Devoured Eccentric

Time: Estimated 7~10 AM

Location: Clearing in the woods, south of Thorna the Village

Current Crisis: Severe lack of proper food

Nero had started to slow down drastically from since waking up in the morning, he had found some nuts, which were edible according to Aldin, but only restored some of the energy needed to be up and moving. They also tasted like black coffee beans.

'Kowalski, what's my state of body and mind?'

.State of the body- Poor (Recuperation stopped due to lack of nutrition)

.State of the mind- Poor (Running low on electrolytes, needed ASAP for proper functioning)

.Rate of perception and processing- slow (Due to the debilitated mental state, the chip has adapted to slow down the rate of processing)

''I could easily die of starvation right now, hehe" He started laughing, slightly crazily.

"What an experience. I'm probably in some other Universe which has so many similarities, yet my situation is so different. The trees are taller than I've ever seen and they have a hue of blue in the leaves. If I don't come across some fruits or meat in the next ten minutes, I'll climb a tree to scout."

Nero was severely affected by the lack of food, his body was running on fumes and, momentarily, he forgot all about the questions he previously had and put both himself and Kowalski on the task to find anything that looked even vaguely edible.

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Almost exactly ten minutes later, right after crossing past the clearing, he found an empty make-shift Campfire, with left-overs on the sticks hanging on top, the food left was on the burnt side and probably the reason it was left uneaten.

.Caution, the food is giving off particles that interact with your brain waves, the user is advised to keep at a distance.

'... A trap?' he instinctively bent low, down enough to be hidden in the tall, emerald-tinted grass, away from any watchful or prying eyes.

'let me lob a pebble at it'

He found an elliptical-shaped smooth rock, with a slight emerald glow unnoticeable by the naked eye, and threw it. As hard as he could.

Only being a dozen or so feet away, he didn't miss.

It hit the stick...

And nothing happened.

Nero waited... and waited for longer... And longer until he couldn't stop his body's crave to instinctively move towards and indulge his hands and face completely into the meat.

Even half an hour later, Nero was chomping away when he got a message.

.Alert, the digestion of the particles has increased the concentration of the unknown fluid in the blood vessels.

"Don't care right now, tell me later" he said out loud, burping right after only once again chomp away on the remaining piece of meat. It tasted incomparably worse than his own lab made recipes, but at that moment, it was the most delicious thing he had ever had, the crunch on the slightly burnt surface and the chewy insides brimming with an odd fluid made everything taste on a heavenly level.

"Who the hell leaves so much food behind?!" he silently praised them in his heart.

After finishing it all, Nero felt so full he didn't think he could run for another few hours. Both his thirst and starvation dissipated, the fluids making up for the lack of hydration.

Finding a sweet spot under the shade nearby, he rested, and later, took a nap for a few hours. He realized it would take a while to be back up to his prime, and with rest, the time taken only lessened.

It also gave him enough time to recollect his thoughts.

'at least I'm not on the verge of starvation anymore' he felt like he was on his old cloud 9, a literal floating cloud capsule where he used to go whenever he felt stress build up or heavy-headed from sleepless nights of work in the lab.

Waking up from a nap after a couple of hours, Nero asked Kowalski to estimate the time from the sun's position and light rays. It was around 2 PM by estimation.

It was finally time to get some answers.

'First of all Kowalski, tell me everything about these odd abilities you spoke of before. After that, check through the kid's memories and find a habitable place, anything nearby. Process through everything.'

.Acknowledged.

.With my current amount of observation, I can only hypothesise of these strange particles.

'Whatever, go ahead.'

.My hypothesis is that all forces at work in this world that should be bound by the Higgs field are still bound. This also applies for all the other elementary particles that are unbound by the universe covering field like photons, muons and gravitons. Essentially, everything is the same, except for this absolutely new particle. And this absolutely new particle is so extremely unique that the word 'anomaly' doesn't even come close to the physics-defying interactions it has with other particles. What's more is that humans have the ability to, in a sense, harness power of these particles.

In their core form, they act exactly like elementary particles however, when interacting with strong alpha brain waves and, in my hypothetisise, both the unknown fluid in the blood vessels as well as the 'Dan', they can turn into some sort of gas or liquid or, theoritically, solid.

"Huh?!" Nero perked up from humongous-sized tree root he lay on.

His inner-subconsciousness once again tremored with curiosity.

"Something like this can't be left unearthed." he murmured to himself like he used to in his lab, old habits definetely died hard.

.There is no lab equipment or even a near-suitable environment to perform tests. Only possible experiment is observing the brain wave interaction.

'Let's do that then.' he cheerfully replied.

'So what's the first step, meditation? A Zen state or something?'

.As told before, the user has to relay a command onto the particles with intent of 'asserting dominance' as well as 'focus'. An assertive meditation state would likely improve the amplification.

'Aye-Aye Cap'n' taking a cross-legged meditative stance, Nero thought of using his newfound emotions. Placing his hands gently on his knees, he opened his eyes and imagined elementary particles bending to his will. His hands clasped, what looked like, seemingly empty air, but just that action alone made the temperature drop a few degrees, as if the atmosphere was submitting to him.

Nero's mind was filled with many scenes of mutilation, gore and acts of torture, forcing out his instinctive feelings, those specifically to dominate, was a smooth process. He went over all those scenes full of crimson blood and cries no man should make and felt himself in every one of them.

He was the one who decided fate at those moments, fate of the people tied down for the sake of dissection, torture, genetic mutation,

But most of all...

For the sake of his curiosity.

Nero inhaled, and with it came the blue and green tint of the plant and animals around him.

He could feel it! The control over his surroundings, the control over the atmosphere, over the bloom of life. He felt if he concentrated enough, he could bring out their 'life' or what seemed like so.

And so he attempted it. He tried to condense all 'life' around him, and store it, specifically in his 'dan'.

The greenery in a 5 feet radius came to sudden stop, then slowly bent towards the figure in the center, emitting lustrous shades of emerald light. Their tints started to gather and move, taking their time and gradually forming a sphere no more than one feet away from Nero, one, which not long after, started to condense.

The overwhelmingly thick waves spreading from Nero's mind started to focus right at the sphere. The resistance afterwards from the 'life' sphere seemingly disappeared as it compressed further and further until it was no more than the size of a coin.

With a single command from Nero's brain, the orb moved and got absorbed into the area of the 'dan', permeating through the skin and tissue.

Right after entering the Dan, the orb expanded...

All that 'life' trapped in the Dan tried to escape, hitting the inner walls and bouncing right off it.

Nero could feel this, he could feel his Dan, something which Aldin hadn't been able to achieve due to his inexperience in life.

Slowly inside his Dan, 'life', instead of bouncing off the walls, was being absorbed by the walls, not a lot but little by little, one at a time.

Nero's skin started to clear at a noticible rate. Instead of excreting through the skin pores, the dead tissue broke down to provide extra energy and the by product built up in the excretory tract.

After most of the 'life' was seemingly gone from the Dan, Nero let out long, exhausted breath.

"I feel so physically fit, but mentally, once again, damaged... That was exhausting!" he looked around and observed the plants around him. After finding a slight difference in shine between the grass he was near compared to the grass not in his range, he concluded that even plants have something different from his world, something that can help even regular trees grow over 50 meters, something... Otherworldly.

He also noticed something else...

"I gotta take a shit, quick."