One day, as I was gathering magic to grow bigger and playing around with all the atoms in me and trying to make gold —if only I could remember how many protons gold was supposed to have— I realized that I was blind. I could literally see every single photon within my space, knew where every single quark around me was, but even though I was getting more used to seeing the world around me in this odd manner, I didn't really understand what I was seeing. I had thought I was, but hundreds of days had gone by, and only now did I realize that I could tell what atoms were part of what molecules.
Having made that realization, I started tediously going through masses of molecules, near instantaneously counting how many protons each atom had. There was plenty of oxygen and nitrogen around me, from which I had long ago realized that it meant I was probably in an atmosphere similar to Earth's. Now though, I could make out whether the carbon around me was part of long molecule chains, or small ones. In other words, I could find out of there was any life in my space.
It took just a day for me to regret my discovery, since I soon realized I was full of life. Everywhere in me there were lots of organic molecules, and now that I found them, I became aware of them. I could feel the shapes they formed, I could feel every single virus and cell crawl in my space, and now I really wanted to give myself a thorough wash.
No matter how many I kept throwing away, more just kept coming back. I hadn't wanted to, but soon enough I started slaughtering them with my magic. I would take entire cell clusters, and squeeze them together till they popped, or rip thousands upon thousands of them at once. Then I would do the same to their organelles, and then tear all the molecules that had once been parts of life apart. I was now full of dead life, but it was better than feeling everything in me squirm.
It was once I became used to continuously slaughtering cells that I calmed down, and realized that I had grown a lot. Much faster than normal, and in just the last hour, I had grown by the same amount that had previously taken me days. I stopped killing the cells for a moment, and looked at the new cells entering my space closely. They had magic in them, and seemingly much of it. The magic from all the cells that died in my space had become mine, and I had grown as a consequence.
I stopped doing anything, releasing my concentration from gathering magic to a fine point in my center, I concentrated on thinking. I wanted to get bigger. I wanted to be large enough to find if there was any intelligent life where I was, whether there were others like me or maybe even people. The cells seemed to be a fast way to do that, but I felt like there should be a more efficient way to do so than just slaughtering them.
Focusing on a single cell, I ripped a hole in it. Some of its organelles flowed out from it, along with a sliver of magic, before it sealed the breach in its membrane. Then as the hours passed, as it gathered food and grew, it took some of my magic in it. Then it split, and the now two cells gathered nutrients and some of my magic, before both of them split. I killed the cells before they could steal any more of my magic.
Though its life had ended short, its sacrifice had given me a brilliant idea. Killing the cells in me just caused me to get magic stolen from me back. But if I managed to get and kill cells from outside my space, I would profit. I could even move my entire space from one place to another, or make some cell bait to make sure that I would get a continuous feed of new magic.
It turned out that moving my entire space would squash all the cells just outside my space, as the matter in my space collided with them and their magic. It meant that moving wasn't exactly profitable, so I decided to go with my cell bait idea instead.
It didn't take long to find out what the cells ate, so it was relatively simple to move all the cell food to the edge of my space, and use the dead matter in me to make more nutrients. Soon enough, more cells started entering my space from around me, and I started growing really fast.
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In only a few days, I had grown twice my size. Vacuuming the magic to me had made me grow maybe a grain or two of sand wider each day. Now I was growing a thousand times faster. It hadn't taken long before I wasn't just consuming cells, but also multicellular organisms. I had noticed a few large and small cell clusters that seemed to move in unison. With a quick look, I had realized they probably were tardigrades and other such life. I found some worms, insects, spiders and seeds in what I could only imagine was the dirt in my lower half.
It seemed that the larger organisms had their own magic apart from the individual cells they were composed of, and as such they gave me even more magic on average than the previous cells, but there were also much fewer of them. I figured out that the smart thing to do was to cut off a leg or something similar, take the magic from that and then throw the insect out from my space. One day, the insect would then find my bait again, but after it had already healed some, and gathered more magic.
Then I found my first bird. It was a small songbird looking for a few of my insects that it could eat. Upon sensing it, I could feel its magic. It seemed that the general rule was, the larger the life was, the more dense its magic was, seeing as the bird was absolutely full of it.
Birds were a bit more complicated than insects. I couldn't just take off a limb, seeing as birds really needed them, and losing one was as good as a death sentence. I decided to kill the bird that had landed in my space. It had a lot of magic that could be very useful, and a new bird would land in the same space another day. But when I tried to shred its brain to dust, nothing happened. My magic couldn't get inside the bird and do its stuff, instead the bird somehow resisted it. It even quickly flew out of my space immediately there after.
A few days later when a second, or maybe the same bird landed in my space, I tried something different. I gathered my magic around the bird, covering every single inch of it, and squeezed. The bird still managed to shrug off my attack with its own magic pushing against mine, before it attempted to escape.
Birds were a menace, and I couldn't just let it eat my insects before flying away. Thinking quickly, I grabbed a chunk of dirt, and threw it towards the monster. It was soft dirt, and I clearly didn't throw it fast enough as the birds feathers absorbed the impact. I needed to figure out how to kill the bird, or maybe trap it and steal its magic without killing it.
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Killing the bird turned out to be relatively easy, and so did stealing its magic. All I needed was a sharp bit of stone aimed right at the birds head. Its magic seemed to be able to only defend against other magic, and thus couldn't stop my sharp stone needle. After I had successfully done that, I concentrated on figuring out a way to steal its magic. After multiple experiments on my various bugs and cells, I figured out that if I formed a magic vacuum around the bird, or all other life, it naturally lost some of its magic from breathing, shedding its feathers and from defecating. If I condensed my magic around it, then it would steal some of my magic as it breathed and ate.
Thus to take magic from the bird, all I needed to do was let it simply live in my space while vacuuming its magic away, and then it'd eventually leave and come back with new magic. It was simple, but efficient. As the weeks passed by, the amount of birds that came to my feeding place grew, until eventually I had dozens of birds coming in and outs feeding me with their magic.
After the bird count had increased, more various animals started to come for a visit. I would shape the matter around me to be edible for them, and so more animals came in. Then even predators started entering my space, which was when I found out that animals lost a lot of magic through their blood. Gaining magic that way was faster than letting the animals just live in my space. The bleeding animal would flee the area after having lost vast amounts of its magic, and come back once it was healed and coincidentally, full of magic.
I started coming up with ideas after that. I had grown to about the size of a house, probably in a forest clearing, seeing as there were no trees in my area, but it was full of typical forest animals like squirrels. I could make my space to a relatively comfortable space to live, and the center of it could be full of good animal food, but also be dangerous to the animals. It could be a small space with a few traps, where animals could risk getting more food at the chance of pain and death.
I potentially might get magic quickly and efficiently via the animals willingly risking their lives, while at the same time I could get magic by giving them comfortable lives. It was a win win situation where I could win twice over, and there was no way I'd not try it.