A pale blue slime stepped onto shore. Glancing down at the reflection in the clear lake water, a small, nearly transparent child stared back with glowing cyan eyes and a large, dark brown sphere floating within its torso. Two dagger shaped shards of rock were held at the ready to defend itself.
Scanning the vicinity, Clarity found no threats in sight, just a beautiful lake view with lush forest on all sides.
Over 50 days had passed since Clarity's “birth”, and JJ finally felt confident enough to venture outside of his lake again. He had spent that time bored out of his mind, most days doing nothing more than passively absorbing mana to increase Clarity's mana pool, and he finally built up enough to support one of Dwayne's rocky core shells within Clarity's squishy body.
JJ planned to explore away from the lake today, hoping to find the entrance to the Pathways that the guards had meant to take him and the other students through. He still remembered the spot where the leader had thrown his old body in the lake, and had a general idea of what direction they had come from.
Clarity stepped forward, into the teeming undergrowth, passing unharmed through thick vines filled with vicious looking thorns that found no purchase in the gelatinous slime. 'Hiking is so much simpler when you can just walk through obstacles!'
Every few steps, a dagger lashed out to leave a visible mark on the bark of nearby trees, to show the way back to the lake.
After about 20 minutes of uninterrupted travel, Clarity rounded an old oak, and came on to an odd sight. In the middle of a clearing stood a large, hairy tree.
'Wait, a hairy tree?' JJ wondered, pausing before he could strike the tree with his dagger to mark it.
Looking up, he realized he wasn't looking at a tree at all. Instead, he was staring at the hindquarters of a gigantic boar, at least four times taller than Clarity, and dozens of times thicker. The boar rooted around in the ground, digging up clusters of wild mushrooms.
Quickly jumping back behind the oak before the boar could notice it had a visitor, JJ thought of going around, but his inner gamer rebelled at the thought of abandoning such easy experience.
Casting the new spell he'd learned when he caught and transformed a newly spawned slime into a dark slime, a small cloud of mana covered Clarity's body... and became visibly a little bit darker.
'I don't even know if this will do any good' JJ grumbled to himself.
Sneaking out from behind the tree, Clarity closed in on the boar, holding the two crude rock daggers in a backhanded grip.
The boar continued to happily devour mushrooms, oblivious to the impending danger, as Clarity crouched mere inches away from the boar's front legs.
Clarity launched itself towards the boar's neck, driving one of the rock daggers straight into the windpipe, and wrapping a gooey tentacle around the boar's neck for stability. The dagger snapped like a toothpick, failing to draw a single drop of blood.
The boar reared up, bucking hysterically, trying to throw the mysterious assailant off. It began throwing itself into nearby trees like a cannon, snapping their trunks and toppling them like bowling pins.
JJ could practically feel the boar's squeels as it stormed through the forest. A shockwave rippled through Clarity's body as JJ realized 'Holy crap, I really can feel it!'
In a desperate attempt to stop the boar's rampage, JJ extended one of Clarity's tentacles towards the boar's face, inserting it directly into the nostrils and down into its throat.
The boar snorted in surprise, nearly ripping off a chunk of tentacle with little more than the strength of its lungs, forcing JJ to sacrifice more mana in order to increase the durability of Clarity's body.
Fortunately, the boar was either too panicked or too berserk to think clearly at this point. It ran straight through the forest, plowing head first into every tree it saw, damaging itself far more than it could hurt Clarity.
Several minutes later, after running itself ragged, the behemoth of a boar finally collapsed, foaming at the mouth and no longer working its lungs.
'This thing is absolutely packed with mana' JJ noted with awe as he looked at the corpse, before glancing back at the trail of destruction the boar had left in its path.
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
Clarity globbed on to the dead boar, beginning to absorb the massive carcass, as JJ contemplated his recent fight. 'Maybe my dark magic might be more useful than I thought? That pig didn't even notice me when I was right under his nose. At least the dark slime was less disappointing than the other slime I caught this month.'
He couldn't help but recall his frustration with how, after catching his dark slime, he had created another enchantment, this one using Clarity's mana. It was meant to keep out all types of mana, so that he could save the unattuned, newly spawned slime until he could find another interesting mana type to feed to it. It worked almost perfectly, keeping the slime locked away from any outside mana. But then, a couple of days later, the slime transformed into another water slime, in a lake already chock full of water slimes. After checking his enchantment for any leaks, he'd realized that even though the slime couldn't absorb the outside mana, it could absorb the water around it by simply converting that into mana instead, thus rendering his efforts useless.
After an hour long break, Clarity now stood in front of two large boar tusks, the rest of the boar cleanly absorbed. Each tusk extended nearly a foot in length, tapering off into a sharpened point at the end.
'These will make much sturdier weapons than those rock shards' JJ thought happily, tossing away his one remaining rock dagger.
Clarity picked up the two tusks, with JJ noting they were much more reasonably sized weapons now than they had appeared to be just a bit ago.
'Damn, Clarity must have grown a foot taller from all of that mana! That pig gave me the equivalent of about three weeks worth of my normal mana absorption' he cheered.
The now three feet tall Clarity followed the trail of destruction back to where they had encountered the boar, keen to resume the search for the Pathways.
Returning to the clearning, Clarity's sphere of mana perception happened to encompass the fungus the boar had been rooting through, allowing JJ to see why the giant boar had been so desperate to get at the overgrown fungus.
'Would you look at all that mana!' he exclaimed.
He felt like he'd just struck the jackpot, until he tried having Clarity wrap a tentacle around a few pieces the boar had already dug up, and found them unable to be absorbed.
'Crap! Of course it's still alive' he lamented. 'So that pig had no trouble eating this stuff, but I can't? I guess I'll just leave it here, maybe it will attract something I can actually eat.'
Finding the trees that were already marked, Clarity took off in the opposite direction, once again placing an X on each tree they passed.
'It should be around here somewhere, I know that guard was really flying when he carried us to the lake, but it couldn't have been too much further' JJ estimated to himself.
He expected that he may have to start spiraling out if he wanted to find the entrance, but what he didn't expect was for Clarity to walk out of the heavily wooded forest in the next moment and step directly on a winding dirt road, rutted with what looked like wagon tracks.
'This wasn't here before!' he cried mentally 'That magic carriage wasn't following any road, and this should be nowhere close to the outskirts of the forest!'
After a long pause, he came to his senses and had Clarity immediately dash off the road and rush back into the forest.
'Roads mean traffic, and traffic means people, people who probably aren't going to be happy to see a slime wandering around. Plus, I have no idea if those people from the empire are still looking for me. They did dump my body in a lake filled with slimes and leave me for dead, but still...'
After debating whether or not to turn back now or continue exploring a while longer, JJ decided to continue while nobody else was around. 'The only thing I can think of that would be worth making a road for in this forest would be the Pathways entrance, so my best choice would be to follow it.'
Picking a direction at random, Clarity turned left and began following the side of the road, remaining in the underbrush where any passersby wouldn't be able to spot it.
JJ had so many questions he wasn't sure where to start. 'Who built this road? Why? And when? It certainly doesn't look like a new road.'
While he was contemplating the mystery of a new road appearing out of nowhere, two people suddenly rounded the bend ahead of him, walking casually down the road.
Clarity stopped moving completely, hiding beneath a rotten log and behind a thick, spur-covered bush where they wouldn't be able to spot the slime.
JJ peaked through the underbrush, noting that the couple consisted of a man and a woman, both appearing no older than late teens. They held a posture of complete confidence, at odds with what he would expect from two people walking through a monster infested forest.
Even stranger, the man looked like he'd just walked out of a renaissance fair with sturdy leather boots, a cuirass worn over padded leather armor and leggings, and a massive two-handed sword on his back that nearly matched him in height.
'How does he even wield that thing?' JJ wondered. 'Or is it just for show?'
The man wasn't even particularly bulky, looking more like a professional runner in physique than anything else.
The woman looked a bit more normal, at least from afar. But as she came closer, JJ realized that her dark dress was actually some kind of robe, and her sunhat was instead more like a witch's hat. She even carried a staff with a large, red gem on top. 'That definitely isn't an ordinary walking stick!'
They seemed to be having a lively conversation, although JJ regretted that he was unable to hear what they were saying, as Clarity had no sense of hearing. Unless he wanted to pop out of Clarity to observe them in astral form, he would just have to remain deaf. And that was something he had no intention of risking, not after what had happened with the goblin shaman.
As they got closer, the man suddenly reached out and grabbed the woman's arm, pulling her to a stop. Both took on serious expressions and began examining the forest surrounding them.
'What's going on? Is something coming?' JJ wondered, looking around to try and find what had startled them.
The two continued to inspect the forest a bit longer, until the man closed his eyes and took on a look of extreme concentration. The woman stood beside him and raised her staff protectively. Curious about their course of actions, JJ focused on them once again.
In an instant the man opened his eyes, reached down to his belt and pulled out a small needle, and then flicked it directly at Clarity.
The projectile took JJ by complete surprise. Before he could even understand what had happened, the needle clinked off his core shell, leaving a deep gouge before bouncing off.
Wasting no time, Clarity rocketed off into the forest, in the general direction of the lake. JJ wasn't in a proper state of mind to look for his tree markings and simply ran on instinct away from the road.
Luckily, the two humans didn't seem to have any intention of following, so he eventually came to a stop behind a large boulder, looking at the unfamiliar surroundings and wondering where he'd just run off to.