The question drove Lucy like steam through a turbine, energizing her thoughts and readying her body for action.
Her cilia still tingled with a ghost of the energy she had felt just at the edge of the blue light. Now, she dreamed of what she might be able to do with that energy if she could get close enough to learn how it worked. To harness it.
Despite her drive, what felt like days passed before Lucy made any serious progress.
With Sam’s help, she sectioned off a portion of one of the side tunnels that led off from the main chamber of their shared cave, chipping around the first blockage and setting one up farther down to create a private space.
With her own area, she had a place to think, and to experiment with options for protecting herself from the strange energy.
The water sat still around her for hours on end as she navigated the interface of her System and delved into the inner workings of her unicellular body.
There were options open to her that might help, like improving the durability of her membrane.
But nothing there would give her what she really needed. She had plenty of ways to increase her defenses against physical harm, but nothing that could reliably protect her from radiation.
Likewise, there weren’t exactly plates of lead lying around in the caves that she could use as a shield. Even if she had such a material, she would need to find a way to integrate it internally, since damage to her genetic code was the real concern.
After hours of making what felt like no progress at all, Lucy left her private section of the cave and went to see what Rikorlak and Sam were up to, hoping for some easy conversation to take her mind off her task, to rest and rejuvenate for a while.
Emerging from her chamber, she found them both floating comfortably in repose, dozing. Worm corpses that had been sucked dry were stacked in a neatly-separated pile from those still containing nutritious cytoplasm.
Lucy tried to wrinkle her membrane wryly. It wasn’t the first party she’d missed out on due to studying, and she was glad Sam and Rikorlak had enough food to last a while. She wasn’t quite sure what the future held for the three of them as a group, but for now she was happy enough to contribute as they each had in their own way.
Though, she admitted, it wouldn’t hurt if they developed some combat abilities.
Lucy had a decent grasp on her own System by now, but she still didn’t understand what was going on with other organisms in the area. Her efforts to talk to Sam and Rikorlak about it hadn’t cleared much up, but she supposed time would bring clarity.
As long as we can survive.
Her thoughts turned slowly to what else she could be working on. Her exploration of the area had only just begun, and there were still steps she could take to secure it.
In her excitement to learn more about the magical light, she realized she had neglected to swim back up to the worm caves and investigate them. She knew she had killed enough of them to strike a blow, but hadn’t actually gone to see for herself.
So with the others dozing and nothing better to do, she set off along her trail of symbols carved into the stone cliff.
She began to feel uneasy as she swam. The current had shifted at some point in the time she’d been in the cave, and now pushed her directly into the cliff face.
Lucy kept aware of her surroundings as she struggled to swim forwards, but somehow the lack of any other organisms around didn’t feel like a comfort. Inside the cozy confines of her tunnel it was different, but out here on the cliff face with the current shoving her around and ridges of lifeless stone as far as she could see, the emptiness felt more like desolation.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
In a short time she was there, finding the stragglers she expected lurking in the mouths of the caves. With a few puffs of her enzymatic cloud, they were gone, and their eggs as well, leaving the six cave entrances and alcoves scoured clean of the worms’ presence.
Collecting up their corpses, Lucy considered venturing into one of the cave entrances, but decided against it for now, satisfying herself with a brief peek inside the largest of them.
It wasn’t until the trip back to her own cave that she made the discovery that would ultimately lead her to a breakthrough for learning magic.
As she passed the alcove that led to the blue light, curiosity warred with caution in her mind.
She’d taken no obvious damage from her previous exposure, but the crackling energy given off by the blue stone had been potent enough that it would be foolish to get too close.
In the end, she conceded to curiosity but paid her debt to caution by deciding she would only approach until the barest tinge of blue light was visible in her Awareness, satisfying herself with a reminder of what she was working towards without endangering herself too much.
She hoped even the distant glimpse of the energy would galvanize her efforts and maybe even offer some insight to how she could safely learn more.
But as she swam down the tunnel, prepared to stop at any moment, the light never came. Proceeding by one slow push of her flagellum after the next, she soon found herself standing in the same chamber as before, only now it was completely empty, bereft of any significant features that might distinguish it from any other.
The stone emanating the light was gone. Sure that she had somehow gone to the wrong place, Lucy retraced her path.
But the way was clear. This chamber was the same one as before, only emptied of its magical light.
She swam to where the stone had been embedded in the wall.
Had it somehow dissipated or dissolved? The stone had given off enough energy that she wouldn’t have been surprised if it was slowly losing mass over time, so it was possible, but there were no obvious decay products left behind.
In other places around the room, deep gauges marked the grey stone. Courtesy, Lucy assumed, of the long claws of the digging creatures.
Moving closer to the wall, she looked for such marks where the stone had been.
Given their clear relish of worm flesh, it seemed unlikely that the digging creatures had a metabolism suited to making use of radioactive energy.
As she examined the stone, Lucy found the answer.
They don't eat it. They cover it up.
In the place where the glowing stone had sat embedded in the wall, a ridged lump protruded outwards from the stone. As Lucy looked more closely at it, she thought she could make out a slight difference in color between it and the surrounding stone, a deepening and darkening of the usual grey into a shade of green that was nearly black.
Producing her spike and moving gently, she tested the protrusion with the tip of her dagger. It had more give than the surrounding stone, and eventually she was able to chip off a small piece.
A soft cyan glow shone forth, revealing the pure blue shard underneath.
Lucy felt like Indiana Jones as the soft cyan light bathed her membrane like the shine of an ancient treasure unearthed at long last.
Before the tingling could intensify any further, she put her theory to the test, painfully squirting out a dollop of thick green goo from her cilia onto the exposed area of stone.
The light faded from before her, and after a moment, the goo hardened, beginning to harden and grow darker.
As Sam’s defensive slime did when exposed to certain enzymes, the green goo produced by the digging creatures underwent some kind of reaction upon exposure to the energy coming off the blue stone.
Lucy had found her defense against the magical radiation. The material produced when the green goo hardened blocked the energy coming off of the stone entirely, leaving not a trace of the crackling buzz she had felt before.
After some careful application of more slime to the area around the stone and some delicate chipping and prying with her dagger, she left the cave, encased treasure held safely in her hand.
There’ll still be work to do, she thought.
She wasn’t sure yet about the possibility of designing her own gene blueprints, but couldn’t help but dream of custom-made organic housings for her RNA made from the catalyzed goo.
With a sample of the glowing stone itself as well as the discovery of a material to protect her, she was confident she could at the very least learn more about strange world around her.
There was still work to be done to make her current home safe, but with the beginnings of her magical progression literally in hand, Lucy was happy.
More than happy, in fact. She felt like a whole new world of possibilities was just starting to open up to her, paths with as much potential as her System to help her along her journey. From what she’d heard from Rikorlak, magic could accomplish great things for those who mastered its use.
But as she emerged from the cave holding her chunk of magical stone and bright hope for the future, a more tangible and immediate concern presented itself.
A few body-lengths from the narrow tunnel she’d just exited, Lucy was surprised to see a clutch of slimy eggs clinging to the stone of the alcove.
She readied her dagger and primed her fungal vacuole, assuming that the organism that laid them was nearby, perhaps a larger worm. But when she swam cautiously to the edge of the alcove and looked out into the open water, a stranger and far more concerning sight greeted her.
The group of eggs had not been laid by a creature nearby. It had drifted in on the current along with dozens of others.