While I remained near the water, Lia and Silva went and tried to hunt sothing that I could use as a test subject. Since I had no desire to personally et whatever was in the water, or whatever had struck before, I kept a distance and started to experint. Luna stayed with , using her eyes to study the effect just like I did, only from a different angle. Her eyes worked in a different fashion from mine and while we had discussed the differences, I wasn’t really able to make sense of her description. It was, quite frankly, weird but then, I had no idea how to describe the scent of magic either, nor how I subconsciously knew what the different colours represented. There were cases where I could recognise the colour but was able to see quite a bit more, with minute differences that I doubted I could see if it was a regular colour.
In this case, neither of us was really able to make out anything, even as we both carefully perford so experints. One of mine, using a tendril of conjured water in an attempt to get a remote connection to the water in the lake, demonstrated that the water itself was mostly harmless, though the experint also demonstrated that there was sothing in there. I could feel so Astral Power within the water, but diluted, at least until I noticed movent in the water and suddenly, the sensation of power grew by orders of magnitude and I felt my own power getting drained from the conjured Water. Looking closely, I could see a weird tendril snake its way into the tendril I had conjured, making imdiately drop it. I had no desire to get up close and personal with so weird tendril coming from the water, certainly not with one that drained Astral Power.
Further experintation was done with my blood, either infused with Astral Power or plain, before I started to include Concealnt effects in an attempt to suss out what was going on. It would have been far easier if the results were consistent but sadly, they weren’t. Multiple tis, the exact repeat of an experint yielded a completely different result, making it impossible to try predicting what would happen next, to say nothing of safely investigating closer. While the existence in the water never struck a chunk of Ice with my Blood on it if I concealed it in shadow, the creature didn’t have a consistent attack pattern. It might be unable to see through my concealnt or it might simply have given up on striking the Ice I floated over, I simply didn’t know. Thus, I had no desire to test out my concealnt directly.
Interestingly, the creature seed to be sowhat attracted to fire, as Alex figured out by tossing one of their flaming concoctions into the water, causing a rrily burning fire on the water. Monts later, the water started to churn rapidly, with more of these strange tendrils swirling around, but it didn’t look like they were trying to extinguish the fire, more like they were trying to spread it. Or maybe it had been my imagination, I wasn’t sure and couldn’t really try.
But it made think of the will-o-wisps we had seen the previous night and I realised that there were none of those now. It was either a curious coincidence or there was sothing fairly interesting going on. Either way, more experints and study was needed.
Luckily, before we ran out of things to test, Lia and Silva returned with my test-subjects. Or maybe calling the pair of rabbits ‘Bait’ would be more appropriate, after all, I was about to go fishing with them. However, I quickly realised that even the pair of rabbits was most likely not sufficient to get a better idea of what was going on, let alone start doing sothing about it.
There was almost certainly an entity in the water, so sort of monster, be it animal- or plant-based, I wasn’t sure. The reaction-speed I was observing made think it was an animal, plants normally didn’t react this way, but given that magic was involved, I wasn’t about to discard any possible option. Not after witnessing mind-controlling fungi and walking trees, though the latter only on Mundus.
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No, just because sothing felt wrong to my pre-change instincts didn’t an those instincts were correct. They had, after all, evolved and ford in a different world and I needed so ti to truly incorporate the truth of magic into my instinctive reactions. I was getting there, at least in combat, but when it ca to my ntal instincts, that wasn’t the case. My ntal threat assessnt was still largely based on instincts that evolved in the ancient past and had been passed down through successive surviving generations. But the threats had greatly changed, it wasn’t the stalking lion, the poisonous spider or the charging bull that was a physical threat, now even sothing as innocuous as a simple vine might want to strangle you. Or, as I thought was the case here, drag you into the water and drain your Astral Power.
The realisation that the creature before us might be a distant relative of Lia, one that decided to take a very long bath, almost made snort but I managed to keep the thought to myself. I sohow doubted that Lia would be happy to be compared to a tentacle-monster, she might just bite for that. Though I doubted it.
Shaking off the weird thoughts, I decided to start my next experint, naly a live-testing of my trusty concealnt magic using a living entity. For that, I first put a cage of Ice around one of the rabbits, carefully casting my cloak of Shadows around both afterwards. I even added so appropriate Runes to the cage, hoping that it would remain concealed before decided it was ready.
Looking at my concealnt from the outside was a little weird, I could see the Astral Power that made up the concealnt and my mind knew that the concealnt was there but my eyes could easily pierce it, to the point that the concealed area was more visible to than the rest. My magic was there, draped around the entire thing, giving far more information than my eyes normally would and my mind was able to incorporate that information into the image displayed by my eyes. Or at least I was relatively certain that this was what was happening, I would have to do so more testing, especially with sobody else casting concealnt magic of their own, to be certain.
Either way, floating the Ice-cage forward was surprisingly difficult, it felt as if the rabbit was weighing far more than it should. A curious effect but not one I could care about at the mont, it was sothing to add to my ever-increasing list of things I wanted to look at. Soday.
To my annoyance, the experint was utterly inconclusive. Floating the cage over water was easy and nothing happened, even after it reached the point where previous experints had been interrupted. Deciding to keep it there for a bit, I simply waited and then, my experint ended when another of those stupid tentacles shot out of the water, snagging the cage despite my best efforts to pull it back in ti. Curiously, I noticed that the tendril didn’t really go for the cage but easily speared through the bars, hitting the rabbit within. The rabbit was instantly dead and only then did the tendril wrap around the cage.
Using Overflow, I tried to rip the cage out of the tendril’s grasp, but to my surprise, I failed. The tendril was strong enough to withstand my Ice Magic and I even had to stop when I noticed that I had made a stupid mistake. I was pumping Astral Power into an effect that drained Astral Power, aning I was effectively feeding whatever was in there. Imdiately after I cut off my efforts, the cage was dragged into the water and lost to , the Astral Power fading from my grasp.
“It was as if that thing was drinking your magic,” Luna muttered, “But it didn’t really seem to care for the bunny.”
“Maybe that was the case but I think it targeted the rabbit first. Maybe we should see what would happen if the rabbit gets close without any active magic in the area,” I suggested, before asking Lia to find us so sort of long rod, sothing that we could use to fish.
She managed to drag a long, branch back, one that was too heavy for to easily lift, but working together allowed us to put the stunned rabbit over the water, without any magic working on it.
Sadly, that didn’t seem to change a damned thing, the weird tendril shot out just as it had before, maybe even a little faster, and tore the rabbit apart, forcing Lia and to let go of our branch.
Failure, more experints were needed, if I wanted to figure out what was living in that lake.
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