Ow

Everything hurts. Wooden walls, floors, and roof tiling. I am all wood. It’s rotting... I’m wood... It’s... rotting? I’m rotting?!

I try to push it from my mind. I try to imagine myself feeling something else. Something just to bear the pain. What ended up happening was quite amazing. I felt myself getting tired, but the rot was getting reversed. It would take a while, but it seems I can fix myself faster than the weather breaks me down. But how is this possible? I’m a building, so how can I get tired?

As the pain of rot lessened, I started to think clearer. I was able to focus on different parts and started noticing energy flowing from a small round thing in a centre of a space near the top. As I focused on it, I found I had some intuitive understanding of what it was. A core, an essence of me. I could rebuild anything else, but if I lose this, I am dead.

How do I know this? I began to question myself, but then another thought overtook it. Am I empty? Perhaps it is dangerous. I started to search the tiny attic I had, well that’s an overstatement, it’s not large enough to be a crawl space, and it houses more than the core.

There is a nest nearby, a moth nest by the looks of it. I do have enough energy to clear it, but another possibility enters my mind. I could make it my own, assimilate it. Not sure what would come after it, but simply destroying a nest of night’s butterflies felt wrong. Assimilation it is.

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As I begin, some energy flows into the nest from the core, and it seems I am at my limit. I was reversing ageing, integrating with a whole nest of insects. Yet I felt pathetic. Almost like I was out of breath for simply walking up the stairs. I feel like I should be able to do more.

While it was hard to focus while this tired, I was also bored, and sleeping doesn’t seem to be an option. I finished checking myself. There are a few small spiders and flies in here, seemingly not aware or interested in my core, laying just on the other side of the room. Seems like that’s all in terms of this. With nothing else to do, I resigned myself to ‘watching’. I told myself it was to make sure no moth crawls out to bite my core, but I knew it wasn’t a possibility.

It might have been days, or maybe hours, maybe weeks. Hard to tell when I could not sense anything outside myself. However, the moths successfully assimilated. The nest took some of my energy just to exist, but it was spitting out moths, faster than it had any right to. Moths were fast to hunt the bugs, and that revitalised me. The energy, mana, from the bugs paid for nest upkeep, still ongoing repairs and then some. This is nice, but I got spiders to deal with. I could probably assimilate them, but I already got moths to cover pest control. On top of that, given their larger size, there is probably a lot of mana to be gained from squashing them.

I pumped my energy back into the moth nest, hoping for a bigger moth to deal with a spider’s web. To my pleasure, the nest obliged and produced a moth as large as a bird. “Yes! Descend onto those spiders, devour them” and so it did. I saw it fly on the web and swallow the spider in one bite. As predicted, her efforts resulted in a nice bounty of mana.

This felt nice. I was pest free and full of energy. Perhaps too nice. Back on earth, I avoided killing spiders as much as possible. Now that I had mana to gain, I became far less merciful. I’ll keep that in mind. But for now, I will focus on investing all this energy.