Thank you, sent the creature. Its previous terror was starting to fade, and it no longer seemed like it would pass out from fear.

I babbled a few ‘friendly/peaceful’ thoughts at it as Sallia retreated back out of the room. Meanwhile, the creature wobbled out of its restraints… and then promptly collapsed onto the floor.

Name is Sekundyrr. Many thanks for freeing me, sent the creature as it remained faceplanted onto the floor. What is name of you? Have name?

I frowned, trying to figure out how to translate my name into any sort of mental babble that the creature would understand.

I tried tying the concept of my name to one of the water bubbles, but quickly realized that it was a bit too complex for me to manage using general shaping and my rune ability. Despite several attempts, I failed to communicate anything beyond incoherent emotions and nonsense.

Unfortunately, right now, my options were still quite limited when it came to doing mental communication.

I sighed, and turned back to Sekundyrr. “My name is Miria,” I called out, just in case the creature understood what I was saying.

The creature didn’t respond at all. I glanced at the creature that was still lying on the floor, and couldn’t find anything resembling ears. I also recalled that Sekundyrr hadn’t responded to any of the other sounds we made earlier, and shook my head.

I was pretty sure that Sekundyrr was deaf.

I decided that I would just have to ignore its request that we share our names for now. Instead, I focused on the fact that Sekundyrr was still faceplanted on the ground.

Concern/worry? Hurt/pain? I sent at Sekundyrr, making sure to float my water bubbles closer to it so that it could actually see them. I glanced at the creature, wondering if lying on the ground was somehow relevant to its biology. It was very hard to tell what was or wasn’t normal for Sekundyrr’s species.

Okay. Wobbly. Legs cramping, sent the creature. No name? You talk poor. Like baby babbling. Not smart? asked the creature, giving me a dubious look.

Sallia looked at me and chuckled. I snorted and refused to look at her.

My intelligence was above average in this life!

Before I could ferociously tickle Sallia into realizing how great my intelligence was, Sekundyrr’s torso of vines and plant matter expanded, growing several new appendages, and then quickly stabilized themselves by using the surrounding area as handholds to push the creature up.

“I suddenly feel a bit silly for worrying that it might attack us,” said Sallia, focused on the creature again. “It can barely even walk.” She glanced at the several vine-appendages the creature had grown. “Though I admit, Sekundyrr does look kind of scary like this.”

Felix and Anise wordlessly nodded, also studying our new acquaintance’s dozens of new limbs.

“If I had more alteration essence laying around, I would have probably healed it up a bit,” I said. “I’m not sure how my alteration essence works with muscle deterioration, and this might have been a good opportunity to see how my healing interacts with other species, too. I could have probably learned a lot.” Then, I sighed, and glanced at Felix’s two fingers that were still half-burned off, and shook my head.

Even though I felt bad for the creature, my friends had priority. I would heal them before I even thought about healing an alien creature that could attack us at any moment, even if Sekundyrr seemed all right. And right now, I needed to keep my remaining alteration essence ready for fighting.

Thank. Bring home? Asked the creature, wobbling around as it slowly crawled its way across its former prison cell.

I had no idea how to send Sekundyrr home, but if we found a portal to its home dimension or something, I would be happy to send it back. I had no idea how to communicate that idea, though, so for now, I just nodded and babbled ‘good/hope’ at the creature.

Much like Sallia, Sekundyrr crawled out of one of the window-like openings in the room, before flopping out of the window and then collapsing onto the floor again.

Concern/worry? I sent again. Although the creature had somehow survived centuries without any food or water, its body seemed to be in poor condition.

The creature froze moments after it exited its prison cell, and I could hear a strange, rasping sound coming from it arms and legs. I frowned.

The creature hadn’t responded to my previous babbling.

Concern/worry? I sent at the creature again.

The creature still didn’t respond.

I started to get very worried.

When I had stuck my pinky into the room where the creature was held, it had started to hurt and turn blue within seconds. This clearly implied that the laws of reality within the room were somehow harmful to my body. If some law of reality was different in our dimension, such as the way atoms bonded to each other or the way mana and biology interacted with each other, it was entirely possible that being outside of its prison cell would literally kill the creature.

Concern/alarm/worry I sent at the creature, hoping it would respond.

The creature started to violently squirm, and shuddered like a leaf in a storm.

I hurriedly grabbed the creature and shoved it back into its prison cell, where the creature stopped shaking.

Hurts, sent the creature, and I could feel a crushing psychic impression of pain imprinted into its message. I let the sensations embodied in its thoughts wash over me, and for a moment, I could feel the sensation of every cell in my body heating up, as if they were on fire. It was as if my blood was boiling and my entire body was about to turn into a raging bonfire, consuming even my soul in a horrendous explosion of heat and pain.

Thank you. Can’t… can’t leave cell? Sent the creature, and I could detect a note of extreme horror and sorrow in the creature’s words.

The creature had likely been trapped alone in this facility for centuries. Eventually, the four of us had come along and freed it from its bonds, letting it freely walk around its prison cell… but in the end, its freedom was more of a cruel joke than a reality. It had been able to taste its freedom for less than a minute before it realized that its prison cell was the only thing keeping it alive.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

It was a minor miracle that the creature didn’t go mad from frustration and despair on the spot.

Finally, the creature sent the mental equivalent of a sigh.

Cannot walk outside. Your friend walk inside cell. How?

I glanced at Sallia.

“Does your healing rune… work on this creature?” I asked.

Sallia thought about it for a moment, and then shrugged.

“I have absolutely no idea. We can try, if Sekundyrr is willing.”

Heal/happy/walk? I sent, hoping that the creature could somehow interpret what Sallia and I were proposing. The creature looked at the water bubbles I had floated near its face, and then its two eyes looked at me from inside of its cell.

Even though Sekundyrr had no facial features besides eyes, I still got the distinct impression that was completely and utterly baffled by my attempt at communicating.

Anise quickly realized I was having a hard time communicating, so she once again jumped in and started projecting pictures onto the floor near Sekundyrr’s eyes. She showed magic light streaming out of Sallia’s hands repairing various injuries, and then showed an image of Sallia shooting light at Sekundyrr while carrying Sekundyrr around outside of its cell. It was a bit rough, but I hoped Sekundyrr understood what we were trying to communicate.

Walk. Hope heal. Try. If fail, not your fault. Thank you. sent Sekundyrr, sending a confused mixture of gratitude, sadness, and joy at me.

Sallia leapt into Sekundyrr’s room and picked it up, before lifting it like a sack of potatoes and dragging it out the door. At the same time, she started pouring absorption essence into the creature. She stopped moments later.

Healthy/heal? I sent at the creature, hoping it understood what I meant.

Not hurt! Sent Sekundyrr. Thank you much! Can leave!

“How bad is the essence consumption to keep Sekundyrr alive outside of its cell?” I asked Sallia.

She paused, closing her eyes for a few moments to concentrate. “It’s not great, but it’s not bad, either. I could probably keep this up for ten hours, I think? The biggest problem would be sleeping and fighting. I can’t really do either if I need to hover around Sekundyrr to keep it healthy. And I don’t think it’s a good idea to just rely on just you to fight all of our battles for us,” said Sallia. “After all, your essence consumption is atrocious, even if you have exceptional lethality when you use extinguish.”

I nodded, and then sighed. “Maybe we should just leave Sekundyrr in its prison until or unless we find a way to return it home?” I said, after hesitating. Freeing Sekundyrr and then just leaving it in its prison cell felt… awful, but I didn’t know what else to do. If we found a way to send it home, that would be ideal, of course, but what if we didn’t? On the other hand, what if we died while we were exploring? If we freed Sekundyrr only to get it killed right afterwards, I felt like that would be even worse than just leaving it inside of its cell.

Felix, meanwhile, started probing the insides of Sekundyrr’s cell using his alteration essence, before he sighed. “I don’t see any rare materials or any ways to take the dimensional laws inside of the cell with us. So there’s no easy way to fix this problem.”

We started trying to explain our problem to Sekundyrr as best we could, but the creature was understandably upset at the idea of being left in its cage. We did, at the very least, eventually work out a better communication method with Sekundyrr, by having it repeat what it thought we were saying back to us whenever we said something.

Finally, after a great deal of very rough communication, we agreed to take Sekundyrr around with us while we explored the dimensional facility.

I personally felt it was too dangerous. Sekundyrr also acknowledged that it might die during this journey… and it seemed all right with that. Even if Sallia was forced to drop it on the floor in order to defend herself during a fight, Sekundyrr claimed that it wouldn’t mind, even if that caused it to die.

Apparently, the creature found the prospect of spending another day inside of its cell intolerable, now that freedom was so close. However limited its actions were, and however reliant it was on Sallia’s help to keep moving around, Sekundyrr didn’t want to stay stuck in its cell. To be honest, I didn’t blame it at all. Sallia indicated she was fine with it too, although she intended to move Sekundyrr back to its cell whenever she was running low on absorption essence or needed to sleep.

The five of us started slowly walking through the rest of room four. We found several other creatures imprisoned inside of various dimensional cells, many of which Sekundyrr was able to identify for us. Most of them were long dead, and Sekundyrr noted that those creatures needed things like food and water to live, while his own species (and several of the ones that were imprisoned) had no such needs, and also didn’t really have any effective limit on their lifespan. Apparently, so long as Sekundyrr wasn’t killed, it wouldn’t die of anything like disease or old age.

Sekundyrr was also happy to single out which creatures were hostile or territorial, and I was happy to remove those creatures using extinguish after my friends weakened it a bit to get assists.

The first hostile creature we came across was a plant that was rooted in the soil, but the top half looked like it had grown into a bear. Its bear half snapped and snarled at us, and so Sallia, Felix, and Anise blasted it with some spells and arrows before letting me finish it off with an extinguish, since I was the only one that had an ability like {Endless Hunger of the Ocean} right now.

Slaughter: Kill a Voltenthus for the first time

Achievement +115

Endless Hunger of the Ocean has devoured Voltenthus for the first time. New Skill created.

Strength of the forest: Increase your Strength by 10 whenever you are surrounded by plants.

The creature died instantly when I hit it with a rather low-powered extinguish. Its vitality was nowhere near as hard to snuff out as creatures such as the Orukthyri, and my attunement was also expert grade now. I found wiping out weaker creatures like this relatively easy.

My Achievement went from 15,418 to 15,533, which was a nice boost. The Skill {Strength of the Forest} seemed quite useless, so I didn’t even think about picking it up. It was simply worse than all of the skills I had right now.

Then, in another cell, we found a creature that looked like a human-sized wooden figurine that was shaped vaguely like a human screaming. This creature was the most creepy one we had seen so far from Sekundyrr’s dimension: it looked almost like a voodoo doll, rather than a living creature.

However, the moment it saw us, it started trying to establish some sort of connection between us. Moments after we saw it, my limbs felt uncharacteristically heavy, as if they had been weighed down by lead, and it became harder to breathe with each passing second. It felt like something was squeezing my lungs. I saw Sallia’s arms sag, before she started putting more strength into her grip.

Anise started making unpleasant coughing sounds.

I immediately realized the creature was somehow interacting with me using binding essence, and before anyone could say anything, blasted it with a full-power extinguish, eating up most of the rest of my alteration essence. I didn’t know what the creature was doing, but if it was able to make it harder and harder for me to breathe when my Fortitude was grade 11, it clearly needed to die before it killed Felix or Anise.

Slaughter: Kill a silent puppet for the first time

Achievement +300

This brought my Achievement up to 15,833.

Endless Hunger of the Ocean has devoured Silent Puppet for the first time. New Skill created.

A curse upon the world: Increase your binding essence stat by 13, and make it easier to bind heaviness and organic matter together.

The skill description for {Curse Upon the World} baffled me. I had no idea what ‘binding heaviness and organic matter together’ meant, beyond what I could guess from the word choice used. I had no idea what that meant in concrete terms. Felix seemed very interested in the word choice for the Skill when I told him about it, which was something, but I mostly left baffled.

The skill {A Curse upon the World} was also rather useless to me, so I didn’t even bother thinking about equipping it. I had no use for my binding essence stat right now.

That was the only other living creature we found in room three. We also found several piles of ruined research notes, but we couldn’t make out anything useful from those. There didn’t seem to be any special resources present in the room, which left us with nothing else to interact with.

Silently, we started heading towards room 4 of the Dimensional Habitat Facility.