While I remained near the water, Lia and Silva went and tried to hunt something that I could use as a test subject. Since I had no desire to personally meet whatever was in the water, or whatever had struck before, I kept a distance and started to experiment. Luna stayed with me, using her eyes to study the effect just like I did, only from a different angle. Her eyes worked in a different fashion from mine and while we had discussed the differences, I wasn’t really able to make sense of her description. It was, quite frankly, weird but then, I had no idea how to describe the scent of magic either, nor how I subconsciously knew what the different colours represented. There were cases where I could recognise the colour but was able to see quite a bit more, with minute differences that I doubted I could see if it was a regular colour.
In this case, neither of us was really able to make out anything, even as we both carefully performed some experiments. One of mine, using a tendril of conjured water in an attempt to get a remote connection to the water in the lake, demonstrated that the water itself was mostly harmless, though the experiment also demonstrated that there was something in there. I could feel some Astral Power within the water, but diluted, at least until I noticed movement in the water and suddenly, the sensation of power grew by orders of magnitude and I felt my own power getting drained from the conjured Water. Looking closely, I could see a weird tendril snake its way into the tendril I had conjured, making me immediately drop it. I had no desire to get up close and personal with some weird tendril coming from the water, certainly not with one that drained Astral Power.
Further experimentation was done with my blood, either infused with Astral Power or plain, before I started to include Concealment effects in an attempt to suss out what was going on. It would have been far easier if the results were consistent but sadly, they weren’t. Multiple times, the exact repeat of an experiment yielded a completely different result, making it impossible to try predicting what would happen next, to say nothing of safely investigating closer. While the existence in the water never struck a chunk of Ice with my Blood on it if I concealed it in shadow, the creature didn’t have a consistent attack pattern. It might be unable to see through my concealment or it might simply have given up on striking the Ice I floated over, I simply didn’t know. Thus, I had no desire to test out my concealment directly.
Interestingly, the creature seemed to be somewhat attracted to fire, as Alex figured out by tossing one of their flaming concoctions into the water, causing a merrily burning fire on the water. Moments later, the water started to churn rapidly, with more of these strange tendrils swirling around, but it didn’t look like they were trying to extinguish the fire, more like they were trying to spread it. Or maybe it had been my imagination, I wasn’t sure and couldn’t really try.
But it made me think of the will-o-wisps we had seen the previous night and I realised that there were none of those now. It was either a curious coincidence or there was something fairly interesting going on. Either way, more experiments and study was needed.
Luckily, before we ran out of things to test, Lia and Silva returned with my test-subjects. Or maybe calling the pair of rabbits ‘Bait’ would be more appropriate, after all, I was about to go fishing with them. However, I quickly realised that even the pair of rabbits was most likely not sufficient to get a better idea of what was going on, let alone start doing something about it.
There was almost certainly an entity in the water, some sort of monster, be it animal- or plant-based, I wasn’t sure. The reaction-speed I was observing made me think it was an animal, plants normally didn’t react this way, but given that magic was involved, I wasn’t about to discard any possible option. Not after witnessing mind-controlling fungi and walking trees, though the latter only on Mundus.
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No, just because something felt wrong to my pre-change instincts didn’t mean those instincts were correct. They had, after all, evolved and formed in a different world and I needed some time to truly incorporate the truth of magic into my instinctive reactions. I was getting there, at least in combat, but when it came to my mental instincts, that wasn’t the case. My mental threat assessment was still largely based on instincts that evolved in the ancient past and had been passed down through successive surviving generations. But the threats had greatly changed, it wasn’t the stalking lion, the poisonous spider or the charging bull that was a physical threat, now even something as innocuous as a simple vine might want to strangle you. Or, as I thought was the case here, drag you into the water and drain your Astral Power.
The realisation that the creature before us might be a distant relative of Lia, one that decided to take a very long bath, almost made me snort but I managed to keep the thought to myself. I somehow doubted that Lia would be happy to be compared to a tentacle-monster, she might just bite me for that. Though I doubted it.
Shaking off the weird thoughts, I decided to start my next experiment, namely a live-testing of my trusty concealment magic using a living entity. For that, I first put a cage of Ice around one of the rabbits, carefully casting my cloak of Shadows around both afterwards. I even added some appropriate Runes to the cage, hoping that it would remain concealed before decided it was ready.
Looking at my concealment from the outside was a little weird, I could see the Astral Power that made up the concealment and my mind knew that the concealment was there but my eyes could easily pierce it, to the point that the concealed area was more visible to me than the rest. My magic was there, draped around the entire thing, giving me far more information than my eyes normally would and my mind was able to incorporate that information into the image displayed by my eyes. Or at least I was relatively certain that this was what was happening, I would have to do some more testing, especially with somebody else casting concealment magic of their own, to be certain.
Either way, floating the Ice-cage forward was surprisingly difficult, it felt as if the rabbit was weighing far more than it should. A curious effect but not one I could care about at the moment, it was something to add to my ever-increasing list of things I wanted to look at. Someday.
To my annoyance, the experiment was utterly inconclusive. Floating the cage over water was easy and nothing happened, even after it reached the point where previous experiments had been interrupted. Deciding to keep it there for a bit, I simply waited and then, my experiment ended when another of those stupid tentacles shot out of the water, snagging the cage despite my best efforts to pull it back in time. Curiously, I noticed that the tendril didn’t really go for the cage but easily speared through the bars, hitting the rabbit within. The rabbit was instantly dead and only then did the tendril wrap around the cage.
Using Overflow, I tried to rip the cage out of the tendril’s grasp, but to my surprise, I failed. The tendril was strong enough to withstand my Ice Magic and I even had to stop when I noticed that I had made a stupid mistake. I was pumping Astral Power into an effect that drained Astral Power, meaning I was effectively feeding whatever was in there. Immediately after I cut off my efforts, the cage was dragged into the water and lost to me, the Astral Power fading from my grasp.
“It was as if that thing was drinking your magic,” Luna muttered, “But it didn’t really seem to care for the bunny.”
“Maybe that was the case but I think it targeted the rabbit first. Maybe we should see what would happen if the rabbit gets close without any active magic in the area,” I suggested, before asking Lia to find us some sort of long rod, something that we could use to fish.
She managed to drag a long, branch back, one that was too heavy for me to easily lift, but working together allowed us to put the stunned rabbit over the water, without any magic working on it.
Sadly, that didn’t seem to change a damned thing, the weird tendril shot out just as it had before, maybe even a little faster, and tore the rabbit apart, forcing Lia and me to let go of our branch.
Failure, more experiments were needed, if I wanted to figure out what was living in that lake.