Experiments

Instead of levitating myself and taxing my energy, I used it to shape myself by shaving away any excess.

I shaped myself into a ball and reabsorbed those shaved dust not wanting to lose any of my mass.

By using my shimmer to roll myself and adding a pivot I was able to roll and stop until I was in an area not too far away, my shimmer could sense up to ten yards.

I ran into a bear in my second year in my new location which used the area as a hunting ground.

This was huge because I had never come upon anything else previously.

If I did it was at the edge of my sense and was unable to reach it.

I was not sitting idle this life; I have been experimenting with many different things with my energy one of which was to change its shape.

Changing its density cost a lot of energy because once I released it a lot of the energy would be gone and I would have to accumulate it again.

I immediately got my shimmer into a condensed shape of an arrow wanting to know what would happen if I launched it at a living being.

I waited until the bear was about five yards away.

It was on its daily trek for food when I launched my condensed shimmer arrow at the bear. It immediately smashed its head to the ground and roared.

I tried another experiment while the bear was incapacitated. I reshaped the arrow into a tentacle with one end connected to me and the other reaching out for the bear.

As soon as my tentacle contacted the bear it was my turn to feel pain but unlike the bear, I could not express it.

It was blinding.

My conscious was overloaded with information from the bear in an instant the bear's life was my own.

I was able to read his memories from birth until now and gleaned some interesting information about the forest I called home before abruptly losing consciousness.

When I recovered, I reached out with my shimmer sense but could not sense the bear.

It seems it was smart besides from the bear's memories I could tell that this part of the forest was considered a no-go for a lot of the animals due to poison fog.

It receded not too long ago which also explained why I ran out of minerals.

I have been cataloging different minerals in the area although without tools and hands and really anything to use to analyze I have been forced to catalog as I go in my mind.

Within my time spent here, I was able to catalog more than seventy different minerals but nothing I could see that would draw my consciousness to this planet or this place.

It feels like my luck is forever in the gutter, but my determination was just as strong as my luck was shitty.

Ten more years of experimenting gave me some answers and left me with more questions about the shimmer that I have been using.

With it, I can communicate with other living beings and I realized that there is a lot of intelligence around me.

For example, a wolf that was hunting a rabbit den about one hundred yards away immediately turned around and ran away the moment my shimmer made contact with it.

It had a barrier around it rejecting my energy all I could make out was the shape.

It was shocking 'So I am not the only one that can use this shimmer' Also I learned different tricks to make it grow.

I can stay awake for six months now before succumbing to the depth of the darkness.

The effects were stronger tendrils and stronger arrows.

I can read a subject without the backlash of what I like to call memory overload but that only works for certain subjects.

I noticed it hurts more for subjects who have lived longer or have more data to extract from them.

I learned that there is nothing but miasma to the east where I came from.

To the west is more forest.

I haven't met any animals that have been to the edges yet. North is where the mountain is, and south is again more forest.

I spent my time training my shimmer and collecting the minerals that allowed me to be me and to grow.

I am now a perfectly round rock sitting at five feet high and seven feet wide, small victories right?

At this point, I have moved towards the mountain making more than a fifty-year journey after the fifty-first I felt it.

The mountain minerals were extremely pure I could feel the hunger, but it wasn't my stomach, it was my whole being.

I rushed the rest of the way sometimes pushing myself and rolling continuously without checking my surroundings before realizing how stupid that was and how it would waste almost a century's worth of work.

By the end of that sleep cycle, I was able to reach the base of the mountain, and was I excited not for the minerals.

It was time to run my experiment!