, I had a feeling both the animals and plants had a steady diet of Ether and whatever they could scrap up in this lightless hell. If I didn’t want to have another run in, I needed to get a move on.

Given that any sort of vehicular crafting was out of the question, I settled for summoning enough wind to budge me along.

Strip wind bare and you’ll find that any breeze, any gale is the movement of gaseous substances on a large scale. It is the result of atmospheric pressure difference and chaos mingling at a cocktail bar and having one too many drinks, the result of the Uneven Heating of Earth showing up with a baggie of mysterious pills and going wild.

But here I was, somehow manipulating that force. How was that possible?

Did the manipulations happen at the molecular level, or were quantum electrodynamic vacuum fluctuations in play? I knew of all the different types of radiation — assuming this planet was orbiting a star, were there stray neurons passing through the planet that achieved this abnormal pressure manipulation? I didn’t know the composition of the air here, so I couldn’t make any deductions.

After a while of idle budging and thinking, I came up with four hypotheses: pressure manipulation, heat manipulation, teleportation, or vacuum creation. Any of these could explain how I was manipulating air.

Air — or rather, the elements that make up the soup of breathable air — had to be displaced for wind to occur. Until I reached a state where proving one of those hypotheses was possible, I would have to work with the phenomenon and desperately try to not think about it.

I was happy with that conclusion, until I discovered that I could intensify the wind by allowing Ether to return to the world. There were no noticeable side effects; the current was moving entirely on its own.

I was effectively spending Ether to break physics even more, which completely violated the principles that I had so carefully constructed.

This made me unreasonably angry.

My inner academic was throwing a fit, tearing up his research papers, and sobbing in a bathroom with a fifth of cheap vodka.

At some point, as I pondered the impossibilities and implications of Ether, I started laughing.

—The only reasonable conclusion was that I was stupid.

I was a rock that could think. What was I expecting, thinking the reasonable laws of science would hold?

The economy was in shambles. Stocks of reason plummeted in value. I would never financially recover from this.

I created a small layer of directed air underneath me and just shot myself here and there, smashing into walls and plinking off fallen boulders. I received a few chips, but I didn’t care. I gave up completely.

I successfully evolved from tortoise food to a self-contained air hockey puck. Great. Whatever god or demon that put me here was having plenty of fun punting me around, so this new trick was well within the bounds of cosmic mockery.

Next, I needed a way to grow. After brushing against a creature that could sap me of my life with a mere chew, I decided early on that hurling myself at high velocity was a last resort.

That meant I had to get creative.

My tantrum had attracted no attention from the local residents, so I slid towards trouble on my own.

I was extremely conservative with my Ether after I calmed down, scared that I would get marooned and munched on as a snack. Yet to my immense relief, my stores regenerated over time. It wasn’t refreshing fast enough for me to slip into permanent air cruise mode, but it was something.

Recalling my run-in with the Ether-eating tortoise, my Ether stores increased after I siphoned his. I looked around, trying to find an easy way to get more.

I tried ramming into Ether-storing stones, but all I got for my efforts was a broken corner and a wounded sense of pride. Siphoning from them was a failure; the way the opposing stones stored Ether in hex-shaped lattices resisted my empty body technique.

Knowing what I knew about the general atomic structure of gemstones and crystals, the entire structure would shatter if I hit it at the perfect angle with enough force. Since doing that would risk my own integrity, I had to find another way to get more Ether.

I hid myself among my rocky brethren and observed the environment, fleeing to another cluster whenever anything moved in my direction. Since my sight and hearing was artificially constructed, I had all-around vision and general awareness of vibrations; these were perfect talents for an opportunistic scavenger.

There were bats down here, prodigious, dog-sized bats that swarmed the upper alleys of the underground ravine. They preyed on their fellow bat and formed colonies that refrained from eating each other while they were still alive, but they didn’t have any interest in Ether crystals.

These bats were messy eaters. They left behind scraps of Ether when they fed, and sometimes used partially eaten bodies as bait.

Life was harsh down here. With no sunlight, the animals around here evolved to maximize their survival with the smallest of resources. Even the various fungi down here grew independently of Ether.

If I wanted to get out of this damned cave, I had to forget my dignity and take what I could get.

The first corpse I got to know had been opened up like a juice pack and was squeezed clean by the local inhabitants. Now that I was fully aware, I got to witness the wonders of nature and decomposition first hand; I gagged until I summoned the mental fortitude to harvest.

I let maggots crawl on me for a single drop of Ether.

The second was just as bad. I nudged shredded pieces of a bat back together for another drop.

The third was still in the process of dying.

I approached a bat that had suffered an accident, a youth that was clipped by a falling rock. The poor thing’s wings were broken, and it was bleeding out in a secluded cavern where no one was around to give it the blessing of a quick death.

He crawled in no particular direction, smearing dark trails with his broken body. The only sound he made were pathetic little yips and yaps, as though crying for help.

If I had hands, I could’ve made a splint and administered aid from my working knowledge of emergency medical treatment. As I was, I only had one way of helping.

I sent over a glob of Ether, giddy as a rock could be. This would be my first proper experiment, a case study of Ether’s effects upon physiology.

The animals down here recovered from grievous wounds, somehow using the invisible fuel to push back against the embrace of death. The sample I worked on had silky brown fur and a cross-shaped scar on his back.

If he lived, I could give him an interesting name.

The effects of Ether were small, yet immediate. His wounds closed; broken bones pushed themselves back into place.

The bat’s tiny black eyes locked onto me. Seeing as he was still heavily injured, I decided not to move.

Fangs bit into me. Then, it drank directly from my Ether through little filaments in its teeth.

I was happy. All this Ether, which was used for nothing but flinging myself around, was finally being put to good use. When he used about 30% of what I had, his body was nearly entirely healed.

He didn’t stop drinking.

Hey, I thought, you can get off me now…

The bat was completely healed when he drank 35% of my reserves.

I tried to shove him off with my wind, but that only made him gnaw and gnash his teeth faster.

I tried calling out to him, pelting all sorts of pet names and firm verbal reprisals. He was perfectly healthy now, so he didn’t need to do anymore.

I wanted to believe that he would stop of his own volition. That he sensed what I was saying. That, somehow, this bat could have been my first friend.

I really wanted to believe.

At 50%, I was actively trying to escape, hoping that it would come to its senses if I did. But he was stronger than me now.

My Ether was being used to increase his own limiter. He slobbered saliva flecked with blood all over me, showing no intention of stopping.

I came to a realization as he drained me past 75%.

To him, I was food, a lucky meal that stumbled into his lap. This bat was an animal, after all, and all animals loved to eat.

Everything that lived down here was a creature designed to survive and reproduce. They only knew instinct. That’s all they would ever know.

I was such a fool.

I burnt 20% of my Ether and accelerated us. The bat concentrated only on draining me and didn’t notice what was happening.

We hit the wall. His head popped like a cheap balloon.

I salvaged what I could and left.

There were many other corpses. I snuck in only when I was sure the coast was clear, pressed myself up against the decaying bodies, and siphoned the remnants. If there was the slightest indication that something was nearby, I fled.

Day after day, night after night, week after week, year after year, I ran at the first sign of danger, scared out of my wits. Without being able to fight, this was my only option for survival.

Sometimes, there were many more corpses to leech from.

The caverns had a heart, a place that bled out a potent wave of Ether every season. It was the same pulse I had felt when I was merely inanimate and lodged in a wall far above this place. When the wave of Ether came, the animals reacted.

The objective of all creatures that lived here was to maximize their Ether, as their adaptations allowed them to harness the energy. When an individual had an excess, they went on hunts, burning their energy to secure food and more Ether.

When every inhabitant had an excess, the feeding frenzies began.

Without any way to influence the world around me, I merely watched.

I came to an epiphany as these creatures tear each other apart.

Life exists all around us. Bacteria, insects, mammals, avians, humans, all of these things are alive. Yet few creatures live to the end of their natural lifespans.

Down here, I saw the truth of life.

An Ether-eating tortoise smashed a bat against a wall and licked the smear. A swarm of insects stung a jaguar to death. A beautiful snake suffocated trying to eat a lizard carcass.

In the following months, these animals focused on reproduction to make up for their lost kin, only to engage in another burst of ceaseless violence during the next pulsation.

To live was to kill and maim. The same cycles continued into eternity, a dance of death and birth with no visible end.

What a pointless existence.

What was I doing, degrading myself below animals who only killed and bred? These things matured in a matter of days, rather than weeks or months. Even though they should’ve long gone extinct in a nonsensical environment like this one, they were thriving off bloodshed and the cavern’s heart.

Savages like these didn’t have time to mourn their dead — this place was a mad experiment, an example of nature on one-part illegally distributed growth hormones and two-parts garage methamphetamines.

Further hindering my escape, I learned my Ether limit growth was constrained by the square–cube law. Because despite my previous experiments, math and physics only reappeared when it was time to screw me over.

To put this to a numerical example, I originally started out with about 1 EX. Problem is, to reach 2 EX, I needed 8 original EX’s worth of Ether as each additional unit of Ether only added a smidge in each applicable dimension. This would only get worse in the future.

3 effective EXs required 27 EXs.

4 required 64.

5, 125. 6, 216. 10, 1000.

Scavenging wouldn’t be enough if I wanted to keep growing. The next step was introducing human ingenuity into the ceaseless cycles of life and death.

The best defense is a good pre-emptive strike. Having a large contact list and about 1.5 EXs to my name, I enlisted my good pal Gravity to help me out.

There were high speed bat chases. It took a bit of experimentation, but a burst of wind disoriented the participants and caused them to smash into walls. A delicate application of my power caused a crash landing, and sometimes, I could exhaust bats to the point where they were attacked by other bats.

It was frighteningly easy to kill them. Such fragile, stupid creatures, they all reacted in the exact same way when I took their wings.

The effectiveness of my wind manipulation scaled by the surface area of my Ether limit, as there were more places to pull from at a single time. I tried to game the system and stretch the Ether into funny shapes to maximize the area, but it ended up collapsing into a vaguely spherical shape the moment I stopped exerting myself.

I had no way to get an exact measurement for my power, but if I had to guess, my baseline would’ve been a 5 on the Beaufort scale. A fresh breeze, something that pushed around rocks if applied precisely, and, as I had been doing, could mess with flying creatures not expecting a sudden breeze. If I channeled my Ether, my wind blew as a strong breeze, a 6 on the scale.

Even freshly harvested, these bats didn’t provide growth much compared to the tortoise I killed all those years ago. But I had no other choice for my growth — I kept my eyes open and took advantage whenever I could. Then, one day, I made it.

All this work, all these endured years allowed me to reach 2 EX. Know what I got for my efforts?

I slid a wee bit faster.

Beaufort 6 was my new baseline, but I couldn’t do much with it. Even when I burnt Ether to reach 7, pushing around any creatures other than bats and moderately sized reptiles was beyond me.

I tried escaping the ravine system when I reached that benchmark, but without any ways to generate lift, I was still stuck down here. I even tried to make a paraglider out of particularly wide leaves.

I collected materials between hunting ventures. Eventually, I had a sizable collection of leaves, vines, and flattened bamboo — materials I had no real way of working with. When I filled an entire crevice with raw material, I realized the futility of my actions.

This underground jungle wasn’t that bad, all things considered. It was a decent view, spacious enough, and there were a few bioluminescent flowers and pretty fungi to admire, yet I yearned for something more.

What did I want? I kept asking myself the same question over and over, but no answers came to me.

If I wanted safety, I could hide in a crevice and persist until the end of time.

If I wanted revenge against that woman who spoke to me so long ago, I’m sure I could’ve gotten it by ending myself and wasting her gift.

So what did I want?

Truth was, the answer was at my side all along.

If I strained my mind, I could still hear the song of the seasons, a wind that blew from somewhere much kinder than here.

Instead of trying to conjure up grand sounding words or generate a speech that could convince myself of my own desires, I let my mind conjure an image from that song.

I wanted to see that brilliant blue sky and experience a warm sunrise underneath flowering trees.

I wanted to stand ankle-deep in a sapphire ocean and let the sea spray drench my skin.

I wanted to go to a festival during the night and enjoy something warm and sweet while watching the fireworks above.

—I wanted to see people again.

I would’ve taken that damned woman’s company, had she revealed herself even once.

This wind, this song, these wishes, they were certainly vestiges from a previous life. Reaching towards them would be much better than merely surviving.

Seeing the sky was a concrete goal. If I actively pursued that goal, I would definitely make it if I tried.

I still remembered Samson and how he chose to die. I hoped that pod was functional; maybe I could use it as a shortcut when I finished my business here.

No more questions. No more wandering. From now on, I would complete my new objective as efficiently as possible.

There was an entire world out there goddamnit, and I was going to see it — no matter what.