Avery continued observing, cheering on the living rocks as they learned and improved, slowly growing more civilised, until one of them stumbled on something quite extraordinary.
It started out as a day like any other, with one of the creatures peacefully digging a tunnel according to the routine, using the techniques he had learned from his elders. He wasn’t a particularly remarkable specimen either, and the only significant difference he had with the rest of his species was that had been gifted with slightly longer tentacles. That, and that it was about to discover a world-changing item.
Everything was going when he suddenly felt his tentacle spasm in intense pain. He had hit something buried deep underground, and his tentacle had been almost cut off. This did happen from time to time, as their tentacles were much more fragile than their hard shell, but it had never felt so easy to cut through ten centimeters of powerful muscles.
Once abiding to the advice given by the elders, the creature ignored the pain, and carefully shifted the earth around the harmful object to bring it up to the surface without hurting himself. This was protocol, as any sharp rocks they found were precious commodities that could be used in their traps.
However, as the supposed stone shard broke the surface, it revealed itself to be something completely different. It was a translucent object that seemed to be midway between illusion and reality. It emitted a soft white light, hiding its form and making it impossible to ascertain its shape.
The living rocks were very confused by it, but Avery recognised it instantly. It was one of the fragments of the jade butterfly of fate, which had fallen to earth during the creation of the world.
It wasn’t one of the 1000 defined runes, those that mirrored the runes Avery knew about in reality. It was one of the undefined fragments, who’s usage and meaning was still unknown.
Even when he checked what it was through his Dao sight, he was not able to ascertain their purpose and returned empty handed. It wasn’t that he did not manage to find or understand the information either. It was that information did not exist, because those runes had not yet been attributed an identity. They were one of the vestiges of the incomplete creation of the world, an inadequacy that still needed to be remedied.
Avery wasn’t sure what it meant for there to be 2000 magical items of undefined use in his world, but one thing was certain. He was witnessing a historical moment, as this was the first time living creatures would come into contact with magic.
Realising the importance of this moment, he quickly focused his attention to a single proton, causing time to slow to a crawl, effectively pressing pause on all of the events happening in the world.
Avery knew the boulders had a way to communicate, but he had never investigated how they did it in detail. It had been enough to watch from afar as the global civilisation advanced, and learning to understand their undeveloped animal talk was too much trouble for it to be worth it.
Now, however, they had already matured a lot, and this was the first introduction of magical powers to the creatures of this world. He really did not want to miss the mess it would certainly cause just because he was being too lazy to learn to understand them.
Before learning their language, he needed to find out which communication they used, as it was obviously not by talking. For this, the first thing he had to do was to take a peek under their carapace and find out what organs they were equipped with.
Predictably, most of the organs he was familiar with as a human were absent. In fact, the creature had a relatively simple anatomy. Its rocky shell was certainly huge, providing almost one and a half cubic meters of space to fill, but three quarters of that space dedicated to housing its massive rolled up tentacles. Of course, since the tentacles were almost always in use, it ended up being empty most of the time.
The tentacles were arranged in a circular fashion, extending out from the rim of its shell. And from inside the circle they formed, was a terrifying maw. Rows upon rows of sharp teeth, with not a single flat tooth in sight. Its tentacles did a good enough job crushing bones and tearing enemies apart, so those teeth’s only job was to tear flesh apart to make it more easily digestible.
Speaking of the digestive system, that was another thing that Avery recognised. It had a stomach, intestines and everything else it needed to live on a diet of meat, dirt and water. Accompanying it were huge pouches to store water and fat, and a unique breathing mechanism that extracted oxygen from the millions of minuscule holes in its shell.
Last but not least, was its nine brains. The main one was situated at the very center of the monster, where it was the most protected, and eight smaller sub-brains at the base of each tentacle.
That was it. No eyes, no ears that could hear though its carapace, no tongue to taste or talk. They even lacked any kind of reproductive organs. So how did they communicate with the outside world?
As with most things that had to do with these creatures, the answer laid in their remarkably versatile tentacles. They were equipped with powerful tremor sensing abilities, capable of sensing and emitting minute vibration through the earth.
He was going to study how they worked when he was stunned by the many functions of the tentacles. What surprised Avery wasn’t so much what they could do, but rather how well they could do it, and how fast they had improved.
He had already gotten a superficial glance at their tentacles when he had first seen the creatures, equivalent to five hundred years ago for them, and they had looked quite different back then. It was not the fact that they had changed that was unbelievable, but how much and how fast it had happened.
Half a millennia ago, these creatures already had eight tentacles, but of those, six of them were identical, designed solely to move their heavy mass, while the last pair was more delicate and used to craft traps and cover up tracks.
Now, not only had the general length of their tentacles increased, they had also become way more specialised.
A pair of them had lengthened considerably, much more than all of the others, while simultaneously becoming thinner and more agile to more easily edge its way in the earth and reach water. Its ability to act as a straw and suck the water up to the main body had also been improved, while all the other tentacles had lost that ability.
Two others had specialised in what Avery was currently interested in, namely tremor sense. They whose appearance had changed the most, as instead of wet and slimy skin, they were covered in stiff fur-like lamellas designed to catch any incoming vibrations. He did not really understand how it all worked, but it involved huge amounts of nerves and tiny muscles, as well as a strange viscous liquid trapped behind the mass of sensorial fibers.
In terms of strength, these tentacles were the weakest ones, but they more than made up for it with their astonishing precision. They were capable of accurately measuring the movements of their fur to the micrometer, and use it to send equally precise signals.
They used this both as a sort of underground echo localisation, to replace sight, and as a communication method, replacing ears and tongues. It did not have a huge range, but they could hear the minute vibration of a nearby tentacle that was less than a few dozens of meters away.
Besides that, they still had four strength-based tentacles, but a pair of them had still changed slightly, taking a more angular shape. This was no doubt to facilitate digging, as it could now be used as a sort of shovel to separate and carry the dirt, instead of roughly pushing it away.
Avery had found what he was looking for, but something about all this was disturbing him. He could understand the living rocks becoming smarter and building a primitive civilisation, as intellectual progress went a lot faster than natural evolution. but this was different, as they had undergone extreme physical changes in a very short time frame.
He was not surprised by the changes themselves, as he could totally see how they were all evolutionarily advantageous. What baffled him was how quickly they had changed. His memories of his science classes were a little iffy, but he was pretty sure evolution was normally nowhere near this quick.
It normally took at least hundreds of thousands of years, or perhaps a million years for any significant physical transformation to occur. How was it possible that he was seeing such drastic modification after only a few centuries?
A quick search through his Dao sight database revealed no easy answers, so Avery decisively pushed those distracting thoughts aside to concentrate on his initial goal.
He had found how the creatures communicated, and with quasi-omniscience, he would have no trouble hearing their conversations. The only thing left to do was to become fluent in vibrating tentacle talk.
On earth, Avery had had a hard time learning foreign languages, and had known almost nothing of Spanish despite studying it for almost ten years. However, compared to unraveling the mysteries of the Tao, even learning a completely alien language should be child's play. With him having access to all of the information he wanted, it should not take more than a few weeks to learn it. And with the current rate of the flow of time, that would translate to less than a nanosecond for the living rocks.
