The effect after the monster's defeat wasn't immediately noticeable.
Rather, over the following month, the Oasis stopped drying, and then it started healing, and that was simply enough..
After saving the village, defeating the monster, and generally purging all excitement from their world, many adventurers may have been disappointed by the hum-drum village life that followed.
Cas, however… Cas was having the time of her life!
She was a hero! A legend! The talk of the town!
She wasn’t being executed, for one! She officially had citizenship, and quite generous yearly rations to boot, not that she had much use for food and tea.
Naturally, the villagers were eager to show their gratitude beyond simply not killing her, and Cas took them up on that unabashedly. First thing was that she wanted a new hut at the edge of the village.
Elder Nemaris was aghast at the suggestion. A border hut for such a well renowned figure could be interpreted as a slight, but Cas didn’t care and the people worked like ants to have her place built within the week.
Naturally, this was followed by another ceremony, speech, and a housewarming party that lasted longer than Mardi Gras.
It was wild! It was like a reverse end-of-the world party. Ie… a lot less chaotic and depressing than an apocalypse jam, as depicted in various disaster movies where people threw parties for some reason.
Eventually, however, the party died down, Cas became yesterdays news, and she was left alone to stew in her hut, studying obscure things nobody cared about.
This was the life of her dreams.
Her current obsession was the life cycle of slimes. Now that she knew where they came from, she could feel that she was this close to figuring out how they reproduced, and – unlike in the cave – this study was sparked by a painful curiosity rather than painful boredom. Cas wanted to know the answer to this question which had eluded her for so long. She wanted to be the first person in this world to discover where slimes came from.
And, in her peaceful little den, with a pension and lots of free time, she was free to focus herself entirely onto the task of scientific discovery.
…
Still, no matter how jealously she guarded her hut, the chaos of the village life outside had a way of intruding.
Today, that chaos was called Tami, and she was distraught.
Kari stood up and addressed the woman as she entered: “Hello, Cas is actually busy at the-”
“Oh, great Sage, thank goodness you’re here!” Tami spoke in a hurried and heartbroken manner, managing to slip naturally past Kari’s attempts to play receptionist.
“What is it?” Cas asked, dissolving the magnifying stalk she hovered over her desk and flipping her eye back like a coin.
The woman was near panicked, throwing her shawl back to reveal a beautiful face, coal black hair and light eyes. “Please,” she said, holding out a bag full of some strange looking tubers in one hand, while in the other was a small clay container filled with dust. “This is a matter of utmost importance.”
Sensing the hurry in the woman’s voice, Cas simply complied.
One of the natural abilities of slimes was to transmute various substances. Korivenna used her slime to make fire powder from the Jinjibl root, as well as various other medicinal balms and powders from a dozen different plants.
The advantage of slimes – or Sakkari as the locals called them – was that they could make things out of season. For instance fire powder, by human effort, could only be made from the concentrated nectar of a flowering Jinjibl plant. A properly trained slime, however… could make it from the root in any season, so it went for many other medicines and useful products.
Cas reached out with a stalk and tasted the small, dark powder the woman held up to her. There was barely enough there to dust the woman’s fingertips, but it was enough for Cas, who immediately tasted the primary flavor… a hint of concentrated Kamari root.
Knowing enough by tongue, she reached out her second stalk and took the bag, flipping it over and dumping the contents into herself, watching ripples and air bubbles form in front of her crystal as the group of roots fell and floated inside her body, already dissolving.
Tami, hands clasped together, looked on with disbelieving joy.
You see… despite the Sakkari’s amazing abilities, they did have one weakness. They could only make useful things if trained properly, and it was hard to train a mindless blob of water that didn’t speak human language.
Most apothecaries specialized their slimes into creating about a dozen different common materials. Attempting to teach them more often resulted in the slime becoming confused and forgetting old lessons and – for the rarer medicines – well, there was little that could be done about that.
So, Cas – who required no training – had become quite the hot commodity for creating rare and unusual medicines.
Chemistry 101 XP Cap met. Lvl 14 -> Lvl 15
And she was getting quite good at it, too.
Cas reached out her stalk.
Tami was ready for her, holding out a massive jug in both hands, into which cas poured the black powder, filling it up to what would’ve been the two-liter mark if the world were a Walmart.
The last sifts of the material shifted into the jug, piling high over the rim in a black dune. Tami looked down at the jug greedily as if it were a pot of gold. Placing it down on a nearby, wooden, table, she reached into her pouch and pulled out a small, flat, clay container.
The container was filled with some sort of butter, into which Tami poured a finger pinch of dust before mixing… turning the butter dark with subtle glitters.
Showing off some immaculate dexterity, she simultaneously pulled out a small, horse-hair brush which she dipped into the mixture and began applying across her eye-lids like mascara.
…It was mascara.
“Oh, thank goodness I found you when I did, darling,” Tami spoke in a conversational tone, a steady hand applying lines of glittering darkness across her face. “I was in such a panic to discover I’d run out. It’s silly of me, I know, but I forget how often I apply this stuff. I could’ve sworn I had another jar in the back shed.” She paused a moment, dipping her brush in the clay jar and moving over to her other eye. “Anyway, how has your day been?”
“Really?” Was Cas’s only answer, annoyance palpable in her expressive voice.
Tami looked back at her, confused. “What?”
“Is this what you call a ‘matter of utmost importance?” You walked in here like someone was dying!”
The woman looked affronted, looking back up from her clamshell dust holder. “Beauty is always a woman’s priority, darling,” she waved a hand dismissively, “Oh, I wouldn’t expect you Sakkari to understand. You don’t even have faces.”
“I used to be a human, you know,” Cas retorted.
“Well, apparently not a very fashionable one,” Tami retorted, standing up straighter as she stuffed the brush and holder back into her side satchell.
“Get out…” Cas said.
----------------------------------------
Kari had finished her errands for the day.
Hugged in front of her was a basket full of various roots, herbs, plants and dried meats that had only just come into season.
It was a strange experience for Kari. Having work to do that wasn’t carting corpses, being needed, it was… new.
Running errands for Cas, however, meant that she sometimes had to go into the village.
Kari didn’t like going into the village.
It felt like she was a ghost wandering through a memory.
It felt like she didn’t belong, and that she should’ve disappeared when her birthday had come.
The people didn’t treat her differently. In fact, her life now was almost exactly the same as it had been before her pardon. People were distant, didn’t look in her direction unless they had to, and otherwise shadows who’s faces she never saw.
Kari hiked the hem of her shawl higher to cover her face.
Everything was the same, but she hated it more, now. Before, this was all she knew, but now she understood that things could be different, she had a friend she could miss.
—-
“What!?” Kari said a little too loudly.
Cas paused, cocking an eyebrow as she stretched out her toes. “What do you mean, what? I’m just saying we should let the villagers know what I can do. It’d certainly save us a lot of headache if I could transform freely.”
“No!” Kari said obstinately, crossing her arms.
“Kari,” Cas asked sweetly, sounding and looking so much kinder in her human form, “why are you so against this?”
“Because…” Kari hesitated.
Because Cas was her friend, and that was their secret, and seeing her like this was something she let only Kari do. Why did anyone else need to know?\
“Because,” Kari continued, “people will just ask you for more favors if they found out! Besides, you don’t need to tell anyone else here. They’ll just get the wrong idea, especially if they see you looking like that ugly corpse body.”
“Hey, Golem V2 looks much better, thank you!” Cas shot her a hurt look under her eyebrows. “But I guess you make a good point. We can hold off on telling them for now.”
“Great!” Kari hopped up onto her toes, rushing over to nestle her neck into Cas’ and crush her with a deep hug.
“Hehe… fine, but you know what that means, don’t you?”
“Of course!” Kari hopped back, watching as Cas melted, turning into a large, spherical ball of slime that glimmered like a red jewel in the moonlight.
There, inside the sphere, the crystal eye moved out of the center, swimming up to the surface where – emerging from the surface – a winged thing appeared, breaking away from the larger slime ball just as Kari picked it up and placed it on the windowsill.
“Ok,” the thing spoke in a small voice, “I’m going all night. You know what to tell anyone if they see it?” The thing gestured a wing at the eye-less, senseless slime ball that sat at the edge of the room.
Kari rolled her eyes, “that you’re sleeping and not to be disturbed.”
“Good girl!” Cas complemented, dissolving her vocal chords and preparing for takeoff, stopped only by a small voice.
“Do you have to go?”
“Huh…” Cas asked, looking back.
There Kari stood, hands behind her back and her toe tracing embarrassed lines in the sand. “I just… I mean I don’t think you should go all the time. It’s not good to be away for so long..”
Cas paused, turning around to more fully face the girl. “You know I have a lot of work to do in the cavern, Kari,” she explained in a soft voice.
This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
“I know,” Kari answered, moving over to rest her arms on the windowsill. “I just… I hate seeing you go,” she said with a muffled expression.
Cas laughed at that. “If you hate seeing me go, why do you always come to my shed at night. You know you can just go to sleep before, and I’ll be here to wake you up in the morning!”
Another, embarrassed look from Kari. “I know that, too,” she said. “I just like to see you fly.”
Cas couldn’t smile in her form, but she did express a rather unnecessarily loopdy loop to the cheers of Kari as she left for the mountain.
----------------------------------------
Cas returned from the mountain with more questions than answers. Such was the day of a researcher.
Still, she made a point to enjoy the journey back, both in a metaphorical and literal sense.
Flying could be quite the relaxing activity, you see.
It was still very early morning, and – a thousand feet up in the air, with a horizon dozens of miles away – Cas had a panoramic view of the night sky as the globe drifted slowly beneath her.
The desert was a lot more lively in the dark. Her night vision allowed her to see with perfect clarity in this light, but – being so far above the earth – she relied on the strangely shifting sands to alert her to the mass of life that crawled across the desert sands below.
The village came into view, and soon so did her hut, and her window, which expanded with the shrinking distance until she was perched inside of it.
She stayed there for a moment, enjoying the morning breeze and looking inside the hut.
She had multiple wooden tables set up with her samples and equipment, both gifted to her by village elders. And in terms of decoration, this hut was perhaps the best clothed in the entire village.
And, sure, the people here could be pushy at times, and rude, but… Cas found that, after saving their Oasis, she found the days going by more slowly, reminiscent of the lazy summers of her youth. It felt like she was back home again, and living her perfect life.
Well liked, useful, and able to spend all day on her research, research that was actually helping people!
Cas sat on the window for the next several minutes, staring down absent mindedly at the eighty five pounds of slime material she’d shed.
Her mind, cleared of all obstructions by the soothing winds of her recent flight, was left more flexible and creative in the croaking racket of the night animals.
She wondered, as she looked at the inanimate parcel slime flesh, what exactly was the difference between her and it. It had no eye, for one, but neither did Korivenna’s slime. Wouldn’t it be natural for her to be able to create slime balls that could run predetermined chemical reactions?
Chemistry 101: 345 XP gained!
New skill discovered!Sakkari Clones:
Create slime clones that can transmute products based on a predetermined stimuli.
Cas looked curiously at the XP gain.
It somewhat confirmed her suspicions that XP gain was about understanding, at least somewhat. The new skill, however. She was curious…
…
Yep… Cas – in her larger body now – looked down at the miniature slimeball she’d separated out from herself.
It was a small, eyeless sphere that sparkled internally with undissolved minerals.
It had its own stats that read:
Sakkari Clone 1
Size: Small
Instructions:
Transformations: Will create Tamari Balm from Tamari Vines.
Instruction: Will enact transformation when fed Tamari Vines.
Instruction 2: Will grow when fed water and other foods.
Instruction 3: Will stop growing once it achieves 5 pound weight.
Instruction 4: Will not dissolve meat.
Instruction 5: Insufficient Level to Include more instructions.
Cas looked curiously at the instruction set.
Training the slime ball had been… an interesting experience. It felt like she was talking to herself, as thoughts, memories and images flowed within her, coalescing in one place before dropping away into the… Sakkari 1, as she’d uncreatively named it.
Now we were getting somewhere, Cas thought.
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Sin was a wanderer trapped in a desert island.
Cas could tell by the anxious energy that seemed always to overflow from the man. He often left his farm, and his home village of Fari, making unnecessary visits to the other villages like today.
The five mile trip was too short by far, however, to tell by the amount of extra energy he had to burn by the time he arrived. Energy, Cas noted, that everyone agreed was best spent entertaining the children.
Today, he was telling one of the same five stories in his repertoire. All of his audience knew the story by heart, and had heard him tell it many times before to boot, so today’s session took the character of a question and answer sequence.
Sin stood at the fore of little seated figures, striking a dramatic pose as he continued recounting the harrowing tale.
“And the beast – scales glistening and teeth flashing like the moon, battered the earth with its body and shook the sky with its voice. Every buck of its shoulders sent another tremendous earthquake that tore apart the armies of Nemoria! And Gingibl stood witnessing this, and in order to defeat the injured beast he…!”
Sin stopped at this crucial moment, drawing a pained groan from the crowd of children. “Actually… I’m having trouble remembering how he defeated the Rom Beast.”
“Aww! Come on!” some children grumbled while the disappointed cries continued.
“Hmmm,” Sin said with an exaggerated posture of questioning. “Did he, stab the beast to death?” he asked, thrusting forward with an invisible spear.
“Nooooo!” the children cried out in unison.
“Oh… then maybe he danced until it ran away?” he asked, curving his body in a mime of a shoulder dance.
“Nooo!” some children answered while others were taken in a fit of giggles.
Sin paused, struggling with himself. “You know,” he admitted at last, “I actually don’t remember, can one of you-”
Before he managed to complete the sentence, a dozen hands shot up, raising the bodies they were attached to after them as the children, with attentive eyes and perked ears all waved for his attention with a chorus of “Me! Me!”
“Ok,” Sin said, pointing to a particularly enthusiastic figure, “you there, young girl. Can you tell us how he defeated the beast? I’m dying to know.”
The girl all but leapt up onto her feet and yelled, “he killed it by falling asleep, and making it think he’d died!”
“Correct!” Sin leaped up in a jester’s posture, drawing another laugh from the crowd before going into a song and dance that had the children chanting along. “Ok, ok, now go on and play,” he waved them away after a while.
Then the children, excited, all leapt up in the unison of common purpose. Grouping off into pairs and triplets, they quickly started their own separate productions, reeinacting the tale of Gingibl.
Groups of monsters and heroes ransacked through the village streets with just that extra decibel of racket that only Sin could inspire, and for which the villagers were quite happy to send Sin off on an adventure to a neighboring village.
Before the Village Elder was called to kick Sin out again, however, Cas approached.
“Oh! Sage!” Sin greeted with that ever cheerful smile, not a hint of guilt on his face as a pair of boys knocked into a cart behind him. “I saw you were enjoying the story! Not as interesting as your own exploits, I imagine, but hopefully the performance was entertaining!”
Cas, seeing the villagers gathering with annoyed faces and a petition for his expulsion, didn’t waste any time on small talk.
“Can you teach me how to use Aura?” she asked.
—-
Away from the village center, in a quiet place, Sin knelt down with an amused expression next to Cas.
“So… why the sudden interest?”
Cas rolled her eye. “It’s not sudden, I just found myself a lot less busy after the Oasis got saved. Besides it’s a useful thing to learn, how to use Aura.”
“Well,” Sin said, looking a little miffed. “You don’t ‘use’ aura he corrected. You… hoska it.”
“Hoska?” Cas asked, not having learned that word yet.
“It’s like… if something wants to go somewhere. It’s bound by its limits. That is... It needs a path. Hoska is the making of those paths.”
“Ah..” Cas said, deciding to translate it as ‘channel’ for now.
“Ok, and how do I channel Aura?” she asked.
Sin picked up a small, dark pebble from between his feet. “It’s simple actually. All living things have an Aura, even slimes. Auras tell us a lot about ourselves. They’re what judge us when we do wrong and what allows others to look at our misdeeds.” He focused his attention, and a soft glow arose between his fingertips, engulfing the pebble. “Put a little mind to it, however,” he snapped his finers together, a thundercrack snapping through the air as the pebble broke apart into a hundred shards that scattered like shrapnel around them.
Ok.. Cas was impressed.
“When can we start?” she asked.
“Well, first you’ll need to get stronger. It’s difficult to train an aura if the body its expressing itself through is weak.”
Cas nodded her eye. “Ok, and how do I get stronger?”
Sin’s initial answer was only a smile.
—-
Cas stood in front of sin in a deserted area of desert. Before her was a perfectly ordinary boulder, about the size of a soccer ball. Beside her was Sin, looking at the boulder with some expectation.
“Uhm… did you want me to hit it?” Cas asked, gesturing an unsure curve with her stalk.
Sin laughed. “Oh, no,” he said. “It’s far simpler than that. See this rock here?” He pointed to the boulder. “You’re going to repeatedly lift and put down this heavy object!”
“Until?” Cas asked.
“Until it becomes uncomfortable, of course!”
Cas sighed. She knew his heart was in the right place. She also knew that hypertrophy wasn’t gonna work on a slime of all things, but the look in his eye told her she wouldn’t be getting aura lessons until she did this.
So, she reached out some stalks, wrapped them around the rock, and lifted.
Cas looked over at sin, who looked ecstatically happy to finally have a gym buddy, and she put the rock back down and lifted again, unwilling to crush his hopes with the fact that this wasn’t gonna work.
----------------------------------------
Cas couldn’t believe it worked!
Base strength value updated: 2 -> 3
image [https://i.imgur.com/mpDQjMZ.png]
The increase to her base stats was modest, of course, but the fifty percent increase to strength paid dividends when applied to her transformations! And if money was flight, Cas was left feeling like Scrooge McDuck.
A powerful beat of her wings gained her several feet of altitude.
Even with vulture bones, Cas had previously found it difficult to gain altitude at night. The desert cooled quickly after dusk, and the lack of thermals made for a very unsupported ride. With this, though–
Another wing beat slashed down barely a second after the first.
She felt like she was actually flying!
Despite the poor flying conditions. The desert was full of life at night. Down below she could see things by the marks they left in the sand, and forward ahead, she could see the fox had taken to the air, occasionally diving down onto one of those shifting sands as it began it’s night time hunt.
Another flap, and another, and Cas could feel herself picking up speed, the wind whistling over her figure with a familiar howl.
BRFTRFTRFTRFT!
Speaking of familiar. Cas’s eye flipped right to look through her body. Being night time, she had no need for a sunblock surface, and was able to see around her body quite clearly.
Her wings were once again the issue, rippling in place as the air battered their hardened surfaces and drew a sound like tearing paper from the appendages.
Cas felt her tail fin cut side to side with competent trajectories, turning her forward dive into a smooth, swimming wave as she zig-zagged through the air, letting the wind slow her down as she rounded the base of the spire.
Cas went directly from flight to underground, smashing into the side entrance and eating about a half liter of slimes on her way into the cavern.
There, she transformed.
Cas had a weight limit of seven pounds whenever she flied. Still, despite her diminished size, on the ground, Cas found a bipedal form to be quite useful, as she transformed into a small, elf-like thing she called “Homunculus”.
Standing about a foot tall, Cas found the cavern ominous as she lit herself up with Glow-Worm, casting ominous, upward shadows on all the jagged edges and dripping stalactites.
Cas was ready to get to work
----------------------------------------
Note taking was more of an art than a science.
It was vitally important that you take note of the important things, and often the most vital facts were hidden behind a veneer of triviality. So, it had always been Cas’ method to first record the stuff she thought looked ‘cool’.
It was as good a criteria as anything else, and it had gotten multiple new discoveries to her name back on earth.
Here on Nemoria, however, in this cavern, the thing that first caught her eye were the glowing crystals in the rock.
You see, even the most boring pebbles you might pick up on a hike could glitter in the right light. The sand outside had particles that looked like a drag show. These crystals, however – in addition to being exceedingly numerous – had a peculiar ‘color’ to them that wasn’t really a color. Their glow had a quality which separated them from all other rocks and which reminded her of the colorless light that slimes reflected when the sunlight hit them right…
Well… at least now she knew what her eye was made of, Cas thought.
The puddles were her next order of business.
Marching over, she stepped gingerly over the edge of the nearest puddle, where a converyer belt of new slimes were constantly being ejected from the surface, and lowered herself into a squat, taking a closer look.
Perpetually muddy, looking into the surface revealed little other than a haze of flowing eddies in the mucky opaqueness of the body. It was from the edge of every one of these small puddles that slimes flowed out in a primordial scene, and their movement seemed to disturb the suspended dirt particles in a perpetual dance.
Cas interrupted this ball, and dug her hand into the puddle.
The movement disturbed the water, and a strange, glittering light suddenly appeared in the puddle, as if wafted up from the silty bottom.
Pulling her hand out revealed a wet clump of sand which reflected intensely that same colorless ‘color’ which identified the slimes, as well as the crystals that peppered this cavern.
Interesting...
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