Displaced

Chapter 94

With a careful eye, Bazzalth watched the uptick in his readings as the kaersha came into contact with the small piece of his own flesh. Having already tested the substance multiple times with crawlers, this was the only thing left he could do to broaden his dataset. Testing on small pieces of his flesh, however, was as far as he would go no matter what. He would never test it on a person and not even Tavreth's threats would be able to dissuade him from that.

Luckily, she seemed to understand... for the moment at least. There was no telling how long that would last; the drive of her hoard seemed to push her further and further every time he saw her. There was no way the Tavreth of the past would have ever considered tolerating a kaersha existence.

"Nnnnnnn!"

This method had its advantages to his previous method, at least. Bazzalth had been caught off guard the first time he'd exposed a crawler to his concentrated kaersha liquid. He hadn't expected the sudden, almost blinding spike of soulforce from the subject, the magnitude of the spike large enough to suddenly turn the crawler into something close to a threat. In the end, however, he'd won by default when the crawler had suddenly perished in a rather disgusting display of black, rotted flesh.

Since then, he'd taken to anesthetizing the subject before administering the substance. Even without his instrument, he had been able to watch with his soulsight as the crawler's soulforce increased exponentially. However, the new soulforce would slowly lose stability until it eventually lost all cohesion and the crawler burst apart.

"Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!"

Now, however, with both better materials and a better setting for observation, Bazzalth could glean far more data than what his senses had already revealed to him. Though the incoming measurements were a collective boon to his hoard, the metric that stood out against the rest was none other than durbidian harmonic frequency. He could observe in real-time how the soulforce generated by the lifeforce conversion process would manifest with the proper frequency, only to be slowly corrupted by the kaersha as the black liquid dragged the harmonic closer and closer to its own. The constantly generating new soulforce would counterbalance the shift, keeping the overall frequency barely within tolerable bounds, but nothing could stop the harmonic collapse as soon as the replenishment ran out. It was almost as if-

"NnnnnnnNNNNNnnNNNnnnnNNNNNNNNNNNN!"

"Pari-child! Enough whining!" Bazzalth growled, reluctantly pulling his attention away from the dials and readouts to turn and face the source of the annoying noise. There, to his frustration and dismay, he found his priceless data half-naked, her bottoms on the floor and her top in the process of being removed right then and there. "Pari-child! For last time, put clothing back on!"

"NNNNNNNNNNNNN!" the child whined, stomping her tiny feet as she threw yet another tantrum. "Pari hates clothing!"

Bazzalth couldn't help but sigh. This again. Pari had been such a nice, cooperative source of Knowledge until now, cheerfully helping him in his studies and providing endless amounts of data. But now, she had become something far more exhausting.

"Bazzalth worked hard to create clothing for Pari-child. Pari-child must wear clothing."

"No! Clothing itchy and scratchy! Clothing bad!"

Given that any single one of the claws on the ends of his fingers were larger than Pari's entire body, creating clothing for her had been an incredibly frustrating experience. Yet it had also been a very edifying one that contributed to his hoard. As a person, he had little use for fabrics and even less experience with them. Even his collection sack was made of the hide of animals instead of fabric. Given this, he'd been forced to make use of the bits and pieces left over from his experiments with dead crawlers, patching together a crude set of clothing fashioned after the standard configuration he'd witnessed many times. The process left him wishing he'd bothered to strip all the crawlers he'd submerged within the Ichor these last few years instead of simply letting the liquid eat away at the fabrics.