Slime Evolution

Chapter 485 - Calibration

The first thing Lohan did, after deciding he wasn’t going to let anything else break in that apartment, was sit on the living room floor, cross legged, and breathe.

It wasn’t an ordinary breath. It was one of the techniques he had developed over those weeks, whenever his human body received another wave of Slime traits from Elysium, and which he called, without any originality, "Calibration."

The idea was simple: instead of trying to control his strength at all costs, which only left him stiff and clumsy, he learned to listen to his body before acting, the same way he did with the gelatin in the game, dividing his attention between what he wanted to do and what his body was actually ready to do.

He closed his eyes, and felt his heartbeat slow down, and the rest of his body followed, his muscles releasing a tension he hadn’t even known he was carrying.

The first exercise was the silliest, and also the most important: the egg.

Lohan got up, went to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator with his fingertips, and took out a raw egg, which he held in the palm of his hand like someone holding a little bird.

The white, fragile shell was cold, and he could feel every tiny irregularity in it, every invisible microfracture, with an almost uncomfortable clarity.

He closed his hand slowly, a fraction of a millimeter at a time, increasing the pressure until he felt the shell begin to protest, and then loosened his fingers, and repeated it.

Before the evolution, he could do that without breaking the egg most of the time. Now, he could do it while feeling the shell change its resonance at the exact moment it was about to give way, like someone hearing a rope stretch before it snaps, and he stopped at just the right instant.

He repeated this a total of forty times, without a single crack.

’Okay,’ he thought, putting the egg back. ’This is working.’

The second exercise was the water one, which he had invented one night when a teacup burst in his hand.

He took a plastic cup, the only one left in the cupboard out of the few he had at first, considering that what he didn’t need right now was a glass cup, and filled it to the brim, and then lifted it and began to walk around the room, slowly, then faster, then turning and changing direction, without spilling a drop.

The idea was to train the smoothness of the whole movement, not just the hand, and as the water sloshed from side to side, he learned to absorb the momentum with his shoulders, with his hips, with his knees, spreading the force throughout his entire body, like a spring.

It was during this exercise that he noticed, with a smile, something interesting.

Instead of straining to control the force, his body was responding the way the gelatin did in Elysium, absorbing the impact and returning the energy smoothly, with an elasticity that wasn’t exactly human.

The third exercise was the strangest, and the one he was embarrassed to show anyone: the gelatin fingers.

He stretched his hand out in front of his face, and focused his attention on the tip of his index finger, something his real body had inherited from the Slime.

With practice, he had learned to soften the tip of his finger on purpose, and to stretch it, and to curl it into a small spiral, and then to harden everything back in the blink of an eye, until the skin was firm and normal again.

Today, after the evolution, it was much easier, and he managed to stretch both index fingers to almost a hand’s length, twist them around each other like a cord, and return everything to normal without any effort.

’This is going to be useful for picking up keys that fall behind furniture,’ he thought, laughing to himself.

The fourth and last exercise was the feather steps, which served a completely practical purpose: walking around the apartment without making a single sound.

Considering he was wearing shoes, this took far more work than it seemed, even though he was walking on a hard, cold porcelain tile floor.

He crossed the room on tiptoe, in slow motion, and little by little he adapted the balance and motor control of his own body, canceling out the sounds caused by the shoes until the sound disappeared completely.

With the series finished, he stood still in the middle of the room for a moment.

The strength, instead of being something he had to hold back, had become something he could measure out, like the faucet of a sink.

But there was still one thing he was curious to test.

He went to the work desk, picked up an ordinary ballpoint pen, and placed it on his palm, open and outstretched.

He closed his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and extended the invisible hand, the same one he used in Elysium, the one that felt like an extension of his will.

This time, the pen didn’t just tremble.

It rose from his palm, slowly, as if someone were holding it by a thread, and hovered about three centimeters above his skin, swaying gently.

’Ha!’ he thought, with a wide smile. ’Three centimeters!’

It was tiny progress for anyone else, but for him, who less than an hour ago had only managed to slide the pen, it felt like an enormous achievement.

He picked up a second pen, and tried to lift both at the same time, and one of them fell to the floor.

This time he used Abyssal Clarity, dividing his mind into independent layers, one for each pen, and the difference was immediate.

The two pens rose together, still shaky and out of control, but little by little floating with more and more grace, until they were slowly circling his body, and stopped, hovering in the air with a stability he hadn’t expected.

’Okay, this is really cool,’ he thought. ’Let’s go for three.’

Three pens. Then four. Then five.

In less than twenty minutes, he was standing in the middle of the room, eyes closed, with five pens floating around him in a slow, silent orbit, each one controlled by a separate layer of his mind, like five ballerinas spinning around a center, never touching one another.

He tried it with heavier objects, which was even possible, but the level of mental power consumption was very high, so high that after a few minutes of practice he would probably pass out, so Lohan chose to train his control over it instead of training total weight.

When he opened his eyes and saw the scene, an idea came to him, so clear and so perfect that he almost laughed out loud.

He remembered movies, novels and games he had seen in the other world, one of the few things he had been able to do in the hospital room, about assassins who controlled floating needles or blades around their bodies, invisible, silent, deadly, each one ready to pierce a target before it even noticed it was being attacked.

’Needles,’ he thought, and his smile widened. ’Needles floating around me. Thin, fast, almost impossible to see... if I can control this, even if I can’t carry a block of concrete with my telekinesis, I’ll have a lethal, extremely discreet mid range attack... especially considering I can put a membrane with my camouflages over them, which would make the attack even deadlier!’

The image in his mind was so satisfying that he stood still for several seconds, just watching the pens spin.

Each needle could be sent in a different direction, piercing eyes, joints, vital points, all with minimal energy, since his telekinesis didn’t need brute force, only precision.

And if he managed to coat the tips with the toxin his body was capable of producing, he would have a silent, lethal arsenal that no armor could stop.

’This is genius,’ he thought, and his excitement was so great that the pens wobbled a little. ’This is completely genius.’

He looked around, searching for something that could serve as a needle, and realized, with a pang of disappointment, that his apartment didn’t have a single needle.

Not for sewing, not a syringe, not anything else. A man with the body of a Mythic Slime and a mind that could calculate the trajectory of a hundred projectiles at once, and there wasn’t even one needle at home.

’I need to buy needles,’ he noted mentally, with the seriousness of someone registering a matter of state. ’Acupuncture needles, maybe. Or knitting needles. Or both.’

The idea of buying acupuncture needles to train a movie assassin’s fighting style made him laugh to himself, and he thought, for a moment, about what Isabella would say if she found out. She would probably think it was a horrible idea, and then ask to see it.

Letting the pens settle gently onto the desk, one at a time, he looked at the clock in the corner of his vision and realized he still had time.

"First, I need to fix the bed." He extended a thin tentacle of gelatin, hardening it to the maximum, and used it as an improvised splint, reinforcing the cracked wood beneath the mattress, enough to hold until he bought a new one. Then, he sent a quick message through Syn to the building’s maintenance department, asking for the bed to be replaced with a new one.

That was one of the advantages of such a luxurious building, requests like that were extremely common, with the staff already having contacts to carry out all kinds of services like these, charging only a small fee once everything was done.

Considering that Lohan was young, handsome and rich, a broken bed like that raised no doubts in anyone.

He then took a quick shower, still with exaggerated care not to rip out the faucet, and when he came out, he picked an outfit without any hesitation, because his mind now decided things like that in a second: a dark blue dress shirt, black pants, and the comfortable sneakers Isabella had picked out for him at the mall.

Looking at himself in the mirror, he buttoned the collar, and the blue mark on his forehead, which only appeared when he used telekinesis, stayed completely hidden.

Forty minutes were left. Which meant he had plenty of time to test the last thing.

The car.

He went to the parking garage of the penthouse apartment, stopped in front of the dark gray Porsche, and stared at the door for a good while, as if it were an adversary.

He knew the car was very sturdy, but he also knew that "very sturdy" for an ordinary human was one thing, and for a Level 21 Devourer it was something completely different.

He reached out with the delicacy of someone touching a soap bubble, and pulled the handle.

The door opened, silent and intact.

’Okay,’ he thought, with a relieved exhale. ’First phase complete.’

He sat in the driver’s seat with the care of someone settling into a "fragile boat," and the leather beneath him creaked, but didn’t tear. He fastened the seatbelt without pulling too hard. He started the engine by touching the button as if it were a piano key, and the ion turbines purred softly, with no crack, no creak, no sign that the system was suffering.

He gripped the steering wheel, feeling the texture of the leather under his hands, and made a series of small movements, squeezing and releasing, testing every centimeter of pressure, satisfied that nothing broke or deformed.

For the first time since he had woken up, he felt confident.

’Let’s go,’ he thought, and shifted the car into gear, which rose smoothly off the ground, cutting through the sky of the High Zone with great calm. ’Now I’m ready.’