Chapter Nine

The mouse went about its own business, scurrying from cover to cover, eating whatever edible things it found, dragging me along. I didn’t pay any mind to it. My attention was on Jack’s Room.

I observed the room, and Jack’s body in it, but not in a way I could call visual on any level. I felt it. I knew it. I knew it like I knew how much Essence or Mana was in the pools.

I’d killed Jack. The poor thing. He was the first and the closest to what I could almost call a companion in this world. Granted, he was an ant… but five days! Hell. I’d been here five days and just when I thought things were getting better, I killed the one creature I didn’t want to kill. What was Wensah thinking? Putting my soul into this monster of a spirit? Was this how things were going to be? Killing everything I touched? Just what the hell was Wensah thinking?

‘I’m so sorry, little buddy,’ I murmured, my voice the same as before, distant, hollow, ghostly.

If someone had told me a week ago I’d be a tentacle spirit, grieving over an ant no less, I would have laughed. Now, I was on the verge of shedding invisible tears. And it wasn’t just Jack. This whole situation finally sunk in, and I was grieving and mourning my old life. I was grieving and mourning all the souls I’d eaten, and all the souls I was inevitably going to eat.

My new life sucked.

I had to calm down. Being sad and angry didn’t help. Not me, not Jack. Nothing could help Jack now. But even in his death he helped me. He had helped me learn more about my new self and he'd helped me build a room, a room in which I could store physical, material objects. Because that’s exactly what Jack’s Room did.

Thank you, Jack,’ I said. ‘You’re the best ant that ever was. And I won’t forget you.’

***

I let the bat-faced mouse do whatever it wanted to do, which mostly revolved around food and the occasional stray thought of reproduction whenever another mouse — presumably of the opposite sex — came into proximity. At the moment, I didn’t care for the mouse and its needs and I didn’t care for the night-time scenery of the field either. I focused on Jack’s Room.

My Tentacle Horror instinct was more than adept at guiding me to do things. It made Jack’s Room possible. It was almost as if I was a kindergartener, learning to draw letters and numbers, and the teacher was holding my hand to help me guide my pencil on the paper. Unfortunately, this particular teacher was also rather skimpy on the details and explanations as to what I was doing and how. So I looked, I felt and I studied Jack’s Room, hoping to crack the mystery of its construction.

The first thing I noted was something I knew already: as it was the case with my Essence and Mana pools, Jack’s Room was not actually inside my body, or at least not in the body I could see. It was somewhere else, and the only thing I could think of was the good old sci-fi trope of other dimensions. Maybe it was some sort of spirit world? Who knew?

Whether it was the case or not, I went with this theory. And building on it I concluded that the core of my being, including my human soul, was probably at the same place or dimension as my pools and everything else. I figured that my blue and ghostly body was probably a representation or an extension of the creature I was, here in the physical world. But I had no awareness, no perception of my hypothesized spirit-dimension. I could have been wrong, but what other explanation was there?

The second thing I noted was that Essence, Mana and Spirit-Stuff seemed to be the building blocks of spiritual life and function. I couldn’t see, feel or detect anything else. They were the protons, neutrons and electrons of the spiritual world, or at least that’s what it seemed like to me. And as such, mixed in different ways and different quantities, they made different atoms, molecules and spiritual materials. I had to admit the analogy was somewhat inaccurate and perhaps stupid. But as I concentrated my perception on Jack’s Room and my pools, I began to discern that all of them were built or formed with the mixture of the three. I couldn’t determine ratios and compositions, not yet, but that could wait.

The third thing I noted was that while the three substances acted like building blocks — because they were building blocks — they were also more. Much more. This was where I thought the proton-neutron-electron analogy was simply not enough to cover it. The three spiritual substances were more than just building blocks, having functions and capabilities on their own.

Souls were made of different variants or grades of Spirit-stuff, forming complex spiritual organisms, like souls. Or myself.

Mana was a greatly responsive substance that interacted with everything.

And there was Essence. Essence was glue, it was communication cables, it was brick and mortar. Essence somehow pulled the body of an ant into a spiritual dimension, and I was sure it was Essence that maintained a connection between my apparent body here and my soul and my pools over there.

No wonder Wensah wanted this stuff.

I had a feeling it could be almost anything you wanted it to be, either on its own, or mixed with the other two substances. Provided you knew what you wanted and had enough spiritual muscles to work with it. I even suspected that the thread Wensah was using to siphon Essence was actually made of Essence. And Essence seemed to be everywhere — I was collecting it from the air, for God’s sake.

Essence was all important. Probably.

Now I just needed to figure out how I could use the three substances, what I could build, what I could do with them.

It was easier said than done.

***

I’d spent quite some time thinking about these spiritual affairs. The moon was making its way through the incredibly beautiful, starry night sky, and I could see a faint glow over the horizon in the direction that must have been east. The sun was going to rise again, maybe in an hour or so.

I turned my attention to my latest mount: the mouse.

It’s soul was different from those of insects — unlike the ghostly white outlines of an ant-soul, it had a yellow tinge to it, not quite golden, but not plain yellow either. And I could tell it was more detailed, more complex, not only by the feel of it, but also by the amount of the tiny Essence wires needed to create a net that covered it in its entirety. For Jack it had taken less than a single EP and a hundred or so wires to do this. For the mouse, it took 3 full EP’s worth of wires. The mouse was so much larger than an ant, and I wondered how much EXP I’d get from its soul. I had a feeling the amount didn’t just depend on the size and mass of the soul, but also on the complexity of its build as well.

This poor mouse was doomed. Whether it was going to die of old age or by me finding a more desirable host for my immobile body, its soul was going to be a meal for me. How sad. But before I could even begin to get used to my new host, or I could get my bearings, the mouse’s doom manifested itself. However, it didn’t take the shape I’d imagined.

***

A dark shadow descended on us from the sky, blotting out the stars. Talons penetrated the body of the small creature. Its almost imperceptible squeak was drowned out by the sound of flapping wings, and the next thing I knew, we were in the air.

The bird was reminiscent of owls. It was fluffy, it looked like the embodiment of wisdom and mystery, and it was a predator. Oh, and it had two tiny horns. Why did everything have horns here?

The mouse was dying. So I did what anyone would have done in my situation: I plunged one of my tentacles into the owl’s soul, expelling 5 EP’s worth of Essence into it. Then I ate the soul of the mouse. It tasted wonderful: a memory of chicken with peanut sauce popped into my mind. Its body stopped moving and squeaking, and I calculated the EXP. I was more than just surprised to feel that it gave me more than half of what I needed for my next level: about nineteen-hundred. The mouse wasn’t bigger than the creepy spiders I’d seen, but it was clearly levels above them in terms of the spiritual sustenance it provided.

Stolen story; please report.

Feed! Young!

The thoughts of the owl were clear. It wasn’t going to eat the mouse, it was for its owlets. Well, I was just happy I managed to avoid becoming immobile again.

***

I was impressed with my new host; flying was quite an experience, even if I couldn’t feel the air, the wind, or the fact that we were moving. It was a purely audio-visual experience. I imagined it would have been like a roller-coaster ride, or being in one those simulators at the RAF museum, if I could feel things like acceleration and the likes. Oh well, it was what it was.

We flew over the field, then over a forest, then into the forest. We landed on the branch of a tree that had a hollow, and in it, in a nest of dried grass and small twigs, two hungry looking owlets screamed for their dinner. Or breakfast. My host, presumably the mother, presented them with the meal, and the two small birds tore it apart and swallowed the parts as happily as a school kid munching on cheese strings.

The forest, the trees … they looked familiar. I wasn’t an expert on trees — if anyone asked me to name what trees were in a forest, I could only name oak, beech, maple, and pine. And if anyone asked me how to tell them apart, the only thing I could say was that if it didn’t resemble a Christmas-tree, then it wasn’t pine. Still, the place didn’t look much different from what I remembered from the few countryside hikes I had reluctantly participated in.

I couldn’t feel temperature, but the impression I got just by looking was a pleasant coolness. This was what they called a temperate forest, if I remembered correctly. I called on my limited knowledge of what kind of animals lived in a forest like this. I was comfortable using Earth examples and analogies. So far — horns aside — this world was more similar than different to home.

Mommy owl flapped her wings a few times and got into the hollow to join her offspring. They rustled and bustled, then they all settled down to sleep. The owlets laid down, and their mother simply perched in the middle of the nest and closed her eyes.

***

Morning came, then an uneventful day. Bugs were abundant, so were the ugly, squirrel-type creatures that jumped from tree to tree without a care for sleeping birds of prey.

I could only hear the critters that inhabited the ground and the shrubs. Judging by the sounds, they ranged from small snakes to frogs to mice and larger rodents perhaps. I didn’t mind spending the day observing the small part of the forest I could see from the hollow; I almost felt like I was the cameraman for a nature show on Discovery Channel, with the one difference being that I couldn’t move.

It was impossible to see the sun through the foliage, but as the forest gradually darkened, and mommy owl opened her eyes, I knew evening was coming again. The shrieks of the owlets were a sure sign of their hunger. Mommy owl stirred, stretched, and exited the nest to perch on the nearest branch. She was in for another night of hunting and feeding her young. But there was something I wanted to do before night fell.

I pulled on the Essence-wires that connected me to the bird and I explored that connection.

Hungry. Search! Eat!

This much I’d expected from her. She’d hunt, she’d eat, then she’d order a rodent take-out for her kids. But she’d have to wait before she could get to it. I was sure the owlets would forgive her for bringing their dinner a bit later than usual.

I pressed my own will through the wires, into her soul. She stirred, looked left and right, up and down, probably wondering where the sudden influx of extra thoughts in her mind had come from. Other than that, she didn’t move. I tried again and tried to be as clear in my instructions as I could manage it.

'Fly up!’ I said it out loud.

The instruction reached her with the speed of a thought. She flapped her wings, and we were in the air. She flew past a few trees, then through a gap in the foliage, rising up above the forest.

It was still daylight: the sun was going down behind some sort of rocky mountain in the distance, and a few stars were already peeking down on the world.

‘Higher!’ I said.

Search! Eat!

The owl complained, but she obeyed, flapping her wings as we flew higher. I could feel she wasn’t entirely comfortable with this. I didn’t know much about owls; they were birds, and I assumed they had no problem flying. Well, this was an alien owl by all accounts, but I felt she was struggling. Regardless, I pushed her until I saw enough.

To the west — as I designated the direction in which the sun was setting — I could only see the mountain. I wondered what lay beyond it.

To the east the forest stretched endlessly, rising and falling along small hills and valleys. A few streams flew into a narrow river, cutting through the valleys, and the river flew into … the sea. Or ocean. There was a shoreline to the east, quite a distance from us. Huh.

I wasn’t sure which was north or south here, but in one direction — south, maybe — I saw more forests, and another beach several kilometers away.

The north was pretty much the same: forests and then the sea.

The owl kept complaining about this expedition of mine. I’d seen enough for today and I let her glide downward and let her get on with her business.

***

Apart from a little exploration every evening, I let the owl do what she wanted to do: hunt for herself and her owlets. We couldn’t go too far, three, maybe four kilometers at most by my best estimate. Still, it was enough for a suspicion to take root in my mind. This might be an island. To the north, the south and the east the land terminated in unappealing rocky beaches and cliffs, and beyond them nothing but water. Just the endless ocean.

The only unexplored area was the mountain to the west, and whatever lay behind it. I wanted to fly over or around the mountain, to either confirm or disprove my suspicion. But it wasn’t a priority, and I just didn’t have it in me to make the owl abandon her young to go for such a long trip. So I waited, I let it hunt, and in two weeks time I gained two levels by eating all the souls of the critters she picked up.

At Level 12 my body was almost two and a half centimeters in diameter, and each of my tentacles were around twelve centimeters long. My Essence and Mana pools grew to 24 and 14 respectively, which wasn’t bad.

Jack’s Room did not grow. I spent some time trying to figure out how to make it larger, but it wasn’t a priority. It wasn’t like I had anywhere important to be, and since it looked like I had nothing but time on my tentacles, nothing was a priority.

***

At the end of the third week, the owlets became full fledged owls: they could fly, they could hunt, and they definitely didn’t need to be fed any more. It was time for a trip.

Gladys wasn’t thrilled, but she obeyed me. Yes, I named the owl Gladys — there was just something about her that screamed Gladys. I knew it was a mistake, and I knew I’d be devastated if I killed her, too. That’s why I’d sworn an oath to myself that I’d stick with her until she died of old age.

It wasn’t conducive to my leveling; she didn’t hunt anything larger than mice, small gecko type lizards, and the occasional smaller squirrel creatures. Still, I made it to Level 13 and realistically I could expect to reach Level 15 or 16 in another three or four weeks. After that the EXP requirement would become too high to grow as fast as I’d been so far, unless I went after larger animals. One of the wolves I’d seen would have been an ideal partner; they hunted horned boars, strange looking unicorn-goat-deer creatures, and anything in between. But that was for another day. For now, I wanted to see the land behind the mountain; it was time to make my own journey to the west.

***

Gladys reached the mountain in a night, stopping to hunt for a snack here and there. We found a hole in some rocks and spent the day there. In the late afternoon we set out to fly over to the other side.

It was difficult to guess or make estimates as to how tall the mountain was. It wasn’t very tall, in fact I wasn’t even sure if it qualified as a mountain. It was an almost completely barren, rocky formation. From up close, it was really just a few large, rocky hills pretending to be a mountain range, and I didn’t think it would pose a problem for Gladys to fly over them. And it didn’t.

What posed a problem was what lay on the other side.

There were forests here, too, some smaller hills, and another river snaking along the valleys. And in the distance, maybe five or six kilometers away, I saw the sparkling, glittering blues and whites of the ocean.

Damn. Not the kind of enlightenment I wanted from my journey to the west.

I was on an island. I really was on an island.

Granted, it was a large island; if my estimates were anywhere close to reality, the island was at least fifteen, maybe even twenty kilometers across from east to west, and almost the same from north to south. And it was an island with no signs of civilization or people. I hated that I’d been right in my suspicion.

I didn’t have to wonder any more about what Wensah was thinking. Now I knew exactly what she was thinking: get an extremely dangerous Spiritual Tentacle Horror, stick a human soul in it to curb its murderous instincts, and she could safely enjoy all the processed Essence it could provide. And if instinct took over somehow, no problem, he was on an uninhabited island, so it was all good.

Clever and devious that Wensah.

What was I supposed to do? Was there anything I could even do? I wasn’t sure and I took a deep mental breath as I watched the sun setting over the ocean.

My mind came up blank: I had no idea what to do, except look forward to a spiritual lifetime of solitude. It wasn’t the greatest or most welcome prospect, but I decided to keep a stiff upper lip, get on with it, and grow.