Chapter Five

Over the next few days my experiments were both a success and a failure. They were a success because ant-souls tasted as good as ever. They were a failure because eating seemed to be the only thing I could do to them so far.

After the sixth ant-soul I’d eaten, I felt I was getting full.

I didn’t know how spirit-stuff worked. As far as I could tell, I was roughly the size of an ant; my spherical body was about as big as an ant’s head, and my tentacles were maybe one and a half, perhaps two centimeters when stretched out, and as thin as Chinese noodles. What this meant was that I’d eaten at least six times my spiritual body mass already. I had no idea where all the food was going. There was no waste leaving my body, I wasn’t even sure if I had a spiritual digestive system. I just absorbed the souls through my tentacles, and … they were gone. Yet I felt full. It didn’t make sense. Where was my stomach? And on that note, where was my Essence pool? Or where was my Mana pool? Was I some bottomless pit? I didn’t think so. I had a feeling that the rules of physics didn’t quite apply when it came to the apparent size of my body. Must be some weird, spacial-dimensional shenanigans at play here, but I wasn’t an expert or a scientist, and my suspicion was mostly based on sci-fi shows I’d watched. Well, regardless of how it worked, I was getting full, I felt it.

I ate my seventh ant-soul and I was no longer getting full. I was full. I suddenly felt bloated, like I had just gobbled down two or three plates of full English at a cheap cafe where the cook firmly believed grease was the basis for all life. I couldn’t eat another soul even if I tried. What to do now?

I closed my imaginary eyes and I focused on myself. The tunnel vanished from my sight as I shut my vision down completely. Feeling my tentacles was more vivid, more substantial an experience than seeing. And they weren’t like they had been before. All five of them were still drawing Essence into them, but Essence flowed through them slower. It was obstructed, and as I willed my non-visual perception to take closer and closer looks, I realised it was some of the consumed spirit stuff that did the obstructing; spirit stuff that was both there and not there.

The broken down souls were an intangible, liquid mass that filled my tentacles as well as my spherical body, and at the same time it didn’t. But I could feel it and I had a much clearer mental picture of what happened to all the soul-ants I’d eaten. They became pure spirit stuff, ready to be used as … as … I wasn’t sure, but my Tentacle Horror instinct came to my aid once again. All the souls I'd eaten were ready to be used as the material for growth.

I. Could. Grow.

Not only I could grow, but my instinct was telling me I could choose whether I wanted said growth to manifest as a growth of my tentacles, or my spherical body. However, my instinct also told me I couldn’t do both; it was either or. Still, I was getting somewhere.

I gave it some thought. I considered growing my tentacles; I believed they’d get longer, maybe thicker, too, but in the end of the day, I didn’t need more reach, not yet, and if the need arose, I could alway eat a few more ants. So, I was left with the option of growing my body, and I did just that.

Based on my previous experience, all I needed to do was to make a conscious decision and will it to happen. And it happened.

It was a strange sensation: I felt a part of my body I couldn’t see. I felt I was stretching, expanding, like a balloon being filled with helium. It happened slowly but steadily, and as my body, grew the accumulated Spirit-Stuff disappeared. Then, it was done. My first growths spurt was finished.

It was time to take stock.

Looking at my visible body, I estimated it grew maybe two millimeters in diameter. I was still tiny, but progress was progress, and I wasn’t in the mood to complain.

I checked on my pools. Both my Essence and my Mana pools had grown. I did a mental before and after comparison, and some quick calculations later I determined that my Essence pool’s capacity changed from 8 to 10, and my Mana Pool from 6 to 7. The rate at which I could fill my Essence Pool remained the same: 1 EP per minute. It still didn’t require me to be consciously involved, and I believed I could increase the rate of collection by growing my tentacles instead of my body. I decided I’d do that next, once I’d eaten my fill of souls again.

My Tentacle Horror instinct was tugging at me, telling me there was something else that had changed, but it was a vague feeling, and no matter how much I meditated and focused, I couldn’t find or figure out what it was. Well, I supposed it could wait.

I tried to will myself to move, but nothing happened. Well, I hadn’t expected much to change in that department, so I wasn’t overly disappointed. I was just happy that I’d grown a bit.

And I wanted to grow again. I didn’t know how many ant souls I’d need to eat this time around, but it was going to be more than seven — not only it made sense, I could also feel it. Luckily, the ants seemed to be in plentiful supply.

It was bit like how Experience Points worked in games: with each new level you’d need more of it to reach the next. So sticking to my previously established gaming analogy, this qualified as a level-up.

Spiritual Tentacle Horror Level 1 to Level 2.

I supposed I could use my growth as a basis for levels, although I wasn’t sure how consistent it was going to be. But, for the lack of any other ideas, I just went with the idea. The amount I’d needed to eat to grow was now Experience Points, or EXP, and each time I grew would represent a new level.

I smiled mentally: setting myself up as a game character was … ridiculous. It really was. But I had reasonable excuses and justifications.

Firstly, not being able to move resulted in way too much time on my tentacles. Even though this new world and my new state of existence weren’t a game, thinking about it in those terms was fun, and fun had the potential to keep me off the path that led to boredom, despair and possibly insanity. Well, I knew people back home who’d probably argue I was already a lunatic thinking about points and levels in my situation, but in the end of day, they weren’t here. I was.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Secondly, quantifying and keeping track of my resources was something I considered important, and my resources weren’t conventional now, were they? What made more sense and what sounded better: “I had two-hundred grams of Essence and half a liter of magic stuff in my spiritual storage organs” or “I had 9 EP and 7 MP”.

With that settled, and successfully having reached Level 2, I considered my next move. My next experiment.

***

My Tentacle Horror instinct kept trying to tell me something, and it bothered me that I didn’t know what it was. There was something else that was new, something that I could do. It was right there in front of me, but … it wasn’t. This was annoying, like a tune stuck in your head, knowing that you knew what song it was, but you just couldn’t recall it, and the more you tried the further away it got from you.

So the best thing to do was to not think about it.

I didn’t count the ants any more; I just watched them as they crawled by. I wasn’t sure how many ants were in an average colony, but I guessed they must have numbered in the thousands. The fact that they kept coming and coming seemed to support the idea. I watched them for half a day at least and I almost forgot all about that annoying tune stuck in my head when the answer just jumped out at me. The song I was looking for was … Essence.

And it made sense. I recalled how the accumulated spirit-stuff from the ants obstructed the flow of Essence as my tentacles gathered it. It meant Essence was capable of interacting with the Spirit-Stuff. My tentacles were capable of gathering it, my Essence pool was capable of containing it: all interactions. And the feeling I got from all this was that I could probably use Essence for something, something other than making Mana and paying a tithe to Wensah.

Essence wasn’t responsive like Mana. As far as I could tell it was largely inert. My tentacles gathered it and moved it into the pool. When I wanted Mana, the Essence Pool did the hard work of pouring it over to the Mana-Pool. And Wensah just sucked her dues out of the Essence Pool as if through a straw. Essence really didn’t do much on its own and it certainly didn’t respond to my will like my own body or Mana did.

So the consumed, broken down souls - the Spirit Stuff - was my EXP; the fuel for my growth and my levels.

Mana was the magic stuff that let me interact with the physical world around me and do things.

Essence was … what was Essence?

It was time to find out.

The only thing I could think to try was to see how an ant-soul would react if I splashed some Essence on it. If I could gather it and store it, surely I could also eject some of it from my body.

I willed my Essence pool to push one EP’s worth of the stuff back out into my body, then I willed one of my tentacles to … well, suck it into itself and push it to the tip. It worked: the tentacle stopped collecting Essence from the air and moved the inert EP I’d taken out of the pool all the way to its tip.

I didn’t have to wait long; my tunnel was a popular hiking route for the critters, and not a minute went by without at least one or two ants coming and going.

The ant came — it must have been the thousandth I’d seen. I flung my tentacle at it and I ejected the Essence. The Essence left, making it to the outside. Other than that, nothing else happened. The ant crawled past me, and I just hovered there, looking at the stuff stuck to tip of my tentacle on the outside. Huh. Why did I even expect anything else? Mana had done the same at first, hadn’t it? It seemed I couldn’t re-absorb it, I couldn’t even shake it off, no matter how much I flailed the tentacle around. Oh damn! What now?

It took a minute for the next ant to show up, and by that time I was throughly frustrated with that single EP stuck to my tentacle. This was annoying. It was akin to the kind of weirdness when you put a jacket on, your sweater’s sleeves rolling up to your elbows when sliding your arms through the jacket’s sleeves. It was the sort of thing that had no right or reason to be as annoying as it was.

The ant approached, and I was determined to wipe the Essence off my tentacle onto its soul. I wasn’t sure how that would work, but I hoped Essence would prefer to stick to the ant rather than me.

I brushed my tentacle against the critter as it reached me.

The ant stopped and shuddered. I stopped and shuddered. Something happened, I felt it. I tried to pull my tentacle away from the insect, but I couldn’t. It stuck to the ant’s soul. For a moment I panicked, not knowing what was happening. My tentacle, instead of coming away, sunk into the ant-soul. Not deep, just a little bit. Then my metaphorical jaw dropped.

The Essence, that single EP’s worth of Essence, moved. That inert stuff I’d thought was never going to do anything on its own, started doing something. It changed and it morphed. It became hundreds of long threads, or filaments, or wiring, so thin I could barely sense them. But I did sense them; they perforated the tip of my tentacle, too, the part that I’d lodged into the ant soul, and they spread inside my body the same way they spread inside the soul of the ant. In a second, I sensed a hundred microscopic Essence-wires running through every part of the ant-soul. And I could feel, I could hear what went on inside it.

Well, it wasn’t much. I didn’t think it was thoughts, it was more like an instinct driven imperative. If I had to sum it up in one word, that word was: work.

Work! Work! Work!

That was all that that drove the ant. It wasn’t much of a surprise — there was a reason ants had a reputation for being hard workers, and it seemed that reputation held up even in this world.

But the Essence! It felt like I’d just discovered that Essence was nothing less than the nectar of the gods. In reality, it was more a combination of spiritual glue and data cables. I couldn’t withdraw my tentacle; it was stuck to the ant-soul as if Essence had glued, or soldered it onto it. And the connection it had created between me and the soul, that was something else. I basked in the sensation. It was strange, it was unique, it was comforting.

I wasn’t sure how the ant experienced this new state of being connected, but it didn’t move for long seconds. Then, out of a sudden it decided there was nothing out of the ordinary happening, and it went on its way, following its ant instinct, pushing it to work and work.

And the ant dragged me with it.