[Slimy Slime] Chapter 50: Teleportation: Unlocked!

I can do it! I CAN DO IT!

Fear me now you overgrown bird, I have unlocked powers men can only dream of! That women can only lament not having. That children can only look on with awe and envy.

For.

I.

Can.

Teleport!

“BWHAHAHA! Oof!” I felt something collide with the back of my head.

“Knock it off already!” Sandra said, calling out to me. I saw a small rock nearby.

“Oi! Who throws a rock at someone who’s laughing?!”

“And who teleports behind someone, screams, and then runs a few feet away and starts laughing like a maniac?! I swear to the gods and goddesses if you’re losing your mind I’ve been more cursed than I ever knew…”

“Hey! I can teleport! That’s so cool!”

“Bah!” Sandra seemed to be more fired up than normal. Some accent I couldn’t place seemed to be leaking into her speech. “Who says you can teleport?! Stupid jumped up King. Can’t even direct where you’re going, appearing behind people, nearly gave me a heart attack...”

I laughed sheepishly. Yeah, yeah this is going to be a skill that needs practice. But come on Sandra! I can teleport! Well, shadow teleport but it’s the same thing! Isn’t that so freaking cool?!

I focused again, trying to appear underneath the table shadow… only to appear behind Sandra again. Somehow, she must’ve expected it, because she was already glaring at me. Cough. Well… oops?

I slimed myself away a little bit, Tilia clapping and laughing happily in Sandra’s arms. She seemed to be enjoying herself at least. Yes Tilia! You, you truly understand me young one. The joy of teleportation is unrivaled and awe-inspiring. Some day, I shall teach you too, how to do such wonderful magic!

Sandra gave me a deadpan look while I was looking happily at her baby.

“She thinks you’re playing peekaboo with her.”

Cough

“W-Well… g-good? It’s good to be a happy baby.”

Sandra let out a sigh as I focused back on my task at hand.

Truly, having Sandra become my teacher was the best decision I had made today. Probably. The day was still young, I might have another great idea or two. But for now… I really did need to focus on this teleportation thing.

It didn’t make sense, which made it even more fascinating than normal. Let’s go over what I think I know about magic. Magic comes out of ‘veins’ that are… probably spiritual in nature. Almost certainly, really. I can feel a very vague connection with them but for anything beyond blindly feeling in the dark, I’d need higher spirit and even then, it would only be going by feel-

OR… I could trick my [True Sight] into letting me see souls and magic itself…

Thoughts for later! I still haven’t mastered omnipresent sight yet. Till I can see in a sphere around me, instead of just in front of me, I shouldn’t try anything new with it. But later… oh boy, later is going to be great.

So! The magic veins I call ‘Meridians’ after the Chinese stuff. Makes sense to me. They are literally spiritual veins. The ‘Meridians’ are connected to my magic ‘Core’. Somehow, this Core produces magic. Wait… is that right? No. Somehow, this core has my magic in it and from it, it flows out into the Meridians and then causes effects into the world. That’s… mostly correct, at least for now. A million questions from that alone rise up but now, teleportation raises a new one.

The magic in my core, I ‘move’ it to a shadow… but not immediately. It takes a moment to make the magic, well, there and then to move it. But the thing I don’t understand… it doesn’t go down my Meridians. How? Why? What does that even mean? I have no idea what path it’s using to travel or how it arrives in shadows and I especially have no idea how it’s bringing me along with it…

Questions among questions among questions.

And not a single one can be easily answered. Even focusing or holding the darkness magic in the core… nothing is different. I could hold it for millennia. ‘Moving’ it to a shadow is equally… annoying. I can’t slow the process down or speed it up. I can barely direct it. It’s the reason I keep missing. The teleportation isn’t a sight focused thing. That’s a necessary part, as is the darkness or shadows, but the mechanics follow a completely different ruleset. It feels like I’m trying to divert water going the correct way, but with my hand alone, and it’s as fast as lighting and as immaterial, as, well, shadow. The ‘hand’ in this metaphor is… what, my control? That doesn’t make sense. There must be something I’m using to act on it. A hand doesn’t just move, it uses muscles, which uses nerves, which use electricity all wired into the back of your spine, which goes directly towards your-

I gasp.

I quickly bring up my status screen but only focus on one part of it.

[INT: 35

WIS: 35

SPI: 50]

Intelligence, Wisdom, Spirit.

I’ve felt what Spirit is. The interconnectivity between Soul and Body. No, maybe even more. Between soul and all things the soul controls. That might be the ‘hand’ in this case. Partially. It directly touches upon my soul. But it… isn’t quite my soul. It feels more like it’s the ‘Nerves’ helping to reinforce it. No, even that metaphor is wrong. But it’s close. It’s like, it’s the outer part of my soul. The muscles to my will. Yeah, that sounds about right.

But the other two…

I know for a fact that intelligence makes you think faster. Not smarter, technically, but that only depends on who asks. To many, simply being able to multiply 512 x 512, 100 times quicker, makes you more intelligent. Having more thoughts in same span of time… yeah, that could be defined as more intelligence. I haven’t really noticed but when would you? My thoughts have been quick enough to react on the fly in fights and control nearly a dozen separate hands.

Part of controlling my magic is extremely tied to this. Magic isn’t always the simplest thing in the world. It’s like… clay in a way. Needing many tiny touches and control for the right thing to come out and not just a murky blob, at best.

I summoned a hand and from that hand I summoned a small bit of darkness, resisting how the sun tried to remove it. I shaped it, focusing, until it looked like a perfectly black, floating triangle. I slowly added depth, feeling my brain feel like it was over heating and my control begin to slip, as I transformed it from a triangle into a small building with a door and a house. Almost immediately, it grew out of control, before falling to pieces.

The clay was too difficult to shape right now.

The system gave assistance. I could feel it working with me, increasing my control. The strange part was that I could feel it at all. I couldn’t feel my ‘Strength’ increase or other increase in my stats, that was just the new me now.

I frowned in thought.

Because there was no system assistance, no extra there. It had purely changed me. Stats, after the increase… were just telling you the information. Even if I had everything system related pulled out of me, I’d still be just as strong and fast.

But there was another stat there. One much, much harder to define than Intelligence or even Spirit.

Wisdom.

Wisdom increased my mental fortitude. Said another way, it let me be more stubborn. Things that should crush me… would meet a barrier. That was somewhat disturbing. It was the closest stat to changing how I actually thought but I remember Knowledge’s lessons this time. Especially this time. It wouldn’t stop me from being depressed or change my personality, it would just let me withstand more. That was a double edged sword if I ever saw one. It was like artificially having a really high pain tolerance. Sure, you could survive years of war and not break down into a mess… but mental injuries were still injuries, everyone need a good cry and break down now and again and resisting that would do you no good.

How it related to ‘Wisdom’ was a bit more tricky though. Wisdom was… god, what was wisdom? Being able to make the right choices in the right situations I guess? Someone being particularly clever or coming up with good ideas was often thought of as wise. Especially in situations with only some information, and mostly going off ‘instinct’. If I curved my eyesight really, really hard, I could see how it could be ‘Wise’ to keep going even after suffering so much.

Honestly though, since the system is based off RPG’s, I assume the Gods just copied it from a video game. Which raised new questions. Said a different way… there was no Wisdom stat. Just ‘mental fortitude’ reskinned. Why was there no stat for becoming more traditionally wise? There was definitely stuff like DnD where wisdom meant wisdom. Maybe it really was the personality change reasons. I should have asked more questions. Wait, no, I should have been given more time to ask more questions. Not thrown through the ringer like that.

I shook my head. I was getting way off topic.

The point was that Wisdom… was what I was feeling. If spirit was half nerves, half muscles, and intelligence was my speed of thought, then wisdom was my… bones? Yeah. Yeah, that was it. And when whatever was going on happened when I teleported, I was using my intelligence to think and react, my spirit to ‘move’ and ‘push’ with my control but my wisdom… my wisdom wasn’t pushing along correctly. Part of that was stat imbalance but… it was also a skill issue.

So…. if I just focused and do it like this…

I teleported, aiming for in my cave.

A dark area greeted me.

[Magic Skill level up!]

[Magic Skill: (Dark) T5]

I did it. A wide slimy grin appeared on my face. I did it! But… that skill is going to need a lot more practice. It feels like I’m trying to recreate and relearn a whole alien body from scratch.

God, was this what it would’ve been like without [Natural Instincts], except for my slime body? I’d have been dead on that first day. Long, long ago.

Well… nothing to do now but practice hard.

And I know just who can help me with that.