Ha! I have once again proved that I am the greatest genius to ever walk (or float) in all of demon history! In slightly less than two months, I have not only devised a revolutionary new way to orient myself in a disorganized spiritual sea based on the density and emotional fluctuations of the native will, I also succeeded in decoding most of the garbled data that I gathered. In short, apart from the tiny potentially life-threatening demonic corruption issue, all our problems have been solved by yours truly.

…

Why are you still not praising my divine wisdom? Are you curious about the information I received? Well, I suppose I can share it with you. A lot of the data has been lost to the demonic corruption, but I managed to save the most important part.

First, I was right about those sound waves being a primitive way of communicating. Just like the native’s frankly barbaric method of eating each other for energy, this way of communicating is unnecessary convoluted, and seems to have been invented solely to facilitate misunderstanding and lying. Basically, every letter is assigned a unique soundwave, and it is the listener’s job to reassemble the string of sounds into a coherent sentence. Forgetting the unreliability of a method so defenseless to outside interference, how do they communicate from more than ten meters away? It seems there is still much more to learn but let us not get carried away and start discussing the truly exciting stuff.

The tiny individual whose mind I am reading is a fairy. She has a very simple mind, and her entire life was basically wasted talking to and taking care of non-sentient flowers before brutally plundering their life force as nourishment under the guise of “sharing the heart of nature”. This cycle apparently continued for years until one of her sisters discovered a dying tree. As usual, several fairies, including this one, carried out the ritual to receive the unfortunate tree’s life force, justifying their action by claiming they earned this by guarding the forest.

Although it was dying, this tree was still very powerful, and it must not have been ready to “give back what it had received”, as it had a slight negative reaction. By which I mean the tree reversed the spell and devoured the fairy’s intelligence and magic, becoming a sentient plant with charm magic and a dozen of living fairy puppets. The newly awakened plant then started enticing the surrounding wildlife to give up their vitality for his recovery and became the evil tree I am facing. This also explains the disastrous state of the fairy’s spiritual sea, as it no longer has a core or inner mind to stabilize it. The calm lake would already have transformed into a destructive whirlpool if I were not suppressing it. This would eventually result in the annihilation of the outer mind, but according to my calculations the demonic corruption will have been taken over long before that happens.

Apart from this incident, the memories hold a lot of interesting, if not particularly valuable, knowledge about the forest and its inhabitants. Most of the information is disappointingly superficial with only the outer appearance of creatures and plants memorized, but the fairy remembers meeting a sentient creature once.

It was a creature resembling a giant two meters tall fairy without wings. The fairy was traumatized as it witnessed a pair of these creatures hunting an animal and dragging its dead body out of the forest where a group of these fellows slaughtered hundreds of trees and built strange and elaborate constructions with their corpse. The fairy could not sleep for a week after witnessing this terrible scene, which is rather hypocritical as she has no trouble watching animals hunt each other’s, and she herself has killed more plants than the giants.

…

Well, that is all the good news I have. I found a way out, decoded some data, learned the fairy’s language, learned about the evil tree and the rest of the forest, and most importantly found hints of a civilization. In contrast to this, I have only one piece of bad news. The demonic corruption.

Do you remember when we saw that totally-not-related-to-me portal to a demon world? And how it was contaminating the surroundings, irreversibly corrupting everything around it? Well, I seem to be doing the same thing. Since my avatar is extremely weak, it has no perceptible impact on the physical world, but it is another story when I am invading a fragile native mind and they come in direct contact with my much more powerful will. My mere presence is causing everything to become warped, in a process not unlike the situation between the evil tree and the fairies.

As far as I can see, this is due to my otherworldly nature. I obey different laws compared to the rest of the world, and it is trying to compensate for the fact. This is similar to putting an ice cube in a glass of water. The cold ice will heat up and the hot water will lose heat until an equilibrium is reached. I am like the ice, radiating my demonic nature and affecting everything around me, while simultaneously getting assimilated by the world. After a few centuries, I expect I would become indistinguishable from a native of this world, while my demonic nature would be spread out across the entire world, becoming so diluted it would be insignificant. In the short term however, it would taint and ruin everything around me.

Since being a roaming disaster might slightly impede my plans of becoming an objective and unnoticeable observer, I must find a solution. Unfortunately, I am exploring uncharted territory here, and I have not yet collected enough information to devise an elegant solution. I have yet to understand how this all works, so I can only try to bypass causing any problems by avoiding direct contact with this world’s alien laws. I must hide my mind inside of my avatar and cover my avatar with an outer layer suitable for walking this world. The drawback is that I will no longer be able to go around reading minds or using any similar abilities.

Now that we have decided our next course of action, let us examine our current situation. The spiritual sea around me is a wreck, and it will fall apart shortly. My presence is the only thing keeping it together, and I do not have the expertise necessary to fix it.

No matter, I have already collected all I could. I am worried that if I stay here too long, I will corrupt the evil tree through his link with this puppet. The death of a living being is simply unacceptable.

To save time, I did not attempt my new pathfinding method (it pains me greatly to think that it will probably be years before I will be able to test it), but rather I used brute force, shattering the weakened consciousness around me. I felt my will fall back to the physical world and naturally return to my avatar.