Feeling. A concept Cytra hadn’t understood, or been capable of understanding, until just now. Flashes of memories flit through her mind, as she examines her own existence through a lens other than survival. She knows instinctively that before, her thoughts had been more like ‘Hunt, Catch, Kill, Eat, Rest’, and not the more… cognizant ones she had now.
She’d been doing things before, now she could look back and understand why she did them. This large creature beneath her, that she’d killed, her master had told her to do that. Master, a concept she understood more clearly, too. Obeying the voice when it spoke to her, a concept she’d been following without knowing why, now understood. And then at once, that understanding vanishes.
She sinks her fangs into the large creature once more, and feels her strength and mind grow as she ‘eats’. More, more, more! Her small mind cries, desperate to return to that peak of understanding and consciousness she’d just had, to experience that world forever, more than being a mere ant before giants.
Something slips through her consumption, from her stomach to her mind. A memory of the creature she is feasting upon. Not Cytra’s memory, either. A flow of knowledge and meaning. Concepts, ideas, not her own, but from that creature. Confusion rips through her rapidly deteriorating mind, before she feels the curious presence of her master beside her, of something akin to the concept of kindness she now understood, and lets herself fall unconscious.
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What the hell was that? Seriously, what the hell was that? The druid is dead, I didn’t expect her to die so quickly after just one of Cytra’s bites. Six seconds between the bite into her neck and her falling down to the ground, paralyzed. I can tell she died not long after, once the poison reached her brain or heart or something.
But… my Cytra, are you ok? Why were you biting the corpse? Why? I can see the mana flowing into you, I can take things from here, please rest, you’re worrying me!
She seems to have calmed down now. That’s good. Is- Is she sleeping? Um… Ok. Ah… I guess I should start by breaking down the mana from the druid… No. I should offer you something. You might have been trying to kill me and my stuff, you might not have been, but I can’t just kill you and walk away, metaphorically speaking.
I set some of my fungus, as well as a couple ants, swarmbugs, and plants about and around the corpse. There’s plenty of space, after how many of my plants her spell killed. I shall make you the food for the regrowth, druid, perhaps you’d have wanted that. Perhaps not. But I won’t interfere with how things grow on and around you beyond seeding it.
Cytra… She absorbed about 30% of the druid’s blood mana and miscellaneous mana, a far cry from the rather even split the brambles take. I suppose she just might not be able to hold that much, I can tell her body is… rather saturated with blood mana at this point. It’s ok, my dear, I will make sure you are safe.
I grab the remaining mana from the druid and shove it on its way to my orb, before setting my hands to Cytra. If I had to guess, that saturation of mana is what normally causes stuff to mutate, but if I guide it, use it to fuel my designs rather than leave it to do it’s own thing, I wonder if it will be safer or more efficient somehow.
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On this line of thought, I use about half of Cytra’s absorbed mana on just increasing her size again, and I was right, she will be about half again as large as before. There’s still a sizable amount of blood mana left, but now that I’ve burned through some, and also have the remainder of the druid’s mana in my orb, I think I should make some theories on what the orange, purple, and gray are.
Orange is probably just fire mana, so I’ll ignore that one.
No idea what purple is.
Gray is just what the bone magic, or I suppose bone mana, looks like once it’s out of a body.
Actually… I have a theory on what purple is, given that when Cytra first killed the druid, a couple bits of purple mana coalesced in her head, and nowhere else. Now that I think about it… Purple mana was only focused in the druid’s brain too, just mixed with everything else so it was hard to tell. So… psychic mana? Mind mana? Something like that. That might be how I make more intelligent stuff, then. Or I could be thinking about this the completely wrong way.
Ok, the rest of Cytra’s portion of the mana, which I’ve decided is half the total, not the amount she tried to absorb on her own, will not be spent right now. I want her to adjust to her new, enlarged size when she wakes up, and then… I think I’ll try and ask her what she wants. I put some more of that purple mana into her brain area, just because if it turns out that is how I make stuff more intelligent, I think Cytra has deserved it.
Uh… Now what? I’ve just killed someone, even if in self defense. I’m an orb in a forest, corrupting the landscape around me to my whims. I’d accepted that. But killing someone… I didn’t want to, and I still feel kind of bad now, but… In terms of attachment…
If I was reincarnated with any knowledge of what I am now, or what I’m supposed to be doing, I might have some. If I knew whether or not I was ‘supposed’ to be doing these things, maybe this decision would be harder, as it stands now, though… I don’t want to sound so cruel when I say it to myself, but I didn’t much like other people, even on earth. I’d never have wished death upon anyone… Ok, maybe a few people, but not to the extent of ever wanting to kill someone.
Now, though… I’m not a human anymore. I can tell that my insistence on thinking like one has been holding me back in terms of how I make and do things. It might even be the reason I nap from time to time. Now that I’ve killed a human now, too, it’s time, I think. I feel no attachment to you, people of this world, not yet. And my only real interactions with you were hostile, so I will be casting aside my previous hesitation.
A wave of plant mana over my still living plants, blood over the wasps and ants, and six more saplings of my massive trees seeded, and it is time. This forest will be mine. If any more druids want to excise me, my plan is to simply be too big to kill. That took almost all of my remaining plant mana, so I eat about two hundred more regular trees absently, while designing a couple more things. I decide to let my plants expand into the empty space naturally.
Cytra is waking up, good. I extend what I’m beginning to think of more like ‘links’ or ‘feelers’ rather than hands, to her. Ok… Um… Hi? What do you want to do with the mana you earned? No response. No, wait… She’s… shaking… Jump if you can hear me.
She jumped. Ok. So this is working. I want to make you smarter, but I don’t know how. She doesn’t respond. Should I make you bigger? I think she’s using lightly hopping like that to mean ‘yes’, now, so I continue. Can you respond in any other ways? I watch in a bit of amusement as she shrinks down on her legs in a way that unmistakably means no.
Psychic communication is hard, especially since I’m not sure how much she can hear. Ok, I’m going to alter you now, please be patient. With that, she hops, and then sits there, waiting. Working time, I'll put all of her remaining portion of blood mana into making her larger, an easy start. I think I’ll donate some of my personal blood mana to that cause as well, I think I can make her about the size of a german shepherd.
My thought process is that she’ll need a bigger body to support a bigger brain. Speaking of, a chunk of blood mana concentrated on her head to make her brain bigger, and I decide to sprinkle all my remaining purple mana into it as well.
That druid had a ball of miscellaneous mana next to where her heart should have been as well, so I think I’ll try something like that as well. Equal portions of plant, blood, bone, air, and water mana, in a big ball about the size of a baseball. That should be enough. I place it right in the center of her midsection, and monitor it for a bit to make sure it doesn’t turn into something weird. Satisfied with the way she seems to be growing into my changes, I turn my attention elsewhere.