Speed. She was speed. Pure, jumping, running, OHMYGODWATCHOUTFORTHATTREE oh thank goodness she OHCRAPTHERESANOTH- phew! What was I HOLYPOOPCAKESONAPLATT- oh Jesus, my non-existent heart can’t take this!
Do you have to go so fast! To which Terra responded with empathy, slowing down just a little and making me feel heard.
Pfft, no! She just laughed! Freaking laughed and of all things, went faster! I spent thousands of years not moving even the tiniest bit! Yeah, yeah, that temporary body possession doesn’t count. Know why? For that period, I was so powerful I could just smash through solid rock without suffering injury. Now I was a passenger on a Terra-fying rollercoaster with a one-way ticket to Splattersville!
Oh man I wanna hurl. Can pills hurl? Even if they can’t I think I’m gonna figure out a way to do it…
I could make Terra hurl, mess with her stomach nerves. Hmmmm. Though the downside is that the distraction would probably lead to actual death by tree.
Worth it?
Nah. Not worth it. By thaaaaaat much though, just thaaaat much. Little, itty bitty, finger pinchy amount there.
Terra howled with joy as she twisted just inches from a branch, scraping her claws along it and redirecting her passage just barely enough to position her to leap off of the next tree’s trunk, renewing her semi-ballistic momentum.
“How much farther!” Though shouted at a volume well exceeding normal human limits, Terra’s voice was nearly drowned out by the screaming wind. Laughter rolled through her again as her foot smacked down on a thick tree limb just in front of an unsuspecting squirrel. Not the squirrel. That old grandpa Cultivator squirrel fluff-for-brains was impossibly stable on Terra’s head. “Tell your cousin I didn’t mean to scare him!”
I didn’t blame Terra for stumbling in surprise. Nor for the gut wrenching feeling of a now uncontrolled fall, crashing through the smaller branches near, but out of reach of the thicker ones, before she dug a clawed hand into one and slowed to a rough stop, settling on a thick limb.
“W-what?”
“You were joking? You made a joke! Ha! Pill, did you hear that?”
Yeah, yeah… I make jokes too ya know….
“Don’t be jealous, Pill. You make jokes all the time. Grandfather here has only made insults so far. I think he must like us.”
The squirrel had estimated this evening. Terra seemed to take it as a challenge to her pumped-up body.
We arrived in the late afternoon.
Hearing those blessed words and definitely not due to any whiny pleading by yours truly, Terra descended down to the forest floor. Ferns erupted in crowded cliques here and there and everywhere, bursting forth from the thick pine needle layer like sprays of dark green. Moss huddled thick on trunks, on crevices, on rocks and on logs. On Dasher and Pr- I seem to have dredged up some random memory. Fascinating…
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When Terra’s boot, more scraps of leather held together with Qi and prayers than true footwear, sunk through the pine needle layer into a pool of water, she and I gasped in unison. Her’s may have been the only technical gasp, but the thought counts! The water was murky browns. Now that the blanket of needles floating upon it had been somewhat pulled back, the smell of anerobic decomposition burned in her nostrils.
How nice, I didn’t have to make her hurl in retribution afterall!
Though to be honest this whole, experience the sense of my host thing? It was starting to get old really fast, when all the unpleasant stuff was equally unpleasant for me too. At first the sheer enjoyment of just experiencing was worth any discomfort. Now though I’d had plenty of time to develop a comparative understanding of good and bad sensory experience.
Those high impurity ‘waste deposits’? Bad.
Eating roasted mushrooms and tubers? Good, usually. Terra’s preferred tastes weren’t quite my own, I think, but eating things was a whole mess of good sensations.
Going pee when you really had to go? Not gonna lie, thought that one would be pretty uncomfortable, but it could also be soooo good. I’ll just… I’ll just keep that one to myself though.
Gotta say, now that puking uncontrollably on the side of a literal cesspool was on my list of experiences, I could say it was definitively not on the good list.
Terra tried to protest. Or something. She opened her mouth and I was definitely picking up the emotions I associated with her wanting to voice something. Opening her mouth just brought forth another series of dry heaves though.
While we’d been traveling almost day and night for a week, Terra had still stopped opportunistically to eat. Generally, it was for a few of the more potent mushrooms. She didn’t even need me to confirm they were the right ones. The ones she’d liked, which was most of them to be fair, she recognized. I simply did my processing stuff in her stomach to make the various mycotoxins integrate positively with her body, or broke them down entirely. Even when she picked a similar looking but different variety, it wasn’t a problem.
Still hopped up on her massive upgrade, Terra had continued relentlessly and without sleeping. As she crawled away from the pool with all the desperation of an exposed earthworm seeking the soft loam of its preference, the sense of incredible exhaustion fell upon her in an irresistible blanket. Wrapped in its soothing embrace, her eyes fluttered closed and she began to snore softly.
The way he said it while retreating himself, much further than Terra had, while holding his breath, made the entire admonition feel hollow.
Right. Fine. Run. Run you cowardly squirrel! Just leave me here still… ugh… still smelling that fetid mess! Come on Terra, wakey wakey, let’s get some distance…
Yet it was not to be. Once asleep, the week of skipped rest was coming due. Which meant…!
Terra slept with a disturbing level of peacefulness, given what I was doing. The esoteric boundary between her Meridian network and my artificial Dantian hummed quietly to my Spiritual Sense. Closer, closer I bridge the resonance. The goal wasn’t to fuse with Terra’s system. It was just to connect to it.
In the hopes of accomplishing this, I started forming a very small Meridian system. While I’d felt that my own Dantian had been somewhere around the limits a body could support, Terra had proven that firmly wrong. Her pseudo-Dantian was almost double the volume of my own. That gave me some space to work with, within her center, to bridge that connection.
The new section grew outwards from my Dantian. Shifting the resonance along its length was a real challenge, but doing it while it was growing rather than later made it just this side of possible. The biggest issue was Qi. I had just gasps and farts left in the tank. Trying to cultivate directly to my own Dantian threatened to shattered Terra’s more fragile system almost instantly. Now she had a much more robust setup, but one that was strongly tuned to her own Terra-rroir.
When she’d swallowed me before, the method she’d practiced had created a much less personal system. It was built upon a ragtag jumble of different Qi types following some basic concept of balance. My method focused on absolute purity followed by complete attunement to her Spiritual self. It also made it basically a brick wall to my own Qi.
So slowly, pulling the last dredges of available, free Qi from within my Core, I connected these bridging Meridians to her system. They were mere filaments. But they worked. The faintest trickle of Qi pulled inward. It was even filtered through her Beast blood, meaning it was actually a little bit more truly pure than the Qi I’d been absorbing before.
Each little bit went into gradually widening those connecting Meridians, allowing more Qi to flow at once, and slowly, but steadily, increasing the rate I could absorb.