The creature has never felt more cramped. Its home was fine a while ago, but now? Not so much. The problem isn’t that its home shrunk, but that it grew too big for its shell.
Crack! Using its claws, it bashes at the interior of the shell. After a few hits, the shell starts to have thin beams of light shining into the darkness. This is the creature's first look at itself, though it isn’t a good one. All it can see is black fur.
After the light first shines in, the creature continues to claw its way through the shell. While trying to get out, it figures that clawing is a lot more effective than slamming its paw against the hard interior like it first did.
With its new method of attack, the light grows more and more until the shell falls the pieces around it. The light is blinding at first, but the creature starts to get used to the brightness as it stands in it. Once it has grown accustomed, the creature takes its first steps since birth… and smacks into an invisible wall.
Blinking, it tries to find what stops it, but it can’t. The creature tries again, only for the same thing to happen. Confused, it reaches out its long claw tipped paw in front of it. To the creature's surprise, there is actually something there, even though it can’t see it. After a little bit of testing, it swings its claws at the wall hard.
The wall shatters into tiny pieces, scattering all around it. A few of the pieces of the wall dig into the creature’s fur, causing a burning sensation to race through it. Since this is its first time feeling this way, the creature tries to figure out what caused the uncomfortable sensation. It’s inquisitive mind leads it to step on a piece of the wall. Almost instantly, the creature feels the same feeling. To its surprise, it sees a lime green liquid pour out of its fur where it stepped on the wall.
The creature licks its paw, an instinctive response to the lime green fluid. The saliva sticks into the wound, stemming the flow of the substance from its body. Fascinated, the creature watches as the wound heals in just a minute, leaving the tiniest of scratches as evidence.
Once its wound is healed, the creature hops over the shards of the wall, leaping into the room that the case was in.
Inside the room proper, the creature gets its first glance at its birthplace. The place looks like it was built for giants. Everything is taller than the creature by a fairly large amount. There are gray raised platforms that hold weird items all over the place, but the creature can’t reach them since they are taller than it.
As the creature looks around, it starts to feel a burning sensation, different from before. While the one before was a small burning, this one is a searing feeling from inside of its body. The creature stands still, hoping it will go away, but it instead becomes more and stronger. As the sensation grows, information enters the creatures head.
[Soul Meltdown imminent… First time for a newborn creature… Playing log Alpha 1-1…]
The creature wonders at what all is happening, since it has never experienced anything like this before. Almost in answer, images start entering its head. In a flash, the images combine and a voice starts to play along with them.
A being stands in the same laboratory that the creature is in. It has blonde hair and sharp pointy ears. The being wears a white… something that reaches down to its legs, covering its body. The creature starts to open its mouth, and a voice enters its head, “Now then, if you are watching this, that means that I succeeded! Unfortunately, if you are watching this, I am most likely dead… I’m sure you are curious about what is happening, so I will explain briefly before getting to the point of this video.” Although the creature can’t understand the words, it does understand the conveyed meaning, almost like it is being translated directly into its brain. “Firstly, I have implemented a system to help you stay alive by allowing adaptation easier. This system will play logs when certain conditions are met, like this one, and can show you your status at any given time. To see your status, just think ‘status’.”
“You are my finest creation. I made you in hopes of creating the perfect creature. Since you are an artificially engineered being, there are some problems with your body and soul. To be able to have a full soul, I set the fragments of yours to grow indefinitely, becoming more powerful. The problem is that it will grow too big for your body, especially while you are weaker and freshborn. Eventually, your body will grow strong enough to house your soul, but until then you have the problem of entering what I call a Soul Meltdown.
“This happens when your soul will cause a catastrophic failure in your body, incinerating it. Now, the point of this video, prevention of a Soul Meltdown. To be honest, there is no good way to go about this. In my experimentation, I found dozens of ways, but most of them are temporary means and can cause problems further down the line.
“I say most because I found two solutions that should work. The first is to grow your body to be able to accept your soul. The growth of your soul is slow, unless sped up through some other means. If you can grow your body steadily along with your soul, you most likely won’t have a meltdown. There are millions of ways to grow your body, all the way from eating certain food and ingredients to learning means to channel energy.
“The second method is to extract the part of your soul that is causing the meltdown. This may sound dumb, but hear me out. By extracting your soul, you are almost doing something like giving birth. You aren’t litteraly creating a child in your womb, if you have one or not since I don’t know your sex, but the end effect is mostly the same. By extracting your soul, you are giving life to a new creature since it will also be able to grow. My recommendation is to do this with a nonliving object, preferably books, weapons, or armor.
“You can do this with a dead creature, but it will eventually burn out since its body won’t be able to sustain the soul for too long. You might be able to accomplish this better with necromancy, though I won’t suggest it since that type of magic is known to corrupt a beings soul…
“Why books, weapons, or armor? By doing this with books, you will instantly learn everything in the book, almost as if downloading the information. I recommend starting out with a dictionary. I think I have one on the back shelf inside of the lab. It should have a green cover with red text. I don’t know what else can be done past this with books, though I am sure you will figure it out. If you do this with a piece of equipment, weapon, armor, etc;, it will become animate and sentient, moving on its own. Armor moving on its own can protect you while a weapon can kill your enemies. Also, something cool I found through testing is that the weapon/armor will grow more powerful the longer it is alive, growing with the soul. I’m not a hundred percent sure what other types of equipment can do since I’ve only done small tests on weapons and armor.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.
“I don’t know exactly how to get rid of your overflow since it differs from creature to creature. You will have to figure it out for yourself, so try to find out quickly. One last word of advice for this log, don’t die. I know this is common sense, but I really do want you to live since you are my creation. Also, if you die, so will all of what I call Soul Equipment. Your Soul Equipment will be the creatures that you make by infusing your overflow into an object. Good luck! You’ll see me in the next log.”
The video disappears, leaving the creature standing there, stunned. It doesn’t stay that way for long though. With a Soul Meltdown imminent, it immediately gets to work.
The creature walks towards the shelves, looking through all of them for a green book with red text. Since its creator suggested it as the first thing, then the creature will do what he suggested. Afterall, the creator is like the parent of the creature, at least in its mind.
While looking through the shelves, the creatures sees many pieces of equipment and books. It has no idea what most of the equipment is or does, but it does notice something about the books.
All of the books fit into two groups in its mind. Both groups have the common similarity of being covered in chicken scratch. The first one has scratching that seems to flow really well together, almost natural. The second has scratchings that seem rigid and more unnatural.
When the creature finally finds the green and red book among the shelves, it notices that the scratchings fit into the second group. The book sits on the bottom most rack of the shelf. There are other books on the rack and shelf too, but they are not nearly as vibrant. Most are a dim brown or a dark gray color.
Using its mouth, the creature gently bites into the book and pulls it off of the shelf. The creature sets it down on the ground, scattering dust as it hits the floor.
Its creator said that it needs to figure out how to out poor part of its soul on its own, so the creature gets right to work trying to figure it out. After a few minutes of trial and error, it successfully extracts the overflow. It did this through envisioning. It used its mind to force the overflow into a small ball, then focused on it appearing at the tip of its nose.
The soul overflow is like nothing the creature has ever seen in its short life time. It glows with a vibrant golden light. The overflow itself is a small golden ball. Purple cracks run throughout the ball, shining out with a darker glow then the rest of the overflow.
As soon as the overflow appeared on the front of its muzzle, the searing sensation inside of it disappeared. It still feels a little coarse, but it isn’t actively hurting anymore.
The creature lowers its nose to the book. The ball sinks into the book with no effort, leaving the top of its nose empty. As soon as the ball sinks into the book, the book starts shining with the same light that the ball did. Eventually the light gets too bright, throwing off glares like a small sun. Then in a flash, the glow disappears along with the book.
The creature stands there, confused. It thought its creator said that it would gain knowledge, but nothing happened other than the book disappearing. Did its creator lie? No, there would be no reason to lie to it since it is newbor-
Its thoughts get cut off as it feels like its head will explode. The burning sensation returns, along with millions of words. Most of the larger words go over its head, but a lot of the smaller one force their way in, along with their definitions. The feeling continues for well over an hour before finally dissipating, leaving the more intelligent creature panting inside the room.
[Your intelligence has increased from 3 to 16]
‘What is this? Intelligence has increased? Also, what am I doing right now? Wait, there was a word for this… thinking. This is new. Previously, I just followed my instincts and didn’t do very much of this. And my thoughts were definitely not cohesive… is this because my intelligence increased?’ The creature stands there, confused on what is happening to it. Its confusion grows as other thoughts enter its head.
‘What is my name? That was one of the words that seemed really important… I don’t have a name? What should I be called?’ The creature looks around for a second, seeing if there are any clues on what its creator called it. Its eyes lock onto the container it was in before. This time, it recognises the invisible wall as glass. On one of the glass panes that isn’t broken, the creature sees scratch marks. This time, it realizes that they are letters, and letters make up words. The words on the side say ‘Operation: Hope’
‘Is my name Hope then? Sounds feminine… wait, what is my sex? Am I male or female?’ The creature tries to remember what the book said about sex and how to check. It remembers, but the problem is that the book is only described for sapient creatures like elves and humans.
‘It said between the legs, and I have four… it should be between the hind legs, right?’ The creature walks over the glass and looks at its reflection. While looking at its sex, it also gets its first good look at itself. All it knew previously was that it had dark fur.
The creature sees that it looks a lot like one of the creatures that the dictionary mentioned. It looks like a fox, although there are some deviations from a typical fox. It has black fur, with some lighter shades around its head and tail. Its head has two small horns sticking out of it. In between the horns is a feather that glows with a faint light. The feather doesn’t stick out like the horns. Instead, it bends back, hovering just above the creature's fur. Its belly is covered with a set of fragile looking black scales, though when it scratches itself, nothing happens.
Its paws are extremely fluffy and furry, looking extremely cuddly. ‘I thought I had claws, what happened?’ The answer soon reveals itself as it tenses its paw. Four deadly looking claws jut out of the previously fluffy look tips. Each of the claws is tipped in a lime green fluid, like the one it saw earlier. It realizes that the liquid is poison after searching through its memory for the right word.
Finally, the creature checks between its hind legs, seeing nothing dangling about. It does see a small slit, peeking out through its scales. ‘I guess this means I’m a female then? That's assuming that my anatomy is like the other creatures… Then Hope isn’t a bad name… I guess I’ll take on the name of Hope then since my creator can’t name me.’
Hope tries to say the name aloud, to test it out, but all she hears is a loud purr. She tries a few more times, but only variations of the same sound come out. ‘I guess the ability to speak is not one that I have. This may prove to be a problem if I need to communicate…’