Chapter 6: Bigger Pond

The pond had an edge.

Andy discovered this the way most discoveries happen at his scale: by bumping into something and having an opinion about it. He had been hunting near the thermal vents, methodically clearing the local population with the workmanlike efficiency of a man punching a clock (a clock made of siphonophores, but the metaphor held), when the chemical gradients shifted in a direction he hadn’t encountered before. Not warmer or cooler. Different. Foreign compounds. The equivalent of stepping out of your apartment and smelling a restaurant you’d never noticed.

He followed the gradient.

The pond was connected to something larger. A narrow, rocky channel where his warm water met a cooler, faster current carrying chemicals and organisms from somewhere bigger. On the other side was a body of water so vast that his nerve net registered it as sensory static, too much information from too many directions, a library when he was used to reading a single book.

He had been living in a tide pool. This whole time. A warm, sheltered, geologically heated tide pool, and he’d been strutting around it with his glowing horn like the king of the kiddie pool.

[NEW TERRITORY DETECTED]

[OPEN WATER BIOME: SIGNIFICANTLY HIGHER BIODIVERSITY, LARGER ORGANISMS, INCREASED ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS]

[EXPLORATION BONUS: ENTERING A NEW BIOME FOR THE FIRST TIME GRANTS ADDITIONAL XP FOR KILLS, DISCOVERIES, AND SURVIVAL EVENTS.]

[PROCEED?]

The System was asking permission. That was new. “Proceed?” was the kind of question that contained, within its politeness, the implication that turning around was the sensible choice.

Andy proceeded.

The channel was narrow enough that his tentacles brushed the walls on both sides, and then the channel widened and the open water hit his nerve net like stepping out of a closet into a cathedral.

Space. Depth. Distance. The tide pool had been a warm bathtub with thermal vents and a ceiling made of surface tension. The open water stretched in every direction beyond his sensory range. He was, for the first time since reincarnating, truly small. A tiny organism in a body of water that did not care about his horn or his combat moves or his twelve millimeters of predatory intent.

Cooler here. Thinner nutrients. He was going to have to work harder for every XP.

And the organisms were bigger.

This rearranged his understanding of the food chain with the subtlety of a slap. In the tide pool, Andy had been apex. The biggest fish in a very small pond, a cliche that hit differently when you had recently been a fish in an actual pond.

The open water hosted things that would eat him without noticing.

He sensed the first one as a pressure wave, large and moving, displacing enough fluid that it reached him from several body-lengths away and sent him tumbling backward like a cork in a bathtub during an earthquake. Something big had just passed through his vicinity. Not hunting him. Just moving. Going about its enormous business, and its wake had tossed him without a second thought.

If the tide pool was the kiddie pool, this was the ocean, and Andy had just shown up with his little horn out.

He stabilized. Extended his tentacles. Reoriented his spike toward the direction of the disturbance. Waited.

The thing came back.

It was somewhere between fifty and a hundred times his size. Something that had evolved beyond the colonial stage into a body plan his tide-pool experience had no frame of reference for. It moved with a slow, powerful undulation that displaced water in rolling waves, and Andy, at twelve millimeters, was well within the size range of “snack.”

He did not engage. He did not heroically charge. He did not name a combat move.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

He hid.

The mineral deposits near the channel mouth provided cover, pockets of shadow where a small jellyfish could tuck its bell and wrap its tentacles close and become, for a tense interval, as invisible as possible. Which was not very invisible, because something was wrong with the horn. His nerve net had been registering a new output from the spike for the last several hunts, a faint energy signature at the tip that wasn’t heat, wasn’t pressure, wasn’t any sensation his jellyfish body had a name for. He hadn’t known what it was until he’d noticed smaller organisms orienting toward him in the dark, drifting in his direction the way they drifted toward the bioluminescent colonies near the thermal vents.

His horn glowed. He couldn’t see it (no eyes, no light receptors, just a nerve net and a bad feeling), but the evidence was conclusive: the spike was producing light, a soft blue-white output that had been barely noticeable in the bright tide pool and was now, in the dimmer open water, apparently obvious enough to function as a dinner bell for everything within swimming distance.

“My stealth weapon,” Andy thought, watching the massive shadow pass overhead, “has a nightlight. This is like putting a bell on a cat. Like painting a sniper rifle neon orange. Like, and I cannot believe I’m saying this as a jellyfish hiding behind a rock, having a boner at the worst possible time.”

The horn-as-phallic-metaphor was getting less metaphorical with every evolution and Andy was choosing to simply not think about it.