Congratulations to Host Daphne for defeating a Spirit Beast of an Equivalent Level!
Alert! Host Daphne has taken severe damage from Lightning Attack, Penalty Cost 15 Vitality Points to heal/repair damage. Vitality reduced until next Level Up
Host Daphne skills lack synergistic compatibility with defeated Spirit Beast skill Lightning Mastery. Harvested skill schema can be exchanged for lower level spiritual skill selected randomly
Exchange Schema? Yes / No
Daphne accepted the system's options, whatever skill she received was fine, hopefully a useful skill for fighting or hunting.
Host Daphne exchanges Lightning Mastery schema for new skill Aura Sense
Trophic level 6 Diet herbivore, omnivore, carnivore Strength 8.0 Stamina 9.0 Agility 8.0 Vitality 10.0 / 30.0 level reduced due to health recovery penalty cost Intelligence 11.0 Charisma 6.0 Spiritual Energy 35 Skills
Piercing Barrage Level 5
Speed Boost Level 5
Iron Chitin Level 5
Water Control Level 5
Second Life Level 1
Aura Sense Level 1 NEW!
Aura Sense- This skill allows Host Daphne to perceive spiritual energy sources directly. The sensitivity of detection is dependent on the level of spiritual energy contained within the Host’s spiritual core.
As Daphne Leveled up, surrounded by brilliant energy, she considered the implications of her new skill. The skill could detect the presence of spiritual energy all around her, making her hunting more efficient, allowing her to focus on prey with the best spiritual energy.
She should be cautious for the time being, with her Vitality so weakened, a severe blow such as another Lightning attack could easily kill her. It would be better to hunt spirit beasts with weaker skills for the time being.
She continued downriver, but her progress was made slow by her meandering path, moving from one channel to another watching the varying currents of spiritual energy throughout the river.
Without Aura Sense, she had never realized that the water itself was filled with spiritual energy. Flowing traces of it passed through the water like drifting smoke. Much of it followed the currents, but she also noted that it seemed to flow strangely around life. Live things seemed to both attract and repel spiritual energy at once. It would not pass through them, but circle around them in a gradually spiraling orbit, till it was absorbed.
At the same time,life released spiritual energy from within, which spiraled outwards and then joined the mass of ambient energy flowing in the water. Plants seemed to absorb the energy through their green parts, while animals absorbed it through their gills.
Daphne could see her own gyrating flows, both inwards and outwards. She spent a brief time experimenting if she could manipulate the flow of energy into herself by changing the flow of water over her gills, and when that failed, by manipulating the energy within her core.
Spinning the energy in her core faster seemed to slow down the rate she absorbed spiritual energy.
She tried slowing the spin of her core, but that ALSO slowed her absorption of the energy.
It would appear that her core was tuned to run at the optimal rate on its own Which was convenient, but also frustrating that she could not speed up her own progress by controlling it directly.
Eventually, she came to an area where the river's broken channels merged back together into a single wide one. The water was very deep in places here, some of the pools were so deep that Daphne could not see the riverbed through Water Control. Extremely large fish lurked in the bottom of these, some that Daphne was certain were high level spirit beasts. She was not their opponent, yet. She marked down this area in her mind, to return to when she was stronger.
Daphne hugged the banks, remaining in waters where she could sense the bottom. She continued hunting carp and the last straggling salmon as she drifted, her new Aura Sense enabling her to select the most energy-rich prey from every group. She had long ago stopped consuming an entire fish, merely eating the tastiest and most beneficial portions and abandoning the rest for the scavengers.
Later, Daphne noticed one of the strange logs floating on the water, the kind the squawking Homo sapiens had used. Most of them were small, very much like she had seen. The squawkers were throwing huge nets of finely twisted fibers into the water, then dragging them back into their logs. The meshes of strands caught many fish in them, and the squawkers were pulling these fish out of the mesh as they brought them into their logs.
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Daphne finally realized that they were using the mesh to hunt. The mesh was a trap, the fish would be tangled or just surrounded by them and then hauled into the log by the squawkers. It was a pretty efficient method for void breathing freaks. Daphne was impressed.
She swam close, directly beneath one of them. She peered up into the pair of squawkers above her with Aura Sense. They were surprisingly dense in spiritual energy, primarily in their bizarrely oversized heads.
She used Water Control and latched onto the curved side of the log-thing, giving it a forceful pull downwards. It flipped over, dumping the shrieking Homo sapiens into the river. She quickly shot them with Piercing Intent, and neatly sliced open their skulls with a finely controlled jet of pressurized water, pulverized their brains and ate them.
Her entire body shuddered at the vile, waxy flavor of the squawker brain, but they gave her an impressive amount of spiritual energy. Hunting these nasty things would definitely be a profitable enterprise in terms of quickly collecting spiritual energy, but Daphne was appalled by the taste. Her mouthparts felt coated and greasy, she shuddered in disgust.
Abandoning the overturned log-thing and the corpses, she moved downstream. More and more crafts floated on the water, until she came near an area where a large number of log-things were tied to fixed structures built along the bank. She could hear large numbers of squawkers' voices through the water. There was a large group of them living on the bank here, a hive of Homo sapiens.
The odors drifting past became incredibly foul, several drains of turbid sewage flowed into the river near where the logs were tied. Daphne was repelled by the disgusting taint pouring into the water. She activated Speed Boost to push herself downstream till the stench dissipated. She could still see many boats on the river, but the pollution was no longer detectable.
Then, her Aura Sense nudged her, just at the very edge of her range of perception. She stopped, and oriented herself towards the trace. Somewhere off to the right?
She moved as close as she could to the edge of the right bank and moved downstream carefully.
The aura source grew larger and larger in her mind’s eye. It was an extremely vibrant and stable beacon of spiritual energy.
Working her way closer to it, she realized that it was up on the bank of the river somewhere. Was it unreachable? She pushed forwards irritably, reluctant to miss such a strong source of opportunity if she could find the means to reach it.
She passed the source and began to leave it behind.
Daphne was frustrated, but she had no way of moving around above water She continued on, angry.
Then, a narrow, stone-lined channel appeared, emptying into the river. Daphne carefully sampled the flavor of the spiritual energy in this drainwater, it was warm but clean and sparkling with a tiny zest of vibrant energy.
This water was in contact with that aura source!
Daphne turned into the narrow channel. Peering up the stone drain, she saw that it soon became a tunnel several yards back from the entrance.
Eagerly, Daphne swam up the drain. It was more than wide enough and tall enough to let her pass, but very quickly the water level became shallow, not enough for Daphne to swim in.
She used Water Control to gather a generous bulge of water, enough to completely cover her carapace and keep herself floating.
She pushed the bulge and herself up the drain using Water Control. It curved gradually to the right as she moved upwards, she could feel herself getting closer and closer to the powerful aura.
Finally, the drain straightened and she saw light. She pushed forwards and surged into the open, a wave pushed in front of her as she found herself in a square, stone-bordered pond.
Nearly the entire surface of the pond was taken up by a single massive lotus plant. The energy Daphne had been sensing was this plant! She marveled at the incredibly thick flow of spiritual energy she saw amassed and surrounding it. She could see enormous flows of spiritual energy being absorbed and released back outwards into the world. The rate of absorption and release seemed to be hundreds of times faster than the rate Daphne could achieve.
The tissues of the lotus were surging with spiritual power! It was diffuse, and unconcentrated, but many hundreds of times richer and more than out in the river. Somehow the lotus was creating conditions that allowed it to cultivate spiritual energy with maximum efficiency while increasing the total raw concentration of spiritual energy in the pond.
There was only one place on the lotus where spiritual energy was being concentrated, she could see several flower buds growing near the center of the lotus. As Daphne watched, the buds seemed to grow with visible speed, pushing upwards towards the surface. Energy was actively concentrating in the buds, spiking upwards when they pushed through the surface into the open void.
Daphne was confident that the buds would be very valuable food, but she didn’t want to try to eat them till they filled up with energy. Idly, she sliced off one of the huge leaves sprouting everywhere and pulverized it. The fresh, crisp flavor of the lotus leaf was a shock to her taste buds.
It had been ages since she had eaten any plants directly. Not since she was a tiny plankton, had she tasted greenfood. The richness of the spiritual energy gave the fresh leaves a piquant flavor, far more complex and nutritious than any of the simple greenfood she had eaten in those days, but her mind was filled with nostalgia.
How beautiful mother-sister had been, sculling through the night waters and feasting on the succulent greenfood. Daphne wondered if mother-sister was still alive. If her daughter-sisters that she had birthed in the pond, or the larger ones she’d birthed here in the river still lived. It pleased her to hope for them, although she knew that their odds were not good, the waters were filled with hungry predators everywhere.
Shespent the entire day in the pond, watching as the lotus buds pushed upwards to break the surface, swelling and all the time becoming more and more concentrated with powerful spiritual energy. The flows of energy within the pond and in the void above began to curl inwards towards the growing flower buds.
Night fell, and the flow of energy changed. It grew slower, somehow thicker, colder, more sluggish. The light wispy flows of energy began to collect together in thick syrupy, beaded streams, like cold mercury.
This thickened, concentrated spiritual energy flowed inwards and the flowerbuds absorbed it directly. They began to show a brilliant shine in Daphne’s Aura Sense, she pondered eating them immediately, but she wasn’t sure how much more energy they could continue to collect. So far the rate at which it was flowing into the lotus buds had only continued upwards. She had never seen such immense concentrations of spirit power, even when in the spirit fish she had killed.
As the dawn gradually brightened in the eastern sky, the flow of energy changed once again. It became almost still for a moment, but far more potent until the moment just before the sun breached the horizon. A huge surge of purple energy raced across the sky, some of it was trapped by the great suction that the lotus was generating. At that moment, the flowers burst open into bloom, and they began radiating waves of energy back out!
Daphne surged forwards, slicing the stem of one of the flowers and pulling it towards herself eagerly. The intense spiritual energy it was releasing bathed over her like the heat from a bonfire.
She reached out with Water Control to pulverize and eat this treasure.
A brilliant blade of infinite sharpness slashed down on her carapace, clanging off her hardened chitin and stunning Daphne. Several of the tendrils of her swimming antennae were severed from the fierce blade of sword intent.
“NAUGHTY ANIMAL! Dare to steal this seat’s Treasure Lotus! Die to me!”