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Host Daphne has defeated Level 3 Spirit Beast Channa argus!

Host Daphne skill Water Sense has synergistic compatibility with defeated Spirit Beast skill Water Mastery. Harvest of relevant skill schema allows adaptation of skill Water Sense to skill Water Control.

Bonus for defeat of higher level Spirit Beast applied, ten points Spiritual Power, six points Vitality, one point Intelligence, and 0.5 points Charisma. Congratulations Host Daphne.

Sufficient Spiritual Energy for Host Innate Ability Upgrade- System auto initiating Host Daphne innate ability [extremophilic estivation]

Skill Creation…. Please Stand By….

Skill Created- Second Life NEW! UNIQUE!

Second Life- This skill enhances Host Daphne innate ability [extremophilic estivation] to allow Host Daphne to store embryonic copy of Host Daphne in invulnerable hibernating resting egg within Host Daphne’s brood pouch. In the event of death of Host Daphne, the host can revive via the resting egg once conditions in the environment surrounding are conducive for hatching.

Daphne floated in the vast energy of the Level-Up. She felt her body expand. Her damaged extremities began to regenerate and grow. Her carapace grew stronger, an iridescent, adamantine sheen shimmering across its surface.

This battle had been the most arduous she had ever fought, coming within moments of dying from the caustic acids of the snakehead’s stomach. She gloried in her final victory over the enormous fish.

She also reflected on her shortcomings, her ambush tactics had not worked well. The snakehead was able to react before she could effectively strike a killing blow. She had only won because her Piercing Barrage skill was still available to her after she had been swallowed. The snake would have won had it managed to kill her before swallowing her. Her Intent was unable to penetrate its outer armor, and her tactics had been detected too quickly.

Daphne was convinced that she needed to increase the strength and penetrating power of her Piercing Intent, as well as developing more varied attack strategies. Her water-based skills had dramatically improved. She now had the ability to control the flow of water around her, the way the snakehead had. She began experimenting with her new skill.

She discovered that she could use the skill to significantly increase her speed through the water, but in a completely different method than from her Speed Boost skill.

She could increase the viscosity of the water as she pushed on it with her swimming antennae, giving herself a kind of surface to push harder against. Beyond that, she could both push her body forward andslide the water in her path to the side, creating a small space of rapidly moving water containing herself, moving in whatever direction she wished to travel.

In a sense, she could surround herself in a packet of water that traveled through a narrow tunnel of ‘loosened’ water she could build in front of her and closed behind her as she passed.

She was fascinated by how this new skill taught her things about the nature of water itself. She had been born in water, all of her sisters were made from water; for water, it was their home, their entire world, but they did not think about its nature. Everywhere around her, the water was alive, tiny motes of it, individual molecules were vibrating with energy. They linked together, touching and dancing between each other. The water molecules alternately grabbed one another closer or repelled each other with their tiny magnetic poles.

Daphne could see each of these connections, every pull and push was laid out before her. The ripples of energy sent by the tiny flagella of single celled swimmers, she could feel them! The water rushing over the gills of tiny fish, the breath of the freshwater clams and mussels from their siphons. Each created a pulse through the water, echoing around the pond and Daphne felt it all. It was astonishing.

All these pulses, ripples, pressures flowed across the pond and into Daphne’s awareness. Everything that swam in the water spoke a story to her. She could feel the force from the breeze as it flowed over the surface of the pond, pushing waves up and setting tiny currents in motion across the pond, which struck the bank and reflected back.

Her level up had expanded her awareness radius beyond the confines of the pond of her birth. From any point in the pond she could feel its entirety. For the first time, she knew the scope of her world, a small half acre pond, U-shaped, curving to the north on both upward ends of the U.

Long ago, hundreds of generations of mothers before her mother-sister, this had been a section of a small river. Then a flood rearranged the river’s course, and the pond was created from the old riverbed.

She realized that if she could feel something swimming and breathing, she could find it and hunt it. She ceased exploring her new skill for its own sake and began to test its powers in the hunt.

Her Water Sense showed her another snakehead, smaller than the daughter-eater, but a dangerous foe for her old self. She stalked it, slipping easily through the weeds to its rear, her power shifting the stems gently out of her way as she crept forward. When she was close enough, she shuttled forwards using Speed Boost.

The fish detected her quickly, just as its older cousin had done, but now Daphne was larger and more skilled. She reached out towards the snakehead with Water Control. Forcing its head, which had twisted back to face her, upwards to show Daphne the soft underside of its jaw. She rammed her necktooth into the fish directly between its gill plates, through the fish’s skin, tongue and palette, and into its brain. The fish lurched madly but was completely helpless in the grip of her tightly bound chains of water holding it in place.

She fired off a shot of Piercing Barrage to pulp the creature's brain, ending the battle before the snakehead had any chance to retaliate.

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This was power! She could completely dominate an animal far larger than herself with ease! Water Control gave her the ability to manipulate and hold her prey steady for her strike! She reveled in the possibilities this brought to her as a hunter.

Host Daphne had defeated Channa argus Level 2

Daphne hovered over the snakehead’s body. Now that it was dead, her Water Sense was able to pass directly through its entire body. Without the consciousness of the fish blocking her spiritual power, every one of its water-filled cells was made clear to her. She realized she could use the skill to disintegrate the corpse, peeling the fish apart, layer by layer, skin, muscles, every cell could be separated from the other by slashing blades of water combined with tugging and tearing strands pulling the tissues into tiny particles.

Within seconds the fish exploded into a cloud of minute pieces, only the scales and bones were left behind. She was also able to control the flow of the particles, preventing the precious food from drifting off, away from her control. This was so much better than her old method of blasting the prey apart with Piercing Barrage!

Daphne fed with delight on the delicious fish, able to eat almost the entire animal for the first time. Her previous method of feeding left enormous quantities of flesh floating away from her, wasted in the water.

For the next several weeks, Daphne established herself as the top predator in the pond. She found and ate every adult snakehead, satisfying her revenge for the death of her daughter-sister, and also her stomach. She found the flavor of the snakeheads almost as delicious as her old favorites, the Carassius hatchlings, which were far too small for her to bother with now.

She next hunted the carps, there were numerous large common carp in the pond, Daphne found their flavor to be lacking, but most of the adult carp were at level two, the same as the adult snakehead. The adult carps also had tiny shards of spiritual energy inside them, too small to be considered a true core, but they were the closest thing to a spirit beast Daphne could find after her defeat of the original snakehead. Perhaps the pond was too small of a habitat to produce multiple spirit beasts. It was possible that Daphne would be stuck here, waiting for long periods to level as all she could defeat were normal creatures of a lower level than her.

She had killed the adult snakeheads and carp in the pond but had left the juveniles and fry alone. In time they would grow and mature enough to become her food once again, but she had begun to wonder how long this would take. Daphne did not realize that her rate of growth as a spirit beast was shockingly swift compared to the normal process. The snakehead she had killed was decades old and had only ascended to become a spirit beast recently, by the luckiest circumstances. chance

In her boredom and desire for challenges, Daphne began attempting to hunt creatures from beyond the waters of the pond.

She had hunted frogs and newts of course, and the water shrew, so she knew that there were animals that could leave the pond to walk about on the land above. She soon noticed other life, some that never entered the waters of the pond but would come to the edge of the bank to drink. She began hunting them.

She first tried to kill them directly with Piercing Intent, firing up out of the water at them. This strategy worked a few times, but often the shot creature failed to fall into the water, or it would run off beyond her reach. She then began attempting to swamp the creatures with a small wave, grabbing them in a rush of grasping water under her control and dragging them back into her domain.

This worked, but only for the smallest mice and insects, which did not register on her system for levels. She also did not relish the taste of mammals, so she looked for other prey.

She had become aware of birds attracted to the water. She felt the streaking trails of swallows as they flew low over the surface, dipping their beaks in the water to drink on the wing. She assumed that these flying creatures must be some type of spirit beast, as she could not imagine being able to move in the air, so far from the supporting water she understood.

To Daphne, the air was a void, empty of anything she recognized as matter at all. She had no concept of the difference between a liquid and a gas.

She began lying in wait for the swallows, just below the surface. When she detected one of them striking the water, she would attempt to throw a sudden wave into their path to drag them down. This failed time after time. The swallows moved with lightning swiftness over the water, and they could react to the building wave almost instantly with a turn of their wings.

The problem was that she could not detect the swallow's approach, by the time she became aware of the bird beginning to take its drink of water, there was only a fraction of a second to build the wave to try and swamp the bird. She missed and missed, skirting about the surface of the pond every morning and evening trying to position herself in exactly the right spot. She never succeeded.

Daphne did not realize the dangers of constantly lurking just below the surface of the water, she was originally a zooplankton after all. Tiny creatures like plankton had nothing to fear from the land or air. All the predators she was familiar with, the threats she understood, came from the water.

So she never expected one afternoon to be plucked from the water by the talons of a white-tailed sea eagle. As it passed overhead it saw Daphne’s shape just below the surface of the water. Assuming she was a fish, the eagle stooped down and plucked her from the water with a delicate splash.

Daphne was intensely disoriented to be hauled into the air so abruptly. In the air, the Water Control was useless, she was completely blind. Her eyespot was designed to see in the water, not in the air. She could only see vague blue and green blurs drunkenly waving across her view. She had never been so completely helpless since the moment she left mother-sister.

The eagle flew onwards, passing over miles of woodlands covered in pines, oaks, and aspen. A mighty river came into view, a mile across from one side to the other, dominating the landscape.

The eagle soared higher, wheeling into the upper atmosphere before turning and gliding across the river to its nest tree on the other side.

Finally, the eagle came down to land, the nest was an enormous construct of dead branches over eight feet across and tangled in the top of the remaining branches of a huge dead tree. Below the nest, a rocky bar of gravel extended for almost 50 yards to the edge of the great river.

The eagle flapped slowly, calling to the pair of downy eaglets in the great nest. The two young chicks had begun to feather out, but were still flightless and dependent on their parents. The eagle landed on the edge of the nest platform and dropped Daphne to the chicks.

Instantly they lunged for Daphne, their beaks clacking over her carapace, trying to rip flesh away. Their inability to crack her shell frustrated them, and they began squawking angrily and nipping at one another. Then, one of the chicks grasped Daphne’s necktooth in its beak and tried to break it off, the tip of the neck tooth slipped into the chick's gape.

Daphne fired a blast of Piercing Barrage. The force of the shot blew through the chick’s skull, killing it instantly. The chick dropped Daphne to the floor of the nest as it collapsed. The mother eagle shrieked in surprise and fury, not fully realizing that her chick was dead, but suddenly aware that Daphne was dangerous. She reached into the nest with lightning quick reflexes and grasped Daphne in her beak. With a jerk, she flipped Daphne end over end out of the nest, plunging and spinning to the distant gravel below.

She landed on the loose stones with a clatter, the force snapping her tail spine and the tip of her necktooth off. She lay on the hot gray stones, stranded.

Host Daphne had defeated a juvenile Haliaeetus albicilla Level 2

WARNING! System Detection of Unsurvivable Environment Condition- Desiccation.

System suggests Host Daphne innate ability [extremophilic estivation] skill Second Life.

Use Skill? Yes / No