Once they had gotten a fair distance away, out of sight of the halfsicle undead they had left away banging at its crystal prison, Sean stopped to resummon his bone shield and then tear into the boar with Gel’s help. They ate its upper half as rapidly as possible which refilled their mana stores and netted them both another 2 exp. Sean then used its two tusks to pierce the boar’s remaining skin and form a macabre makeshift porcine bag that held together surprisingly well. He made Gel carry that one, though the slime didn’t seem to mind.
The rolling hills in the terrain became more noticeable as they ran on. Grass types of variant dark and green colors gave way to spotty patches of barren dirt, which itself gave way to sand here and there. Sean noticed new types of flora in this border region, though he didn’t stop to examine any of them too closely. Still, he made a mental note of each in case such information might come in handy in the future.
There was a prickly-grey bush that resembled several stacked bundles of gaunt sticks more than a collection of leaves. His pulse sense reported something like a heartbeat coming from within its inner stem, and the plant swayed towards him as they passed. A series of oddly claw-shaped cacti seemed to drift slowly with the wind through the dirt and Sean gave them a wide berth. There were also several wide, orange trees shaped like bulbs with plate-sized bark he guessed to be a cross between a palm tree and a head of garlic. Their bark chimed and tinkled in the wind very nearly to the way glass chimes sounded back home, making him suddenly nostalgic for both the beach and his grandmother’s back porch.
The wind had picked up a fair bit, the warm breeze occasionally bringing sand with it, which was encouraging from at least one perspective. Enough so that Sean was starting to feel better about this whole ‘into-the-desert’ idea. Which was good, because the view currently stretched out before them showed only a half-mile or so of this distinct border region before the edge of the forest met the vast desert. A desert that appeared to stretch out all the way past the horizon.
“If this wind keeps up, it may blow away our tracks for us.” Sean said, voicing a little optimism of his own at the slime for once.
“Does that mean we can go back and get some more of those pigs later?” Gel asked hopefully. Sean may have refrained from sharing the wonders of bacon with the slime directly, but apparently more than one of the villagers had already made that particular delectable discovery and the slime was already eager for Sean to recreate it. “I promise to share the second – no, the fifth– hmmm… I promise to share some of the bacon with you after it’s done.”
“We’re not going back until either we’re ready to take on Bancroft, or that thing behind us is dead.” Sean re-confirmed. They had discussed the plan on the run and both were of the same mind on this. It was just too dangerous for them to continue to stay near the necromancer’s lands if he was going to keep sending progressively stronger minions their way.
True it would be a phenomenal way to power level on experience, but that was assuming they survived. They had needed to summon a celestial rage badger to beat the shroud, and even Gel hadn’t been eager to tango with whatever that hulking undead had been. Even half-frozen their opponent still might have killed them.
So, given that they also had no idea how many more of those things Bancroft had sent – not to mention in which direction they might have gone – the best possible option left to them was to get the heck out of Dodge. That wasn’t to say the slime warrior didn’t have his own reservations about the idea, however.
“You’re sure there’ll be enough hunting out there?” Sean asked Gel for the second time. “If deserts here are anything like they are back home, then we’re not exactly walking towards the buffet.”
“Should be.” Gel said confidently. “I have multiple memories of trips out into the sands, and some of them came back alright.”
“You said one of them came back with one leg and a third of an arm.” Sean deadpanned.
“I didn’t say all of them came back.” The slime said defensively. “I made a very clear distinction.”
In the distance, right about where the heat of the sands started to have that hazy mirage effect, Sean could see what looked like large, dark shapes prowling the desert. Shadows and tricks of the orb that hinted at wild monsters every bit as massive as the ones they had just left behind, or perhaps even more so. Sean had been low-key hoping his non-ocular eyesight wouldn’t be affected by such tricks and he wouldn’t have to worry about daytime illusions messing with them out there, but that didn’t appear to be the case.
Ah well, can’t win everything.
The one other noteworthy landmark ahead were the mountains on the other end of the desert. They were odd to Sean, seeming to appear and then disappear on the same heat waves that bore the other shadows. One minute the sands would stretch on to infinity, and the next the multi-peaked mountains on the far end would loom over the desert like displeased titans.
Sean stopped paying attention to that after a while, letting the distraction fade into the background of his vision. Mostly because the constant changes on the horizon line were starting to give him a headache. An endlessly vast expanse he could deal with. Geography that wanted to play peek-a-boo was a problem Sean did not want to think about right now.
"Good thing we still have that map." Gel pointed out as they ran on. "Once we’re absolutely sure that thing isn’t behind us, I say we pull it out and figure out where exactly we’re going out here."
“You’d think a necromancer who slew his way through entire towns would forgive a little arson.” Sean joked.
“He’s a mage. They never forgive anything.” Gel scoffed. “I told you, it’s all about ego. You could hand him a hundred horses and he wouldn’t care – but take one and he’ll run the rest into the ground trying to catch you.”
"Colorful.” Sean quipped as he jogged up another dune. “You know in our defense, one of those horses was on fire before we even showed up."
"I don't think Bancroft will find that a compelling argument if he ever gets his hands on us, but you're certainly welcome to try."
"If it works, I’ll be real surprised right before you eat him." Sean said.
“That’s the spirit! The element of surprise is the last one I want my food to have.” Gel cheered happily. “Unless there’s an element of salt, in which case that’s the last one. That’s the last one by far.”
Once they got to the top of the dune Sean stopped for a moment to just take in the sights. The warming sand at his feet wasn’t as pleasant as he remembered from when he still had flesh, but it felt nice to be up here nonetheless. Before them, the morning sun was steadily climbing towards the sky. It was massive. Easily twice or more the size of earth’s sun, and it looked distinctly more yellow, too. Sean was almost afraid to stare at it for too long – his mother had been quick with a slap for that back when he was a kid – but the glare didn’t seem to bother his undead orbs.
Still, just in case, he averted his eyes after a few seconds. No sense going blind by being a dumbass. Nuggets of wisdom, mom. Nuggets of wisdom.
The vast desert stretched out before them, unraveling like a series of unnatural waves flowing over a rough, red ocean. They weren’t quite out of the border region. Sean judged it would be another three or four dunes before they stopped seeing any grass at all. He couldn’t count how many dunes there were until they reached the shadow monsters roaming around in the desert’s mirage zone, but he supposed they would find it when they got there.
"Well, shall we head Into the horror-filled desert, then?" Sean asked, throwing some optimism into his voice. He was surprised to find the optimism wasn’t forced. He was genuinely excited to see what they might find - thankfully not enough for his body to dampen it.
"Into the horror-filled desert!" Gel cheered, every bit as loud in Sean’s mind as before. "Though I do hope most of those horrors are substantially made up of meat. That would make this whole chased-out-of-our-forest thing much more tolerable."
“Speaking of forest,” Sean began as he headed down the dune towards yet more strange patches of differently colored dirt. They had seen plenty of this once they had gotten to the border region, but it hadn’t been in patches larger than a few paces until the grass had started to vanish. “What’s the deal with the land around here?”
Some were brown as regular dirt. Others were a grey so blanched it was nearly white. Yet more were a moss-green that had seemed to foster small shoots of bright grass. As they approached the desert, more and more of the multi-colored patches of earth became rust red. On a whim, Sean had been simply running through them as if they were checkpoints in a video game.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
He had decided to ask about it because each time Sean had passed over a ‘variant’ patch of earth, there had been a subtle yet distinctly noticeable sensation at the base of his heels. The vibe for most of them had felt… weird. All save the grey one, actually.
“What do you mean?” Gel asked, as if the shifting landscape around them were
“I mean why are the colors changing?” Sean asked, before a flash of insight struck him. “Is this because the mana in the area is changing? Like what Bancroft was doing with his pit, only on a larger scale?”
“Right on all counts.” Gel commented simply. “Run through a few more of those red ones if you don’t mind, I think I’m finally starting to feel my wobble again.”
“Your… ‘wobble’?” Sean asked, quizzically. He swerved towards another of the red patches, though even those were starting to give way to the sand by now.
“Yeah, you know? My wobble. The rhythmic bounce by which I live my life. I don’t know what you bipedal things call it. It’s the feeling you get when everything is just… wobblin’. You know? That feeling. I’m getting that back.”
“Oh, so like, your mojo.”
“I don’t know what that is, but I like how it sounds. We’ll go with that.” Gel seemed satisfied, though the slime couldn’t help but add. “Can one eat a ‘mojo’?”
“One cannot.”
“Ah. That’s too bad. Wobbles are better. You can eat someone’s wobble, you know. It’s delicious.”
Sean was about to comment on that when he finally noticed what was bothering him about the change in landscape. It wasn’t the terrain itself, or even its vegetation (or relative lack thereof, now). It was that the closer they got to the desert, the more Sean could feel that pervasive sense of ambient calm he had felt ever since arriving in this world start to go with it. It had been stronger at certain times, most notably amongst Bancroft’s horde and at the Dry Run cemetery, but now it was starting to vanish entirely.
Which raised another, rather disturbing, question so abruptly that Sean slowed down almost to a complete stop.
“Gel… Can I even survive without death mana around?” Sean gestured at the unending sands of predominantly yellow mixed with swirls of reddish coloring that were now much closer than before. He couldn’t put specific words to it, but the feel of the desert he was getting now was anything but inviting. “What’s going to happen to me if we go out there? I won’t just drop because there’s none around, right? My upkeep costs won’t go… up, will they?”
His amorphous friend was quiet for a long moment before answering. Far longer than Sean cared for.
“You’ll… you should be fine.” Gel responded hesitantly. “As long as we can find things to eat, it won’t matter what kind of ambient mana is around. It’s not like you need a certain concentration of it just to live.”
Relief suppressed Sean’s growing concern, until the slime continued in a curious, almost academic tone. “You… don’t need a certain concentration just to live, do you? Because I’ve heard of some undead who--”
Sean stopped walking, resisting the urge to stare down into his chest at his friend.
“Gel...!” He warned.
“Fine, fine, I’m kidding.” Gel grumbled in his mind, and Sean’s tension eased some. He started walking again. “Mostly. Look, all death creatures are drawn to death mana. That’s just a fact, just like life creatures are drawn to life mana. Everyone and everything out there likes to be around more of what they are, so they’re all – we’re all – attracted to concentrations of the ambient mana mixtures that best represent our inner nature. Make sense?”
Sean supposed it did. It sounded kinda like how you had to take into account the natural environments of different plants when gardening. Or how most animals sought out habitats that they had evolved to succeed in. But he had paid attention in his geography course back in college. There were at least five major biome types back on Earth: ‘aquatic’, ‘grassland’, ‘forest’ ,’desert’, and ‘tundra’. All of which could be broken down into further subgroups that Sean had never memorized because finding the ‘true’ breakdowns ultimately came down to whoever was pushing their thesis paper at the time. At least, that was how it had been back on his campus.
So, knowing all that, and realizing that it was probably about time he answered this likely fundamental question about his new world, Sean asked:
“Just how many types of mana are there?”
“Six.” Gel answered confidently.
“Wait, just six?” Sean had been prepared for a complicated discussion about mana mixtures after Gel’s last statement, or to get some rambling speech. He hadn’t expected just six.
“There’s not like… ‘fire’ or ‘earth’, or elemental types of mana, or something like that?”
“No…” Gel said in the same tone one used when explaining something obvious to a child. “Fire isn’t a type of mana, it’s just fire. Useful for cooking meat and people, but that’s it. You can’t live off of it and as far as I know you can’t eat it either, so it's only good for those two things.”
“How do you know you can’t eat fire? Have you tried?” Sean quipped back, a little put off at Gel’s lecturing tone.
Instead of answering, Gel just went right on with his explanation like an offended professor skipping past being called out. “There’s Life, Order, and Nature, then there’s Death, Chaos, and the Astral. The first three sit at opposite ends of the mana spectrum from the other ones. It’s why the nodes of those two groups aren’t seen together so often on the manasphere, and even less so if they directly oppose.”
“You did try it, didn’t you!” Sean said, barking out a mental laugh. The idea of the ever-hungry slime reaching for a candle flame was too entertaining to pass up. “Wait, did you try it when we got to the campfire? You told me the steaks were hot, I didn’t know you were trying to chew flames!”
“Anyway.” Gel said, barreling past Sean’s continued laughter as the slime tried to move the conversation on. “You probably noticed the different nodes you could pick on the sphere were all different colors, or at least some should have been. You shouldn’t have gotten all black, for example. Those colors represent the types of mana, the mana types give you insight into the nature of the node, you get the idea. It’s all connected.”
Sean had definitely noticed the color scheme matching the different ‘mana aspects’ each node had belonged to in his prompts. Simply pulling the black ones up so often had been enough for him to figure that the black nodes were all ‘death’ mana aspected. Even a non-sentient skeleton might have figured that one out. If he were so inclined, Sean had no doubt he could figure out what the rest of them were supposed to be by pulling up the manasphere again.
That was something he could do later, though. The real revelation had been the limited types, not their existence. He had already deduced that much.
“Alright, so there’s six types of mana.” Sean said, slowing his pace a bit to half-walk, half-climb yet another dune. “And I’m a ‘death’ creature, but I don’t need death mana to survive. Just mana in general. Easy enough.”
“Mhm.”
“Back at Bancroft’s you said more death mana would give me bonuses, though.” Sean pointed out.
“I did. Also, technically as an undead you’re both death and astral. Or at least, you were before we evolved. Technically we’re the same types now but to answer your question: it does if there’s enough of it. The greater the concentration, the stronger you – and every other death creature in the area – will be. It’s why people out here try not to fight things on their home turf.” Gel explained.
“And we are effectively leaving my home turf.” Sean suddenly felt like the desert idea hadn’t been that great. At least tall dark and half-frosted back there will be at a disadvantage as well.
“Sure are.”
“Which means we are going to be weaker out here.”
“You will be, yes.” Gel corrected. “I’ll be every bit as magnificent as I’ve always been.”
“I will be, huh?” Sean felt like that statement was less accurate and more bravado. “Aren’t we the same type– er, types? After the evolution? Or are you saying I am the death half and you–”
Gel prepared himself in response to this question by rattling Sean’s ribs for full effect as he roared out into the desert around them just like he had done back in the clearing. Rapidly reforming a new pair of lungs and mouth to bellow a challenge directly at the rising sun.
“I. Am. CHAOS!!”
Sean chuckled at his friend’s antics, taking care not to slide down the dune’s other side as he did so.
“Also, since you asked, before our evolution I was chaos and astral. Slimes are both. We also tend to lean harder on the chaos side as we go. Most of us, anyway. At least, I’m pretty sure. I think so?” Gel’s voice sounded progressively less sure as the slime went. “I haven’t really met too many others, now that I think about it.”
“You don’t know?”
“Look, this is my first real day out of that pit, Sean. I’m working off the memories of at least a dozen dead settlers, half of whom couldn’t even read. There’s plenty of things I don’t know! I’m doing the best I can here.”
Sensing some legitimate frustration there, Sean reined in his teasing. It was nice to get some more answers about the world. Even if the more he learned, the less he felt like he knew. It was becoming appallingly obvious that he was still only scratching the surface here. Sean couldn’t help but wonder how much out there the slime didn’t actually know that could help them.
Pity there’s no Wickipedia to doomscroll through. That would be obscenely helpful right now.
“Sorry, Gel. I know you’re helping. I’m just… new to all of this. Still trying to get my bearings here. I–” Sean was going to say more, but his pulse sense warned him of a presence on the other side of the next dune. A presence that was currently running towards them both, and if Sean didn’t miss his guess – based on the mapping of veins that he could suddenly see pulsing away – there was only one thing this could be.
Of course it’s a scorpion. Sean thought, raising his bone shield. What is it with this world and giant scorpions?