Chapter 2

Exploration

~<(0)>~

It had left itself with enough size to be able to feel the walls on either side, as well as the bottom wall. It had discovered at some point that there was an up and down, a force drawing it towards one direction. Now that it was so much smaller, it did not simply fill up the entirety of the open space and could use this downward force to know where it was in the tunnel. It could also tell, due to this property of the world around it, that it was slowly travelling upwards. Occasionally it came across a cluster of hard ordered material, which it would quickly attack and absorb. It had gotten much better with its absorption process, at least related to the hard ordered material, and could do it in what it considered a short period of time. It did not find any more of the familiar and comforting soft disordered material, however. The entity wondered if it would ever find it again.

The entity had come across something incredible, and completely different to anything it had encountered thus far. It had completely surrounded this new discovery within the time it took the entity to realize it existed. A cursory examination revealed that it was nothing the entity had encountered before. To make matters more complicated, it did not fall into the preexisting categories the entity had classified other things as so far. The strange thing it had found was…. Moving. Well, that wasn’t exactly right. It was…. In some way like the entity itself. It was moving inside. It was…. Not all one single material. It examined the strange object for a time. There was a shaft that extended from a crack in the bottom wall, and near the top of the object there was a strange… wider portion. It decided to start absorbing this strange object and was immediately stunned by the amount of information it was having to process. Immediately, it realized it knew so much, and yet so very little of this object’s attributes. The strange object was dismantled and added to the entity’s mass. It had been easy, much easier than the hard-ordered material, aside from the new information it had worked to extract while absorbing it. It understood, to some degree, that what it had absorbed was not the entirety of the object. It continued down into the crack, and beyond that the entity did not know, for it had not pursued it further into such a small space. Though, it may have been more accurate to state that the strange object had grown upwards out of the crack, an extension of whatever larger object was below. Whatever this object was, it was alive. The entity didn’t really understand what being alive meant, other than that it was the state of being for objects like itself and this strange new one. Due to this, it also was able to partially understand what it was it had absorbed; Namely, it was a special object used for the creation of a second instance of the greater object. It had, obviously, already learned that there were more objects that possessed some degree of similarity to itself, AKA alive. But the idea that an alive object could create another version of itself was both fascinating and a little terrifying for the entity. It didn’t really understand this fear; It did not fully understand fear itself. Examining this feeling, the entity concluded, at least for the moment, that this fear may stem from the knowledge that other living things could reproduce, but it did not know how.

It had continued on, moving slowly upwards. It recognized changes in its environment. The walls had variation, certain changes to the hard structures that made them up, though none of them overly interested the entity. Occasionally, it would come across more clusters of hard ordered material, though this was growing less and less interesting to the entity. It was as though the more recent clusters were lacking something that the earlier ones contained in abundance; It was the same thing that had made the soft disordered substance that it had completely absorbed so interesting. It made a decision to ignore any hard ordered materials that did not catch its interest like they had previously. It had also come across more of the strange wide topped living objects. The one the entity had encountered before seemed to be the odd one out, as more often than not, it encountered and absorbed groups of hundreds of them. All of them contained the same information, that they were alive, part of a larger entity, and part of this reproduction ability.

There were pools of a new soft disordered material on the bottom of the tunnel in places. After examining it, the entity was surprised to realize it had actually been encountering this material almost everywhere previously, it simply hadn’t encountered enough of it to notice, and the material wasn’t remarkable enough in its own right to warrant attention in the miniscule amounts it had been found otherwise. In such a quantity as this, however, it was incredibly interesting. It was thicker than the quite boring material that seemed ever-present, however it was a lot thinner than any of the material that made up the entity’s mass. The entity could absorb it, though it didn’t make a whole lot of a difference, aside from perhaps temporarily thinning out the material the entity was made up of. Experimentally, the entity absorbed all the material in the pool, and then tried to change the properties of the material it had absorbed to be closer to the hard ordered material it had found coating the walls of the room it had first found itself in. It quickly discovered that this was spreading outside the material it had specified, bleeding into its being, making it harder to move as the soft ordered material of its body became thicker. It immediately stopped its experiment and let the foreign material slowly lose its hard ordered state, returning to the thin state it seemed to normally be in. The entity ejected this material from its being and moved on, having learned a valuable lesson involving what it considered simply as changes in the state of a material, but could more simply be described as temperature.

The entity had understood that there were other entities out there, somewhat like itself, that were alive. It, however, was not expecting to come across one such being that was actually moving like itself. It had accidentally engulfed a small entity that was vigorously thrashing inside its body. The entity examined this new living being. It was completely different from the previous one it had found, and still completely different to itself. It was moving quite a bit, with several moving extensions of its body that it seemed to be trying to use to break free of its sudden prison. No, it realized with an odd feeling, 3 of them seemed to be trying to do some sort of harm to the entity, two attempting to cut or grab it, while the other seemed to be attempting to impale it, with no success. Upon further inspection, the entity realized that the third appendage was also leaking some strange material that it couldn’t parse the meaning of, though it examined it thoroughly in case it was useful somehow. The entity decided its examination was concluded, and it was time to absorb this strange being. Immediately, new information flooded its awareness. As it dismantled the being, it learned it was incredibly afraid, afraid of ending. This was a new idea to the entity. It knew that at some point it must have begun, but it did not think that it could end. It didn’t exactly like this idea, it wanted to learn, to grow further. The being in its grasp stopped moving, and shortly thereafter it was fully absorbed. It had contained a lot of information, things that were hardcoded into its very makeup, things that the entity now knew. It did not know what eggs were, but it knew that the being would need to lay them to make another one of itself. It knew of the need for material it could consume. This was similar to the entity’s goal of growing larger, which involved consuming. However, the being it had consumed had very different ideas of what it could consume. It also now understood that the appendage, the being’s tail, had been attempting to poison it. It hadn’t worked in the slightest, but it seemed that this was not the case for other living beings it attacked. Poison was a foreign idea to the entity, a material that could disrupt enough of the processes that made something alive so that it would end. If this small being were any indication, it seemed that the world outside where the entity had been born and grown to its current state involved a lot of ending other living beings. It didn’t know what to make of this information.

~<(0)>~

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“You are sure of these findings, Head Monitor?” The voice was smooth and melodic, a definite trait of the elves.

The elf the question was directed to nodded, “Yes, My Lord, our thaumic radiation sensors have detected drastically lowered levels in the Central Leyline Convergence Reserve.” The Head Monitor of the Leyline Management team looked a little pale, sweating from visible nervousness. The Leylines were stable, the gateway nodes working just as well as they had been millenia ago. To anyone that knew of the leylines, this seemed like it was a non-problem. However, to the few on the team that the Head Monitor was in charge of, as well as the researcher himself, This was a matter of grave importance. It had been discovered as a side effect while triangulating the drastic change in thaumic energy to get its exact location. What they found was startling. The thaumic energy hadn’t vanished completely, instead it seemed lowered and, thanks to a few readings that didn’t line up, it was discovered that this thaumic locus was moving.

This was truly what was worrying. It was natural for there to be fluctuations in the background levels of thaumic radiation over the course of centuries. This was something that the elves had been aware of on the Day of Awakening when they opened the doors and flooded the world with magic. As long as the leylines and gateway nodes that fed the magic into the world in a controlled fashion were working as they should, there was no worry for a catastrophic thaumic collapse. For all of that thaumic energy to just up and vanish like that, over the course of such a short period of time, was at best something that would require a team of analysts to be sent to investigate. However, the locus was moving, which meant that the thaumic energy hadn’t simply vanished, but been absorbed. Considering that the Central Leyline Convergence Reserve had been the largest natural thaumic battery in the world, the thought that some creature had absorbed all of that energy was positively terrifying to someone like the Head Monitor.

The lord of the elves nodded gravely, “This truly is a serious situation then. If there is a creature out there that has absorbed this level of power, it would be of a danger level we’ve seldom encountered before. State what you need, and it shall be granted, up to and including the limit of this country’s resources.”

The Head Monitor nodded his affirmation, “I will require two squadrons of your best men. A team of grade SS Elven mages. And, if it is truly not too much to ask… Her.” No one in the court needed to ask what that meant. She was legendary amongst elves, without a doubt the greatest magic caster in the world. Lyrei Araphine had been around since the very inception of the Saturation Project. In fact, it didn’t do Lyrei justice to say as little as that. She had been part of the original team that worked on the Saturation Project, which had resulted in what the plebian masses called the Day of Awakening. She had since stepped down from the team in the intervening millenia to be able to continue her research and development of Thaumic spellcraft. Lyrei’s works were found in every school of spellbook that both novice elven mages and experts alike read to better their craft. Not only did she have special knowledge related to the topic at hand, having helped create the system that had accidentally allowed this creature to exist, but she was incredibly powerful and a surefire asset to their team.

The Lord of the elves was unsurprised at the request for Lyrei. It was reasonable, after all, and she was one of the Elven Empire’s greatest trump cards compared to the other nations in the world. “I cannot guarantee anything. I will send someone speak with her, but you will need to operate on the assumption that you may not obtain her assistance. Do you have any added requirements on the chance she refuses?”

A quick nod and a hurried answer, “Of course your Lordship. I had anticipated that the answer might be no, so I would request an additional two teams of SS Elven mages.”

“Your request in some form shall be granted. Now see to your preparations at once. We have not a moment to lose if the situation is as dire as you suggest it may be.”

~<(0)>~

Initially, Lyrei had not been happy to be interrupted during the midst of her research. Everything, it seemed, interrupted her research; Eating, bathing, drinking, relieving herself, it all seemed to need to happen all too frequently, and almost always while she was in the middle of some important experiment or while she was in the depths of theory crafting. Thinking back, she was fairly certain that at least one or two wars had managed to interrupt her in such a manner as well.

Regardless, she continued not being happy about this interruption right up until the page who’d been sent to ask her assistance mentioned the nature of this so-called emergency. It involved the leylines, apparently. She hadn’t really messed with leyline management for a good few millenia. As a responsible parent to such a massive system, she’d checked in once every couple of centuries to each of the gateway nodes to make sure things were going smoothly. In time, however, she’d gladly passed this task on to the leyline management team. Her true place was on the frontier of thaumic development. So, in a way, something wrong involving the leylines was something that she partially felt responsible for. The page hadn’t been able to explain things in much detail, useless elf that he was, so she knew she’d need to wait to talk to whatever members of the Leyline Management team were on this expedition. She had, of course, said yes, and shooed away the annoying page so she could gather her equipment and prepare for the journey ahead.

Normally in such a situation, they’d use a gate spell to go right to the problem, but due to such a high level of thaumic concentration moving around like that, as well as the fact none of them knew anything about this creature that had absorbed all of this power, it was reasonable to be cautious. This meant taking one of the established waygates to the nearest elven city and travelling on foot to the system of caverns that apparently housed this mysterious thaumivorous creature. Lyrei wasn’t exactly thrilled to be walking such a distance, but she was well aware that this was to be expected with field research. She had packed her staff and travelling outfit (which required a few minor magical refreshments, as it hadn’t been used in…. one or two centuries?), as well as her own personal set of calibrated thaumic measurement tools. The five members of the Leyline Management team, including the Head Monitor, had brought their own measuring equipment, But Lyrei didn’t exactly trust those leyline jockeys to have as efficiently calibrated, personalized, and modified measurement tools. She REALLY liked using her own equipment over anything anyone else had tainted with their own inferior techniques.

She was by far the oldest in the expedition, and honestly couldn’t connect to the elves that might as well have been children that made up the travelling group. The soldiers were all “training this, fighting that” all the time, and she had little need for such boorish behaviour. The elven mages were… passable at best. Never mind that she could have written their most complicated spells in her sleep. She also had the feeling that a few of the males, and even a few of the females amongst the group were lusting after her, wanting to either get her pregnant or carry her babies; She was really starting to regret inventing the spell that made dual female pregnancy possible. The last group was made up of the Leyline Management team. They’d really fallen from when she’d first formed the group. If they hadn’t, something like this would never have happened. So it was that the most powerful sorceress in the world walked alone, speaking only the bare minimum to those around her and, more often than not, choosing to not speak at all. This suited her though.

The cave entrance before the group wasn’t all that impressive… it was rather small and overgrown with vines, roots hanging down to mostly obscure the dark entrance behind. Of course, Lyrei knew better. She’d been in this massive network of caverns many times in the past. The Central Leyline Convergence had been designed to handle all the overflow of thaumic energy that the leyline network produced. Of course, the idiots after she left had pegged this as a natural occurrence and called the phenomenon a natural battery, and the Central Leyline Convergence Reserve. She hadn’t felt any need to correct this idiocy, as ultimately it shouldn’t have affected the operation of the leyline network. Regardless, this entire cavern had been chosen with its size in mind, a massive overflow holding area, capable of holding the entire network’s energy in gelled form, in case work needed to be done on the leyline network with it being inactive. Of course, it seemed some idiots in the past had forgotten to empty the cavern every so often, and had never passed this information to their successor, and thus the problem had repeated itself until the present day. And until very recently, the primary overflow reservoir cavern had been filled to the brim and started flowing up the access passageway. At least, that’s what the sensors she’d left strategically throughout the complex had indicated to her. She guaranteed she’d left the readout panels for these sensors with the original leyline management team… this just further proved that all the ones since then were so woefully incompetent.