After three days of traveling away from my home, I found myself completely alone.
The place I came from wasn’t the only settlement of squirrels on this branch, and I would likely soon stumble upon another one. There were also other people traveling between settlements on the branch, but the last one I had passed was out of sight and I couldn’t see another coming.
I found a small side branch, climbed it until I found new growth, and grabbed a bud to munch on as I settled down.
There wasn’t much of a chance of running into someone I had seen recently, at this point, which gave me the opportunity to experiment with [Transformative Growth]. Finishing up the bud I was snacking on, I closed my eyes, and started mentally prodding at myself.
Healing was fairly easy for me. All of my first healing skills had been spells, which required memorizing very long and difficult chants as opposed to understanding anything about the body or medicine. I trained those skills regularly, and in the process, came to recognize the feeling of supernatural healing.
Then, as an Uli, my only access to healing was through a restoration skill. That was a supernaturally sped up process, powered by Blood, but it was mostly just accelerated biological healing processes. My body already knew how to heal, I just provided additional energy to do it faster. It was a fairly common skill among the Uli since their lifestyle resulted in a lot of injuries, and once they studied their own recovery, they learned how to push it further with Blood.
Between those two things, acquiring [Restorative Growth] in this life had been a breeze. It was a bit of both, channeling an external energy in order to heal myself naturally, but because it was an external energy source, I could also direct it into others, though with minor loss in efficacy. In my case, the healing had been instantaneous and effectively perfect, on account of my high Love stat.
[Transformative Growth] was different. It allowed me to push my body to grow parts that wouldn’t grow naturally. My body didn’t have an established framework for these parts, and so the growth reflected the source of the energy: the Mother.
I was a bit worried that my high Love stat could act against me, here. A mistake could be dangerous. Normally, a squirrel would learn this skill with a Love stat in the single digits, often only 1. The growth would be gradual, and no single day of the skill use would be so extreme that things couldn’t be corrected in the days that followed.
If the energy source was internal, I would have tried to use a controlled amount, limiting the flow, but while I was only the channel for the energy. The source was the Mother. The energy was provided daily, but I only got what I got, and I wasn’t sure I could limit or cut it off.
Experimenting with [Restorative Growth] would be slow, since I only “recharged” once per day, and as a squirrel, I had a very finite number of days of life. It would also require quite a lot of self-harm, which I was capable of, but didn’t exactly desire, particularly without a knife to perform clean and controlled cuts.
The first things I wanted to grow were my patagia, the gliding “wings” which would save me in case of any falls. That was particularly important for when I started climbing the trunk. Many squirrels grew them, even if they didn’t plan on climbing the tree, and so I knew that it took a while to grow them in full. Given how much total time and energy went into growing them for the average squirrel, I didn’t think my current Love was far in excess of what was needed for them in total, so that would be my first attempt at using the skill.
Since the gliding wings weren’t part of my natural growth, I couldn’t rely on my body to provide the structure. I also knew the squirrels didn’t have enough education and knowledge about their own bodies to be controlling their actual DNA, or whatever the equivalent to that was in this universe. Either they were drawing on some kind of blueprint from the world-tree itself, or the growth was based on a mental image.
Imagination-driven change would mean that they could grow anything, if they had enough perspective and insight. With their short lifespans and only oral storytelling, they ended up copying what they saw from their parents and community.
For the moment, I would do the same. I pictured my mother’s wings, which had so frequently wrapped me up in hugs. I had been curious about them as a child and studied them in great deal, so I was rather familiar with how they attached to her body already.
It didn’t take much more than a thought and a focus of will to feel the rush of energy flow through me.
[Transformative Growth 1]
Basic additive transformation to form using Love.
I nearly fell over from my seated position. I felt hollowed out, like I had been emptied, which made no sense to me since the energy was supposed to have come from the world-tree itself.
My stomach gurgled, and I realized I was ravenous, even though I just ate.
Ah, that’s it, I realized. It wasn’t the energy cost, it was the mass. If the growth came slowly, over time, it would only require a small amount of tree material from my normal intake, but I had done a hundred-fold growth all at once.
Looking down at my arms, I confirmed that I had grown the patagia that I had wanted, and in full. Growing them in one fell swoop had taken it out of me, but fortunately I was sitting among buds. I crawled over to the nearest one and started to eat, and continued to choke down as much as I could long after I felt full, trying to replenish what I had lost.
I reached for [Restorative Growth] to see if that could accelerate my recovery, but my energy for the day was spent. I wouldn’t be making any more progress on my journey that day, so when I had eaten all I could, I rolled onto my back and closed my eyes.
*
After sleeping and eating until the next morning, I felt a lot better.
I would need to be careful using this skill, ensuring I had enough to eat for any future transformations. It would be best to do it at the end of the day, after eating as much as I could, and surrounded by more food to replenish my physical reserves right after.
Though, I wasn’t sure what exactly I would want to add to myself next. Most squirrels around where I grew up grew their patagia when they reached adolescence, and beyond that, they had little use for the skill besides growing some antlers for show.
Part of me wanted to grow a big set of antlers, because it was something I associated with masculinity from the male squirrels I grew up around. I had thought Tochiki, my teacher, had taken his antler growth a bit too far, but I found myself kind of understanding it a bit more now.
Having a big set of antlers wouldn’t change what was between my legs, though. More importantly, it was purely cultural, and I was leaving the branch. It wouldn’t necessarily be associated with masculinity on other branches, where they had other local growth customs.
I looked downward. Could I change what was between my legs, with this skill?
Taking a closer look at the skill, I wasn’t so sure. Maybe I could grow boy parts, but they would be additive. They wouldn’t replace what I already had, and that was the primary source of my discomfort with my body. I could still be impregnated. Perhaps I could grow something over my existing parts to block them off, but I had no idea what the health consequences of that could be.
I was also fairly certain that the growth would look similar to the patagia and antlers, meaning it would be comprised of world-tree matter. Having a prominent, glittering nutsack would only draw attention to my attempted alteration.
What I wouldn’t give for some clothing, I thought with a sigh. I briefly considered fashioning something out of leaves, but that would also make me stand out as unusual.
It was better for me to continue my journey and explore the tree before I started adding other parts to my body. If I found the right place with the right culture, maybe I could live out my squirrel days presenting as a male rather than female. Otherwise, I could just keep traveling. So long as I didn’t settle down anywhere, no one was likely to proposition me to have their babies.
I shuddered at the thought once again.
Stretching my arms out, I examined my new features. The “wings” were just like I expected, based on my mother’s. Giddy, I looked down at the main branch from where I was perched.
After a brief moment of hesitation, I jumped, holding my arms out wide.
The air caught my patagia, and instead of falling, I glided forward, a slow controlled descent. The English word “skydiving” came to mind, but I was pretty sure I had never done it before. My heart was racing with excitement and I let out a whoop. What a rush!
But the branch surface rapidly approached, and while I wasn’t falling fast enough to be killed on impact, I realized that I didn’t exactly know how to land.
Some part of my martial skills told me to tuck and roll, and by the end of my tumbling, I managed to wind up on my back, looking up towards the canopy, without too much injury. My high Form stat likely helped limit the damage as well. I’d need to work on the landing, because flying was awesome.
Groaning and getting back to my feet, I shook myself out, making sure I could still walk. I had left the branch with the buds on it behind, and unless I wanted to backtrack, it was better to wait until I reached another part of the branch with food before I used [Restorative Growth], if I even needed to use the healing skill at all.
I resumed my journey towards the trunk, thinking more about how I could use my new skill.
Unlike the squirrels, I had a ton of ideas to draw from when it came to possible transformations. Two lives on two different worlds gave me insights that the squirrels may never have.
Could I grow another pair of functional arms, like the Uli? I wasn’t sure how I would come across to the other squirrels, if I did, and didn’t want to become something that was perceived as a monster, ruining the rest of this life. There wasn’t even really any advantage to having more arms in this life. Most of the things I could use another couple of hands for was crafting or combat, and neither of those things was really a concern here.
I went over other physical changes I could make, and most of them came down to ways of getting “stronger”, either increasing my defense or offense. None of it really made sense for this life, and most of it would weigh me down, which ran opposite of my goal to climb the tree. My mind wandered back to my reproductive organs, and from there, I started thinking about other possible internal transformations.
My next step faltered, and I came to a complete stop, freezing in place.
Can I give myself a mana circuit?
Would that even work? Mana circuits weren’t physical objects like wings or antlers. It was an energy construct that existed in Tovar’s world, but beyond the physical, for pushing mana through. Mana didn’t exist in this world, though the energy I used for growth was something similar.
[Transformative Growth] was specifically additive growth to my form, though, and I was fairly confident from when I acquired [Manakinesis] that my mana circuit existed beyond my form. It probably wouldn’t work, or I would wind up with an infinitely complex structure of crystal inside my body if I tried.
But that wasn’t necessarily the case for Uli and Sheowon Blood.
There was a lot I never truly figured out about Blood, but it was intimately related to the physical blood that ran through my veins, pumped by my Uli heart. Blood retaliation was carved into the skin closest to my heart, radiating outwards along the blood vessels. Blood recovered through eating food and sleeping, very comparable to any other physical process.
It didn’t make sense to grow another pair of arms like an Uli. But if I could grow another heart, an Uli heart, could I regain access to Blood?
There were a lot of issues with the idea, most notably that there were probably countless complications with mixing biologies, assuming I could even grow a heart at all. Would it just be some weird crystal tumor, if I tried, shoved in and grinding up against my current organs?
But I couldn’t shake the thought as I started walking again. If I could figure out how to bridge different powers this way, I could regain access to skills from past lives, and regain all the benefits of the work I had put in to those.
Maybe I didn’t need a whole second heart. Maybe I just needed whatever it was that allowed me to generate Blood energy. Was it even a physical construct, thought?
It was part of the rules of that universe that all sapient life had Blood, but that didn’t rule out that Blood was accessible in other universes. I would need to get the energy from somewhere and process or convert it, but could I then store and use it?
When I wounded myself to learn [Restorative Growth], I saw that my blood in this body was quite different. Maybe it wasn’t even blood at all, some other kind of fluid that sustained this form. That could negatively impact what I was imagining, potentially rendering it impossible.
I thought back to my experiment making my “Bloodbound daggers” as Mali, which had been a total failure. At least that failure had no cost and still resulted in functional blades. Experimenting with this was a whole different matter. It could kill me.
Death wasn’t that big of a deal, though. I had already died three times, that I knew of, and I only had a handful of years left in this life in the best of cases. Sure, I could still probably advance my skills further in those years, but if I couldn’t bridge this chasm between my sets of skills across lives, there was much less of a point of putting in so much effort to gain and train skills anyway. The skills would only have use in a universe that had a similar enough base system to allow those skills to be active, and I had no idea if or when that would happen. If I were ever born into another tree-and-squirrel life, it wasn’t like that was a life that required I start out with super advanced growth skills.
The day passed by while I wandered in deep thought, and I pulled myself from my thoughts only long enough to find another source of food before the black sun rose. By the time I found new buds to eat, I had more or less convinced myself that the risk was worth it.
Maybe it would be better to wait until the end of this life to make the attempt, so that if it killed me it was less of a loss. In my other lives, I would have said “four or five years left” was already the end of my life, though. While I was only at the start of my journey in this life, I was likely only able to climb a few branches as I was, explore some cultural differences between squirrel settlements, and then die alone, anyway.
If I had access to my Blood techniques, for these remaining years, I believed I could do more. Most of the skills were fairly combat-oriented and thus useless, but I also had augmentation skills that could help me in my travels. [Blood Augmentation] and [Blood-Empowered Leap] would certainly aid in my climb. The faster I could travel, the more I would see, and in turn, the more I would learn about this world.
And once I figured out how to bridge the skills of two of my lives, perhaps I could expand that bridge to cover even more.
The potential trade-off was worth it, even just for this life. When I added the possibilities beyond this life, there was no longer any question in my mind that I had to try.
I ate as much as I could before settling back down to think through how I would make my attempt.
Giving myself a second heart probably was a mistake and a quick path to death. It was also probably unnecessary. I only needed to add whatever feature it was of the Uli that created Blood to my current body.
Despite not having a perfectly clear picture of what that was, I had spent decades as an Uli and was intimately familiar with the end result. This was the case for young squirrels, who didn’t need to perfectly understand how to grow antlers, they only needed a clear mental picture of the results they were after. I knew my end result better than most squirrels would know anything, just from the difference in lifespan. That, and some ridiculous stats to back it up.
That didn’t guarantee it was possible, since I was trying to grow something from outside of this universe entirely. Hopefully, it was enough.
I let out a slow, shaky breath.
“Here goes nothing,” I muttered.
Grabbing hold of Mother’s Love, I pushed my form to grow the ability to produce Blood.
Every bone in my body started to ache. The ache grew until it reached a tipping point, and liquid fire poured into my veins, flowing through me like a tidal wave racing towards my heart.
Pain like nothing I had ever felt before blossomed in my chest.
I tried to cling to consciousness, failed, and passed out.