Trophic level 3 (4) level reduced due to second life penalty cost Diet detritivore, herbivore, omnivore, carnivore Strength 3.0/4.0 level reduced due to second life penalty cost Stamina 2.5/ 5.0 level reduced due to second life penalty cost Agility 5.0 Vitality 4.0/10 level reduced due to second life penalty cost Intelligence 2.5 Charisma 1.0 Spiritual Energy 10/25 level reduced due to second life penalty cost Skills

Piercing Barrage Level 4

Speed Boost Level 4 (5) level reduced due to second life penalty cost

Iron Chitin Level 3

Water Control Level 2 (3) level reduced due to second life penalty cost

Daphne felt the power restoring her strength, particularly her spiritual core began to regain the sensation of bright, bursting potential she remembered. She was still weak, and she hadn’t grown in size with this restoration, but she felt much more confident to challenge some of the dangers of her new home in the river. She eagerly desired more spiritual energy, she didn’t just hope to return to her former self but surpass it. Large enough that no eagle or bear could dream of pulling her from the water.

Observing the pool, she saw the massing salmon above her and eagerly began hunting them again. This time she tried for a male. They were larger and more dangerous looking, with their hooked jaws filled with sharp teeth. As she stalked her first one though, she found it no more of a challenge than the females had been. The male salmon died a swift clean death on her necktooth.

Feeding on the male, Daphne noted that the distribution of spiritual energy was completely different than the females. The spiritual energy was not concentrated in the reproductive organs, it was diffused in the muscles of the fish. The only place Daphne could detect a significant amount of concentrated energy was in the teeth! This was irritating and baffling to Daphne.

She spent a considerable time experimenting with Water Control to pulverize the teeth and could not do it effectively. In the end she fired a short-range blast of Piercing Barrage and managed to shatter several of the teeth. When she tried to consume them however, she was unable to. She didn’t have the ability to extract spiritual energy from what was essentially a mineral. Daphne abandoned hunting male salmon altogether, returning to the delicious females and their roe.

She continued happily harvesting salmon eggs for several hours but realized that she wasn’t receiving a restoration credit for them. As delicious as the salmon were, the spiritual energy available from them wasn’t increasing her power fast enough. She paused and slowly devoured the last salmon entirely. She would need to move on to other prey, most fish were not as succulent as these delicious salmon. She tried to carefully savor the experience in case her next prey was something disgusting like the newt.

After finishing, she drifted out into the water, still hugging the bottom rocks and slowly scanning her surroundings for hidden dangers and hidden treasures. There were many large fish in the main river that she was unready to tackle. Although she wasn’t actively swimming, just cautiously drifting along with the current quickly took her from the spawning tributary stream back to the main river. She marveled at the massive expanse of water the river represented. Her Water Control couldn’t begin to show her the opposite bank.

She followed the main channel downstream for several miles, at which point the river separated into several branched channels with low, gravelly, brush-covered islands separating them. She hung to the near bank as she continued downstream and gradually entered one of these narrower channels.

The water here was slower and shallower, water weeds grew thickly up from the sediment and waved in the slow current. Daphne brightened at the familiar sight of water choked full of plant life. She decided to stay and hunt here.

Reaching out with her Water Control, she began searching through the weeds for fish.

There!

Several fat carp lazed at the bottom, mouthing absently at the weeds or the mud, holding in place in the slow current with tiny waves of their fins and tails. Daphne stalked around the carp in a wide circle, far out of their view through the thick greenery. She selected a large fish that was off by itself, nosing in the mud with enthusiasm, eating through a cluster of tiny river clams.

Daphne ascended higher into the weeds, nosing through the tangled plants with her swimming antennae folded back, she could push forward just by controlling the water around her, allowing the plants to open before and close behind her gently as she worked her way directly above the rooting carp.

She took position and waited for the carp to pull its head clear of the cloud of mud it was producing, exposing its head for her attack. She drove downwards with a quick burst using Speed Boost efficiently stabbing through the carp's brain. A sudden jerk and the fish curled to the right, rolling onto its side. Daphne was beginning to enjoy the feeling of ending her hunts cleanly and quietly like this. The other carp in the area hadn’t even noticed her prey’s sudden movement.

Host Daphne has defeated a Cyprinus carpio Level 2

She carefully wrapped the dead fish with her Water Control and slid away downstream into the weeds. She did not wish to feed so close to the group of carp, they had a very powerful sense of smell, she didn’t want them to detect her feeding on their companion.

She carefully disassembled this carp, testing each area of the body for spiritual energy, as she had with the salmon. Just as with the carps from her old pond, the fish had the bulk of its spiritual energy concentrated in a tiny shard in its skull, beneath its brain.

Unlike the energy from the salmon teeth, this shard dissolved into a clean stream of energy that Daphne instantly collected and consumed. She felt it streaming through her tissues and collecting around her spiritual core. Such a pure source of easily assimilated energy! No other creatures she had eaten had such dense and accessible spirit energy, except the spirit beast snakehead. It had had a true core, but her system had assisted her in assimilating it. The carp were the best prey she had found for ease of hunting and value of energy collected.

Their flavor, on the other hand, was muddy and bland. She turned away from the carp’s corpse in disgust after a brief taste of the flesh and returned to the hunt. While she had been feeding, more carp had arrived in the weeds, to Daphne’s delight. She stalked around the edges to find another straggler, careful to avoid startling the others.

She quickly found another one, smaller this time, and repeated her stalking tactic. She stabbed down into the carps skull and dispatched it cleanly. This time, instead of slipping away with the corpse, she carefully widened the hole she had pierced into the carp’s brain and extracted the spirit shard. Wrapping the shard in Water Control, she shattered it and absorbed it quickly.

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She then turned to find the next carp, rapidly stalking and killing three more in quick succession. She took only the shard of spiritual energy from each, the corpses could be food for less choosy scavengers. If she wanted a meal, there were plenty of salmon in the river now.

Host Daphne has defeated five Cyprinus carpio Level 2

Spiritual Energy reserves now sufficient for Full Level Restoration

Begin Restoration? Yes/ NO

Daphne eagerly accepted the restoration, her focus on finding potent sources of spiritual energy in her prey was clearly the correct strategy for gaining strength. She must always be on the watch for choice sources like the carp.

Trophic level 4 Diet detritivore, herbivore, omnivore, carnivore Strength 4.0 Stamina 5.0 Agility 5.0 Vitality 10 Intelligence 2.5 Charisma 1.0 Spiritual Energy 25 Skills

Piercing Barrage Level 4

Speed Boost Level 5

Iron Chitin Level 3

Water Control Level 3

Bright swirling energy surrounded Daphne, filling her core, expanding it until it had finally returned her to the power she’d had before death. Her carapace finally split open and fell away as she felt the familiar sensation of her body expanding, filling out and extending while she grew a new, stronger carapace.

Water Control returned in greater power as well, her awareness of the river expanding outwards from her core, she saw further and deeper into the weed choked backwaters that surrounded her. The bait fish were darting in the plants, while predators lurked nearby, waiting for a passing unwary fish.

Then something completely new passed into her range of perception. A pair of merganser ducks landed on the water. Their webbed feet churned beneath them as they moved over the surface. Then one of the mergansers dove beneath the water, it began probing the bottom, stirring up the gravel and sediment then darting to grab insects, crayfish, or tiny sculpins as they fled the disturbance.

Daphne’s attention sharpened. A bird. A bird had killed her before, this one was different, it swam under the water, but it was an outsider, nonetheless. A dweller from the void above the surface. Daphne recalled the horrible dryness and heat of the void, how her gills had slowly died and suffocated with nothing to breathe.

Birds were her enemy!

What was more, they were almost certainly all spirit beasts, how else could they survive in the void without water to breathe? It stood to reason. She must kill these birds and take their energy. Taking revenge for her death from all the birds of the world!

She drifted closer to the questing duck as it eagerly rooted among the stones, they approached closer and closer to each other until Daphne felt she was absolutely in her range of good control. She reached out with aggressive nets of Water Control, enveloping the duck before it had even realized it was under attack.

Daphne watched carefully as her water net squeezed the duck tightly, immobilizing it on the bottom. A cloud of bubbles released from the duck's plumage under the pressure, then Daphne saw air start to pour out slowly from the duck's mouth and holes in its bill. Why did the bird have void inside it? What possible reason would it have such dangerous nothingness on its insides?

The duck struggled against her restraints, Daphne held back cautiously, she was unsure what sort of spiritual powers the duck might have, so she didn’t want to directly stab the bird as she might ordinarily. As she waited, instead of using any spiritual power, instead the duck merely struggled more anxiously, fighting to free itself and get to the surface. After a time, its struggles became weaker and stopped.

Daphne was puzzled. Suddenly she could perceive the inside of the duck’s body, which meant it was dead. Why didn’t it use a skill? Why did it die when she was just holding it down? It was baffling.

She went ahead and began disassembling the duck's corpse. The feathers were disgusting, she peeled them off and pushed them away down-current. The meat of the fish-eating duck was rather terrible, but the muscles on the breast of the duck were extremely rich in spiritual energy. Maybe it had a skill related to its wings? It could only be used in the void perhaps?

Daphne also noted that she didn’t receive notice of her defeating the duck. Somehow, the way in which it died was not credited to her. This was immensely frustrating. She decided to hunt the second duck in a more normal fashion. She watched, and soon it too dove below the water to fish on the bottom.

She quickly darted up to the second merganser, far less cautiously than she had treated the first, and charged directly into the bird with her necktooth. She pierced the bird’s chest cavity and fired a shot of Piercing Barrage.

Host Daphne has defeated a Mergus serrator level 2

Daphne was shocked to find that the duck was not a spirit beast. How did it survive the void? It was also disappointing, she didn’t even get a level up from the evil creatures. Birds truly were the worst; she should exterminate all of them.

She grumpily consumed the most spirit rich parts of the second duck and moved away. She immediately looked for a salmon to kill. She wanted something delicious to compensate for her disappointment.

She continued her slow drift downstream, scanning the river for interesting creatures, practicing her water control and feasting on delicious salmon that continued to stream upriver.

The channel of the river was extremely wide and divided into a maze of braided channels in this area. Some of the islands between the channels were large enough to support small patches of spruce trees among the low bushes. Daphne enjoyed exploring the twisting paths, observing places to hide when she wished to feed, and the haunts and habitats of the different types of fish.

She noticed an odd log floating across the water. It moved strangely, pushing itself counter to the flow of the current. Dead things like logs should not be able to do such a thing. Daphne sculled closer, filled with curiosity.

As she moved even closer, she could hear strange sounds and vibrations coming from the log, there were some kind of land creatures on top of it, they were the ones moving the odd log in such a weird way. They made bizarre warbling squawking sounds, it wouldn’t surprise her if they were some sort of large rat or another type of stupid bird. They put smaller flattened branches into the water to push the log against the current, a bit like her own swimming antenna, but far less beautiful or efficient.

The log began wobbling unsteadily.

“Please, Brother Zhou! I’ve always paid the River Tiger’s my dues! I can pay! You don’t have to do this! I have money at home, please!” One of them squawked.

“Hey, Lao Chen. Don’t make this difficult for us, OK? This is just business. You know I like you personally, you’ve been a great customer and supporter of the Tiger’s all these years.” One of the larger ones had a much deeper squawking sound.

“What business! You know me Brother Zhou, I make good money in the river trade, and I give the Tigers their cut! Just tell me how I’ve offended you and I’ll make amends!”

Daphne found this one’s very high-pitched squawking very unpleasant.

“It’s a pity Lao Chen, you never offended the Tigers at all, we are going to miss you as a client. But who made you have a conflict with Lord Bu and his Heilongjiang Trading Company? He’s paid a hefty sum to make you go away, Lao Chen. And the River Tigers cannot afford to offend Lord Bu. It’s just bad fate. In the next life, don’t cross those you shouldn’t, eh Lao Chen?”

“Wait, Wait! PLEASE!!”

There was a loud splash as Daphne saw a huge creature plunge into the river. It sank quickly to the bottom, writhing and wriggling without really moving in any direction other than straight down. The bizarre log began propelling itself in its awkward way down the river, leaving the struggling creature at the river bottom.

Daphne approached the giant creature cautiously. It appeared to be a very soft bodied, but giant animal. It had a strange round head, and legs that were similar to the water shrew but longer, actually more similar to a frog, but arranged a bit differently and thicker. It seemed a completely useless shape for moving in the water.

It wasn’t helped by the fiber ropes that wrapped tightly around the creature. They held its upper legs against its body, and the lower legs were tied together as well as wrapped around a strange net made of sticks. Inside the net were many large stones. No wonder the creature sank so fast, it was attached to a huge load of stones!

Daphne observed closely as the creature's struggles grew weaker, bubbles poured from the orifices on its head. It was full of void! Just like the stupid birds were! Did everything above the surface let void directly into their bodies? What a bunch of freaks!

She remembered that the first merganser had died once all the void flooded out. Was this thing about to die? She should probably kill it and see if it had any spirit energy.

She would be doing it a favor really.