I honestly didn’t notice waking up, if I even did. In fact, I might have been laying on the rather hard probably ground for any amount of time before I opened my eyes. I’m not even sure why I did it. I didn’t have any particular reason for doing so. It was just one of those things you do without thinking. A lot like waking up, really.

I found myself staring at a blurry image of off-grey dirt. Well, that wasn’t very worthwhile, but… neither was not opening my eyes. Hmm, probably a good thing I hadn’t considered it ahead of time.

Continuing my successful plan of not thinking it through, I rolled onto my back, revealing the underside of an oddly colorless bush. I stared at the bush. It did nothing. I stared at it some more. It did nothing some more. “Fuck.”

Everything felt numb, something both unsurprising and worrying. I tried to feel inside, searching for the burning core of primordial light that should have lain at the center of my being. I shuddered as my attention focused in on the cold desolate void that was meant to be a barely contained well of divinity. “Fuck!”

I sat up, rubbing my face with a hand that could barely feel it. This wasn’t good. I had known I would be diminished, but this was… unsustainable. I wasn’t even sure how I was conscious, let alone moving. In fact, how the hell was I moving?

I looked inwards, ignoring the fuel and focusing on my spiritual structure itself. It was… there, sort of. If I directed all my attention to it, I could see the tiny threads of primordial light that made up my actual body. As soon as I got even the slightest glimpse of them, I immediately stopped looking. Well, that explained a bit of the problem. It wasn’t just that I was drained to the point that I had even less divinity than an average human being, but I was so drained that even my ability to see my own structure took too much power to really function.

I was used to being able to examine myself without considering it as having a cost. After all, there shouldn’t have ever been a way for any of us to have this little energy. Forget about using magic, I wasn’t even sure I could make my body keep moving. In fact, if I thought about it, I wasn’t even sure this body would stay intact.

I rolled out from under the bush, deciding that I had stuff to do. It was even important stuff. A rather unsteady attempt to stand later, and I was, arguably, standing. It might have been better to say I was upright, since standing usually involved less swaying. I doubted the problem had anything to do with strength, based on my knowledge of what my body was supposed to be doing.

It actually takes a lot more power to sense matter than move it, due to the difference in required complexity. Added to that, my body should be prioritizing movement over sensation. If I could move but barely feel, I could still solve the problem. That wasn’t true of the reverse. That had made sense at the time I came up with it, but I hadn’t been expecting quite this extreme a situation.

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My body sense was so undermined that I was having trouble balancing. The monochrome world that was revealed before me was another effect of my body prioritizing. After all, I didn’t need to waste the resources necessary to discern the spectrums of light to that extent. Yeah, this was going to really suck.

I appeared to be on a street or, more accurately, on the side of a street. I frowned as the phantom taste of blood filled my mouth. Well, at least that was working. That was definitely good, since without it I probably wouldn’t have even recognized the long stretch of… pavement?

Yes, that’s what it was. I swallowed, banishing the taste that wasn’t actually from my mouth. Well, this mouth. I was able to step out onto what I now knew was the local culture’s style of road, when another piece of alien knowledge, heralded by a metallic tang, entered my mind. Cars?

I stopped and considered my new knowledge of this apparent threat. From what I now knew, they were a kind of vehicle, a sort of carriage that’s wheels turned on their own rather than being pulled. Interestingly, they didn’t seem to be magic, but rather mechanics used to harness precise explosions created by highly refined oil. That brought forth a whole new string of blood-stained knowledge about how that oil was extracted and various technologies humanity had come up with in my absence.

I smiled, feeling an uplifting sense of pride to see how far they had come. Sure, none of it was that impressive from an objective standpoint, but they had done it all out of their own ingenuity. I couldn’t think of anything they had that would be impressive by our standards, but they had done it on their own.

Before, humanity’s best way of achieving an advantage over the natural world was to seek out gifts and favors from us. It was true that some of those gifts were far greater than anything they seemed to have now, but those gifts had always been the equivalent of scraps a master would give to a lesser being. They might have worshipped practically anything we gave them, but it had only really lead them to remain as they were. After all, why would you work to create something yourself if you could get inconceivably better things just by sucking up to something else.

I had started pacing, getting the hang of moving without full sensation in my body. This was a fantastic outcome. I had worried that my siblings might have stagnated the world in my absence, but I couldn’t even see any obvious influence. That was strange in itself, but I could see a couple possibilities. One was that I simply didn’t have the knowledge of their influence. The blood memories weren’t exactly precise or detailed. They mostly just consisted of general awareness, not specific knowledge.

The other was that they simply weren’t changing anything obvious. I rather doubted that the Lightbringer would do that voluntarily, but I had rather… compromised them. As for my more muscle brained sibling, I doubted the world would look quite so… flexible if they were free to do whatever they wanted. It was possible that both of them were countering each other, but that seemed unlikely. If both of those two were uninhibited on earth, I really doubted the universe would still be here.

My contemplation of this mystery was interrupted when my rather weak senses finally noticed the light around me changing. I glanced up to see a pair of bright lights. I frowned for a moment before I remembered. Oh, right, cars. That was the last thing I thought before the vehicle that had hit the brakes a little late hit me.