"I swear I'm just a figurehead at this point," I said to myself, plopping onto my vine bed. The whole thing groaned as my considerable weight settled into it, but Sam's vine weaves had only gotten better with time.
The hour I'd promised Sharon ticked by silently in the back of my head. Nevertheless, I took a solid five minutes to let my trains of thought arrive at their stations. There were too many worries, threats and simply general concerns muddying my mind for me to feel comfortable attempting what I needed to. Because I was going to attempt this, even if I fully well knew how much it was going to suck.
"You ready?" I said, cracking an eye and locking it on the axe hammer resting against the side of the bed. The haft was resting against my forearm, so I got a shark grin from the mole-like entity hanging out in my mind. Fievil already knew what I planned to do.
"Deep breath, Ron. It's just every muscle in your body trying to shred at the same time," I said casually. My fist closed around Fievil and I started to dump mana into the Shard Weapon before I could hesitate. At the same time, I fell into myself.
The comfortable light of my spell chains materialized with the near-silent hiss of falling sand. Things hadn't changed too too much since the last time I'd dived into myself in the days after the Hog Parade. The steady rumble of Quake Osseum was there, center stage, as my other unassimilated Traits put out their harmony. I took a moment to just enjoy the orchestral mix of sounds and smile at the stone paved paths that split off from the center room of my soul. With an effort of will, I manifested the Trait portion of my Status.
Traits:
Limestone Skin (74%) > (87 [7]%)
Quake Osseum (Tremor Frame)
Slurry Ichor (8%)
Harmonic Sinew (31%)
"Just as close as I remembered," I mumbled, expanding my senses out to the energy that had been eddying in my central room.
Thankfully, the metaphysical distance between my center and the Paradigm was short with my previous efforts of paving the path. The warbling avatar of my body was still as freaky as the first time, missing eyes and internal organs as it was, but the information that manifested before it brought a grin to my face.
"So close," I said, shoving the Pith right into the avatar and watching as striated paths formed along the surface of the skin suit before fading away. The flickering number of the Sublimation Threshold spiked up, reaching all the way to 99% before falling to 75%. Not that the process was any clearer than before, but the numbers made a bit more sense than they had before. Unassimilated potential, clear as day, building to a crescendo until I finally breach the threshold.
If my plan worked, then those breaches were closer than anyone could expect.
"No biggie, just go fishing with your spell chains while the mana you've got left disappears at the same time," I said to myself, my voice warping oddly in the presence of Limestone Skin's Paradigm.
I didn't dare leave the Trait's room, lest I become unable to return. This was all highly experimental, even if I knew that conceptually it had already worked. Now I was just trying to force the issue when not in an adrenaline fueled fog. To say it was worse would be an understatement.
It wasn't clear if it was a result of feeding the mana to Fievil rather than a Skill, or if it was because I was within my soul rather than in reality, or even because it was a trickle rather than a deluge of a spell chain trigger, but regardless of the reason the attempt sucked. Every part of my body clenched internally, and then subsequently as if it were in a vice. Unprocessed mana from what I assumed was the atmosphere pushed against my skin and soul trying to reach the outer reaches where Dreg accumulated. I got the distinct pleasure of feeling what the old world coffee strainers did, eeking out mud-brown essence from the mana in the atmosphere. At the last moment, Fievil turned the flow backwards and released his Arcane Sink to encompass me.
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The pressure lessened, not immensely but enough for me to call it a day. I did notice a final spurt of Dreg get pulled in with the lessened pressure before I got ejected from my soul.
"Damn it," I ground out, twitching on the bed as my muscles flexed out of my control. The Arcane Sink did seem to be soothing the backlash, but not enough to make it a relaxing experience. The pain made it much too difficult to concentrate and return to my soul, so I embraced the suck. After the initial minute of exiting my soul Fievil had deactivated the Arcane Sink, presumably to conserve some of his internal reservoir, and the mole manifestation in my mind resorted to gentle pokes with its claws. It was twenty minutes into this process that I finally felt ready to engage with something other than the phrase 'ow'.
Surprisingly, once I was able to focus the transition into my soul was smoother than before. Additionally, I ended up in Limestone Skin's room immediately instead of at the lobby like all the other times. Had I not been on a time crunch, I would have explored that little change more but I immediately focused my attention up to the 'sky'. Roaming around were dozens of hair thin rivulets of brown light given form. The clearest sign of success, even at the cost of significant discomfort.
"One drop at a time," I said, wincing as I started tapping on my barely recovered mana to fish into the liminal space of my soul. Surprising me once again, was that the process of breaching from the 'Banked' region into the 'Accumulated' region felt just a tad easier. The chaotic mess that was the Accumulation region remained, but I was able to steer my 'bucket' with a firmer hand. I reeled in the Dreg, relishing in the static hiss as it tried to escape my hold only to be chucked at Limestone Skin's avatar. Since I'd completed the pull without having to walk it all the way from the lobby of my soul, I hadn't even needed to repair any damage the Dreg did since it was only within briefly.
There was a nauseating feeling when most of what I'd reeled in splashed off the avatar, and immediately zipped right into the sky of the whitespace. Normally when someone takes a heavy weight off your chest you feel lighter, except when said weight is in your soul then apparently things don't work quite the same way. So, I found myself dry heaving back in reality, twitching like a snail getting a salt bath just because I didn't have the presence of mind --or patience-- to walk a hundred feet to the Entity literally designed to purge Dreg from a body.
Boy am I glad Daniela won't know about this one, I thought to myself, grimacing as I wobbled to my feet. Somehow, Fievil was right there in my hand to help me up even if I was sure I'd lost my grip on the axe-hammer. Maybe this whole attempt hit me harder than I thought.
"Ron?" Jolene's voice came from the other side of the door. "You alright in there? We are getting ready to head out but your time is almost up for meeting the Shaman. You aren't answering your comm-plant again."
"Ah, shit," I grumbled, straightening my back and letting out a satisfied sigh when it cracked. Funnily enough, that progressed Limestone Skin's assimilation. With that double whammy of satisfaction, the grin on my face wasn't totally forced when I walked out. Of course, Jolene was immediately suspicious so I shuffled sideways when she didn't move out of the way. She kept her green eyes locked on mine, eyebrow raised, the whole way until I got to Blobby.
"Hey, bud, come on I need a ride," I whispered, turning back to Jolene and giving her a sheepish smile. She'd crossed her arms. I prodded the slime faster. Blobby looked to be in no rush as the slime turned over the last bits of skeleton it had eaten by grinding it with his cores like some magical version of a gastrolith. Regardless of how damn cool --and horrifying-- that particular adaptation was, it was T-minus zero to questions about unnecessary risks I didn't feel like answering. "You can go full speed with the saddle again, if there isn't a lot of traffic."
Instantly, Blobby turned into an industrial grinder. The last of the bones turned into dust, and then into more slime, before the gelatinous creature rolled across the room to a hollow near the base of Hec's tree. Within seconds, Blobby had equipped and linked the slime saddle and was prodding my leg for us to go. It had even gone so far as to separate a Blobite just to hold the dang door!
So, before I got much of a chance to do anything, I was once again holding on for dear life to the horn of the saddle. Blobby had the decency to slow down enough to form handlebars for me before prodding me in the leg. "Yeah yeah, here you go."
Mana flowed out and into the Metier Crystal set in the saddle, flaring the light coming from the leather, before Blobby started to rotate at frankly unsafe speeds; the slime didn't care. Within seconds, I was down to a tenth of my mana pool again and the Taste of Old was coming into view. I blinked, barely realizing I'd formed
"Let's get inside before we get yelled at by more than Sharon, eh, Blobster?" The slime had the audacity to give me a thumbs up as the bodyguard for the Zebelos establishment let us in without question.