Slime Evolution

Chapter 473 - Clear Mind

For a good while, neither of them moved.

Lisa stayed lying beside the creature’s head, her paw still resting on her neck, and Lohan kept the filaments connected for a few seconds longer than necessary, just to be sure no trace of pain, fear or consciousness remained in that body.

When he finally retracted them, he felt the silence of the chamber weigh on him in a different way, no longer heavy with tension, but with a quiet sadness, like the kind that comes after a funeral where everything that needed to be said has already been said.

"It’s over," Lisa said, finally, getting up slowly and wiping her face with the back of her paw, with no shame at all for having cried. "She’s at peace now."

"She is," Lohan agreed, and noticed that his own voice came out hoarser than usual, even over the mental link.

They stayed there a while longer, unhurried, and he found himself thinking about how much of all this could have been avoided if a single person, at some point, had decided that a creature capable of thinking and feeling deserved to be treated as more than a tool.

It was a useless thought, he knew, because what happened couldn’t be undone, but he still held on to it, because sometimes remembering the reason helps keep it from happening again.

But there was a practical matter to settle, and he knew that putting it off wouldn’t help anyone.

"Lisa," he said, carefully, "I intend to digest her. I know it sounds strange, after everything, but her body holds exactly what I came here for, and letting all of that rot alone in a cave would be a waste she herself probably wouldn’t have wanted."

Lisa looked at him for a moment, and Lohan feared, for a second, that she would find it disrespectful, but her answer came with a calm that surprised him.

"Even though I didn’t know her for long, I honestly think she would prefer this," she said, softly. "If part of her can keep existing in you, and help you grow, I think that’s better than just disappearing in here, alone. Just... do it carefully, okay?"

"I promise."

He moved over the creature’s body with a gentleness he rarely used when digesting something, spreading his gelatinous mass over her pale skin slowly and evenly, and the digestion began without any hurry.

The muscles and thin bones gave way first, yielding a good amount of biomass, far more than any of the offspring, but the body, once again, wasn’t what mattered here.

When the digestion reached the head, the smooth forehead where the horn had been torn away and the eyes sealed by hardened skin, Lohan felt that same door inside his mind tremble, and this time there was no simple distant click, but a deep crack, as if a rusted lock, stuck for years, finally gave way all at once.

The sensation spread through his consciousness like hot water entering a frozen body.

It was the same thing he had felt when digesting the offspring, only many times more intense, so much stronger that the first now seemed like nothing but a faded shadow of it. The pressure that before had been limited to a distant hum turned into a clear, constant warmth, one that spread to every corner of his mind and pushed the walls outward, as if the small room he had always lived in had suddenly gained windows, doors and a much higher ceiling.

Her mental power was immensely greater than that of the offspring, because she was older, more developed, and had had far more time to grow, and now all of that time was pouring into him at once, without a filter, without haste and without any sign of resistance.

’This is... this is incredible,’ he thought, with an absurd clarity, as if he had just woken up from a sleep that had gone on too long, and the thought arrived so clean and so sharp that he almost managed to hear it echo. ’I’ve never felt like this.’

Every thought seemed faster, every sensation more precise, and the world around him gained a new depth he hadn’t known was missing, the sounds of the cave, the heat of the fissures, even Lisa’s presence, a few meters away, now reached him in layers he had never noticed before.

It was as if he had spent his whole life looking through a narrow slit and, suddenly, someone had knocked down the entire wall.

Lisa, beside him, noticed the change before he even said anything.

"You’re glowing," she remarked, surprised, her golden eyes wide. "I mean, there’s a spot on your forehead that’s literally glowing."

"I feel... fantastic," Lohan replied, and sounded almost guilty saying it. "And I hate that a little, because I know where this came from."

"I know," Lisa said, moving closer and gently pressing her snout against him. "But she gave you this willingly, in a way. I think she would’ve wanted you to enjoy it."

He kept digesting, slower now, and that was when fragments of memory began to surface in his mind, small loose pieces of the creature’s life, like leaves carried along by a stream.

There were images he recognized at once as painful, too dark to touch, and he deliberately turned his attention away from them, refusing to absorb anything that would bind him to what she had gone through in that cave.

But deep down, hidden beneath all that suffering, there was another memory, much older and much calmer, and that was the one he chose to keep.

It was a valley surrounded by bluish stones, lit by a soft light that seemed to come from within the rock itself, and a voice singing quietly in the distance, in a language he didn’t know, but somehow understood.

It was a small, simple memory, from a time when she was still free and none of this had happened, and Lohan absorbed it with all the care he could, as if keeping a small flower between the pages of a book.

’I’ll remember her like this,’ he promised in silence. ’Not as the prisoner. As she was before.’

When the digestion finished, there was no trace of the creature’s body left on the platform, only the clean stone, the dissolved chains and an almost reverent silence.

A new notification flashed in the corner of his vision, stacking on top of the earlier one he still hadn’t opened.

[Evolution available.]

[Evolution available.]

He opened neither of them, because he knew he deserved to do it calmly, far from there, in a place where he could read every line without hurry and without the weight of that chamber on his shoulders.

There was a lot to process, and the first thing he wanted to do was sit in silence and let all of it settle inside him.

"Let’s go," he said, finally, with a firmer voice. "We’ve done what we came to do here."

"And the Legion?" Lisa asked, looking at the emptied chamber, where only the dried blood of the Players and the traces of the clones remained. "They’ll be back, when they respawn."

"For what?" Lohan replied, shrugging, or doing the equivalent with his own jelly. "Without the mother, there’s no more breeding ground, and without a breeding ground, there’s no spot. The leaders died, the seven who had already respawned died again, every member lost at least one level, and the only thing holding that guild together was destroyed. If anyone still wants revenge, they might not even know where to find us, but I really doubt they’ll have the strength or the will for it even if they did."

"Yeah," Lisa agreed, shaking out her fur one last time. "Let them deal with their own choices. It’s not our problem."

They left through the stone corridor together, without looking back, passing the torches still burning, the entrance stained with dried blood and the black banners that already looked old and meaningless without the owners who had held them up.

Outside, the night air was cold and clean, with the distant glow of the volcano tinting the sky a soft orange, and the long journey back to the Astralis Requiem headquarters stretched out ahead of them, seven hours of road that, in that moment, felt far lighter than the ones they had left behind.