Chapter 5: Chapter 5: Cornfounded

The edges of my dream distorted, and I jolted awake. I laid still, trying to make sense of the dream while it was still fresh in my memory. I can't understand it. The concept of becoming space itself was highly unusual, except among the more wacky powers. I was certainly asleep, and the dream was clearly not part of reality, and yet…

I looked down, and my form had changed again. I was no longer the cockroach I had been before. Instead, I was a locust. The same locust I had seen and "held" in the dream.

I'm completely dumbfounded. I was trying to observe whatever subspace I had access to, and I guess I had succeeded. I was expecting vague sensations of the location or contents of the sub-dimension, or to manifest a crack in front of me leading to it. I was not expecting that.

What confuses me, however, was not the form of the dimension itself, but the contents. What should have been corpses and gore was life. And not some false, undead imitation of it either, like death-aligned often manifest, but actual life.

I tried to go back to sleep, to look inside of myself once more, but I was unable. I tried to summon one of the bugs from within the space, but was unable to do this as well. I was able to store away the book in my sub-space with some effort, concentration, and mana, but that could be explained away by my space alignment.

Had it all been a dream? Was me changing to a locust form merely a coincidence, and the dream some unconscious manifestation of the event? As interesting as the marble was, it was not possible. It was one thing for me to be able to somehow be space aligned and gain access to some vast sub-dimension. It was another thing entirely to gain access to any form of resurrection magic.

A number of humans manifested the holy alignment, which has a resurrection spell. However, the holy alignment was limited to pure-bred humans and artificial monsters, therefore it’s impossible for me to have that alignment.

A very small number of soul or life aligned were able to resurrect the recently dead, before their souls left their bodies.

Dual-alignments are also impossible for humanoids, unless it’s part of a compound alignment like nature, or their specialization. My specialization seems to be transformation related, which might qualify, but I haven’t gained any monster’s abilities.

I tried to interact with my subspace for a while longer, trying to prove or disprove its existence by retrieving and stowing the items and insects I had seen there. The items could be brought out and stowed away, as expected. When I tried to summon the insects I had seen, I felt my form begin to change, and mentally stopped the process, reverting back to my locust form.

I shoved the memory of that place to the back of my mind. If it comes up again, I’ll think about it, but I don’t currently have any way to investigate. Instead, my mind turned to more pressing matters. My mana has run low again, and I’m not able to simply photosynthesize it back. If I get caught in another life-or-death situation again, I have no way of bailing myself out.

Without photosynthesis, I only have one way of regaining mana right now: food. Unfortunately, the Terrarium household always immediately composted their scraps, so there was no trash to dig through for a few morsels. Even if there were, I doubt there would be any meaningful amount of mana in the food left over.

I turned to go back out through the hole I had found earlier. My front wings flapped, and my new back legs kicked off the ground with incredible force. The difference in speed was nearly 10-fold, and I almost splattered myself against a wall. Fortunately, I was able to get my bearings in a few minutes and head outside. I didn’t stop to hunt for food nearby, instead moving on to Mother’s field. Many of the crops there had been infused with extra mana by mother, and were therefore perfect to recover mana with. I did, however, have to watch out for predators there.

Although I am significantly faster now than I was as a cockroach, I’m still just as vulnerable. Unlike when I was a cockroach, there could be no safety in numbers. Locusts are cannibalistic, so if they see an injured locust flying nearby, they'll likely attack.

I arrived at the fields a few minutes after I left the house. The ground and air was densely packed with flies, locusts, roaches, dragonflies, birds, etc. A good chunk of them were hovering around the wall of still-digesting Ostean Giant Flytraps that guarded the perimeter, trying to find where that sweet scent was coming from. Unfortunately, most of the bugs were in the field destroying the crops. There were always a few bugs that found themselves past the wall, and weren’t tempted by the various flytraps inside of its perimeter, but there had never been nearly this many. This is what happens when nobody’s there to empty the flytraps. Mother is going to kill me when she finds out.

I carefully flew over the wall of flytraps, making sure to keep easier prey between me and any predators I saw. When I touched down on the other side, I immediately stopped to prey on a few cockroaches that were too slow to escape. They still had mana in them, even if they weren't mana dense enough to fill a humanoid when eaten at the pace a locust could. I only ate a few, though. I figured I could take one of their corpses to use as bait in emergencies. That, and the taste of cockroach was disgusting.

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The cornwall was my next destination. It was rather mana dense, and the dense vegetation would serve as adequate cover. Just before reaching it, my worst fear came darting towards me from behind. A dragonfly. It was thrice my current speed, carnivorous, and significantly more maneuverable than I.

I dropped the roach corpse and hopped towards the cornwall as fast as I could. The dragonfly hesitated as it flew by it, but ultimately decided I was its prey of choice. Damn it.

I only had one shot at survival. I jumped into the wall of corn a second before it reached me, and turned around. At the last possible moment, I pulled at the last scraps of mana I had left, and a shadow was cast on the ground just around me. I leaped forward past the dragonfly, and it bit one of my front legs off as I passed. The dragonfly turned to chase after me, but it could not maneuver quickly enough. My encyclopedia fell from above and slammed it down to the ground.

The dragonfly did not die immediately. It broke a wing, and its tail was trapped between the book and ground. Before it could wiggle itself out, I flew above it, and dove at it at an angle it couldn't move its head. I bit a chunk out of its neck, severing its head from its body.

I rolled over and screeched in agony as the pain finally set in. I had never lost a limb before, and father always said the first time was the worst.

I wanted to roll around for a bit longer, but I was afraid I would be spotted by another predator, and I was all out of tricks.

Still hurting, I flew towards one of the nearby corn stalks, and while shifting my mental image of all my limbs to different legs, I crawled inside one of the corn shucks.

I spent a few hours doing nothing but eating corn. For some reason, I never seemed to feel full, even after eating several times my own weight. I'm guessing it's going to my subspace somehow, which was convenient. It seems I still got the mana, and it meant I didn't have to spend days digesting. It was nightfall now though, and I didn't get enough sleep earlier after my dream woke me up early.

I returned to my encyclopedia, and stored it back in my subspace. Afterwards, I found a particularly comfortable corn shuck to rest in, and promptly fell asleep.

I woke up the next day fully refreshed. No reality-altering space-marble occupied my dreams that night; only a recurring memory of burning fields, blood curdling screams, and savage bandits. You know, normal stuff.

If yesterday taught me one thing, it’s this: I am hopelessly weak right now. I don't have the luck, power, or skill to slowly fight my way up the food chain. I need to find a better form, and fast. I don't think I can kill anything myself, and I'm unlikely to find any convenient corpses of anything stronger than a field mouse in the village.

It's time to head to the forest.

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