7) The rock
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After multiple decades of motionless existence, a rock started rising through the ground.

It rose and rose until there was air above its physical form preventing it from rising further.

For multiple years the rock was ignored by everything making its way through the narrow tunnels.

The first emotion coming to the rock was contentment about its peaceful existence.

This peace was disturbed one day. Something dared to touch the animalistic rock. This disturbance occasionally reoccurred, until one day the rock could not take it anymore. It reached out with its senses to find out more about its antagonist. First, the rock found out that the world was really small and narrow. The next was its adversary's identity, water dripping from the ceiling.

Having found out what its adversary was, the rock followed its instincts and started to absorb the water whenever it hit the rock's surface. It did not take long before the creature learned to form a layer of rock and water around itself to prevent the water from hitting it directly, thus ending this livelong conflict of water vs rock.

The rock that could control mud soon attracted the attention of the passers-by. Soon the rock grew annoyed at the observing creatures. Having no way to intimidate or scare other pieces of existence into fleeing, the rock directed its senses outwards. Feeling a presence in the world's borders the rock collected as much water and rock as possible and formed a body for itself. Manipulating this newly formed body the rock moved towards the other presences it felt aside from the one in the world’s borders.

The poor rat-like creatures were swiftly suffocated by the mud.

Within the bodies of the annoying things, the rock found energy, feeling that this energy was what gave the other presences their animation and mobility the rock tried to absorb it.

After a prolonged time of failing to absorb the energy, while feeling that the energy was fading at an ever-increasing rate, the rock felt a sense of loss.

The rock waited for that original emotion to come back, but it would not come.

Feeling angry at the world for having stolen this emotion from within itself, the rock collected more rocks and more water and attacked the borders of the world. Like a wave of mud, the rock constantly threw its body onto the walls of the world.

Making no progress, the rock stopped attacking the world. Instead, it controlled its body to go downhill in a search for more creatures.

Not finding anything the rock expanded its senses to reach further and further. Having expanded to multiple times the initial range it realized that the creatures were fleeing from the rock. The rock was greatly confused by this circumstance.

But this initial confusion soon faded away, making way for hunger and curiosity.

The rock rushed after the creatures just to find out that it was lacking in speed.

Not knowing any other course of action the mud-creature started to spit rocks at the fleeing ones.

Those who were hit by these rocks got slowed down, while the predatory mud got faster.

At one point in time, the predator caught one of these creatures, tackled it, and as before covered the prey’s body with its mud.

After some time, the energy in the body started fading again, and the rock observed.

The energy did not fade equally to all sides but instead was sucked into the borders of the world.

As the next creature was slain, the rock lifted it up to prevent contact to the world’s borders. And the energy did not fade away as quickly, giving the rock enough time to find out how to absorb the energy for itself.

Testing multiple possibilities it found out that if its rock-self was close to the energy there would be some kind of resonance and when it narrowed the scope of its senses part of the energy would be absorbed by the rock. So, it repeated the process of expanding and diminishing its scope of perception, to absorb the energy.

The more of this strange energy the rock took in the more memories kept scratching at its mind.

At first, it felt annoyed at the memories and tried to chase them away. But soon curiosity prevailed, and the rock left the intact carcass of the creature, in order to hunt more of them.

Some of these memories were really strange, especially the ones that conflicted with the scope of the world.

Aside from the memories the rock also felt that its control over the surroundings was gradually getting stronger. Among other things, it could more easily expand and shrink its body.

When the world ended in a small cliff, the rock finally realized that the memories were correct about the world.

The rock exited its world and entered the new much larger world. In this new world, there were bigger creatures.

The rock used its greater control over the environment to cut these creatures apart. Most were bisected with compressed air or shot with compressed stone-infused water.

Due to being incapable of lifting these big creatures completely the rock was forced to share its meals with the world.

One of these memories made the rock depressed about having wasted so much time. It was one of friendship, love and ambition.

 


 

As the rock continued to absorb energies,  it became more proficient in controlling its environment and grew in size as well as power. The rock slowly changed from a simple rock to a perfectly spherical, luminescent gem, radiating in the full scope of the electromagnetic spectrum. Thus, the rock became a rainbow-gem.

Along with this change came another more subtle one. The identity within the memories became the dominant one and the rock turned gem came to acquire sapience.

This opened a new chapter in the gem’s life, as it stopped hunting altogether. Along with the realisation that it was an elemental it acquired a good portion of self-hate.

The first option that was considered was of course suicide. Thus, it checked if its soul was damaged by its previous death and the subsequential change of its race.

The results were disillusioning, as the soul was intact, not even damaged, but not one of the skills recorded in it was usable from the get-go.

So, the first option was discarded and replaced by checking on the most important defensive structure of any mind-mage, the soul castle. The reasoning behind this was that the soul castle was connected to Bae’s realms of servants. Contact could be made and the team would easily find a solution for this predicament.

The result was more shocking than anything the rock had experienced in any of its iterations. The soul castle was gone in its entirety, no soul-fragments, no soul-particles, no structures, no nothing. Doing further inspections into its soul, it found that not only the soul castle was missing! It did not even have a subconsciousness. Thinking about this circumstance, it made sense, there were no body-functions that needed to be upheld so a subconsciousness was superfluous for elementals.

The only option remaining, was the most time consuming one: trying to relearn all the skills it once knew, in an attempt to create a skill that can reincarnate its self into the right kind of being.

At least it had the memories of how its previous incarnation came to learn and train them. And thus, it spent the next decade or so retraining a fraction of what it could once do easily. Starting with the basics.

 


 

After spending some years training with mediocre results, the rock tuned gem, with too many memories, grew bored. Knowing that what it once thought to be the world’s borders must be something else, the elemental for the first time in its life expanded its perception range beyond these borders.

It found nothing worthy of note. Just a maze of tunnels filled with more creatures.

Having reached an extend in its perception, that was neither too disorienting due to being too narrow, nor too taxing on the muddy creature's mind it went on another hunt.

Meeting almost no resistance it went through larger and larger tunnels. Killing everything promising to provide energy. Using both the methods previously employed and the skills newly relearned.

With each kill the energy-density in the stone increased, with this came both a better understanding and higher control of the things it was able to do with both, elemental and mind magics. This, in turn, increased its maximum perception range.

It fell into an automatism until finally meeting resistance in the form of a feline, that saw its meal disturbed by a rampaging mudslide.

As the feline pierced its pointy metallic tail into the mudslide, hitting the gem-like rock, the later felt pain for the first time in its new life.

The torture did not last for long, as the feline soon found out that the disturbance in the form of a rock was not edible. Yet, the pain persisted for multiple hours. And even days after the event, the rock could still feel a dent in its otherwise perfectly spherical primary body.

Left alone by the feline and having recuperated from the pain, the elemental got bored of this cave-system. Thus, while staying completely still and letting loose of its muddy body, it expanded its perception searching for the surface-world.

It was surprising when instead of finding the surface the only thing that could be found was a dungeon’s core at the centre of the cave-system. The rock remembered to have hated dungeons, almost as badly as it did elementals.

After training for a short while, it went hunting again. Trying to gradually increase the rate of energy intake. To increase its own share and reduce the dungeon’s portion of its food.

There were multiple occasions where the gem's food retaliated and over time the rock was forced to learn how to freely move its core within its muddy body, effectively becoming able to dodge incoming attacks for the first time. Whenever it did lose a fight, its adversaries were faced with the same problem. Not one of them was capable of eating the rock.

This lack of threat caused the elemental’s defensive structure to stagnate. While its offensive capabilities grew constantly.

Slowly it learned to combat all the different kinds of beings within the dungeon.

But the most annoying beings within the dungeon were a kind of arachnid who occasionally appeared in front of the elemental, but never attacked. Sometimes they even brought offerings and continuously made strange noises. Worthless offerings devoid of energy, but offerings nonetheless. The elemental did not pay their behaviour any attention and handled them like all the other beings of the dungeon. After all, from its perspective, beings of the dungeon were a hateful bunch, whose only purpose in life was feeding the dungeon.

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