It was about an hour before he sighted the next Field Mole. This time he experimented with using [Identify] at a long distance. He focused on the little brown blur in the mass of green and activated the skill.

"Uwawawa..."

Immediately his knees buckled. He felt sick and began to hyperventilate. Even though his [Identify] was at level 10, this hadn't lowered the cost of using it. Its mana cost scaled with the distance of the target. When he used the skill on himself in the past, it showed him his mana at full capacity -- (27/27), -- and this gave him the mistaken impression that the skill was free to use. In fact, using it on himself was the exception.

The nausea and pain had not let up. But desperate and willing to try anything, he did the first thing that came to mind--

"[Identify] !"

He was able to bring up a status window on himself. Now he realized why he was feeling so sick. His mana was not only depleted -- it was at a negative value.

[UNKNOWN] [Lesser Human Lvl. 7]
[Magic Points: -112/37] [Hit Points: 25/25]
[Total Combat Power: 0]

It was surprising that he was able to use the skill at all.

Though he was able to use Identify on himself, he was too sick to move. For now, he had no other option than to lie still and wait it out.

The boulder felt hot against his back, the sun warm and soothing on his body. He felt the world lose its urgency, and his thoughts began to decohere, oozing in a middle state between feeling and form. He entered a mild delirium. The weight of the scabbard attached to his hip made him associate it with his male organ. For some reason, the fact that he could draw the sword out of the scabbard stopped making sense to him. He laughed at its ridiculousness. How could he take a sword out of a scabbard? What? Should it not always be in his scabbard? If it were not, then would that not mean it wasn't "his", wasn't attached to his body? How could his sword get detached? He began almost feeling convinced that it was abnormal to draw a sword from its scabbard when he remembered his onahole ability. Did not his Legendary Relic do the same thing, in some sense? Did it not detach his sword from its rightful place below his hip?

For a few minutes he struggled with this idea.

Gradually, he began sliding off of the boulder. He managed to regain his senses and catch himself at the last second. It seemed that he was able to control his body, it was just uncomfortable and taxing on his energy.

Using Identify on himself again, he saw that his Magic Points was still -112. Wasn't that the exact same value that he saw in the beginning? Why wasn't he recovering? He would have begun to panic, if he was not dazed by the mana depletion.

After a few minutes of lying on the boulder, he summoned enough effort to use Identify on himself a third time.

-111.

Better. But how long had passed since it entered a negative value? 10 minutes? 15? He had simply assumed that mana would regenerate fairly quickly. But at that rate, he might not be recovered for days...

He knew that he would have to solve the problem eventually. But since he had all day to think about it, and since it was such nice weather, he did not feel too worried about it. Similarly to the way that he was able to postpone his anxiety about schoolwork, back when he was still in university, he now employed the same tried and tested technique. Things that were stressful were left for a future self to handle, who, for some reason (for this future self has proved time and time again to be quite the unreliable type) he placed an infinite trust in.

To give an infinite trust -- and to receive, in turn, an infinite calm. The fields were silent. Now that he was in a perpetual state of suffering, he regretted not taking advantage of all the opportunities he had before to be lazy and enjoy the moment. Why was he so obsessed with leveling up? Why did he force himself to battle weird-looking moles, when he could simply loaf about, enjoy the pleasant weather and the day, and go out every night eating street food with the pretty Ada?

He gazed blankly at the fields and rolling hills in the distance.

But, by and by, he began noticing little "blips" in his consciousness... Similar to the feeling you get when you're focused on a conversation with a friend: the sensation of someone rapidly patting on your shoulder behind you, which, since you're focused on something else, gets relegated to the back of your mind. In such a way, Sora noticed little unexpected blips at the edge of his consciousness, but had not yet processed the image that drew his notice. A light blue animal...light-blue... He had been watching this object for nearly a minute, surfacing intermittently above the tall grass, "patting the shoulder" of his consciousness, before finally, the object entering said consciousness, he realized that an animal so round, hairless, light-blue, translucent, and generally slime-like, could only be the famous slime itself.

His mouth dropped open, partly in awe, and partly in delirium. He began to drool a little.

A slime's magic crystal was valued for being a kind of magical reservoir of mana.

Mana consists of two types. One is the mana represented by magic points. This type of mana occurs naturally in monsters and in regions of land. It is almost totally absent in beastkin, and it is present in only comparatively low concentrations in demihumans. A monster the same level as a human typically has at least 5 times their MP. The other type of mana is less understood. It seems only to be present in living beings. However, it is not known whether it interacts with the first type of mana. This latter type of mana is the theoretical substance (though the only known way of measuring it is through the tools provided by the Gods -- namely, the Identify skill) that corresponds to one's experience points and level. Researchers theorize that it has multiple states. When it binds to a being, it attaches to the life force of the being, which, once destroyed, causes it to enter a radical state, wherein it gravitates to the nearest entities at hand. This is the phenomenon that brings about "leveling".

As our reader might have already inferred, a slime crystal has the remarkable property of being a "free" treasure box of XP. In theory, it was possible for an individual to level up by doing nothing more than consuming these magic crystals. There have, in fact, been periods in some civilizations where it was customary to feed these crystals to noble babies on the day of their baptism. In some of the Southern states, this practice is still done, though, as it is generally regarded as barbaric, it has fallen into desuetude everywhere else. There are limits, however, to what can be done with them. A crystal, once taken from the body of a slime, will lose its storage integrity and gradually decay: for this reason, crystals can't simply be hoarded endlessly and given all at once to a wealthy individual.

In the ecosystem, slimes serve as the base of the food chain. Lower monsters specialized in hunting and digesting slimes are analogous to the herbivores of our world. Larger monsters (like humans), who are poorly adapted to killing slimes without damaging their crystals, and causing the mana reservoir to largely disperse, prey on these specialized monsters instead to gain experience.

Consuming a slime's crystal therefore not only gave significantly more experience than killing a slime (which amounted to almost nothing), but had the additional effect of mana restoration.

It took a few moments for Sora to logically connect the ideas. But when he did, he became fixated on the idea of killing the slime. He could not explain why he was fixated because he was not able to represent his conviction in logic. He felt a vague sense that "this was good", "this was necessary", but wasn't able to explain why this was. Being not able to explain why, he was also not able to doubt why, to consider all the things that might go wrong, to wonder why he shouldn't simply wait till his mana recovered on its own, which gave him a sense of determination without which he would not have been able to endure the suffering of simply moving his limbs.

Perhaps one can put the difference between a state of "certainty" and a state of "conviction" as follows: where one obtains certainty from seeing a logical picture, from grasping its representation, from slowly reflecting upon it, one obtains conviction from the obverse, from not seeing it--but from feeling, nonetheless, that something is there, in that region beyond one's capacity for reflection. In Sora's case, he felt that something made sense, but he was too confused and delirious to "see" his thoughts. In the depths of his mind -- invisible to his consciousness -- he made the connection that the slime crystal gave mana and that mana was precisely what he needed. Interestingly enough ("interestingly" -- we somewhat-pretentiously say -- to those who amuse themselves with the study of demihumans), it was not this connection, but the second connection he made -- that he had taken a quest for hunting slimes, and that this here was coincidentally a slime -- that ultimately made his sense of purpose firm.

...

We cannot describe the suffering and the fear he endured. Crossing the fields demanded of him superhuman strength...but he rose to the task. It wast true, he stumbled and would often fall to his knees. For parts of the way, he would crawl forwards like a soldier wounded from battle. Crawling on the ground, he would forget the reason why he was crawling, and, dusting himself off with a slight sneer, get up to his feet again.

When he finally reached the slime, about two hours had passed.

[Magic Points: -105/37]

The slime felt larger in real life now that he was close to it. This made him a bit surprised at first. But soon he became distracted by something else. -- On the surface of a slime were markings that resembled a face in the shape of a

:3

These were, in fact, simply markings on its gelatinous skin, similar to the markings of animals on earth, and were not actually parts of its body. But to Sora, they made an extreme amount of sense, and seemed to be a confirmation that this was the same slime he had heard about in Japan.

Wobbling a little -- and even more than the slime -- he placed his limp wrist on the hilt of his sword. The pain he felt simply from existing in this shitty body made the prospect of injury -- even be it procured from an unearthly monster -- seem trifling, even childish to his addled mind. He did not feel any fear of being wounded. And indeed, he considered his fortune much as we would the fortune of our avatars in games.

He unsheathed his blade, laughing at the feeling that he just remembered something funny. With a swing, his sword sank unsatisfyingly into the body of the slime. The gelatinous body closed over his blade.

"Aghhhh...aghhh... aghhhhuuuuu"

He found that he sword became stuck in the slime. When he finally shook the slime off, he fell backwards.

This pattern repeated itself a few more times. Once, growing frustrated, he attempted to remove his sword by hand, which almost led to his hand being stuck in the slime.

Finally, with his hand slimy from the goop, he retreated a short distance away. The unchanging expression on the slime's body -- which, in his past life, he used to find endearing, "cute" -- now produced in him no little degree of irritation. He began associating it with the "bad manners" of people he fought online (back when he was into the fighting game scene), who would celebrate whenever they scored a kill, dancing over his body, writing "gg" with a smiley face... And he also began to associate it with the suffering he felt from mana depletion: it was the slime, the slime! who was preventing him from eating the magic crystal and getting his mana back...

Now, it just so happened that his sword was still stuck in the slime (for he wanted to rest before bothering with getting it out), and watching the slime bounce up and down, with the sword stuck in its body, began to make him laugh. The fact that the sword was no longer attached to his body, his scabbard, his hip, but to the slime's made no sense to him. It was as ridiculous as being able (par example) of teleporting a part of one's body... -- Reflexively, he took the Legendary Onahole from his pouch...

It was soft in his hands, soft like the slime... Perhaps that was it (Sora thought to himself)-- perhaps his sword was too hard to cut through the slime. Perhaps he needed something soft to damage something soft. And when he considered it, did this not make a sort of sense? A sword made of metal could cut through the metal of armor. It followed that an onahole, or a similarly flabby object, should be used to kill a slime.

"Onaslash!"

Letting out a scream, full as much of the pain of mana depletion as rage at the slime's changeless mask, he swung the onahole the same moment that the slime bounced up.

The top third disappeared.

"Onaslash! Onaslash!"

The slime, formerly about 3-4 feet in diameter, was reduced to about 2 feet, less than a third of its size (calculating by volume). Sora had not forgotten the objective of his mission...as much as he wanted to beat his frustrations out on its round, light-blue body, he had to consider the slime crystal, the quest, the receptionist, his mana depletion (all of these concepts had become mashed into a single conceptual ball). He threw himself on what remained of the slime -- its formerly proud ":3" was reduced to a mere "c." -- and held it squirming in place. He could clearly see the little crystal core.

Finally, when the "mask" was peeled away, when only a few square inches of body remained, the body of the slime ceased to cohere. In his palm, the piece of crystal twinkled...