Pikawon wasn’t nearly as excited as Dyani was. But he had other priorities, like not dying.
“Yeah, yeah, storybook wonder, amazing adventures, and all that. But, do you think the heroic princess could work on her veil before she goes off to slay a dragon?”
Dyani stuck her tongue out at him, but still closed her eyes and concentrated on concealing her spirit. There were only a dozen or so formless still interested in them, as her incomplete veil reduced the range at which her spirit could be detected, but their tirelessness and limitless regeneration meant they were still a problem.
Dyani sat down, back against the inside of the massive stump as a perfect veil continued to elude her. No amount of focus could compensate for the energy leaking from the hairline cracks in her spirit, which were concentrated within her burned arm and the broken skill slot within her chest. That slot had been cracked from overcharging Feverchill Bloom, and further damaged when she used it to channel unknown energy from deep in her spirit in an effort to stabilize the mana node.
That effort hadn’t been entirely futile. She’d stopped the node from sucking up everything in sight for a few seconds, but she’d been injured herself in the process when the node decided to drain more energy than she could give.
As for what that mysterious energy was, Dyani still didn’t know. She didn’t realize she’d said any of that aloud until she got a response.
“Order. It’s what the formless are seeking.” Curious said.
Dyani cracked open an eye, meeting their pale yellow, pupil-less gaze.
“Excuse me.”
“Did you not ask about this energy?” They extended a single tendril, hooking it through the air and gathering enough of the invisible energy that it became visible as a rainbow haze.
“You know what it is?”
“Yes. It’s order. I just said that.”
“Curious, there’s such a thing as a rhetorical question,” Pikawon called down from his position standing on the edge of the stump, “You don’t have to answer them.”
“Questions you…don’t answer?” Curious hummed as they processed this new piece of information. This time the sound had a high pitched, amused quality.
Dyani did some information processing of her own. She wracked her brain and even queried her interface’s newest function.
* Archive (Rare):
* Level: 1 (0%)
* Type: Interface Function
* Description:
* Store and retrieve data on creatures, objects, substances, or locations.
* Rapidly absorb data from mundane and magical sources.
* Search stored data by word, concept, or association.
* Increased data capacity (Scales with the mind attribute).
* Limited ability to extrapolate new data using stored data.
Her archive didn’t have any records on a mystic energy called order, and when she tried identifying the hazy energy she didn’t get any useful information.
* Unknown Energy (Unknown Rarity)
* Level: 2
* Type: Unknown
* Description: Unknown spiritual energy.
* Closest Match: Mana (14% Match)
“Pikawon, have you ever heard of a magical energy called order?”
“Is this really more important than making a proper veil?” he replied as he kicked a blobby formless off the edge of the stump to hit the ground with a satisfying splat.
“Apparently.” If this was what the formless were attracted to, she needed to veil it, but she had no idea how to go about that. Normal veils just concealed mana.
“Never heard of it. Do you mean order affinity mana, as in, the opposite of chaos? I haven’t heard of that, but there’s tons of sub-affinity mana types, so it could exist.”
She shook her head, though he couldn’t see it from his position.
Left without a simple answer, Dyani reached out with her spiritual senses. It required parting her veil, which wasn’t ideal in these circumstances, but if she had any hope of concealing this energy, she needed a basic understanding of it.
It felt…strange, somehow incomplete. In some ways it reminded her of stamina more than mana, like the moment before moving your body, when all your muscles were tense and ready to explode with motion. But it was clearly more closely related to the spirit than the body, and since it was leaking out the cracks in her spirit, like blood from a wound.
“Dyani?!” Pikawon said, “We’ve got more formless incoming.”
She snapped her incomplete veil back into place, but the damage was done. The momentary lapse had attracted several nearby formless, which had moved in close enough to still sense her, even with her veil.
“Curious, we need to get out of here.”
The spirit nodded, but didn’t say anything, or even hum in consideration. Dyani realized her mistake, huffed out in frustration.
“Curious, where is someone we can get within a few minutes where we will be safe?”
It turned out that Curious could be quite helpful, if you knew how to ask the right questions.
They lead the pair out of the stump and to a location that would supposedly keep them hidden from any formless.They traveled through the surprisingly dense underbrush, over crunching mulch. In keeping with the decay subdomain, most of it was dead and desiccated plantlife.
The only things that appeared to be flourishing were unsettling hybrids between rotting flesh and living plants. They passed a waist-high gnarled tree with bark like leathery skin and pale, pink leaves, a number of severed hands rising up from the ground like limbs of undead who’d been raised just long enough to extend them before falling back into death, and a bush that grew eyeballs like berries.
Since they were able to walk faster than the formless could move at top speed, they easily escaped the initial group of technicolor blobs. However, their route brought them into proximity to even more of them.
The odd thing was, the formless seemed to come into being just to harass them, bubbling up from the ground like spring water or coelesed from the air like breath on a cold day.
And while they were weak, slow, and easy enough to avoid on their own, it was only a matter of time before one got lucky.
A yellow and purple formless dropped down from the crooked branches of a tree that was more parasitic fungus than base wood, falling directly onto Dyani’s injured arm.
She’d expected it to be slimy and cold, but the creature felt more like incredibly dense, warm mist. Dyani tried to shake it off, but the formless tightened its grip on her arm, compressing its body.
She drew the knife on her belt and scraped against the formless, careful not to slice herself. The first stroke cut through easily, but the fluid matter just reformed afterward. The formless continued to condense, its color shifting from yellow and purple to translucent blue. The next stroke carved a bit of the suddenly solid surface away, which drifted down the ground and disappeared. The third stroke did little more than scratch the surface.
“What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?” Dyani repeated in a panic, as the knife became completely useless.
The formless wasn’t hurting her, at least not as far as she could tell, but having an alien creature cemented to your arm like a barnacle was still highly distressing.
Curious lifted twin tendrils like a raised hand.
“The arm is already damaged. Do you still require it?”
That line of thinking didn’t do anything to calm her down.
“We aren’t cutting off her arm.” Pikawon glared over at the spirit before turning his attention to her arm.. He scratched the formless experimentally, but his claws weren’t any more effective than her knife. “Is it hurting you?”
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Dyani shook her head and tried to get her emotions under control.
“It feels a bit tingly, but it doesn’t hurt. Curious, what is it doing?”
“Hmmmm, digesting.”
Her anxiety level jumped higher than ever.
“It’s eating my arm!?” She looked around in a panic, looking for the largest, most durable object she could, which turned out to be a craggy outcropping of red stone. Running over, she began bashing the solidified formless against the rock in a desperate attempt to shatter it.
The rock proved weaker than expected, closer to a mass of pebbles bound together with mold and fungus than solid stone. She smashed chunks out of it easily, but the only change to the creature on her arm was a pattina of rust-colored mucus.
Pikawon and Curious eventually convinced her to continue their journey, during which they were assaulted with significantly less formless than before.
The spirit’s safe location turned out to be a literal hole in the ground. It cut through a curve of smooth white stone that barely breached the earth. They entered, Curious casually, Pikawon cautiously, and Dyani fearfully.
The first sight to greet them was a familiar one.
It was a sphere of toxic, green energy, the size of a human head. It filled the rounded cavern with flickering, chartreuse light that gave the feel the air of a dark mage’s workshop.
* Untethered Mana Node (Common):
* Level: 2
* Affinity: Decay
* Description: A stable, untethered mana node with a decay affinity.
Unlike the mana node they’d encountered previously, this one wasn’t spilling out buckets of chaotic mana. If it had been, they would’ve sensed it before they saw it, veil or not. Instead, this node drew in a continuous stream of ambient mana from all directions.
Dyani tried once again to shatter the creature on her arm, this time against the sturdier white walls of the cave, while Pikawon and Curious talked.
“You brought us to a mana node? We didn’t exactly have the best luck last time we encountered one of these.”
“We will most likely be safe here.”
“Most likely?” Pikawon asked suspiciously.
“There are greater dangers than formless in this subdomain.”
“Like what?”
Before the spirit could answer, Dyani interrupted.
“Incoming formless.”
All eyes turned to the entrance, where an opalescent blob rolled through the entrance in the ceiling, with none of the caution the three of them had used to climb down, and splattered like a vermillion egg.
“I thought you said they couldn’t get in here,” Pikawon hissed, assuming a combat stance. Dyani drew her knife.
“Wait,” Curious said, extending tendrils to block Pikawon from advancing. Dyani was too far away for him to do the same to her, but he still pointed some in her direction.
Dyani listened, as she was already hesitant about getting another one of those things stuck to her.
Pikawon didn’t.
He strode forward, pushing Curious’s tendril’s aside. The formless collected itself, but instead of latching on to either of the humans and solidifying, it leaned towards the mana node. Its body lifted off the ground, carried on the sucking stream of ambient mana before dissolving into glittering smoke that was sucked away.
“Huh,” Pikawon said eloquently.
“I think humans must be bad at listening. I said you would be safe here, not that the formless could not enter.”
“What happened to it? Is it dead,” Pikawon said, “Or destroyed, disintegrated, whatever word you want to use for killing something that isn’t dead.”
“No, it is alive now. The process was very interesting to watch. We should stay here to watch a few more be converted.”
“Alive now?” Pikawons’ brow furrowed. Before he could ask about that, Dyani interrupted.
“Could we deal with this thing first?”
The formless had gone from translucent blue to cloudy blue. As for her, she was unsteady on her feet, sweet beading at her forehead. Whatever the creature was doing, it was starting to take its toll. She lost her balance, but Pikawon caught her before she hit the ground and laid her on her back.
“My knight in shining armor.” There was a spark of mischief in her eyes, which was doing a poor job at hiding her fear and uncertainty.
“There’s an alien slug suckling on your spirit. Still think this is a grand adventure?”
Dyani grimaced, and Pikawon backpedaled.
“But we’ll get it off of you with no problem. Right, Curious?” He looked over at the spirit.
“There are several methods of possible extraction,” The spirit confirmed, nodding. When it didn’t elaborate, Dyani cleared her throat.
“Such as?” she asked, knocking the formless against the ground. She knew it wouldn’t
“Yes, of course, I can explain. Do many humans ask yes or no questions while desiring additional information?”
Dyani considered how to explain implied questions, but at the moment she had higher priorities than explaining the nuances of human communication.
“Later, Curious. What is this thing doing to me?” She waved her arm.
Curious reached out their tendrils and gently laid her arm back down. It poked and prodded the formless, which was growing more opaque by the minute.
“The formless are attracted to your leaking order. This one is feeding on it. It has entered its chrysalis state to begin evolution.”
“What happens if she runs out of order? Is it like mana, does it just come back, or…?”
You could survive without any of your standard three resources, mana, stamina, or health, at least for a bit. Without mana, you’d have a killer headache and be unable to do any magic. Without stamina, moving even a finger would be a monumental task, but doable. Health was the worst to be without, but as long as you didn’t have any mortal wounds, you could survive until it regenerated.
Curious squirmed, every tendril wiggling independently. It was nauseating.
“Curious?” Dyani asked suspiciously.
Curious whined, then slumped, mask drooping like a wilted flower. He said something, but it was too soft to make out.
“Spit it out,” Pikawon said.
“I don’t know,” Curious said in a rush, as if the words were painful to speak.
“You don’t know? That’s it?” That was…not as bad as Dyani had expected. With how reticent they’d been, she’d been worried she was about to die. Of course, she still might be, but uncertain death was better than the certain variety. Curious wriggled in discomfort.
“Forget that. Forget everything,” Pikawon said, slicing his hand through the air. Curious’s uncomfortable wiggling increased. “We need to get it off. How do we do that?”
Curious hummed as they gathered their undulating mass, along with their thoughts.
“I thought it possible the mana node would absorb the formless, but it did not. And the evolution chrysalis cannot be physically shattered without great strength. The fastest method would be to satisfy the formless’s hunger, if Dyani has sufficient order to feed it. When it is satisfied, the chrysalis will break.
“Alternatively, if Dyani can prevent further order leakage with a veil or protective ability, the chrysalis will break on its own in approximately 6 cycles.”
“How long is a cycle?” Pikawon asked, “An hour, a day, a year?”
“I am not familiar with those periods of time. What are they-? No,” Curious cut off their question, “Later, later.” They hummed for a few seconds. “You both awoke slightly less than a tenth of a cycle ago.”
It’d been a couple hours. Two times ten was twenty, so a bit more than twenty hours.
“About a day,” she said, “So I can either keep up a veil to keep the order in my for six straight days, something I haven’t been able to do at all yet, or I can feed it.” It didn’t take a genius to see which plan had the greatest chance of succeeding. “Guess I’m stuffing this thing until it pops.
“I don’t like it,” Pikawon said.
“Hey,” she said. She waited until Pikawon looked at her before continuing. “We haven’t finished our grand adventure yet. I’ll be fine. We didn’t even know order was a thing until a couple hours ago. How important could it be?”
What followed was a tense quarter hour or so of feeling out the order leakage in her spirit, during which time she got a better feel for the nature of the energy.
Stamina was a warm, thrumming energy that loved to move. Health was fluid, gentle, and vibrant, like blood. Mana had a variety of attributes, depending on its affinity, but no matter what its exact alignment, it always carried the impression of chaos tempered with human will, ready to reshape reality in its image.
She’d compared order to stamina earlier, specifically the feeling she got when her muscles were tensed and ready to move, but that was where the similarity ended.
It flowed like a gas rather than a fluid, not appearing to do much of anything, but carrying the sense of powerful potentiality, like it could change at any moment. It was so subtle that she would never have noticed it if a collapsing mana node hadn’t specifically tried to drain it from her, and damaged whatever part of her spirit usually kept it contained.
Dyani would’ve loved to shove it into a skill to see what she could do with it, but she didn’t have the mana or time.
The order was being drawn up from the conduit she’d formed from the damaged skill slot that had previously held Feverchill Bloom, pooling in the skill slot, and continually leaking through its cracks into her entire spirit, then out of the spiritual cracks around her chest and arm.
The formless suckling on her arm was drawing in a continual stream, but most of the leaking order was being wasted, simply dissipating into the air. Dyani tried to seal her spiritual cracks, hoping that her level 2 talent, which increased her ability with personal spiritual manipulation, could aid in healing or repair.
Maybe if she understood her spirit and its natural healing process better, she could’ve accomplished something, but to date she’d focused all her spiritual manipulation on making skills. The best she could manage was temporarily holding a handful of the cracks closed, but there was no way she could split her attention well enough to close them all.
What she could do is focus the problem in a specific direction. Directing the leaking order to a single exit point was relatively easy, and was helped along by the formless’s gentle pull on the energy.
Before she committed, she felt out how much order she had. It was more nebulous than mana, stamina, or health. If she had a single internal pool, she couldn’t feel it. Instead, it felt like order flowed through the background of her entire spirit.
Dyani was sure she had less than she usually did, as she did feel lightheaded and out of sorts, but it wasn’t yet at levels where she was overly concerned.
She started by pushing all the leaking order to the formless, putting everything that was being wasted to better use without increasing the total drain. The result wasn’t dramatic. The formless’s blue chrysalis had already been shifting from translucent to opaque. The process just sped up by a couple degrees.
“That is good.” Curious nodded excitedly. “At this rate, the evolution will only take three and a quarter cycles.”
“Not good enough,” Dyani said, “I can go faster.”