Candy has levelled up and gained five stat points to allocate.
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” I grumbled as I stumbled through the woods once again. This time, I was heading away from the goblins, toward where Ilgot had said there was a human village.
I didn’t know where else to go, but I couldn’t exactly sit in the woods forever. Candy was whiny and insistent. And very much not happy being named Candy.
Though my elation at her annoyance was filled by the confirmation that she was reaping all the rewards from my effort.
“I don’t suppose you can steal less of my experience?” I asked. “I’d be a much better host if I had more than 9 strength and 6 pitiful remaining HP.”
“No,” Candy replied, not even seeming to consider it. “I’m no good at anything as a little plort. And since you apparently need all your organs, then I need other stuff to grow.”
I groaned. I was so tired of walking. My back had like four knots in it from sleeping on the ground. My ankle still hurt with every step. Mercifully, the clothes protected me from my own clumsiness to some degree. No more getting scratched by an ambushing branch I had missed.
This sucked.
But I was alive, and seemingly going to live for the foreseeable future. What a twist of fate.
I mostly tried not to think too hard about what Candy’s presence really meant. Sometimes when I took a break, I could swear I felt a shift inside me. A fleeting feeling that made me question if I had felt it in the first place.
But Candy was definitely inside me, a slime was living inside my body and had created a facsimile of my mind.
It was like having an evil conjoined twin that had never heard of empathy.
I continued forward, following the curve of the stream more or less. My stomach kept gurgling. The whole 30 days without foot thing was starting to seem far less plausible. It hadn’t even been 24 hours, and I was already debating eating suspicious-looking berries from a very bountiful bush.
I kept my jaw firmly shut and ground my teeth. “You literally took thousands of stat points, how can you possibly be useless? You ate like 100 skills,” I scoffed.
“I am not useless,” she gasped with horror. “I just used it all to evolve a bunch. So once I level up a bit, I’ll be far stronger than you ever could have been.”
“Oh, right, 10^10 times,” I sighed.
Candy giggled. “Yeah, it was super weird. Starting all over from a plort again is obviously kinda a pain, but I’m so much more than I was before it. No regrets!”
“Good for you,” I seethed. She hadn’t even gained the power. She had cashed it in for evolutions, a billion times to be precise. What the actual
fuck?! What a damn waste. Now she was just a measly… “What’s a plort?” I asked.
“Mmmm, like a baby, kinda,” Candy hummed. “Plorts are like really young slimes, we’re pretty much just a core and a little bit of goop. We’re like prime snacking material and full of condensed mana. So we gotta play it safe until we’ve created enough slime to protect our cores.”
Ah… well, it was nice to learn something.
“Why do you have a slang term for something specific to slime when you weren’t even sapient until yesterday?” I pointed out with a frown.
“Uhh…” Candy trailed off, seeming to think about it. “We're a hive species, and our genes are full of way more information than you icky solids. We encode stuff magically because we’re that cool. Hence, I’ve got all sorts of knowledge from my progenitors.”
“Ah,” I muttered. Unwilling to provide any crumb of thanks for the information. It just made my head spin. I grimaced, my back cramping painfully. I leaned against a tree. “I don’t suppose you can heal me?” I asked, already knowing the answer. “I’m in a lot of pain.”
“Hmm, no, but I could eat some of your nerves so you don’t feel it,” Candy suggested. “I mean, you’ve got them just lying about.”
“No eating me!” I snapped. “Just admit you’re useless, and we can move on.”
“I’m not useless,” Candy mumbled, seeming almost scolded.
I didn’t really know if she had feelings to hurt, but on the chance she did, I was glad to have hurt them. She had and was making my life worse in every possible capacity. I didn’t exactly have an outlet for my frustration, or even a conception of how to rid myself of Candy, but I could certainly be bitter about the whole thing.
After, once again, far too much walking, I spotted a bridge in the distance. A simple wooden structure that went over the stream. I left the forest behind as the thicket changed into a more grassy terrain, a simple dirt road trailing off into the distance on either side.
Well… it wasn’t a village. But it was proof of civilized life.
The only question was, which way should I go? I could just wait and see if anyone went by. And honestly, given my exhaustion and the definite degree of shock I was experiencing, that seemed like a perfect option. Maybe a nap under the cozy sun amongst the grass and flowers.
I was already filthy, lying in the dirt couldn’t possibly make it any worse.
“What are you doing?” Candy asked as I poked at a lumpy spot of grass with my shoe.
“Looking for somewhere to lie down,” I rolled my eyes.
“No, no breaks. I’m hungry. You need to find us food,” she immediately began again.
“Can’t,” I yawned, doing my best to ignore her. “Too tired. I’m totally out of stamina, and I’m still half dead, so I’m going to lie in this nice spot of grass and wait for someone to come by for directions.”
“That is a stupid idea,” Candy grumbled. “We could be waiting forever!”
“Maybe,” I shrugged. “But I’m sure you can find a way to pass the time. Maybe learn patience?”
“Oh, hmm, is that a skill?” Candy asked.
I closed my eyes and tried to get comfortable. I wasn’t going to dignify that with an answer.
Frustratingly, sleep didn’t come. I was too wound up, too sore, too high on the permanent adrenaline required from essentially wandering about aimlessly for the last 24 hours.
I was bored. And god was it a relief. I fiddled with analysis, enjoying the lack of pressure to do this or that. I might have found peace in the moment last night, but it had only been with death on the horizon. Now, just lying in the grass, it was a little easier to breathe.
[Telepathic Link]
You share a telepathic link with Candy.
Range: self
Yup… that seemed about right. In manga, an analysis skill was always totally useless at the start, and then got actually useful once it levelled up a bit. But none of my skills seemed to have levels. And if they could gain levels, they still wouldn’t, with Candy leeching my experience.
Was I really never going to make an ounce of progress in this world?
A large ball of hydrogen gas fueled by nuclear fission at its core.
A main sequence star.
Colloquially known as the sun.
Oh, now it wasn’t even trying. This was the shit covered in my intro to astronomy class in high school. It wasn’t even pretending to give me new information.
That's grass.
I sighed. Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have complained about getting information I already knew. Now the skill was just throwing a tantrum. Forget slimes, was the system Sentient? It wasn’t an uncommon trope. And it certainly seemed to have a degree of sass. Though it wasn’t like there was any interface or voice to speak to. All I had was the occasional alert about something, or my dumb analysis skill.
Flower.
Green.
Plant.
Candy has levelled up and gained five stat points to allocate.
Ohhh mother fucker! I was going to be stuck with literally nothing for my entire life here. Literally everything I got went right to fucking Candy! My brief eternity of walking, my practice with [Analysis]. The whole point of the system was made redundant. I gained nothing from any of this!
Bull fucking shit.
“Hey, there are people approaching,” Candy piped up from the recesses of my mind.
I frowned, glancing up from the flower I had been mangling.
Sure enough. Squinting in the sun, I could make out four figures headed in my direction.
“How did you even know that? I can barely see them?” I huffed.
“We’re not limited by eyeballs,” Candy scoffed. “Please.”
God, it was embarrassing, outclassed by a literally newborn slime. With a groan, I climbed to my feet and tried to figure out how to look the most casual while standing on the side of the road and waiting for strangers to approach. It was easier said than done.