Drip-Fed Pt. 02

The slime was feeling quite good about itself since it had figured out that it was pretty safe in this environment. As long as it kept its fleshy bits to itself, it was uninteresting to its surroundings. Not that it currently had any fleshy bits in the first place, having outgrown its latest pair of legs.

It had spent days searching around and a lot of new experiences had been made. First and foremost, that of the day-cycle itself. It had spent the first night in fear, hiding in a hole between roots. The reason for it being afraid being that, even though it couldn't exactly see a lot, it very much felt the cold.

As it found out in that first night, it was a cold-blooded creature. Well, it was a cold-slimed monster, but the point was that it needed external help to regulate its temperature. While its highly water based being made it a good heat battery, the continued cold of the night made it feel just sluggish in comparison to its day-version.

When the first night happened, it assumed the world was coming to an end. Not entirely unjustified, as the slime didn't even know that the sun and the moon were a pair of gods in a race whose rules mortal minds could barely comprehend yet.

Some misguided scholars said they were celestial bodies, but they could be corrected through some pretty easy magical calculations. That was something the slime, again, had no idea of. It just knew there was a sudden darkness.

The second time night rolled around it still hid under the same tree, by the third time it dared to venture around its base. Eventually, it just got used to the cycle and appreciated having some way to tell the time by that wasn't as inaccurate as clam digestion.

After growing as much as it could by feeding off grass and trees, putting it at the size of a guinea pig, the slime designated a certain tree as its den and rested there during the day, slowly eating away at it. At first it devoured leaves and small branches, then the thick ones, then, when basically only the trunk was left, it began eating it from the inside, slowly making its way down. That was actually easier said than done.

Because the slime needed things to be past its outer membrane to digest them and a trunk was much too big to do so, it needed to instead resolve to slowly chip away at the wood and eat it in, well, chips of wood. It used tiny insect mandibles for this effort, which was its nightly activity. Needless to say, it was boring as all hells.

The reason why it ate the tree top-down was twofold. One was that sticking onto the inner side of the trunk as it ate upwards was thoroughly uncomfortable. It had tried in that first tree that already had a cavity underneath it. With that experience, it had deemed it would rather eat downwards and let gravity do its work for it. The other reason was that it could feel the sunrays when the day began. All it had to do to that end was devour the bark down to a sensible level.

The eventual end product of the procedure was a very smooth, bowl-shaped cavity topping off a shaved down tree trunk, reduced to a mere half-metre in height. The slime had stopped there, not wanting to ruin its den by completely eating it, and was now spending its time sitting there with tree branches sticking out of its liquid body, waiting for the day to start, while planning out what it would do.

The routine went as follows. Once its body had warmed up enough and photosynthesis had given the slime enough energy for a prolonged period, the slime began its search for water. Being what it was, the slime needed to absorb new fluid regularly, the waterier the better. Blood would do the job, but it was not a long-term solution.

The two go to sources it had for this were the morning dew that hung on blades of grass and hollowed out stones in the surrounding areas, which gathered rainwater. If it rained, the slime simply slurped up everything that landed in its resting place.

At that stage, it would have pulled the tree branches back into its body. Plant parts, like animal parts, were limited in size, albeit for a different reason. The slime could only grow versions of the branches it had eaten. That was a large and often unimportant difference from the animal parts where it grew standardized versions.

It had yet to find a reason to grow giant branches regardless. They couldn't really be used as weapons, seeing how they had no way to move and weighed too much. Maybe if it found some living plant that could actually use them as clubs? The slime liked to theorize that everything existed out there, seeing as there were these cheating things that could fly, commonly called birds.

Anyhow, with a cup of sunlight, stronger than any coffee, and a lot of water refreshing its system, the slime started exploring. The only thing it had actively grown during its trips was usually an Attribute, namely chloroplasts from grass. That turned its appearance from a translucent, slightly blue tinged slime, a tinge that got stronger the bigger it became, to a green-tinged slime.

Feeding itself off of sunlight at any given opportunity reduced the slime's need to eat solid matter to once every three days, rather than every day, even while it moved around the place. Less time spent hunting meant more time to explore, which it needed with how slow it was.

It would have literally killed for a proper pair of legs. Not that the slime had any remorse over killing, it hadn't even heard of remorse. It was hungry, it ate. Sucked to be the prey animal in that situation, but that was just that. The only pair of legs around were these large-eared critters jumping around the place. Way too quick for anything but those flying cheats that appeared basically out of nowhere and carried them off. Anytime the slime saw that, it was reminded why it didn't use those legs, lest it be mistaken for a rabbit and have a less lucky landing the second time around. At least the critter's eyes were useful to realize that there were more differences between day and night than light levels. There was a blue sky with one blazing ball and a black sky with one less radiant circle, accompanied by a bunch of smaller dots.

It kept most of its explorations up or sideways from its position. Going down, it had soon decided, was not in its interest for the moment.

The forest got thicker there, basically switching the entire biome. Thicker and more dangerous, with larger and stranger creatures roaming around. After feeling something rip down a tree just by moving around, the slime decided that it rather not go there yet and rapidly fled the scene.

While it hadn't met anything that ate its acidic self yet, it was just a question of time until it would if it carelessly ran around in clearly more vicious areas of the world.

After all, while it was vaguely aware that it was unique from the way it spawned into existence, it could piece together that there had to be other things similar to itself. Just like there were different kinds of insects and plants, there had to be different kinds of slimes.

And if there was a species, there was a predator. The slime didn't believe its kind to be at the top of the food chain, otherwise it would have met something like it already. At least that was its logic. There was probably some sort of creature that gulped down acid or lived off the magic dwelling in its nucleus.

It therefore stopped exploring deeper into the forest and kept to the mountainside and above. Prey was pretty scarce, and impossible to catch, but there were more than enough plants to fill its proverbial belly.

This whole thing was also a nice mental exercise for the slime. After a day of exploring, it returned to its den and spent the night reconstructing every piece of the landscape it knew already. It produced a remarkably accurate and detailed mental map, a skill most humans no longer trained due to the benefits of having maps.

And one day, about three weeks after it had set slime onto the mountainside, it slugged its way to a very interesting piece of the landscape. Still without ocular, the reason why it had seeked out this particular place was the feeling of what it had thought to be running water. However, the constant running wasn't coming from some sort of river or other flowing mass. If it had been, the slime could have drunk it.

Interested, it manifested its short-sighted eye to get some sort of view on the situation.

What it found was that the stones were bleeding. That was the best description it had for what was going on. As if the mountain had an open wound in the shape of a flat, circular depression in the otherwise slanted landscape, the stones were oozing a mixture of white and black liquid.

The slime thought it was stone. Since it hadn't encountered a metal yet aside from as a part of stone, that was an easy mistake to make. Fact was, the slime could only eat things biological in nature, as such this liquid it had mistaken for water was completely useless to it.

Still, while it was already inside that crater, it might as well look around. It wasn't too big and the slime was a curious creature for things that didn't want to eat it. Following the flowing trickles of black and white metals, it reached a gathering pond in the middle.

No matter how much of the metal went there, the amount in that pond didn't swell. The slime sensed some odd goings-on underground where the liquid was pumped away and back into the walls of the depression, creating an unnatural and endless cycle.

It touched the pond and felt something being gently sucked away from it. No lifeforce, nothing important, just some excess mana it had. It carefully pulled back and the draining stopped immediately. It needed mana to morph around and since its body burned up physical resources to refill it, parting from it made the slime hungry quicker.

However, it had also loaded up on grass recently and whatever this weird place was didn't give it any hostile feeling. With nothing else to do and nothing exciting having happened in three weeks, the slime decided something that could be easily described as careless, bored and not as something wise people would do and fed the unknown metal some more mana.

If it could have spoken, it would have shrugged and said, "Let's just see what happens."

The slime found a happy equilibrium between how much mana it could gather from the energy it produced from photosynthesis and how much it gave to the pond. While its only influence over the former was that the mana regeneration was directly linked to how much it ate, the latter it could change by adjusting how much of it was touching the metal.

It was a weird liquid, to say the least. It hardened in response to the slime's touch. In other words, the slime could sit on it with its whole body if it so desired. It didn't, because the amount of magical siphoning that happened then was unpleasant and unsustainable, but it was an interesting discovery nonetheless.

As the process continued, the slime watched the underground happenings through its tremor sense. It had grown remarkably more sensitive with time. Being one of the few things the slime possessed naturally, it became stronger as its owner did. Like the pheromone glands. Speaking of the pheromone glands, the slime had spent a couple of nights beating itself over the head for evolving it rather than eyes at this point.

Having reliable eyes that could see more than a couple of metres and blurs would have been really nice. Not that the pheromones were useless, they attracted all kinds of bugs to its position, giving it some nice extra snacks through the day and nights, but it was just not something that proved vital. After all, it had yet to even see an ant, which were decidedly not the kings of everything.

The slime gathered its mass at the top, making it look like a cone for a moment, and then relaxed, causing the amorphous, green blob to fall back into its usual elliptical shape. That was its way of sighing, it had developed it out of boredom and to train its stretching skills. Its base body was pretty limited in what it could do, but that was no reason to not keep it fluid. Speaking of fluids, the liquid metal began to behave quite differently as well.

Over the past couple of degree changes of the sun's position in the sky (or hours for regular people), the liquid metal oozing had slowly stopped as the metal had stopped flowing in the circle. At the same time, the pond that gathered more and more of the liquid began to bloat. Not unlike a balloon being inflated, it seemed that the resulting bubble gained in buoyancy as well.

Now it had exceeded the point of being lighter than air and slowly began rising. Simultaneously, the mana siphoning ebbed away, so the slime inched away. It didn't even need to keep eyes on the thing, it was vibrating with such intensity that he could have felt it from dozens of metres away.

Hovering in the air, the vibrations slowly transitioned into tremors and then beats. The hovering bubble deflated into an odd-shape. An animal, although the slime by no means could discern what kind. It had front legs that dangled from shoulders too far up to touch the ground, also they ended in five short grabby things. The hindlegs had more proper soles, while that elongated torso was so slim that the slime had to wonder where that creature left all its intestines.

Then again, it was made from metal, so that question was probably naught.

It stood at about ten centimetres tall, less than half the slimes diameter, and had impractical long strands of fur growing from its head all the way down to its hips. Also it had two weird, not particularly large bumps on its chest. With its vibration detection, that was about all the slime could discern. That and quickly beating wings behind its back that flung into action to keep the creature afloat. Its limited sight also told the slime that this new creature had four colours, black, white, two dots of green and a very weak looking pink.

"Hello, awakener," spoke the creature, "I am the fairy of this mountain and deliverer of the divine quest of the maker of this pocket world. My name is Aclysia."

The slime reached up to it by extending a part of it upwards.

"A handshake?" asked Aclysia, tilting her head quizzically, "How peculiar, I am to be a guide. Then again, I was supposed to be awakened by a human." The metal fairy reached out to shake the tentacle.

The slime slimed around her hand. A feeling of disappointment hit it as it realized that it still couldn't eat this thing that just appeared before it. Metal, dead or alive, was not affected by its acid. At least it guessed that from the fact that the metal fairy up and down motion seemed playful rather than an attempt at getting out of its body.

Also, it continued to make these weirdly calming sounds. What a strange and wide range of noises for an animal to make.

"I do have to admit that you smell rather nice, awakener," Aclysia continued on as her hand was released. It was completely unharmed, indeed the slimes acid only attacked biological matter or things that were directly part of living beings. It would dissolve clam shells, but not armour. Fringe cases notwithstanding.

A fairy entirely made from sentient metal? Not an exception to the rule.

The odd creature sniffed the air around the slime. "Very attractive," she continued, leaning against his form.

Having gotten what it wanted, something interesting to remember of today, the slime turned around and slugged its way towards and up the stone walls. The axolotl eyes vanished, but the slime knew exactly which path it had followed. All it needed was an ant's nose, and it could follow its own pheromone trail back to its base.

The fairy followed it. "Uhm, awakener," for the first time its tone wavered, but the slime had no idea what that different frequency meant. "Where are you going? Do you not wish... to... commune... with... me...?"

It slowly dawned on the metal fairy that it had been accidentally awoken by a creature that had no idea what it had done and was incapable of speech. Did it even understand her? She flew overhead of the blob and asked, "Awakener, do you hear my words?"

The easy answer to that was: Yes, it felt the vibrations dully in the air. Although, even if the slime had known what they meant, its vibration sense wasn't quite good enough yet to discern the words from each other. It just heard the tone and the tone was non-threatening, so it moved on.

The metal fairy hovered on the spot, dumbfounded. It had been sent to this plan by the 33rd god of the omniverse decades ago. Whoever was to find her, so her creator, would be her awakener and she was to help him become a person of greatness. Hero, villain, inventor or conqueror, all of that had been left unsaid, just someone who went and left his, her or (as it turned out) its mark on the omniverse

And it was a slime.

Aclysia gathered herself and flew after her awakener. "It seems then that I am bound to an oddity," she spoke, more to herself than to the slime. "Perhaps you have more underneath your green membrane than my eyes can discern? A slime with mana and patience to awaken me has to hide something."

All around, the metal fairy was taking her fate in stride. There was no reason to be downtrodden or disappointed, in the first place her mission was incredibly vague. For now she would play the observer over this slime.

As night began to fall on the mountain, the slime came to a halt inside its den and stretched out its branches. Aclysia blinked at that display and gave a small, pale-pink lipped smile. Seemed like her awakener was unusual indeed.

With nothing better to do, the metal fairy followed its instincts and settled down on the floor. Her quick beating wings folded behind her back, as black and white as the rest of her body. She inspected herself, from the long, straight, white hair and pale skin to the black, one-piece dress she was wearing. Hands and feet, arms and legs, were also veiled with long pieces of black exterior, serving no other purpose than giving her the appearance as if she was wearing stockings and gloves. The only thing that really stood out in her colouration were the brilliant green eyes, the colour of fresh spring leaves, which she directed at the floor around her awakeners' resting place.

The chaos nature had made of the lawn affronted her eyes. Withered twigs and unruly blades of grass were laying around in an unacceptable non-pattern. If this was to be her and her awakener's home for the immediate future, then she would clean up this place. Not like she had anything better to do while the slime slept.

Of course, the slime didn't sleep, so it spent the night wondering about the curious creature it had awakened by mere boredom. Keeping track of the tremors, as she cleared up tiny branches of the forest floor and stacked them up elsewhere, the slime thought about how this was at least something to concentrate on during the night.

Then it went to update the map inside its mind, maybe the next days would bring something else that was different?

The slime indeed managed to find something interesting. It was a predatory plant. Disguising itself as part of the grass, a network of earthbound vines waited patiently. If a deer, a bunny or anything suitable in size happened upon it, the vines grappled onto the creature's legs. Then, it proceeded to just hold them until they died. Accordingly, this plant was called grip-root. Adventurers weren't known for their naming sense, even if they had a doctorate in biology at the side.

Afterwards, the vines covered the animal and just let it rot away. As this was simply a strategy the grip-root had developed to increase soil quality, getting regular food wasn't necessary. Which was good for it, since only young, unlucky or inexperienced animals would fall for the obvious traps.