Further and further the group of five traveled, finding a few more isolated groups along the way. There really was very little interaction among those of different shapes and sizes, except for rare travelers like themselves and those interested in violence. It was amazing they still managed to communicate.

They came upon the sandy shores of another great lake, but this time Three Squeaks truly couldn’t sense the far edges, or even much of the shores on their side. It seemed to extend… forever.

“This lake is unfathomably big,” Three Squeaks commented.

“Bad… water. Salty,” Meep commented.

“This is one of those… what do you call it…” Half Oink said. “You’re supposed to split them along with the clouds.”

Three Squeaks shook his head. “I assume this is related to your sword training?”

Crossed Antennae pinched his natural energy, drawing his attention. Then she signed the word, reminding him of it.

“Ocean, right,” he nodded. “A big, salty lake. Well, slightly different because it should be connected to… a lot of this. Do you know what this means?”

“We have to swim a lot?” Half Oink postulated.

Three Squeaks shook his head. “None of us can swim continuously without stopping. Our journey in this direction comes to an end. And in truth… we should return home.”

“But I’m not done exploring,” Half Oink commented.

“I know. We’ll take a different route than before. But we have to report back to make sure everything is alright, and if we’re going to be traveling everywhere… there’s a lot of back and forth that has to happen. Besides, I’d like to get more travel food so we don’t have to scavenge in other people’s territories as much.”

“Can’t… leave… yet,” Meep said sternly. “Have… to… get… sea… plants.”

“How’s your swimming?” Three Squeaks asked. “Actually, nevermind. A bunch of it washed up on shore.”

“Oooh, look at that!” Half Oink said, charging towards something in the sand. “It looks tasty!” She dove her head into the sand… and came back up with a mouthful of something she was happily chewing. Then her jaw dropped open, releasing a slimy monstrosity. “It’s not tasty! It’s soft but it’s sharp! I don’t like it!” The warthog started running around wildly, eventually diving headfirst into the sand as it sloped up. Without her momentum, she ended up on her back, her mouth open. “Owwwwww…”

“Let… me… look,” Meep said, grabbing the squishy thing with his energy and dragging it next to her. Three Squeaks hadn’t thought it was a danger because it was just some goop. Nobody would eat random goop. He thought. “Squishy,” he said prodding it with a claw. “With… dangling… bits.”

Three Squeaks approached and focused his senses. “I sense something as well. Can you guys pick it out?” he held the princesses towards it.

“Stingers,” Fearsome Mandibles signed. “Very tiny.”

“Hmm, I can… sort of make it out,” Three Squeaks said, though it was difficult. “It’s like… ant sized for ants?”

“A small percentage of our size,” Crossed Antennae agreed.

“Well make it staaaahp!” Half Oink complained. “It hurts bad!”

“What… have… you… learned?” Meep said.

“That this hurts!”

“I think he’s telling you not to eat random things you find on the ground,” Three Squeaks said.

“Yes. Things… on… ground… are… for… me.”

“None of this is making it hurt less!” the warthog complained.

“Can you help, princesses?”

They shook their heads. “Too small. Can’t grasp things that size.”

“Well, one of us will have to do it. Half Oink, it’s your mouth so… just use your energy.”

“I caaaaan’t! It hurts!”

Now that he thought about it, he’d seen her with a broken tusk and lion claw marks down her side and she hadn’t complained. It might be… very painful. “Okay, just… hold still. Meep and I…?” he looked at the other meerkat. “We’ll try to pull them out.”

“I… pull…” Meep said. “You… hold… still.”

“Good plan,” Three Squeaks said. The old fellow was better at precise energy control. He worked with small things sometimes. Three Squeaks just tried to hold Half Oink still- she was doing her best, but her mouth and tongue were twitching. He tried to clamp his energy down around her tongue without squeezing, while still leaving room for Meep to work.

It was… an extremely slow process. The first one only took a few moments for Meep to extract, but it was even thinner than a hair. Fortunately, he was able to reach into the flesh and disentangle it with his energy. But the process was too slow, even for the patient Meep. “Will… take… forever. Many… thousand.”

“Jutht yank th-hem outh!” Half Oink lisped.

Meep did so. “How… did… that… feel?”

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Three Squeaks let go of her for a moment. “Didn’t feel anything, but most of my mouth still hurts so just do it!”

Meep began grabbing them, five, then twenty at a time from what Three Squeaks could tell as they piled into a shell he’d scrounged up. Even in groups, Three Squeaks could barely make out their form- though he did begin to see something building up in the shell.

An hour or two later, it was all over. “It still kinda hurts,” Half Oink said.

“Poison… inside,” Meep explained. “Don’t… understand. Have… to… heal.”

“It’s still a lot better,” the warthog said. Even if her whole mouth and tongue were swollen, one of the irritants was gone. The other would purge itself eventually. She could be felt slowly trying to do just that, though it was also on a small scale and had only barely pushed into the bloodstream where it could be easily filtered.

“The ocean is dangerous,” Three Squeaks commented, looking back towards it. “We will have to come better prepared, if even dead squishy things from it are like this. Who could even have killed this?”

“Anyone,” Fearsome Mandibles pointed out. “It’s very soft. Anything could try to eat it. That’s one reason to have this sort of thing. The other would be for hunting.”

“Wouldn’t it hurt its own mouth?” Half Oink asked.

“Only if it had one. I think this is the whole thing,” her antennae gestured vaguely to the lump with tendrils coming out of it.”

Meep nodded. “Can… digest… things… in… bag.”

“Please be careful with your samples,” Three Squeaks said.

“Very… careful,” Meep said. “Only… poisoned… self… once…”

“I know that’s not true,” Three Squeaks said.

“Acci… dentally… this… week,” Meep clarified.

“I don’t know if that counts as careful,” Three Squeaks admitted.

“Didn’t… poison… self… hundreds… of… times,” Meep said proudly.

Where was he even fitting all that stuff? His bag wasn’t that big. Wait… “Did you get a storage bag from Anton?”

Meep shook his head. “Made… it. Almost… no… chance… of… explosion.”

“And by explosion you mean…?”

“All… of… bag… insides… becoming… outsides.”

Three Squeaks sighed. “Well, just be careful with that. I’ll go get you some plants.” He definitely wasn’t going to touch any of them with his hands, though.

As he walked along the sand, he saw some sort of leafy thing with pods full of air for some reason. He would drag it along with his energy on the way back. There was some sort of fat leaved thing growing in the sand.

Before he got there, however, he walked a bit further along the shore, with the waves sometimes reaching up to his waist. So pretty far up. He saw it depositing things further along while dragging away other things, including sand. Some of the sand washed away and left behind… a small thing with a shell. A crab? No, the shape was all wrong. It was long instead of wide. It looked directly at him, and he looked back. He only sensed its energy as it dove into the wet sand, burrowing out of sight.

“Wait!” Three Squeaks called. He thought about trying to scoop it out… but that would be too much like an attack. It was very weak, anyway. But he might be able to find it.

He sank his senses into the sand. Below a paw length or two, it became very difficult. Air was so much easier to sense through. But he could still do it. He was just somewhere around a thousand times worse at it. Without even exaggerating, he thought that was correct. His distance was measured in meters, maybe ten at most and only in direct lines. But even with that, he managed to stumble into several, no, dozens of the long crabs, just barely picking out their energy.

Not because all of them were weak, but because they all hid it. And they also reacted to his senses, despite them being fairly subtle. Given their reactions, he pretty quickly stopped, moving away from the wet part of the sand just in case they wanted to band together to fend off the invader he might look like. But after waiting for a bit they didn’t seem to come. His passive senses could potentially pick a few of them out in wriggling in the top layer of sand, but he might have been fooling himself into finding something he expected.

He would just leave that, and go grab some of that plant to sample. And a bit of anything else he noticed. There were a number of round, flat things. Was there a creature in there? Not anymore, at least, just bits of sand. But they had a little hollow and a hole in the bottom, and things didn’t achieve that shape accidentally.

When he dragged the plants back to Meep, the other meerkat at least pared them down to a few parts of each thing. He didn’t have limitless space, it seemed. Furthermore, he wrapped each plant in a specific leaf, tying them inside with thin fibers. “Need… many… small… bag… next… trip. No… touching.”

“There were a bunch of little long crabs in the sand,” Three Squeaks commented. “Or, are I guess. And I think they’re sapient. They at least actively use energy.”

“We should talk to them,” Fearsome Mandibles said.

“They seemed to prefer staying hidden,” Three Squeaks said. “I don’t know if we want to bug them. They might get angry. And there were a lot. I don’t know about you, but I can’t defeat a thousand first or second rank cultivators.”

“I would not be a good match for anything with a shell,” Fearsome Mandibles admitted. “Even if it was vaguely my size.”

“Plus your legs are still recovering,” Crossed Antennae poked her sister.

“They are fine,” the first sister said. “I will return to full power. No, a greater power… soon.”

“Yeah, well,” Three Squeaks looked over at the ocean. “Let’s try not to let either of you get squished or washed away or something.”

“We can swim,” Fearsome Mandibles protested.

“But can you fight against the waves?”

There was no response to that.

“This isn’t a good place to camp,” Three Squeaks said. “Even if birds can’t eat me, I’d rather not deal with them. Let’s make our way back into the treeline and then plan our route from there. We can circle around to the north or south on the way back. If we head far enough, we can explore entirely new area just adjacent to what we already saw.”

“How… far?” Meep asked.

“Yeah,” Half Oink said. “Like, our senses, or your senses?”

“One horizon,” Three Squeaks decided. “As far as you could see with an unobstructed view and a little height. That will let us focus on new areas, and I will be able to keep track of where we went before.”

“New… plants,” Meep said with his own subdued level of enthusiasm.

“Hopefully we’ll find tasty things,” Half Oink said. “Or something to fight.”

Three Squeak didn’t think they’d find much of the latter, which was the whole point. He had at least brushed his senses past the places they would be walking on their route back. That didn’t mean there would be nothing, but they should at least be able to avoid running into a pack of hyenas or something. And if there were any, they’d probably be low in natural energy and not much of a threat- not that they lived in places like this. There were things like… foxes and big cats that would be more threatening.