LIGHTNOVELONLINE Chapter Seventy Four
I heard some interesting news~!
If what I learned from Lily is true, all of the four Spirits’ greater creations have cores inside of them! Regular inhabitants that have allied themselves with the Spirits of course wouldn’t have one; For instance, a human who pledged themselves to the Water Spirit wouldn’t suddenly grow an Aqua Core, after all. Even the elves, forest or fire, wouldn’t have a core in them, since they’re not a creation made with enough power and intent behind them to create one. And even the lizardmen I fought, who I was sure were acting on the Fire Spirit’s orders, didn’t have them.
No, only monsters created for the sake of directly carrying out their Spirit’s bidding are given cores by their creators!
Apparently it actually costs quite a large amount of spirit energy or whatever from one of the Spirits to make cores like that, or at least that’s what Lily tells me. And if what she’s saying is true, then I guess it makes sense that only certain things get to have them. I mean, imagine if I had hundreds of little corpse babies running around, leaching tons of resources away from me every second that passed by! There’s just no way it would be sustainable, really. Yeah, it’s best to just keep a few as an elite team, rather than spread the power around like that and suck myself dry. And that is how the four Spirits do!
Really, it makes sense that the Water Spirit was so willing to let me thin the herd with those Ice Guardians. There were about forty of those guys (less now, after the little spree I went on) just living their lives in the mountain, leeching away from the Water Spirit, while the giant snake had to wiggle around doing all of the work! Kinda makes me feel bad that I didn’t do a better job getting rid of them. You know, if it were me, I’d rather only have the giant snake, and put all my core-eggs into that one basket. Well, no, I’d rather have a couple of giant snakes if it were really me, but I’m sure that’s how the Water Spirit got into this whole mess in the first place.
I guess that explains why the Forest Spirit is also moving from having a bunch of little corpse plants into just having me, the uber-plant.
Anyways, Lily’s talked me into trying my luck at the edge of the Wind Spirit’s border. I’m pretty good against wind magic anyways, and so long as I stay away from where I saw that super big wolf-dragon Avatar thing, I should be fine. Yeah, maybe if that thing shows up then I’ll be screwed, but everything else should be a walk in the park for me now~!
Yeah okay, I admit it, I’m honestly gambling by doing this. There’s totally a decent chance that the damn wolf-dragon shows up and kills me while I’m doing this. But hey! Isn’t it worth giving it a try? I’ll never learn to swim if all I do is stay safe in the shallows all the time! How will I ever know if I’m ready if I don’t go ahead and take the chance?
Besides, I’d rather take my chances there than up against a horde of angry blue giants, for sure!
And so goodbye Ice Guardian mountain! Goodbye, and good riddance! I’ll never see you again, hopefully!
~~~
Getting out of the blue giants’ cave was a lot easier than I expected it to be, now that I was bigger. If I were still the size that I was when I fell down here, then escaping would probably have been a lot tougher, but now I’m just about the right size to fling myself up from one rung to the next without too crazy much trouble, so it's pretty nice and convenient! Maybe I’m not so big that it wasn’t super freaking tedious, and maybe it took me like two hours of continuous flinging and climbing to get out, but hey! I made it, didn’t I? So screw it, I won’t complain too much!
I felt really grateful and accomplished once I was back onto solid ground again and could give my tentacles a rest. Buuuut that was all short lived when I realized once again how absolutely awfully frigid it was outside on the mountain! I had to leave my cute little pelt-coat behind a few days ago because it got way too small for me to use anymore, so I didn’t have anything that I could use as protection. Luckily, the yurt that I was now inside of had lots of pelts for me to choose from, and I hate to say I stole a bit of their patchwork pelt wall, but uh… Well, you can’t blame me if it was for survival, right?
Not that that would hold up in court or anything.
If it helps, I only took exactly as much as I would need! Just enough to wrap up this much larger body of mine like a hotdog, so that I wouldn’t get too crazy cold out there. And then I went on my merry way, out into the ice skating fields once again! And when I finally came to the sudden steep drop off that greeted me at the edge, I was able to use my wonderful stolen cut of pelt as a parachute to help me safely drift down the side of the mountain~!
-Which is a lie!
But at least it was a much more fun and cute imagining than what really happened.
See, because I’ve gotten so much bigger, unless I went for one of the larger pelts that they’d used higher up on the yurt (which now that I’ve seen one, I can only assume came from those super big boars that they’d sometimes bring in), most of the other pelts were from the much smaller creatures that I had already met. Maybe the yetis were taller than me when I saw them before, but now I’m much too big for a yeti pelt to be enough for me. It’d be like wearing a small dress when you should be wearing an extra large! It would have never covered me enough!
So yeah, I just opted to cut out a portion of the stitched together section, enough to properly cover me so my bits didn’t end up freezing off. And uh, I guess the stitching that looked perfectly fine to my (nonexistent) eyes was not of good enough quality to not, uh, let a bunch of air past my parachute. It’s completely unsurprising that I plummeted down the mountain much faster than I had expected to. Really really unsurprising. It’s good that just falling isn’t enough to make me completely go splat, because wow did I fall super far. I think I even fell further than I did when I went down that hole to the lair of the blue giants. It’s really crazy to think about, actually.
Unlike then, though, I didn’t really have any convenient rungs to catch myself on and slow my fall before I reached the bottom.
As you can imagine, I didn’t make the most pretty of pictures when I finally hit the ground.
The good news is, I had a tonnn of resources left in me already since I’d just finished my spree of blue giant serial killing and eating Aqua Cores, so it wasn’t like that time with the original treant where I was too starved to fix myself. The bad news, minor though it might be, is that repairing myself was actually much more costly than I would have liked. I have a pretty big distance to cover before I'll get to where Lily told me to go, so I’m gonna need to stock up before I get going. If I’m being honest, I really only burned through like a little less than half of my stores maybe, but I don’t like the idea of being so low, you know? Especially not when I know a convenient source of nutrients is so close by, waiting to be wrestled with and eaten.
Hello again crabs! Yes, I’m talking about you~! Did you miss me?!
These things are right here at the foot of the mountain anyways, right? So I think it's plenty enough excuse to give the crabs another go. I landed myself pretty close to the beach-y side of the mountains base on purpose, since I knew the area better, so why not take advantage of it and do what I said I might do all those weeks ago? I’m sure I’ve become much much stronger than I was back then, so pulling apart and eating these things should be a total breeze!
Here I come crabs!
It’s time for round two~!
~~~
So as it turns out, everything to do with these crabs was loads easier for me now! They no longer seemed ‘giant’ to me anymore, now that I had grown so much. Their pincers no longer cleanly sliced through my much thicker tentacles and only cut into them, and their super hard shells cracked apart way more easily! I didn’t even need to count on Shui for a single bit of it!
Yes, look at me, the independent, crab eating, plant!
-Which is fun and all, really, but I’m a much bigger plant than I was when I first ate one of these, and my stomach and seed have much more room to fill than the last time. And since I have somewhere to be, why not bring out some help here to speed things up? Besides, it’s been a while since my cute little plant minions got a chance to frolic around the place and hunt things by themselves. It’s as good of a time as any to give them a little treat, don’t you think?
Go on my cute little corpse babies, go eat some crabs of your own!
Everything you eat will just go right to my stomach, though!
Hehehee~.
It works out really well if it's like this, actually, because then I can just shroom up the ones that I kill for maximum magic ingestion, and they can handle the nutrient side of things. Really, I’m an optimizational genius! No one can get in the way of my efficiency!
~~~
Hey! I made a zoological discovery again! It’s about the crabs, or maybe I should say it’s about their babies!
See, I doubt that many people have ever seen a baby crab, including me. But still, you can kind of guess how it would look like, right? Small, bug-like, probably with a soft little shell of its own. Isn’t that about what you’d expect?
Well too bad, because this is a fantasy world! It can’t just let the crabs be regular super big crabs, now can it?! Noooo! It just had to do something weird, didn’t it?! DIDN’T IT?!
So yeah, I saw the babies of the big crabs I’ve been eating. I guess you could say it’s… Sort of like a butterfly situation? Or maybe I should say that it’s like flies. Or maybe bees would be a nicer comparison for them, if I was trying to be kind…
They’re grubs. They’re wriggly, grayish grubs, about the size of two human adult's fingers. And there’s big squirming pits of them, just dug into the back of some of the crabs’ tunnels, waiting to be eaten.
Okay, so I’m big enough now that I don’t need to provoke the crabs to come out of their holes like I did the first time. Now if I want a crab, I can just reach in there and grab the darn things on out! But that means that I don’t really need to pay too much attention about the holes that I was tugging them out of in the first place, you know? Because why go in there when I can just fight them out here?
But now I do.
Now I definitely do.
It wasn’t me who discovered the grubs first, mind you. No, that was actually Shui’s doing. It and Lily had teamed up, since Lily isn’t quite able to dismantle the crabs on her own just yet. When the two had brought a particular crab down, Shui, with its lower eyesight, noticed something nearby, and went deeper into the little cavern that their crab had come out of. And there, it found those grubs. And in a truly dog-like fashion, it ate the crab-grubs without a single bit of hesitation. Lily yelled, which jeez do I not blame her for, and I came over to see what was wrong. And that’s when I found out something very very interesting.
These baby crab grubs are basically like big, squirming eggs.
They’re absolutely loaded with nutrition!!!
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