World Seed

When I woke up, the room was entirely silent for a moment. An eery silence that made my hands twitch in nervousness. However, soon I heard the background noise from the bamboo fountain, the low hum of the ship’s engines. That helped me to calm down before Celeste’s voice was projected into my mind.“John, what the hell was that?”You mean that dream…?Her voice was shaking slightly, showing how worried she was. “That was no dream, John. I see your dreams. This… I don’t know what this was.”Ah… so a god really did contact me… Just to confirm it, I opened up my quest window. Sure enough, the quest I had gotten from Malthan in the ‘dream’ was listed there. So… what can you tell me about the Qu’Lopti?She hesitated for a bit, as if checking her own records. “Nothing. I thought I had gotten information on all of the sapient races, at least basic descriptions and planet coordinates, but I don’t have anything on this race. If what Malthan told you is true, and that you have three years to save them from destruction… Then most likely, by the time of NeoLife, they were a long forgotten, extinct race.”I let out a long sigh at that, shaking my head. Seems the god of chaos really wants us to mess with the timeline. Hope we don’t piss anyone off with that…I could hear the AI in my head giggle lightly at that, but she didn’t say anything else. Instead, I allowed myself to go back to sleep. There was still a long journey ahead of us.About a week after my meeting with Malthan, my dad unlocked his new class. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to regain his former psychic power, the Blind Spot. Instead, he received a different power, known as ‘Recall Steps’. This new power allowed him to teleport to locations that he had previously travelled to. Unlike my own teleport ability, his had a hint of clairvoyance to it, enabling him to travel virtually any distance within the limit of his power.His new class, which he trained to utilize this ability, is a fighter class known as Blink Fighter. Surprisingly, his class seems to specialize in hand to hand combat rather than weapons, but at the same time he is able to dominate opponents by constantly changing his position. All he really needs to do is run around the battlefield once, and he is able to disorient enemies by striking from all sides.As for my mom, she was still working to get her class. She wanted something similar to her previous Shade abilities, but was finding it to be extremely difficult. Celeste explained to her that, due to a vast difference in their bodies, a Deus Ex will not be able to cultivate their affinities quite the same as an organic race. While it was possible to do it without a special upgrade, it would take roughly ten times the effort to cultivate the Dark Affinity. So instead, she had my mom buy an upgrade to enhance the cultivation process. Right now, she seemed to be finally at the point where she was able to wield dark mana.It was another week later when she unlocked her class, which was the same Shadow Stalker class that she had originally possessed. Her class seemed to specialize in hiding inside of shadows before attacking, or controlling the enemy’s shadow to attack. Still, she seemed pretty happy to have her old class back. I asked if she would eventually want to return to being a Shade eventually, but she declined.“Sorry, John, but I really wouldn’t want to live like that all the time. The senses of Shades are… disorienting for people not used to them. Even after I gained a physical body, I still had the shadow sense. I’d rather be a physical race that just uses darkness abilities like I am now.” That was her answer. And, I could understand it. Especially considering the training that I did during the trip.For my personal training, I decided to expand on my Element Avatar abilities. As for why… I can train this at any time, but for my Xeno-Shifter powers, I need to find new species to copy from. Even if I can project my senses into Sharon’s grove, I don’t want to study her animals without their permission. That would be no better than the government putting cameras in your house to monitor you just because they wanted to.Anyways, for my training I wanted to copy the elemental senses. This was something basic that every elemental possessed. I want to say that it was a simple thing to do, and it kind of was… but in order to get it to work, I had to activate my Aspect of the Attuned. Apparently, it took a rather high affinity to gather sense input from the elements.However, when I activated that sense… I could see why people would be disoriented. The first element I activated was water. Even with my eyes closed, I could feel a very thin mist all around me. I could feel my blood vessels, and the blood vessels of the people nearby. It was… almost like seeing, but not. The information didn’t present itself to me visually, it was just there. How do you explain sight to a blind man, or sound to the deaf?I continued alternating through my different elements, to get a feel for what each sense felt like. Naturally, I couldn’t work with the Time Affinity, since it was so low. However, the others each yielded different results.For fire, I could feel the heat of everything around me. For light, it was actually like having a map in my head of the surroundings, complete with color. This was the closest to actual sight out of all of them. For wind, I could feel the air currents, and make out objects by how they obstructed the air. It was sort of like tremorsense, but airborne. The others all follow along that pattern, with me able to sense the element, and make out my surroundings by how it interacts with that element.After I experimented with my new elemental senses, I decided that I’d save them for special situations. Yes, they are very useful, but I can only use one at a time. And it makes me a bit dizzy if I try to use one for too long, really.With that taken care of… I began cultivating the Time Affinity. Although I didn’t really want to touch this affinity yet, I would need it if I wanted to make a monster using it. Just to be safe, I had Celeste, Yin, and Sharon with me when I did the cultivation, and even chose to do so with the use of my clone. If it didn’t look like I’d be able to make advancements without another situation like the time bubble from before… I’d scrap the affinity, and find another way to control time mana for making the monster.Thankfully, I did not require the use of a formation this time, as I could clearly since time mana now if I focused. Gradually, I began pulling the mana into my body, while circulating it and releasing my own time mana. Opening my eyes, I saw the girls watching me, almost perfectly still. I was about to panic, until I saw the bamboo fountain at the corner of the room. It was still moving, albeit at a little less than half speed, so I knew that they were just not moving very much.Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.