“Holy shit!” Luna’s exclamation made me frown for just a moment, wondering if I should reprimand her for the language used or if I should accept it as par for the course, as an exclamation simply necessary in this particular situation.
Following her gaze, I evaluated for a moment before nodding to myself and simply accepting that ‘Holy shit!’ was a perfectly apt description of the state our experiment had ended up in.
“This might be a consequence of my blood,” I admitted, judging the beast we were looking at by its current merits.
The said beast was a salamander, or at least it used to be one when we started this particular experiment. Now, the thing had gone from a roughly twenty-centimetre-long critter I could easily catch and carry in my hand to something the size of a large dog, though one with very short legs, a massive torso and a sharp crest running along its spine. Its colour had gone from a somewhat muddy brown to a fiery orange, with a bit of brown remaining on its belly. Additionally, I didn’t need to get too close to see that it now had teeth, and big ones, alongside claws we knew from observation to be sharp.
The change in size had come about in what I could only describe as a ludicrous fashion; the thing had grown fast enough for its growth to be visible to the naked eye, increasing its weight by an approximate factor of three hundred. It was utterly ludicrous, and yet, it was the reality we were looking at and had been observing for the last few hours, ever since the tiny salamander had, somehow, managed to spit out a plume of flame strong enough to kill one of the local wild hogs. Kill and proceed to eat the thing, including its bones, and in doing so, this insane metamorphosis had occurred. Yes, ‘Holy shit!’ was a perfectly apt uttering.
“Look at the bright side, Luna,” I told her, looking across the chasm I had carried us across when I realised that the results of this experiment might be getting a bit out of hand. “It doesn’t have wings, so I doubt it’ll be able to get across this, or through the river down there for that matter.”
“That’s one thing to be glad about. Not that it could be a threat to us, not as it is,” she spoke with conviction, one that I actually shared. The ex-salamander wasn’t a threat, at least not yet, but it might eventually become something interesting.
“But we should keep an eye on it, just in case it continues to grow at the same rate it did while eating that hog. I don’t want to know what would happen if the thing did, and it could eat plants, or maybe even mountains, in addition to meat,” I told Luna, causing yet another utterance of the apt description of that thing. This was, again, appropriate, given that the mental image I had just described had a lizard, which I wasn’t about to call a dragon just yet, and the size of a mountain in fairly short order. If it came to that, even we would be hard-pressed to take the thing down, though my Mind Magic might be able to do the trick, given that it mostly targeted, well, the Mind, not the body. So, no matter how big a foe might be, I could do something about it if it wasn’t appropriately intelligent.
“Do you think we could repeat that experiment? Maybe with something a little more interesting?” Luna asked, her gaze still fixated on the lizard, which was now lying in a sunny spot, letting its rays warm its crest.
“Honestly, I can only guess what made the salamander turn out like this. My blood, sure, but beyond that, I’m not sure. I doubt it was just my blood, you know?” I replied, though I was playing with the idea, if only because it was so incredibly interesting.
“We could try other lizards or salamanders; maybe we just needed a reptilian base. Snakes might work, too,” Luna mused, now completely intrigued by the results of our latest experiment despite her earlier exclamations of disbelief.
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
So, we deliberately sought out reptiles, snakes, and even general amphibians simply to see if we could accomplish something interesting with frogs. Adding the frogs to our collection efforts might also have been motivated by their own obnoxious behaviour, namely, making a lot of noise right next to us while we were trying to sleep. So, catching a few of them and giving them the possible fate of expiring during our experiments was a bit of petty vengeance.
Once something caught our interest, we tried what would happen if we injected some of my blood into its system and infused its soul with appropriate magic, using procedures we had employed in numerous tests before now. The only real difference was the use of my blood and the food we gave our test subjects afterwards, just in case the metamorphosis only came about when the creature had enough food available to transform. This actually made sense, as the body mass had to come from somewhere unless they directly conjured the material needed and infused it into their bodies as I had done when creating my Wings.
However, as it turned out, the frogs were actually fairly adaptable, depriving us of our petty vengeance. Additionally, our results with them were far below what happened with the salamander, although a few failed and exploded spectacularly. One of the frogs, the one we infused with a combination of Wind and Water Astral Power, actually turned into a fairly sizable creature, though one I decided to kill off almost immediately. Not due to the danger it posed but because the combination we used improved upon its already impressively loud croak, allowing it to magically enhance its call to the point that it could knock out nearby fish; it was that loud.
Another fairly successful experiment was the infusion of a snake with its predominant elements. In this particular case, it happened to be Wind and Lightning, making the procedure quite complex and difficult, but the result made up for the difficulty with ease, as it was something I had only seen in video games before. Well, video games and a few mythological depictions. Like with the other experiments using reptiles and my blood, this one grew a pair of wings, wings strongly reminiscent of mine when I transformed, and the ability to spit out arcs of lightning, making it a very interesting beast. Luckily, its size remained fairly tame, only about a metre in length with a similar wingspan, though given that it could spit lightning, I wasn’t about to underestimate the beast.
When it came to reptiles, we actually had multiple successes. Not only with a combination of Fire and Earth, as we had used for the first salamander, but also pure Fire, Fire and Wind, Wind and Water, and even Water and Earth worked to a degree, though not as well as the others. It was quite interesting to see which elements played well together and which turned out explosively bad, making the entire thing a bit hit-or-miss but it certainly passed the time as we continued to travel north, leaving a trail of fascinating, and sometimes stupendously deadly, creatures behind.
At times, I wondered if the different species of mutated salamanders, which I still wasn’t about to call dragons, even if others might do so, would be viable as a species or if we needed to increase their initial numbers even further. Sure, we made two or three each day, but we rarely used the same species as a basis in the experiments, nor did we use the same elements. Who knew if they would be compatible? Still, it would be interesting to see how this developed over the next few years. Would these mountains become something truly interesting, and deadly for that matter, or would the different reptiles we experimented on just die off? Only time would tell, and I made a mental note to come back with Sigmir at some point just to do some additional fieldwork.
“You know, when we come across a suitable location, some really nice place, we should set up a temple so people know what we did here and can study these creatures in the future,” I told Luna, who enthusiastically agreed to my idea, adding yet another item to the list of things we wanted to accomplish on our journey. Luckily, compared to Luna’s last request, namely that I figure out how to make a flying enchantment for Silva and her, this was a lot easier. We just needed to find the right spot, maybe make a couple of extra-special salamanders to guard the temple, and go from there. Nothing really new there, just a question of finding the right place.
