I awaken to utter darkness.

Uh, what a way to start. What is going on?

Attempting to rise only leads to more confusion.

What the hell? I’m… stuck on something?

I try to move a leg and nothing happens. Something is wrong. I try to move all my other appendages, which offer more of the same result.

Wait, nevermind. It did do something. Every attempt at movement yields a sloshing ‘sound’. It’s less that I’m hearing anything and more like I can feel the sloshes vibrating through my… body? Now that I’ve acquired a method of feeling it out, my body feels much less stable than I remember.

My real body had… rigid limbs? Now that I’m thinking about it, I can’t remember anything about myself!

Shit! What was my name?!

Shit! Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit.

damn.

Whatever, I can deal, what am I doing right now?

Clearly, this isn’t the body that I (kind of) remember. I don’t have any senses except for touch but I can push my liquid-y body around in whatever container I’m in.

By pushing to the sides, I can feel a rough and hard wall all around me. If I push hard enough, I can reach a ceiling that smoothly blends into the walls. I assume this isn’t artificial or else it would be terrible workmanship. For now, I’ll assume I’m in some kind of rock cavity.

This tightness is really making me anxious. I need to get out.

SPLASH!

Ow! Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow. OW!

Okay, I definitely should not throw myself at the wall. It felt like I had torn myself apart! Weirdly, I get the feeling that I haven’t actually gotten hurt at all? Like whatever separated from me came back.

Anyway, right now I need some way to break this stupid rock.

THUMM…

Suddenly, I just… learned it. I learned how I could make the rocks break! Like some weird kind of enlightenment, I just… know. However, the cramped feeling was just upped tenfold. For some reason, I can feel the knowledge pressing against me. I almost had the urge to forget it.

Forget it? It’s not like I can just… forget things, right? Let’s test it.

I’m gonna think, ‘water is wet’, two times and then I’m going to try to forget the first time I said it.

Testing… ‘water is wet’… forgetting…

Huh, I can remember thinking ‘water is wet’ and I can remember forgetting something from a moment before, but I can’t remember saying ‘water is wet’ two times! How peculiar. It doesn’t feel normal.

Anyway, I can forget this new knowledge but it seems like the only way out at the moment, so it stays for now. This next part I’m not so sure about, I need to get some kind of essence into the rock I want to break. I think I can feel some instinct telling me how to draw out some essence so I’ll just go with that… and nothing. It’s like trying to take water from an empty bucket. I have no essence to put into the rock but something is nagging me. I feel like I do have essence but for some reason, I can’t put it in the rock.

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I focus on the essence I have and am immediately revolted. Despite the essence not moving at all, I can feel it squirming and pulsating, like a bunch of worms pretending to be the waves of the ocean. However, even though just looking at it disgusts me, it also feels precious. Like I should hold it close to me and never let it go. Even though I need this essence, I also know it is what can get me out of this cavity. It is what will break this ceiling.

It feels like a betrayal when I attempt to cut off a piece of that essence. Then it feels like pain. A searing pain that banishes all my thoughts.

When I’m back, I can feel a new volume of essence floating above me. It barely trembles and I can feel it itching to be used. So I push it into the ceiling until I can feel it stick to the stone and then I…

CRUNCH!

The rubble crushes my body, causing it to morph in uncomfortable ways. Yet I do not feel the pain from before. Despite feeling the larger rock fragments go through my body in so many different locations, my form is still whole.

What a puzzling anatomy.

I tried to push my body above the rubble and it formed a small liquid pillar that just barely reached above the rubble. Unfortunately, I was unable to grab hold of anything as my form simply slipped off the odd angles. It seems breaking the rock was not going to help me go up. I did not need this knowledge.

I needed something else, I needed to be able to go through the rock.

HMM-

What was that? It felt like I was about to learn, just like before, but it suddenly halted. Am I unable to learn more than one? No, I definitely could learn more. I was just feeling a bit slow after learning how to break the rocks. Maybe there wasn’t enough power to learn it?

Mentally reaching out, I find that the essence was still in the rubble and it is still eager to follow my will. I pull back the essence and push it back into my liquid body. It seems to vanish from reality before I can feel it sloshing around inside me again, although still not wriggly like before. So I mix it in with the wriggly essence and that is when it finally starts to wriggle a bit more, although not much.

I let it sit a while as it slowly gets more and more wriggly. Once it reached a certain level I was immediately free of some of that cramped feeling I had.

HMMMMMMMMMM-

The feeling came back and felt closer somehow. It seems that being less cramped helped but not quite enough. Gaining the knowledge of how to break the rock is what gave me this cramped feeling, so if I get rid of that knowledge I should have enough space for this new knowledge, right? It’s not like the knowledge is helping much at the moment.

forgetting…

Wow, that’s a huge difference.

Like my mind was unshackled, my senses are significantly clearer now. Now I can…

THUMM…

Aaand there it is.

I now know how to make the rock porous, so I move to the wall and attempt to change it.

Uh oh. I don’t have the essence that I can push out since I returned it all. But I need it to use this new knowledge… This is going to suck.

…forgetting…

Wow! Where did all of this usable essence come from? How convenient! Hahahahaha!

I reach out to the wall beside me and make it porous. I slide towards it and then I’m inside. As I enter, a lot of the essence I used is returned to me. It keeps coming back until I reach the end of the porous area. So the essence is automatically recalled when it overlaps with my body, however, there is still some more inside the parts of the rock that are touching my body. It seems that they have to overlap for the automatic absorption. Although the cramped feeling has returned, I can now move through the rock, so I have to see if I can go up.

Straining, I try to push myself up. I can feel my body breaking apart, being squeezed, and pressing hard against the rock that it’s almost overlapping with. Somehow, my entire body remains whole and I’m slowly moving up through the rock with only mild discomfort!

As I move up, however, I soon notice that I can't sense the essence that was in the rock where I first went through the wall. So I go back down until I can sense it again. Since it seems my essence sensing range is limited, I’ll have to return the essence in the rock before it goes out of my range as I climb up the rock. Thankfully, it seems that removing the essence doesn’t revert the changes to the rock.

With my climbing method decided, I resume my ascent. I reach out with my essence, make the rock above me porous, return the essence, climb up, and then repeat.

Man, this is boring…

forgetting…

I can feel the top parts of my body reach the surface, pushing through the stone.

That sure took a while.

I’m now on top of the rock so I move to the side to avoid sliding back down the porous section.

Phew! I’m exhausted. It seems a short break is in order before I settle on my next actions.

As I attempt to start relaxing, I can feel my mind slowing down. Somehow, as each thought takes longer and longer to complete, the cramped feeling from my knowledge lessens and I feel free.