Today I leave the clearing. I’ve been practicing my techniques for almost a week now, I managed to break two twigs with one tackle, yeah, I know, I’m too op. I'm also getting better at controlling my body, I managed to stretch myself up to 2 meters, and I feel that I can be more precise with it now. Anyway, I decided to travel downstream, to maintain direction, and so I can drink whenever I want, also, I can always use the water to attack from a distance, well “attack”. I hope I can improve that at some point.
I followed the river for a few hours now, it’s about noon. I was beginning to get hungry so I stopped to eat some plants and insects, hah, I miss taste a lot. I wonder if there’s anything I can do about it, probably not.
As I was eating I hear something moving in the bushes on my side of the river. I quickly turn around to look and what I found was not something pleasant, not even in the slightness. There, standing over two meters tall, was something resembling a gorilla, but its arms were longer, and thicker, and its teeth were a lot more sharper and scarier.
My first thought when looking at it was “fuck”, as it turns its head to look at me, I had my second thought, “fuck”, and as it roared in a menacing way, I had my third thought, “fuck…”.
The first thing I did was jump into the water, and absorb as much water as I can as fast as I can. Once I’m as full as possible, I shoot it all at the charging tusk gorilla, and, as any sane person would, I ran for my life. Trying to tackle it seemed like a terrible idea.
The water made it stop for a second, to cover its face, and I used that moment to run to the forest in an attempt to lose it and hide in a bush. Before leaving the river, I filled myself up once more. The tusk gorilla chased right after me through the woods, while I had to be careful not to get caught in any branches, that massive beast just broke them like nothing. From time to time, I’d tried to use some of the water to distract it, I’d jump and shoot at it, most of the time I’d miss, but one time I hit right in its eyes, which made it closed them for a second and then it crashed into a tree.
I took that chance and hid in a bush while it was dizzy. I waited for a couple of minutes while it searched for me. It was sniffing around, trying to catch my scent, but as a slime I think I don’t have scent. I don’t sweat, so I don’t know how could it track me. It eventually gave up and left.
I waited for a while, until I was sure it wasn’t around me, to leave my hiding spot. I took that moment to symbolically take a breath. I was safe, but I was lost. I changed direction so many times to lose it, that I have no idea where I came from, and the canopy from the trees doesn’t let me see the sun to orient myself. Well, it’s around noon so it wouldn’t be that helpful. Regardless, it’s not like I have an objective or anything, so I just started hopping in the opposite direction that I knew the gorilla left to, and kept walking for a while. I ate some things on the way, since my lunch was rudely interrupted before.
I don’t know how much time passed, but easily a few hours. I didn’t find the river I was following before, but I did find another one, well for all I knew It could’ve been same just higher or lower. I followed that one for a few hours, until the sun started setting. I found a hollow tree, where I could spend the night. I practiced my techniques until night arrived and then went to sleep. Having run for my life got me quite exhausted.
The next day I kept following the river downstream, after having some breakfast, it goes without saying what it was. A part of me is desperate to find something that stimulates other senses, you never know how much you’d miss the scent of air and the taste of water until you actually lose it. Thinking about stuff like that, I heard a rustling in the bushes. Oh, no, not again. But what came out wasn’t a tusk gorilla, it was a bullboar. It’s not great new but it’s better that horrible news. However, its eyes were bloodshot, and it was behaving kinda erratically. I got so startled by the noise, thinking it was a tusk gorilla that I forgot to hide, and the bull boar noticed me. Oh, well, let’s see if I can do something this time. The bull boar seemed hungry, because when it looked at me, it started to charge right away.
I shoot some water at it to distract it and then jump to the right, to avoid the charge. As it passes by me, I tackle it, aiming for its ribs. It grunts in pain, but it doesn’t seem very affected by it. The force causes it to stumble a little bit, but its immediately back to charging at me. This repeats a few times, I repeatedly aim for the same spot, trying to break a rib, until I finally feel something cracking when I hit it. Wailing in pain, and furious it kept charging at me, and I kept attacking. I was hoping it would run away, but if it’s still trying to kill me, then I’ll keep attacking.
Eventually it died, maybe through internal bleeding. Regardless, it was dead. I didn’t want to leave the body just like that, might as well eat it. The only problem was that it was really big, I’m not sure if I can eat it all, can I even eat meat? Well, just one way to find out.
Eating as a slime is quite interesting. When I was eating plants and bugs I didn’t notice, because I just absorbed it and digested it while doing other things. But now that I’m sitting here for a while, trying to eat the bullboar, I noticed a few things. At first glance it looks like I’m exuding some acid to dissolve it and then I eat it. But in reality, it’s like I’m biting tiny bits of it through every cell. It’s also faster than it sounds, after five minutes I ate half of it, and I can now just carry it inside me while moving.
I kept to my path downstream, I didn’t felt any hunger for the rest of the day, and found a small hole to spend the night. It was big enough for me and was well hidden. I practiced until night arrived and went to sleep.
When I woke up something was strange, I remember the hole I was in to be bigger than myself, but as I awoke I felt cramped. It’d be better to say that the feeling of being constrained woke me up. I thought for a second that I was in some cage, and that I got cough during the night or something, which is why I almost jumped before realizing I was still in the small hole.
As I struggled to exit the cave, I realized that my body had grown during the night. I'm not sure the reason why I grew, but if I had to guess, I’d said it was the bullboar. It’s eating meat the key to growing, or is it eating a lot? Maybe both, or maybe it was just natural. Whatever the case is an interesting finding. If I’m bigger then I can take care of bigger threats, maybe not a tusk gorilla yet, but everything in due time.
To test it out, I filled myself with as much plants as I could carry. It was a lot, all the bushes around me were completely naked, and I wasn’t even half full, so I started hopping and ate every bush and every plant that I came across until I was full. The forest behind me now looks a bit less dense.
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After a week of traveling I can confirm that the more I eat, the more I grow. After the buffet of plants, I grew a little bit more, and after eating just enough, like before, I didn’t grow at all. Also, the type of food doesn’t matter, but it’s a lot faster to eat an animal than plants, though, it’s harder to hunt them, and I still don’t have an efficient method for killing. A problem presented together with this, I was now too big, around the size of a small bullboar. The size itself isn’t the problem, but now I lost some of the advantage of being small and sneaky. Maybe I’ll find a solution later.
Nothing important passed for the last few days, but today I crossed paths with another creature. It was like a rabbit, with a long tail, always standing on its hind legs, and with round big ears, instead of the pointy ones. I'm not sure what to name it this time, kangaroo rabbit? Kangabit? Rangaroo? Mmh, I’ll think about it. It was kinda cute, but this one, like the bullboar I killed the other day, was acting erratically, even more so than the bullboar. Its eyes were bloodshot, it had a small tick every now and then, and before it noticed me it was already making a growling noise. As soon as it saw me, it began running at me, and attempted slash with its claws. I shot some water at it and, given its small size, was enough to knock it down.
With it on the ground for a second I started my attack. It got on its feet and tried to attack me again, it was really fast and managed to slash at my body, but to my surprise, those sharp looking claws didn’t do anything. Seeing that the claws didn’t work, it bit me while I was surprised at this, but it didn’t work again. I was relieved, knowing that my skin wasn’t that vulnerable. After that it didn’t take as long as with the boar, luckily, after seven strikes it was already dead.
I swallowed its body to eat it while I kept moving forward. Throughout the week I found more animals; an armadillo, whose body was covered in spikes like that of a horned lizard, a bird almost a meter in size, with a red plumage and a few others more. All of them had the same symptoms as before, erratic behavior, bloodshot eyes, hostile on sight, one time I found two armadillos fighting each other, and some of them had weird, glowing, red lines on their bodies. I decided that it was a bad idea to continue eating them, and stuck eating plants.
As I kept walking forward I encountered animals more often, all of them with the symptoms and getting worse, I had to be very sneaky, because if I attracted the attention of one, in a minute I had ten following me and fighting each other. To lose them I had to lead them into another one, preferably a big one, that would attack and stop them, but that plan didn’t always go well and I ended up with another blood thirsty beast at my nonexciting toe.
After a few hours of painfully moving at a snail’s pace, I found an old ruin. After what felt like a life time, I finally get a sign of civilization. Well, it was a life time to me at least. The ruin was a massive building, overrunning with vines, and various bits of it were collapsed. The building resembled an old-style manor, and at the front there was an elegant garden, but, the plants had taken over long ago, and some pillars that were decorating, lay broken on the ground.
No animals were in sight, which surprised me, taking in count all the ones I saw before. I thought that maybe they were scared of this place, which could be a bad thing. What could all those bloodthirsty animals possibly fear? I knew it could be a bad idea, but I wanted to see for myself. My curiosity got the better of me and I entered through a collapsed wall.
It was the main hall of the manor. A long stair lead to the second floor, half of it had broken down, and the other half would soon follow. The floor was covered in wood planks, rotten by the years, there was a big hole in the middle of the hall, maybe it leads to a basement. The second floor had some holes here and there as well. Some doors were completely broken; others were blocked by the debris. The floor was covered in rocks and bits of woods here and there and vines were creeping all over.
I walked over to one of the rooms that were open, avoiding rocks and planks from the debris, and entered. It was a kitchen, numerous cooking utensils were hung on the walls, or littering the floor. There was a closed door to one side, and at the other a pile of rubble covering the wall. The ovens had a very old style, fitting the manor, like the ones that use coal as fuel. There wasn’t anything really interesting, and I was planning to go through that door, but then I had an idea and looked through the things in the floor. There were many things, rotten wooden spoons, old rusty pots, and bowls, but what really mattered was a kitchen knife. Well, there were a few, and they were rusty to different degrees, but I took the one that was less rusty. I’m not sure what material it was made, maybe even from one I don’t know of, but it doesn’t matter, it’s sharp and pointy.
After around a month of practicing with my body I was able to shape it to some extent, at least it was enough to grab the knife by the handle. I grabbed it like swallowing it with the end of a boneless arm, like the hook of a pirate, maybe. I’ll might take the other knifes once I finish looking around the place, but for now they’ll just get in the way.
Crossing the door, I arrived at a dining room. There was a long wooden table, covered with a cloth, and a giant boulder, breaking it in half. There were a few chairs as well, but nothing really stood out, so I left. Exiting back at the main hall I kept exploring the rest of the building. At the first floor, there was a living room and a small library, I would’ve love to read some of them but the language was completely foreign. The rest of the doors were blocked so I couldn’t go through them. On the second floor, it was mostly bedrooms, and an office. The bedrooms were really big, and each had its own bathroom. The office had a long desk, papers were scattered on the ground, and a spinning chair, how do I know it was a pinning chair? I made sure to thoroughly test that theory for about twenty minutes after finding it.
Moving on the last thing to check on the manor was that big hole at the main hall. As I approached the border to looked down, the creaking of the wood made me think it was going to fall apart any second, so I stood back, and simply stretched a head a little bit. I couldn’t see much, but I could see that at the bottom the floor was tiled with bricks. So I decided to look for the stairs that lead down before jumping recklessly.
I found them quite easily, it was at one of the sides of the stair leading upstairs. As I went down the stone steps I wondered what could be down here. A dungeon filled with bodies? The location of an old cult? A giant treasure? Maybe a secret laboratory filled with ancient technology? I then passed bellow the hole in the upper floor. Passing through another door, what I found was kinda surprising. There was a big, glowing red crystal on top of a pillar with very intricate markings, surrounding it were ten poles with a small red crystal on top.
In the rest of the room there was a desk filled with various books, rolls of papers, and dried up ink bottles. Looking at some of these papers I could see designs similar to the ones in the pillar. There were also some chalkboards in the room, but they were very rotten. Huh, would you look at that, it was a laboratory with ancient technology after all.
I looked around for a while, but didn’t found anything that could be useful. The books, I couldn’t read, the crystal in the middle gave me the feeling of “in case you try to destroy the world, touch the crystal”, so I didn’t. For now, I can’t do anything here, I’ll come back when I learn the language. Then I’ll be able to decide what to do with the crystal.
I went back up to the first floor, and picked up the other knifes that were in the kitchen. Then I made my way outside. Getting back in track I started walking once again, and for a while there were no animals in sight, but as soon as I got around two hundred meters away from the manor I started seeing many of them, all with the symptoms. Maybe the crystal keeps them at bay? Or, maybe it’s the cause of the weird symptoms, or both. I don’t know and I can’t know yet, so I’ll have to come back in the future.