Requiem 7

The new form turned out to have a new problem. One that only really crystallized as Apexus continued to eat and get back up to his former size and then a bit beyond that. Having devoured a member of the human species had given Apexus a boost in his potential, unsurprisingly. Although that boost was only a difference of a few centimetres. Growth had been slowing for a while. Apexus himself didn’t know if there was some point at which he would top out.

All of those were expected, however, while this new problem was a surprising nuisance. All of the extra slime he now had was impossible to properly control around the bones. Basically, he had a lot more mass than surface that he wanted to cover with it. There were three solutions he had found so far, but none of them were satisfying and now that he had restocked all of his energy reserves, about a day of munching down one and a half trees later, the superfluous amount was downright crippling.

The first solution Apexus had worked with was to keep the extra slime close to the core. That did make it easy to control, to the same extent as Apexus had over all of his body before. However, it soon became unworkable. Thanks to the regained mass, a massive blue bag was soon hanging from his chest, making walking a chore and creating a dangling centre of gravity where he was just getting used to his new weight distribution. So that had to be dismissed.

Second off was trying to distribute the slime equally over the bones anyway. This worked, for a limited time. Control over mass that was more than a few centimetres from the bones was hard or downright impossible, depending on the distance. It culminated in that extra slime ‘sliding’ down Apexus’ form whenever he wasn’t paying attention, all gathering at the feet, causing him to slow down or (much more annoyingly) to just drop off slime in medium sized chunks from his stomach. If it wasn’t getting stuck in the influence zone of the nucleus anyway, which looped right back to the problem of the first solution.

Then, the third thing Apexus managed to come up with, was to just upsize the bones. More surface area meant more place to control the slime. This created a whole new set of problems with the environment, however. Getting thicker bones made him slower again, longer ones created a body that was hard to manoeuvre through the dense woodwork of the forest.

A balance of the two was the best way Apexus had found to go about it so far, but now that he was at his current maximum size again, he was almost three metres from hands to feet. He was much narrower than before, courtesy of giving up the elliptic shape, and it showed in that length. It was absolutely impossible to keep this size, unless Apexus aimed to adopt some slow lifestyle like the Forester Dragons. It was too easy to spot for any sort of ambush and, more importantly, couldn’t manoeuvre very well.

So, now that he had a moment and was no longer craving food to stock up on his reserves, Apexus sat down and dealt with that problem. Sitting on the stony shore of a river, the deformed humanoid of a slime sorted a couple of stones into random patterns, as he thought. A simple exercise he had taken to in order to train more with his new hands. An incredibly needed thing, since his fingers had become as thick as the fangs of some dungeon spiders he had eaten. They were almost impractically stubby.

‘I have two ideas,’ Apexus managed to scramble his thoughts together, literally turning his nucleus upside down in order to shake out a few thoughts. Not that the organ cared about the way it was aligned with gravity. ‘First…’ the slime then tried to exercise even more influence over his nucleus, in an attempt to forcefully convert some of the slime into extra layers of his core. Essentially, he was trying to reverse the process that had allowed his own ‘revival’ to occur.

With absolutely no success whatsoever.

It was like a human trying to slim down by just thinking a lot. There was just no way that was going to work. Apexus had no control over the process and just severely limited experience with the actual regeneration. No matter how hard he concentrated on his core, slimming down this way was impossible for this slime.

‘Other thing, then,’ the chimeric creature thought, not resigning even at the seemingly inedible problem. If he couldn’t store the extra slime elsewhere, he just had to make what was there denser. Easier said than done. It was another area that the slime hadn’t experimented with before, but his mass was an area he had considerably more control over than his core.

From all that Apexus knew, his slime was mostly water. Not just water, as evident by Reysha once wondering if she could drink his separated slime and finding it to taste salty and metallic. Overall unpleasant and unfit for hydration, but still water, as she hadn’t complained about the usual foul taste she experienced when eating proper things.

The acidic parts of it all came from being part of the (somewhat) solid unit that was Apexus himself. A sort of magical solution that dissolved what was inside it as long as the slime's mana pulsated along. Something that also allowed him to digest selectively, like corroding a hole into a clamshell.

Following that logic, it should have been possible to reduce the amount of water in the slime, shaving a good amount of overall weight and size off. There was even precedence in his own body for this. The membrane, as thin as it was, that separated the highly liquid acid from the outside world had a different makeup to it. Which was good most of the time, Apexus didn’t want his trails to be even easier to find by accidentally eating the plant life every step or crawl along the way. Also, without that surface tension, holding any shape that didn’t look like puddle would have been difficult.

Obviously getting a thicker membrane had its own problems. First and foremost, that Apexus would need a longer time to open it to swallow something. As far as he was concerned, however, that was less of a problem, since he was less favourable towards eating live prey whole anyway. The bigger, more powerful his food got, the higher the risk they would struggle inside of him to a degree that hurt his nucleus. Better to kill, then swallow, and in those situations the speed at which he did that was pretty unimportant anyway.

‘Only matters, if I manage to do it, though,’ Apexus told himself, as he continued to shift this or that. A nearby group of wild cats spotted the incredibly odd creature, sitting still aside from the hands, on the incredibly long arms, that still toyed with stones, and decided to go somewhere further up the river to drink.

A decision they took with double the speed when the thing suddenly opened its mouth imperfectly, strands of goo connecting the upper and lower jaw, stretching over the teeth of the translucent, blue creature. A skeletal nightmare straight out of the land that should not be. Throwing his hands into the air, Apexus let out a triumphant little, “Yay!” before feeling incredibly odd at his mimicking of such human expressions. “Not like anyone is around that can understand me anyway,” it echoed out of the unmoving (and practically non-existent) lips, all speech being formed by the vibrating plate attached to the skull.

The reason for this joy was a simple success. Apexus raised his hand and looked at it. The index finger looked incredibly odd in comparison to its neighbour. A shade darker in its blue, from azure closer to midnight, thanks to the higher density, the slime sat much closer to the bone, also removing the problem of his fingers being too stubby for purpose.

The following hour was spent giving the rest of his body that treatment and shrinking down a fair bit. Bones were sized down again, both in length and thickness, while Apexus covered all of his limbs in this new, thicker membrane. Around the torso, he kept the membrane thinner, while he didn’t change anything about the head. Logic being that these were the areas he ate and spoke with. The limbs being largely unused for that purpose, them covered almost entirely by membrane, only a bit of actual slime around the bone, was no problem.

Overall, it reduced Apexus’ size by about half a metre, measured again from the fingertips to the toes. More importantly, it made him a good bit leaner. It also dawned on the slime that there would be other advantages to having a thicker hide. Namely that he wouldn’t be hurt as easily and that he would need less water to survive. The question was, if he could maintain this state for long periods without it naturally converting back.

Time would tell, the slime had to get moving. All this internal shifting had made him hungry again.