Animal Magnetism

The next few days passed quietly and uneventfully aside from a few curious animals. Once I condensed my aura into a thick shell around my body to minimize my presence and then channel the light and holy elements, I became quite attractive to a wide variety of animals. The presence of a still living basilisk kept most small game away, but curious predatory animals had no problem.

A basilisk on land was half as good as a fish out of water as far as arnids were concerned, anyway.

Unless the critters were of magical nature in their own rights, I simply scared them off with a quick lash of low-thermal red flames. If they were of literally any magical nature, though, I would catch them and dump them into my new trash can. Along the way, of course, I was sure to keep an eye out for more herbs and magical plant life.

The few things that I fed to my new pet project outside of the originally intended meals were a strange hairy arnid, an enlarged moth that grew mantis forelimbs, and a large bird with shimmery feathers. Otherwise, the ambiguous amphibian was given either a bird or large rodent that had stuffed itself with blessed and enriched foods in the morning and a couple of similarly treated fish before bed.

For the record, in this creature's current half-life state it shit while it walked like a horse or deer and continuously processed mass as it worked its usually sedentary body without end.

As it walked and slowly 'came to' over the course of a few days, the basilisk at first learned how to balance itself over te course of a full day. Then it began experiencing its more instinctive urges as it blindly listed toward the water. I would have to mentally correct its direction ever few minutes.

On the third day since I started the experiment, I finally let the basilisk back into the water and guided it to swim upstream. This far from the slight plateau of the bridge village the land had a greater incline which gave the water a stronger current. Even though the basilisk learned how to swim upstream efficiently after only a few hours, it could only maintain that pace for an hour or two after the past few days of travel.

Now that the creature had become more self aware and centered I had to constantly keep a presence in its growing psyche. This was mostly done by using the telepathic connection I had created to take over its vision and guide its movements. While making it walks, jumps, dive, or anything at all, I would 'talk' to them by thinking about my understanding of all the movements and gestures and processes.

I would even identify insects and animals that enter its field of view. Because I was in control of its eyes and magically oriented with its enriched body, I could channel my magic into both of our eyes and explain the feelings and impressions of new sights and sounds. In this fashion, I gradually learned what it liked and what it had no interest in.

It liked fish and giant bugs with only some inclination toward the treated food I gave it in the mornings. It, like every other creature on this planet, wanted to eat things with mana in it. Even I was coming up with a prepared seasoning blend containing iramana petals.

In this world, it was said to be the key to basic longevity in the mortal races.

For this amped up amphibian, it was the thing that was allowing it to continue broadening its horizons. Without medicinal and magical herbs introduced into its diet, this creature would still be a vegetable and would inevitably deteriorate even with my magic keeping its vitals functioning. Luckily, I was prepared this time.

If this did not work out, I could have fed it to the wisps and let them start condensing a layer of physical matter around their cores. With my transmutation and their magical capabilities, they could learn to transmute matter into physical bodies outside of raw mana and evolve from there. At that point, though, it would be harder to ride or wield them.

On the bright side, with the previous mana layers of their cores for batteries, they could project their other selves to fight with. If they achieve sentience, I might even be able to teach them magic. The best that I could hope for with this basilisk was for some form of affinity that would allow it to develop unique abilities.

At this rate, though, it would not be long before it began showing some signs of awakening. Now that it was almost fully recovered its body should start adapting to its magic and controlled conditions. How that would happen, I had no idea, but it should eventually take effect.

Hopefully, blessing this animal at the same time as the land would help to cover all of my bases.

The mouth of the river we spent a week casually walking to was a steeply angled waterfall that stretched several hundred yards up the surrounding sheer cliff side. At the top was a large weather beaten cave entrance that had carved out its own steppe over the centuries. It was there in the cave mouth that I was supposed to make an altar or shrine and pray for the land.

Because of the speed and strength of the waterfall up here the basilisk could not swim and thus relied heavily on its tail and my magic to scale the surrounding slope carved from the cliff face. After spending several hours of struggling I finally gave in and used Shade as a hoverboard to prop its upper body on. After only another hour of casually walking up the slope we reached the small steppe around the cave.

At the top, a pristine grayish-white granite and natural marble cavernous tunnel shone brightly in the waning afternoon light, glistening from the wetness sprayed out by a loudly humming subterranean river gushing through the mountain. The light reflected by the wet stone surfaces and the water itself helped to illuminate the tunnel for hundreds of feet into the mountain in only vague shadow.

However, there were mismatched colors of browns and greens in vague silhouettes everywhere around the back of the steppe and further back in the tunnel itself. At first they looked like misshapen piles of rocks that could have been ores from their discoloration but after checking for magic signatures I found living auras. They were clusters of what looked like large rocky snakes coiled around each other.

All of them had some level of affinity either for stone or earth element and water, which was quite a surprise because that meant this was one of the few species that were naturally magical. After a few seconds of searching my memories for the more exotic wildlife I soon identified these literal 'cave terrors'. They were, obviously, save snakes that came in elemental variations and grew to different sizes based on those variations.

The thinner and more stretched terrors that showed water affinity were suited for fishing and traveling in the waters while the larger and bulkier earth terrors hunted land predators in and out of the caves. While pretty much all cave terrors were elementally biased, it was still uncommon for them to have any magic abilities and when they did they were usually passive.

However, numbers such as these were almost completely unheard of and would surely boast some terrors with more combat-capable abilities. The 'rock' terrors alone grew to over thirty feet and would see a magical body size like mine as a healthy meal. The basilisk would probably be ripped apart by the smaller eel-like water terrors.

I suspected that something along these lines would be waiting for me after having been given this destination by Old Man. My job just could not be as simple as coming here and transmuting a shrine to consecrate the lands. I was probably expected to clean out this den of danger.

If this many cave terrors were living so superficially at the cave entrance, they were probably already heading down the mountain for food. Luckily, the villagers also hunted down the mountain so they had a lower risk of running into them. Otherwise, the village would probably have met misfortune.

"Well, if I were to only look at it superficially..." I find myself musing as I watch the nearest clusters of snaked only a hundred or so feet away start reacting to our presence. "These guys usually occupy a lower slot on the food chain in the underground, so for this many to be so close to the outside there's probably something bigger and uglier deeper in scaring them out. That's what a religious Commander would send their Adjutant for."

So far, the snakes seemed to warily watch me without making any moves as the basilisk and I simply surveyed our surroundings through each other's eyes. Some of the smaller water terrors even retreated from their nesting piles to hug the walls of the cave and make room for the bigger serpents. This was also a sign that they were used to being on the defensive.

However, the materials from their bodies and their meat in the basilisk's belly was too good of a profit to pass up.

Reaching out my awareness toward the closest water and rock terrors, I clinch a wire-like thread of mana about their necks and sever their heads with pure kinetic energy. The other snakes simply slithered and hissed as they retreated away from these bodies. Instead of retaliating with a pack mentality, it seemed these serpents were fine with sacrificing a few for the many.

Dragging the bodies over one at a time with magic, I send out my wisps to take up their preferred forms and set to work skinning and cleaning the bodies. I simply let the basilisk have its way with the few caged animals remaining while I walked away with the granite jar containing a dozen or so remaining fish. It was time for some public relations.

Singling out a single young water terror that was only around eight feet in length and as big around as my wrist- the adults could get as big around as my muscular thigh and over twice as big as this one. Oddly enough, the larges rock terror was only around forty feet and as big around as my waist at its widest area.

It seemed to me that these cave terrors were the last two generations, the most recently matured adolescents and those just entering the same stage. If my guesses were correct, all the adults stayed behind to protect the original homes while these guys ran off for the survival of the species.

Developing a bond by surrounding the serpent's consciousness with my own while murmuring a blessing prayer, I simply form and hold a connection with its mind. Drawing a single forearm length brown and gray speckled river fish from the jar, I wait for the serpent to recognize food and play on its hunger and hunting responses to coax it forward. Not only this serpent but probably all of them were currently underfed and willing to risk human interaction for food.

After only a minute or two, I was soon dangling the fish over the serpent's open mouth to let it go and be swallowed whole. While the water terror was busy swallowing, I forcibly entered deeper into its mind to search its short-term memory. As a younger specimen it naturally had a longer short-term memory than the older and larger serpents. And in its superficial memories I found signs of what made them run to the surface.

A usually pitch black world was illuminated by flashes of dark blue and purple arcs, rock and flesh alike would burn and blow apart. There were brief images of more creatures than just the cave terrors, some were giant bat-like mammals that flew about the tops of caves and others were bipedal rodent creatures. All of them, however, were being struck down by the electrifying arcs of dark lightning.

There was not much else besides a few moments worth of sensory data that depicted traveling up and out of the underground to their current location. "Sili," I say to the basilisk who had just started eating. "Take the wisps and go hunting, large game animals please. Shade, Grimm, you two catch fish."

After sending my familiar away, I set to work using visual magic to identify areas of rocks with greater natural energy as well as odds and ends contained in the river. After gathering up magical minerals and even some fossilized life forms, I transmute a large bridge that spanned the river at the edge of the steppe made from naturally enriched pure white marble. In the middle of the bridge I developed a short altar table made from semi-precious minerals and decorated with etchings of holy icons and the extra magical bits from the river.

To finish the altar I made and idol of opaque white quartz that looked like the cloaked and armored god of justice from the temple in my town. Once the altar was complete, I transmuted a mana array rune using the entire bridge as the base to draw in ambient mana to the altar. I still needed to spend a few days praying and blessing the area, but that could wait for when I was done with the locals.

While I was working, the other young serpents grew bolder and bolder, slowly encroaching out onto the steppe to watch my work while searching about for more fish.

Every now and the I would just toss fish randomly out over the water and watch as the python-like eels would strike out into the water in pursuit. None of the fish that I threw out made it passed the edge of the steppe. These serpents were just that hungry and that numerous.

Many of them were even forced to share their catches or have them ripped from their mouths.

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