Three

The next morning I was up at the crack of dawn since I passed out so early the night before. I felt surprisingly refreshed, like I had just woken up the day after I recovered from a cold. In comparison, how energetic I felt now made it seem I was lethargic the last few days. I felt really good.

A little too good. My aches and pains had receded a lot, there was just a dull pressure of pain on my ribs with some soreness, but the stabbing sensation of inhaling deeply was gone. I felt like I had gotten punched in the ribs the other day, instead of being cracked with a baseball bat. That was peculiar.

However, the more interesting and also somewhat alarming discovery was that most of the small scratches on my body were gone, leaving only barely visible pale lines of scarring on my skin. The bigger, deeper cuts were already closed, and looked days, maybe even a week old. The large gash on my ribs was tender, but the scab looked healthy and it didn’t hurt to stretch my arms over my head.

A day earlier, and I might have freaked out about that. But, that was before I had learned how to make a thumb-sized flame jump from one finger to another and dance across my hand.

This day was a brand new day. It was a day full of wonder and excitement. I spent most of my time experimenting with this newfound ability while I went about my daily necessities. I was always fiddling around with it in one hand while I was working.

For instance, while I gnawed on the rest of the cooked meat, I tried making another fire. I quickly discovered that unless I concentrated on making smaller, more efficient flames to light the wood, I could feel a literal drain on my energy that wore me out. It seemed that there was a directly proportional effect of using this juju, where the more I did, the bigger the strain.

Small things were fine, and nearly inconsequential. Turning my thumb into a lighter? The equivalent of just working with your hands at a desk. It was still effort, but not really noticeable, certainly nothing that would exhaust you. Making a fireball the size of a basketball to see if you could throw it? That felt like I was trying to throw a dumbbell, and the bigger the flame, the more weight the dumbbell felt like it weighed. The internal gymnastics of that had me sweating with effort after that one.

There was a new muscle in me that felt like it was getting worked out, a muscle I had never touched before. It felt intangible, ephemeral, but it was there and I could flex it at will.

So flex it I did. I had the thought, “Fire? Why not water? Or wind?” and so started experimenting with different elements.

I tried making gusts of wind, and that was easy. I could effortlessly maintain a hairdryer level of air streaming from my hand. Bigger was always harder, but I managed to actually bend a small tree about as thick as my arm, making enough wind to have it swaying, though I got tired after a few minutes.

Water was a little harder, but still pretty easy. I spent a long time playing in the water, pulling out globes of it to juggle in my hands, altering the surface of the water to hold its shape when I scooped out a handful, which was pretty wild to see nothing rushing in to fill the empty space. I also remembered that high pressure was a thing, and spent some time using water and wind both to see how far I could take that. It was hard to focus its direction properly, and I quit after I accidentally squirted my foot with water and it stung like crazy, turning the skin red for hours. I’d mess around with that later when I understood it better.

Next was earth, I started with dirt and worked my way up from there. I could scoop and shape it without touching it, just like I could with water, but there were differences. Manipulating the water was easier and harder in its own ways. Taking water and pushing it around and stuff was easier than with dirt, but getting it to retain shape was harder because I needed to keep more focus on a water ball than a dirt ball. I guess molecular and/or atomic cohesion is a factor?

Stones, though, oh boy, lifting a rock with magic felt like it was an equal amount of effort as just picking it up in my hand. It felt like it weighed the same, but the strain was internal instead of external. All my fooling around was turning my brain a little mushy like I had been doing math problems for hours, but I kept at it.

I even tried to shoot a rock at a speed fast enough to make it dangerous, sort of like a stone bullet or something, but I only managed it once. Sure, I did make a rock the size of my fist embed itself into the trunk of a tree, and that was surely a success. The backlash, however, was quite severe when compared to the result.

That was my first experience with magic migraines. It hurt badly enough to nearly drop me to my knees, though the pain did fade after a moment. I would remember to be careful not to push myself too hard, it seemed to be just another muscle after all. I hoped the pain was just from trying to do too much at once, too soon, and would use it as an indicator to gauge my limits.

I went to get more wood from the edge of the Bushlands, practicing holding two elements at once, a small drop of water and a small pebble, floating in front of me as I walked. They danced through the air and zipped all around me as I played with how much I could do. I tried to add in a flame but nearly dropped the other two because of how much mental effort it took to maintain that level of heat from nothing. Density, complexity, weight, malleability, there were so many factors that I had to consider as an influence in everything I could manipulate.

Manipulating an active flame was a lot easier than just making a flame from scratch. It was the same with pulling moisture from the air, that was a lot harder than just scooping up water from a puddle. I could do it, sure, and it was cool that I potentially had an infinite water source, but it was too much effort when I could just bring a water flask or something. Efficiency was the name of the game, in a lot of respects.

I was completely engrossed in my research and experimentation and didn’t even notice that night had fallen. There was still so, so much more that I wanted to try. Things like refining the “stone bullet” by combining wind with earth to help alleviate some of the weight issues from earth alone, because moving the air around a stone to give some extra lift was easier than just brute-forcing the entire stone itself off the ground. Which worked, shockingly, and reminded me somewhat of a sloppy version of telekinesis, amusingly enough.

There were many things to try, and lots of time to try them. So many endless possibilities that it made my head spin. The only thing holding me back was that it felt like I had spent the entire day working out, and I collapsed into an exhaustive sleep right after dinner. The next day I woke up with what I can only describe as muscle fatigue of the spirit. I felt worn out and faintly sore all over my body.

I was, again, getting way too ahead of myself. I was much too absorbed in these new experiences for my own good, apparently. I would do my best to reign in my excitement and try to take things slower from then on. Good things come to those who wait, after all. There would be fireballs, but later. For now, I just needed to practice basic, easy stuff until I didn’t need to think about it. The basics are the most important, after all.

So, deciding not to get too wrapped up in my own little world of magic and wonder, I turned my attention back to the main issue: Survival. You can’t ignore survival just because you picked up a couple of neat tricks. Staying alive is the single most important thing.

The amount of meat I had would last me for several days, but I didn’t want to risk waiting too much longer than that just in case it started going bad. I had to find some semblance of a stable food source.

And, after my full day of playing around with magic, I was thinking I might go snag another boar. Now, you might think that would be a bad idea, and you’d probably be right, but I also had a much better means of defending myself now.

I had discovered the functional equivalent of a high-powered BB gun, through a mix of stone manipulation and air compression. I could float a little pebble and blast it towards a target with enough force to punch a hole clean through several inches of wood.

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I recoiled in horror at first, when I realized what I had done. This was something very potentially destructive, and if I could make this tiny little rock do something like that, then shit. Finding other ways to be destructive was a path that made me a little queasy to think about going down.

I didn’t know a lot about physics, but I knew enough to know that if I had this level of control over certain elements and their interactions, I had the potential to unleash some horrifyingly practical devastation if I weren’t extremely careful. Just being able to blow a hole in a wall with basically only my mind was already pretty damn scary.

But, there was a silver lining, in that it also meant that I had a means of defending myself, acquiring food, and accomplishing some exploration. Traveling and seeing what was out there was a very attainable goal, now. I felt much more safe and secure. I felt like I could handle anything that popped up, as long as I was cautious. I could actually do this.

I spent the remainder of that day resting and preparing to go hunt another boar. If my fatigue had cleared up by the next day, I’d take that as a sign that all I needed to do was rest and recover my.. Mana? I didn’t really have a better word for it at the time, but mana worked well enough.

I made two interesting discoveries while I spent a day resisting the urge to use magic every waking moment. The first was that two of the slimes that had been just chilling near my little watering hole, had turned into an interesting shade of pink and grown in size a bit. The second was that the hide I had left on the ground no longer had bits of fat, skin, and blood stuck to it. Those pink slimes had scoured it clean and I suppose changed color as a consequence.

I had left the hide on the ground because I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. Having leather would be incredible, as I only had some dirty underwear and a torn tank top to wear. But, as I was not a crafting man by nature, I knew next to nothing about how to go about turning a hide into usable leather. I only knew that if it wasn’t treated properly, that hide would start rotting just like anything else.

Apparently, throughout the night the little blobs had scoured the hide clean and left behind only the soft feeling skin and hair. It really did feel like brand new leather, and even with a few swipes of a sharp rock, it proved to be quite durable as well. Did these little guys have preferences for food, too? Or maybe the leather and hair were just harder to digest and left for last?

Fascinated by this, I decided to treat the little guys to a reward for giving me something so invaluable right when I needed it. I gave one of the two pink slimes some bits of leftover odds and ends of uncooked meat and fat. I gave the other one some cartilage from the leg joints and some bits of bone I had smashed into splinters with a rock to see if that would be easier for it to digest.

The other slime, still blue and tiny in comparison to the others that were almost twice its size now, was still camped out on the other side of the pond. It was tucked into a little corner where there was no water movement, so it had never been pushed over close enough to my side to notice my existence. This one got some cooked meat dropped near the water’s edge, and I left it alone with it as soon as I noticed it come to life and start inching its way towards its meal.

With that experiment taken care of, I began work on turning the leathery hide into something I was in dire need of: Shoes. It was a slow process of figuring out the right shapes to cut and working a rock knife through the tough material. The long strips of leather I was going to use as a shoelace were the most difficult, but trying to punch little holes around the edges to slide the lace through was pretty tedious also. But, after a few hours, I had two little bags of leather I could pull over my feet and tighten in place above my ankles with a leather string.

They were not the most comfortable things, they made my feet sweaty, and they didn’t conform to the shape of my feet. They also made walking a little more difficult, as they were only little bags that my feet would slide around in.

I had shoes, though. My feet were protected. I could now walk around without worrying about cutting my feet up on plants and rocks and sticks. It was a major success, and I was incredibly pleased with myself. Everything else was fine as long as I could walk around in confidence.

The next project was to just experiment with making some of the bones into a usable tool. I ruined a few, snapping them in half or splintering the ends, and tossed them to the slime that was still working on its first meal. After a couple of hours of trial and error, I managed to make one of the leg bones into a basic knife by rubbing it against a rock. It wasn’t particularly sharp, but it had an edge that could cut through a piece of meat without too much effort, so I called it a success and set it aside.

The boar’s horn that I had kept was very sharp at the point, so I did my best to make another spear, but with a sturdier branch and a strip of leather instead of some grass. I didn’t think I’d need it for defense anymore, but I could still probably find some use for a long, pointy stick. “Better safe than sorry” was going to become a heartfelt motto.

After that, it was already getting pretty late, and most of the daylight had gone. I made another trip to check on the slimes and top up their food before turning in early. I was hoping that getting plenty of rest would recover me completely.

Sure enough, the next morning I woke up feeling energetic and refreshed. There was only a slight hint of a dull ache remaining, but it only felt as if I had had a long, busy day and then got a good night’s sleep. The scabs on my ribs had mostly fallen off on their own, and the pink scar tissue underneath no longer felt tender. I was nearly back up to full, and I was ready to go.

Gathering together my meager equipment and supplies, I swung by the slimes to give them a gander before I set out. What I found surprised me, but after what I had seen, I didn’t really know why.

The slime that had been eating the bone appeared to have sucked out all of the marrow and was very slowly working on dissolving the bone itself. That made sense to me, as bone was very dense and usually the last thing to decompose anyway. The slime itself had lightened some shades of blue and seemed to become a bit less transparent.

The next slime was the one I was feeding raw meat to, and it had become pinker. Just like the one with the bone, it seemed to not be as crystalline and clear, becoming murkier and dirtier looking instead. It also seemed a little more lethargic than the one gnawing on bones, but that might have been my imagination.

The last slime, tucked away from the others, was much the same as the second. It was darker and muddier looking, but still somewhat pink, and that was about as much difference as I could tell. Cooking the meat might have had an effect on the shade of color? Strange, but I suppose understandable?

Was I contaminating them somehow by introducing so much solid matter? With these three at least, adding more than just clean water was turning them into congealed gel blobs instead of clean water balloons. “You are what you eat” came to mind.

This third slime didn’t seem to be moving, either. I broke off a small tree branch and poked at it, but it didn’t stir. I dropped a piece of cooked meat a few inches from it and watched it for a couple of minutes, but it remained in some way dormant. I wonder why the raw meat slime was only partly sleepy and this one was full-on zonked out? Did cooking the meat make that much difference?

Whatever. These were questions for future me. Present me had to go test some things in the Bushlands. If I could kill one of those boars with much less risk and effort, I would begin my plan for travelling these strange lands. I could stockpile food for four or five days, and I could pull water from the air if I needed to, so long as I had food and rest to keep my energy up.

I was still running under the assumption that my “mana” was a resource very similar but separate to physical stamina, but it seemed accurate enough. I was willing to bet on it at this point. I couldn’t stay here forever, so that had to be good enough.

Double-checking my shoes and my spear, I set off. It only took a few minutes of walking, and I was back where I had butchered the boar creature. It was gone, seemingly vanished without a trace. The ground was still all torn up from our fight, but the corpse was just gone.

After the first day, I had come back to harvest more of it and it had looked perfectly untouched, with no flies or ants or anything else scavenging it. There really didn’t seem to be any kinds of insects here, which was troubling in its own way.

But now, after it had been a few days, it had disappeared. Completely gone, with not even a trace of blood or bone from when I had butchered it. There should have been a large stain on the ground from when I had to bleed it out, but it was just a clean patch of dirt.

My own blood was still there, which was a little freaky. I knew it was mine because I could clearly see the trail I had left when I was running from the boar, from before I had ever injured it, leading through the bushes I had broken through. There was more splattered around in dark patches of dirt from when I had struggled with the boar, but I had never really been bleeding a lot, I guess.

It couldn’t have been another animal, there were no other tracks that I could see. Plus, even the blood? Did the boar dissolve or something? But, if things “rotted” that way instead of the long, more natural process I was familiar with, then why didn’t the same thing happen to my blood? That didn’t really make sense.

What in the world was this Twilight Zone shit? Every single day of living here made my brain hurt with how little sense the things around me made. I was learning so many things from scratch, but a lot of things still bewildered me with how insane they seemed.

I gripped my spear tighter to my chest and took slow, deep breaths. I needed to remain calm, I couldn’t let myself get swept away by anxiety. Focus on the task at hand, and take things one step at a time, right?

I stared at the biome line in front of me while I got myself under control. As soon as I entered, I was going to have to remain on high alert the entire time. Any noise, smell, and even any suspicious feeling could not be taken lightly. Survival was no trivial matter. Anything and everything was a threat until proved otherwise.

It was serious face time.