Logan used his talons to latch onto another baleen plate, keeping steady while he opened his senses and scanned everything in a wide net, this time, trying to go farther than he’d ever gone before. With the whale constantly moving, it was challenging as fuck, but in a way, Logan could use this as practice. He could hone his ability here and make it easier once he was on solid ground.
He’d treat every setback as an opportunity, and being stuck inside of a whale was a heck of a setback. Logan felt as if he was getting whiplash as he used [Life Fabricator] to sense the auras around him, latching onto a turtle, only for the whale to keep diving, wrenching Logan’s senses with it.
Scanning over plankton, bacteria, and tiny, microscopic organisms, he finally latched onto a school of cod, a hundred who were swimming in erratic patterns. As the whale dropped below the school, Logan furrowed his brow and clenched his other fist, jabbing his still healing foot into the bottom of the whale’s stomach and using the pain to force himself to concentrate. Logan continued latching onto that school of fish as if his life depended upon it, his mind feeling like it was a stretched rubber band at risk of fraying.
Down and down, the whale dropped until it left the school of fish behind, ten meters, twenty meters deep. As his senses stretched, a shard stab of pain radiated behind his left eye, and a gush of blood poured down his lip and coated his mouth. Then with a last gasp, Logan let the fish go, bringing his senses to the here and now.
Retching, he spat out a wad of blood, sweat beading on his forehead as he tried to steady himself. He’d never wanted the fish’s lifeforce; that hadn’t been his goal. His goal had to train himself to latch onto an animal’s aura and keep latching even as he hurtled past it at speed. For it was all very well and good to have a skill the System rated as epic, a skill that let him create whatever he wanted as long as he envisioned it, but his problem was focus. When he was on a time crunch and dealing with an immediate threat, he couldn’t use [Life Fabricator] because the skill took too long for him to deploy it. That’s why he’d needed a cushion when he’d created the rat vine while fleeing the rat army. He didn’t have enough experience.
If [Life Fabricator] was the difference between winning and losing, he needed to get better at deploying the skill. That would take practice.
Logan hunched over and rested his hands on his upper thighs as he caught his breath. To the side, Vicious was still at work, swelling and pulsing in place as she injected neurotoxin into the whale’s stomach. By now, she’d increased the rotting, dark spots around her to the size of two dinner plates, but she was flagging, her mouth wide open, her face pale as she strained.
“Are you okay?” Logan panted as he willed out a bottle of water from his spatial storage.
Her eyes flared in anger. “Don’t look at me, betrayer, liar, fraudster. Keep to your own pathetic work! Vicious will do what she must.”
Logan grimaced. He’d tried to give the thing the benefit of the doubt; she was stuck in a tiny body and underestimated by everything she came across, but Logan didn’t think he deserved quite that amount of abuse. Once again, Logan realized that he’d lucked out with Ernie, lucked out to the extreme. Throughout the System Integration, many times, Logan had been down in the dumps, defeated, and it was Ernie who’d cheered him up and talked sense into him. If he’d originally been bonded to an octopus like Vicious, Logan didn’t think he’d be standing here to tell the tale.
Willing the water bottle back into his spatial collar, Logan peered down at his foot, smiling when he got sight of his fully intact limb. Damn, was [Regenerate] ever paying dividends! It had been barely half an hour, and he was already back to normal.
Gingerly, he tried putting weight on it, then jumped, bouncing. Kickass. With a blink, Logan willed out a fistful of sand and reformed his missing boot, sculpting it around his new foot.
Cracking his neck, Logan closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Anticipation thrumming through his belly, he opened his senses, scanning for auras and trying to judge how far down they’d dropped. As he’d suspected based on the tilt of the whale, they were still falling, deep to the bottom floor.
But just because they were deeper didn’t mean that there was less life. There might even be more, a mass all around them. A shark that flared bright, swirling colors between red and orange, to a squid that radiated a more even-tempered blue. Not to mention the thousands of algae that were barely blips.
But Logan wasn’t looking for that.
No, he was looking for something different. Although seaweed was different than pine trees, they were still plants, and there were thousands of them down below, covering the rocky, ocean floor in a carpet of green that swayed back and forth in the underwater current.
Logan narrowed in on the seaweed and latched on with all his willpower like his mind was a vise, the strands of seaweed stuck inside. And then like threading a needle and connecting it with a fishing line, he used the life inside of the plant to grow what he wanted.
This was the easy part. Growing a tree was simple, by now, as easy as breathing. Logan envisioned a small tree to start, a sapling, with roots that sucked the liquid from the whale, spreading like a spiderweb. They wrapped around the baleen plates like snakes and created a solid base.
Logan opened his eyes and gazed into the beginnings of his tree. This would be the tricky part. While he continued growing it, he thickened the trunk, fattening it into a narrow sapling. Logan thought of Karma. Specifically, the whale’s Karma. Back in the attribute trial, he’d figured out [Liche Siphon] by thinking of it like he was sucking from a straw, draining Arsen’s pool at the same time as filling his own reservoir. After the first time, deploying the skill had been easy. Easy enough that he’d managed to level it up to a massive degree.
Logan was convinced that [Liche Devourer] had to be the same. The description of the skills were too similar. But with a whale that was thirty times the size of Arsen, he would need to adjust his thinking. No, this time, he envisioned the whale as having a Karma pool as big as a lake, so deep and endless that he could never drain it. Forget a straw, no straw would drain this thing. Logan envisioned that lake as overflowing, cresting its bank. And if a lake overflowed, the excess had to go somewhere.
Like a river, it flowed out of its immense pool and diverted into… Logan’s. Logan envisioned the lake and the river merging into one, combining and flowing back and forth. For the whale’s Karma wasn’t the whale's, it was Logan’s and they were one.
Grunting with effort, his mouth in a grimace of pain as blood continued to pour out of his nose, Logan raised his tree, forcing the trunk to climb as he pulled up his Karma pool:
1200/3600.
1700/3600.
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2200/3600.
Shit! It had worked! Logan bit his lip and tried to hold in his elation. It was taking everything he had to hold his concentration, his mind pulled in three different directions at once. But he couldn’t deny that [Liche Devourer] was working—there was no other explanation. Logan’s wisdom attribute was at 587, which meant that he had a 587 Karma generation. 587 per minute. Instead, his Karma was replenishing at 500 per second!
But to keep the flow, he had to keep working. By now, he could release his hold on the seaweed. The whale had changed direction, going back to the surface, and his rubber band was in danger of collapsing. But he no longer needed the seaweed; it had served its purpose. Now, all he needed was his own Karma to continue growing the tree. But he needed to grow it like a crazy person to keep pulling as much Karma as possible from the whale, keeping [Liche Devourer] ever flowing.
He—
Ding!
[You have fed the blackhole. Liche Devourer at 1% satiation.]
What the hell was that? Elated, Logan pulled up his Karma pool again:
3600/3600.
It had fully replenished. Shit, he knew [Liche Devourer] was still active, he could feel it. Did that mean that the excess Karma had been diverted into his dimension black hole bomb? But even with that, he could tell that he hadn’t fully drained the whale’s Karma pool, the volume of water in his ‘lake’ had decreased, but it wasn’t anywhere close to the bottom. Just how much Karma did this thing have?
Logan blinked and then ground his teeth in resolve, a muscle on his neck twitching as he took in his half-grown tree. Unlike his massive carbon tree monsters, this one looked deformed, brittle, barely alive. Without any sunlight and by sucking mucous, acid digesting water, he couldn’t say that he blamed it. But whether it was mutated or not, it was alive, and that was all he needed.
Clenching his fist and spreading his legs wide apart, his other hand latched onto the baleen plates for stability, Logan used [Life Fabricator] to force the tree to climb. He thickened the trunk until it was the width of a sewage pipe, trying to strengthen and provide it with stability. But unlike with his other trees, he didn’t bother growing lush leaves and branches. Oh no, he was trying something else.
His sword hadn’t been sharp enough to break through the baleen plates, but what if he pressed an endless force against it instead? The force of a tree’s trunk that continued to grow, never stopping?
Logan raised his hand and gestured as he sculpted the end of the tree, forcing it to morph until he’d etched a narrow, sharp end. It was like a spear, a spear that kept rising and pressing against the top of the whale’s stomach. But just like his sword, the baleen plates must have been as strong as stone. Even as he ground his teeth and forced the tree to keep climbing, the spear end compacted, like pressing the end of a pencil against a tabletop. Eventually, the pressure would give. Either the table wouldn’t be strong enough, or the pencil would break.
And this whale’s stomach was no rickety table. It was solid like oak.
His tree splintered even as he asked it to continue growing. But there was no way he could stop. If he did, the whale’s Karma pool would replenish, and then he’d be back where he’d started, with no way out. No, he needed to grow this thing, endlessly grow this thing, forcing it to need so much Karma that the whale’s Karma wouldn’t keep up.
The top of the tree smashed against the whale’s stomach, splintering wood flying, shards hitting the octopuses who grunted or let out whimpers, while Vicious hissed. Logan clenched his jaw, his frustration rising, and this time, he concentrated on thickening the trunk, building rings, making it as thick as his waist, then doubling it once more.
Only after that was done did he raise it once again, forcing the tip of the tree to push against the top of the whale’s stomach. It didn’t splinter. With a cracking sound, the baleen plates split, shifting and pressing against the whale.
There was a curdling scream, a bellow that made his ears ring. Logan suddenly went flying, his legs bashing against the top of the stomach, then the bottom, guts and mucous hitting him full in the face. Logan gagged, but then he dug in his talons.
He’d angered the whale, but the baleen plates held. Cracked, crushed, but the tree was still splintering. At worst, he might have given the damn thing a case of bad heartburn. But there was no stopping. If he stopped, the whale’s Karma would replenish.
Ding!
[You have fed the blackhole. Liche Devourer at 2% satiation.]
Logan pulled up his Karma pool again:
3600/3600.
Fuck. It had replenished once again, and he could tell that the whale’s Karma pool was only half empty.
It wasn’t working.
It wasn’t working.
And worst of all, the damn stomach was filling up with wood splinters and chips, crowding against the octopuses and crushing them. With a growl, Logan threw three bucket sized handfuls into his spatial collar, trying to clear space, while at the same time continuing to grow the tree.
As the whale turned in the water and did a barrel roll, Logan held on for the ride and desperately tried to think of something else. He needed to do something that would require a massive amount of Karma; this tree wasn’t cutting it. He couldn’t thicken the trunk any further or be at risk of putting the octopuses in danger.
The blood in Logan’s head rushed as the whale dropped, his feet flying in the air as he held on with his talons, bark and splinters raining down on his armour. The whale was going back to the bottom again, this time violently, as if for the first time, it knew there was a serious problem inside of its gut and it was trying to break Logan’s concentration. Even as he continued growing the tree, Logan searched, scanning for anything that would….
The seaweed.
Who’s to say that he couldn’t grow the seaweed? There were hundreds of the buggers, thousands of them on the bottom of the ocean. The hard part was already done; they existed. What if Logan made them explode with growth, grew them so rapidly that he made them reach for the surface of the ocean?
“Fuck you, Moby Dick!” Logan screamed, clenching his fist once again and latching onto the seaweed with everything he had. It was a plant, a plant that took nourishment from the bottom of the ocean, its roots interlaced and sucking in nutrients. Logan wrenched, his head on fire with stabbing pain as he latched onto five, ten, twenty, thirty, as many as he could, forcing Karma inside of the plant and accelerating its growth.
It was back to visualization. Visualization had always been his ace in the hole. Logan envisioned those thirty plants multiplying, leaf after leaf, stem after stem growing and shooting for the sunlight that was up above. The plants surged through the water, the green shoots acting like Jack and the Beanstalk, going so fast that the whale’s tail brushed against the top of the shoots as they spread and multiplied.
At the same time, he forced the tree inside of the whale to keep growing, pressing the trunk against the stomach with punishing force. Now the baleen plates weren’t just cracking, they were being pushed up against the fleshy parts of the whale, going into its blubber and cutting through veins.
And yet he hadn’t received a notice from the System that he’d funded the blackhole, which meant that he was still sucking Karma from the whale at a rapid rate, so quickly that it couldn’t keep up.
It bellowed, a sound of anger and pain, its whole body shaking as it—
Karma deprivation.
Ding!
[You have defeated a Level 190 Rabid Humpback Whale! Experience points reduced and awarded based on contributions made.]
[You have leveled up!]
[You have leveled up!]
[You have leveled up!]
[You have leveled up!]
[You have leveled up!]
Fuck yeah, he’d killed the thing! [Liche Devourer] had sucked it dry of Karma, killing it in one swoop! Logan whooped, thrusting his fist into the air, warmth infusing his body as he crowed in triumph. He’d done it! He’d owned that fucking thing! “Hell yes!”
To the side, Vicious gasped, her blue rings flaring and pulsing. Logan had to assume that the System had considered her efforts of injecting her neurotoxin into the whale as participating in the kill, giving her a massive level increase.
Gradually, the whale carcass tipped to the other side, the tree making a wrenching noise and the other octopuses letting out shouts of alarm.
Right. Killing the thing hadn’t solved the problem of being stuck inside its gut, but Logan had a solution for that. He couldn’t use this while the whale was alive, but just like scooping out an excavator’s worth of dirt from the ground, scooping out whale blubber shouldn’t be a problem for his spatial storage.
Logan got to work.