The pressure of miles worth of water negated his ability to lift himself, but was not quite strong enough to pulverize him, and not for the first time he wondered if that was a property of his new species, or a unique property of himself as an individual that his reincarnation had wrought upon his physical form, just as his rebirth had seemingly transformed his soul.
There was a natural urge that he had been ignoring for a while now, but at this point, he genuinely didn't see a way around it.
Luckily, having been stuck in this form for as long as he had, and having been as fascinated by his "inventory" as he was, he had long begun experimenting with it and its capabilities, the capabilities of his "windows" in particular.
And it turned out that they were an incredibly versatile tool, they could be shaped into whatever form he willed, they could give off light, and they could filter out the things he didn't want to capture in his inventory, Meaning they could be used as tools, a shovel, a knife, a platform to walk upon if he had legs.... or feet.
They could even produce light, that same light that shimmered in the latticework of his soul-space, he could effuse from his windows.
And so he began to allow small amounts of the water around him to filter through his shell, luckily he was able to apply a "window" around his shell like a screen that filtered out the saline content of the water. He wasn't keen on discovering that he was not, in fact, one of the few species of tree that could grow in saltwater.
The sensation of roots breaking free of his shell was.... strange, it was a feeling that straddled pain and pleasure, a release of sorts, and yet far more muted in potency than anything he would have felt in his human life.
luckily, since he could interact with the world on a sub-atomic level through his manipulation of spiritual energy and the manifestation of his windows through which he could sense and "feel" every atom they came into contact with, and having studied every science extensively in his human life, he easily recognised the individual elements. Manipulating them, however, took time and a lot of effort.
This was information that would have fried the human brain, but having advanced enough to support his cognition as a spirit, he didn't need to worry about that, though it took a long time to process the information and be able to recognise individual molecules without having to take an hour to deduce exactly what it was by matching his memory of the elements and compounds to the makeup of the individual molecule he was examining.
His primary problem was the pressure and lack of sunlight, that and the loneliness which was sure to come with spending centuries at the darkest depths of the ocean... or maybe not, he was a tree now after all, maybe he wouldn't feel any desire for social enrichment whatsoever, only time would tell.
Luckily for him, he had landed in what seemed to be several hundred thousand years of compressed marine snow atop an outcropping of chalk. It seemed this was a prime dumping ground for the refuse of the upper strata in the ocean. When he discovered the micro-organisms that thrived in the marine snow, he found it incredibly entertaining to study and to watch them, as a human, he had kept ants and termites in terrariums, simply because they fascinated him, these microscopic lifeforms did not possess the same biological sophistication, or eusocial cohesion of action, intent or drive that his former "pets" had, but their mindless, instinct-driven journey to persist and reproduce was a fascinating one to watch regardless, and despite being a tree, and having a great amount to do in directing his growth and dissecting the secrets of the universe, he still got bored from time to time.
While he was sure that his roots would thrive in the immediate future since he was surrounded by dung, he wasn't quite sure how well they would do in the half-petrified marine snow that lay just below the fresh stuff he had landed upon, nor if they would be able to get anything out of the chalk beneath that.
Charles was aware that some trees were able to release some kind of enzyme from their roots which allowed them to absorb the nutrients in stone, he wasn't sure if he was one of those trees, and he wasn't going to bet on it.
In all, Carbon was easily available in the immediate future, and during his time in the Stag's digestive system, he had absorbed some of the food it had consumed into his inventory, a mulch of grass, berries, and other assorted plant matter that should prove useful fuel.
But it would not last forever, and he would have to come up with a way to get carbon out of the water or chalk somehow.
He discovered, after a great deal of trial and error, that he could re-arrange the protons, neutrons and electrons of an atom to form a different kind of atom, transforming hydrogen into carbon, and luckily, the more he performed this procedure, the easier it became, although he must have done it a million times by the point it became a passive process for him, and his body still processed the minerals and nutrients it required a billion times faster naturally.
Before he had to concentrate the entirety of his focus on it, now, he could do it with one hand behind his back, metaphorically and literally, since he could mould his "windows" into the shape of hands, and they were far more sensitive to tactile stimuli than his human hands had ever been.
He couldn't simply *poof" a charging bear into a giant Diamond, at least not before it mauled him to splinters, but he could slowly devour his surrounding environment, and use it to fuel his growth.
He didn't micromanage the growth of his roots or stem, his body was perfectly capable of managing that on its own, all he had to do was provide glucose and oxygen. So he simply allowed it to grow wild, providing only a little direction to ensure they were spread as far from one another as possible, spreading out through the rocky sediment.
The biological process of transforming the hydrogen, oxygen and carbon into carbohydrates required sunlight as the catalyst, but since he didn't have access to sunlight down here, he instead manufactured it manually, yet another process which took agonisingly long to master, but he eventually managed and used the chemical energy released through breaking the molecular bonds that formed the water around him to form said Carbohydrate bonds, ergo, he was now a leafless tree, for he refused to expend energy on something that wouldn't return it in any way whatsoever.
It was a process that grew less and less mentally strenuous as he grew, and as he grew, he grew mostly downward. His vertical growth was incredibly stunted, the more dramatically inclined side of him thought it grew perhaps an inch per century, but the growth that he had achieved had resulted in an incredibly thick and dense trunk which grew incredibly slowly, and was still more a stem than trunk in truth, sitting somewhere around the length and width of a cucumber, tapering to a point striking upward to the heavens.
The Roots had an easier time of it since they had to grow outward and downward as opposed to upward, but they still had the same amount of pressure being applied to them, more in a sense, since they had the Earth as well as the water above them, although the pressure applied to them only came from above, whereas in the water, it came from all directions, so he did have to pay attention to their growth to ensure they didn't end up growing flat.
Eventually, his technique grew more and more refined, he would coat the ends of his roots in a "window" and as he grew, he would devour the chalk in his path, reducing it into its constituent calcium and carbon elements, which he would then absorb and let his body deal with however it naturally would.
The calcium, he would then combine with the Hydrogen and Oxygen he took from the seawater around him and then bound them into Carbohydrates with the energy he took from the water molecules around him.
Whatever excess or waste he produced, he would simply store away in his inventory to be reused.
Charles experienced something of a major geek-out when he realised that he had essentially replaced Photosynthesis with Alchemy. He was rather glad that he didn't have a body at that moment, for he was unsure whether his reaction to that revelation would have been particularly dignified.
He had been counting the seconds since he had seen the Not-Orca, and heavens did that feel like a lifetime ago? It had been somewhere near two years to his estimate, though there was no telling if his mental processing speed was congruent with the passage of time as he was accustomed to in a human body, maybe he thought more slowly? maybe he thought more quickly, and given the fact that this rebirth had catalysed some sort of spiritual awakening, he was inclined to believe he was thinking faster and had probably overshot his estimate.
Then again, he had no brain to support his thought processes and had to rely entirely on spiritual cognition, he did not know whether he had advanced enough to outpace the work of an organ dedicated to mental processes with his spiritual cognition alone.
Whatever way it turned out, it didn't really matter, there was no urgency here, there were likely no predators here, fewer that would be bothered with him, and there was no urgent reason to grow faster than he was growing, aside from a growing longing to see the sun again, to feel it on his..... leaves?.
At some point, he had an epiphany that made him want to slap himself, and diverted some nutrients to growing a short branch, with a leaf at the end, and then he manifested a window, ensuring that nothing could pass through either way, with only its glow illuminating his immediate surroundings.
When he sensed the leaves begin the process of photosynthesis, he wished there was a wall for him to bash his imaginary head against.
Although maintaining the window did cost him spiritual energy, it was naturally replenished easily enough, and the energy expended was but a fraction of that generated through photosynthesis.
He began sprouting leaves all over, and soon, his growth speed had doubled, his trunk grew taller and thicker, increasing by the day in height and circumference.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Eventually, he managed to manifest the windows on a cellular level, a thousand micro-windows shining their photons directly onto the chloroplasts of his cells, and it made his leaves glow gold, illuminating a little of the surrounding waters, enough so that had he possessed eyes, he would have been able to see the falling marine snow.
It wasn't as if it was a constant, heavy snow, it was more like a light flurry of tiny particulates, but a flurry that never ended.
He discovered his first sizeable detritivore, a small creature that appeared to be some unholy offspring between a shrimp and a truly titanic plankton.
It scuttled about slowly, nibbling up the surface particulates almost as they landed, though it looked more as if it were floating, with a surprising sort of elegance to its movements.
He watched the little thing with fascination, divesting most of his attention to the thing, it was his first bit of company, company that didn't want to eat him or excrete him at least, company that could seemingly comprehend his presence, unlike the microfauna which were so simple-minded in comparison.
The Stag-soul didn't count, he didn't want to disturb it within his soul-space in case it grew restless or enraged or lashed out in some way and damaged his soul, so he had left it alone out of caution and fear, although it was fascinating to observe and study.
He grew fond of the little thing rather more quickly than he would like to admit.
At some point, it was joined by another creature, a smaller thing that looked something like a lamprey the size of an earthworm, assuming his sense of scale wasn't entirely in disarray.
He barely noticed the third, but it was certainly bigger than the Shrimpton, as he had named the peculiar thing, although it didn't seem interested in eating its fellow sea creatures.
Instead, slithering beneath their gills, where it sunk its nasty little fangs into the Shrimpton's tender flesh, a sense of pity flared in Charles, and with a small exertion of energy, he pried the thing off and threw it in his inventory, luckily it seemed he was able to control the flow of time inside, so the creature was in a form of stasis, he wasn't able to do the same to the stag-soul since it was an entirely spiritual entity, beyond the reach of temporal laws, luckily it was dormant, but Charles worried that it was an egg just waiting to hatch, and then ram its spirit-antlers up his arse.
The little souls of the microfauna were just as fascinating as the Stag's, never before had he observed the fundamental nature of living things in such a manner, of course he had sensed souls before, but not like this, expanding your soul-sense from a body, and getting all of the information from your surroundings was vastly different from doing it without.
When incarnated in human form, there were just so many distractions, so much information feeding into every sense that even when you extended your supernatural senses, they became greatly diminished, and only those who spent decades honing those senses, learning to distinguish them from the physical senses, could achieve anything close to what Charles was experiencing now, in every waking moment.
The slow and gruelling study of the building blocks of reality was a torturous nightmare, like every school subject he had ever been bad at mashed up and slapped together, it was in no way simple, easy or enjoyable, it took an ungodly amount of time to make even the slightest progress, and the results were rarely, if ever useful.
But when he succeeded, even if he had no use whatsoever for the atomic structure of argon in his current state, when the pieces clicked, and the realisation, all in one moment that he could now piece together an element, to transform one tiny piece of the universe into a different piece altogether, was intoxicating, and it was both that high, a lack of anything else to do, and simple pragmatism, that kept him at it.
His roots were spreading at a rather quick rate these days, around an inch per day, and by the day they grew thicker, whilst by the month, his trunk grew taller and thicker, he was at about five feet now, with a width of somewhere between four and five feet, many thin, long branches reaching out at in all directions, packed with leaves glimmering a golden light.
He had noticed a recent increase in microfauna gathering about him, creating a small ecosystem around his trunk, feeding on his leaves and seeking shelter beneath them, devouring one another, defecating, and with their presence, little by little, the marine snow that surrounded him began to dissipate, and though the idea was an unpleasant one, it was not as if he needed it anymore.
He had long outgrown the need to devour organic matter, his roots had long since burrowed beneath the lowest layers of marine snow, although it made his growth easier, devouring it directly through his inventory was simply unnecessary, and it provided an extra source of nutrition for the detritivores which had come to claim the seabed beneath his canopy home, which in turn enriched the environment with their faeces and corpses, besides, his roots devoured a substantial amount of matter daily, and currently he had twelve roots extending outward, and six extending downward.
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When his roots, which were growing at an equal pace, reached a mile from his trunk, he had grown vertically to about nine feet above the seabed, the more time that passed, the swifter his growth became, and as his roots grew downward, the pressure they endured grew stronger, tectonic forces exerted more and more power over his limbs, but they remained unbreaking, bending a little, but unbreaking all the same.
The more he grew physically, the greater the range of his senses grew, he felt every inch of his physical body and could feel it growing even now, due to its relatively slow growth, his spirit grew in line with his body, and so there was no sense of dysmorphia similar to what the stag had begun to suffer in its final weeks, although he feared that should the rate of his growth continue to increase at its current pace, it was only a matter of time before that particular discomfort began to afflict him.
He branched out, a single root would branch down and out from each root which tunneled downward, and soon enough, one of them broke into what seemed to be an underground cave. The sensation of pushing against something with all your might, only for all resistance to fall away in an instant brought a sense of triumph, and then concern, and a smidge of relief that he was far too large for that momentum to drag his entire body into a tumble in the dark,
His pressed forth, his root inching into the dark pocket beneath the Earth, eagerly searching for minerals and nutrients, the entryway growing as his roots grew in thickness, devouring the stone around them. In terms of girth, his roots grew in thickness ever faster than his trunk had, each now sitting at around seven feet thick.
The cavern was empty, just a rocky pocket of air formed out of bedrock, explaining why it hadn't flooded long ago, being as close to the water as it was.
This earth he was burrowing through was still waterlogged. In truth, he had miles to burrow before he reached genuinely dry land.
That ancient stale air, which had been imprisoned in these depths for untold millennia did not go to waste, however, and he greedily extracted the elements he needed from it and transformed the ones that he didn't need into ones that he did, a process that took in indeterminable amount of time, and one through which he proceeded to extend his root through the pocket and deeper into the earth.
At some point, his roots grew so thick that they filled the whole pocket, and stretched ten miles horizontally from the base of his trunk, and one mile beneath, his trunk had grown to about twenty-five feet, surpassing his tree mother, and possessed a girth of some eleven feet, the exosystem had grown larger, its population more numerous, the ground covered in leaf-litter being gnawed upon by an assortment of creatures so small that one with mortal eyes could not see them without a microscope, though there was a few dozen the size of perhaps a thumb, and one about the size of a closed fist resembling some kind of worm.
He had noticed, over the past day or so, chunks of some large animal, larger than anything he had ever seen before, landing here and there about his trunk, one large chunk of its tail had even collided with his canopy, ripping a branch from his trunk, he shuddered to think what kind of monster had reduced a creature of such gargantuan size to this.
He harvested the remnant nuggets of a soul from the fragments of flesh and bone which rained down and stored them away in his inventory, then a long object about twice the length and thickness of a telephone pole crashed into the sand, a horn, similar to that of a Narwhal, or the mythical unicorn, and clinging to it was a substantial spiritual and psionic presence, a large portion of this creature's mind and heart had been suffused into this object, and Charles hungrily pulled it into his inventory, eager to study the item.
It was then that a new presence slinked through his awareness field, barely a shadow to the mortal eye, swimming just beyond the reach of his light, yet Charles could sense what it was regardless, his spiritual senses reaching about a mile in all directions extending from any and inch of his body.
It appeared to be some sort of small whale, perhaps a juvenile, resembling a blend between a Blue Whale and a Dunkleosteus, whilst also possessing a Narwhal horn, or something so similar it was indistinguishable to the untrained eye, fascinating and concerning, with Charles being so deep, there was little chance of the whale reaching the surface before it suffocated.
It soon became obvious that this creature was likely the offspring of the dead horned creature which had sprinkled his little patch of the ocean floor with its remained, about the size of a jeep, and twice as long, it was quite adorable.
With great strain, Charles formed a bubble, a pocket of air in the water, the amount of pressure it endured was agony, but through force of will, he maintained it until the creature darted forward, circling the bubble cautiously before poking its nose in.
Differentiating between the water pressure and the animal was astronomically more difficult than simply creating and maintaining the bubble, but he managed, at least whilst the little whale manoeuvred its blowhole and took in some oxygen, remaining there for what Charles considered to be far too long.
Eventually, it evacuated its lungs of oxygen and removed itself entirely from the bubble, the instant it was far enough, Charles removed his resistance to the pressure, and the bubble imploded, air particulates rocketing upward at a pace that must have broken the sound barrier.
Charles removed the horn from his inventory, and placed it on the ground, coating it in a shield of sorts to prevent spiritual or psionic decay, watching with a sense of pity as the little whale approached, making a sad, mournful nouse as it brushed its nose against the horn, such was the way of the wild and all that, still, it was sad, and he would help it where he could.
Perhaps a few hours later, the young whale left, but returned shortly after, carrying with it a piece of bone which it placed next to the horn, and then off it went again.
He decided to give it a name, can't keep calling it "the whale", and after racking his brain for a few hours, he decided upon Sulla, after the Consul of ancient Rome.
It collected as many fragments and shards of its mother as it could find, and Charles preserved the little slivers of soul that clung to them, though they had been stripped of flesh by the time they reached him, eventually a sizeable mound of bones had been gathered.
Days passed as Sulla came and went at regular intervals, building that mound of bones higher and higher, and each time it returned, Charles would form for it a pocket of air, yet once, it did not return, and Charles waited and waited and waited, but the whale remained missing.
His worry grew by the day until he concluded that his new friend must have fallen afoul of some predator, and a sense of melancholy grew in him at that, yet that feeling faded with time, and he moved on, focusing on his growth.
He had grown to about forty feet tall when the whale returned, a good 5 feet longer, but thinner, and a pale scar ran along its side, in its mouth it held another horn, shorter than the mother's but still longer than the young whale itself.
'The father?' he mused as the whale set the horn down beside the mound of bones, there was a lingering spirit to the horn, nowhere near as potent as what still clung to the mother's, but there was still something, and Charles immediately shielded it from further decay.
Sulla remained in place before the mound, as if paying its respects, and Charles' spirit trembled with joy at his friend's return and good health as Sulla began to circle him patiently, and as he formed a bubble, it approached without hesitation.
Hours passed, and the whale left but once, returning with nothing, and the tree assumed that it had gone off for food.
Eventually, Sulla assumed a vertical position and entered a state of sleep, though it remained partially awake, Charles felt that its show of trust was quite touching.
