Chapter 478 - Preparing the Ground

Chapter 478: 478 - Preparing the Ground

Lohan’s office had never been so quiet, and so full of movement at the same time.

He had arrived there right after breakfast in the real world, with his experience bar at ninety nine point four percent, and decided he wouldn’t do anything rash.

His last evolution had taught him that a body in transformation didn’t care about furniture, or walls, or anyone’s opinion, so the first thing he did was clear out of the room everything that could break, melt or be hurled against a window when the moment came.

Sure, he could go far away and go through the evolution in an open field, but why put himself at risk like that when he had a perfectly stable and safe base like the guild’s?

Twelve thin, translucent tentacles came out of his body all at once, each one moving with confidence, and at the tip of each one, instead of the smooth tip he usually used, there was a small bluish hand, perfectly formed.

One of them rolled up the moss rug Elle had planted beside the desk, so carefully that not a single flower was crushed.

Another picked up the dew flower vase that decorated the window and stored it in the Astral Chest, and a third gathered Dylan’s scrolls, stacking them in the exact order they had been in, with the edges aligned, before taking them to the same place.

Two others, at the same time, unscrewed the shelves from the wall, and a sixth, the most delicate of them all, held the guild’s small banner as if it were a piece of silk.

Lohan watched all of it with a calm patience, and it was only when he realized he was smiling, with a mouth full of sharp teeth he loved to use, that he remembered how things had been the last time.

Before reaching Level 11, even though he already had much greater control over his own body, he was still limited to forming chubby, shapeless little arms, like a baby’s, that could barely close.

Even after the evolution, which gave him far more detailed hands, he still had to concentrate with all his strength to control two at a time, and any distraction made one of them slide back into the mass. Now, twelve hands worked at the same time, each with a different task, and he still had attention to spare to think about other things.

The hands weren’t only more numerous, but they were better. He could see every joint under the translucent gelatin, every phalanx, the tiny tendons that stretched when one of them exerted force, and even the lines of the fingerprints, which he had learned to form without noticing, just by paying attention to how human hands worked.

One of them held a quill, so thin that a firmer grip would break it, and kept it hovering in the air without any tremor, while another, beside it, carefully adjusted a cushion in the corner of the room.

Instead of just shaping his gelatin into the form of a hand, he had learned a lot more about how to shape that and adjacent parts that helped in controlling those limbs.

’This is going to be useful,’ he thought, with a smile. ’It hasn’t been long since I couldn’t hold a rock.’

The strength was another story too. Two tentacles wrapped around the heavy oak desk, which three grown men would have had trouble dragging, and lifted it off the floor as easily as he would lift a leaf, setting it down to the side without making any noise.

If he wanted to, he knew, those same tentacles could pierce through a wooden board, something that at Level 11 he could only do by concentrating all his energy on a single point.

The difference between the Lohan of nine levels ago and the one now was immense, and the strangest part was that he had only noticed it by accident, while arranging the furniture.

Each level he had gained after 11 had brought only a small gain, a percentage here, another there, the kind of improvement you only noticed when you stopped to compare. But added together, those small percentages had formed something enormous.

And he knew that was still going to increase.

Thinking about it sent a shiver through his mass. In a few minutes, when the experience bar reached its end, he would go through the second evolution, and if the first had given him the leap from the Lohan of before to the one of now, the second was going to make the one of now seem, somehow, like just a starting point.

With the furniture clearing finished, he moved on to the second part of the plan.

Several filaments spread across the floor, the walls and the ceiling, covering every centimeter of wood with a thin layer of gelatin that hardened on contact, forming a kind of cushioning coating.

He didn’t want to repeat the shockwave from last time, which had nearly knocked down the trees of the clearing, and he especially didn’t want to explain to Elle why the headquarters tree was cracked.

Last of all, he set aside a corner of the room, pushed a large, soft cushion there that Alice had left at some point, and arranged two others beside it, forming a little plush nest.

It was a silly gesture, and he knew it, but he also knew that Lisa would want to stay close, and that she would probably spend most of the time pacing back and forth, unless she had somewhere comfortable to flop down.

The moment he finished arranging the last cushion, the door burst open, and Lisa came running in, her fur disheveled and both tails bristling.

"HALON! Am I late?!" she asked, panting, her golden eyes wide as they darted across the empty room, the walls covered in gelatin and the tentacles still holding objects in the air. "Has it started? I ran the whole way, I came as soon as you told me, I..."

"Easy, Lisa," Lohan replied, and two of the tentacles formed little peace signs with their hands, which made her stop mid sentence. "There’s still zero point five percent left. You haven’t missed anything."

Lisa stood still for a moment, and then let out a sigh so long it almost sounded like a groan, as her tails slowly lowered.

"Phew," she said, her voice weak with relief. "I thought I was going to miss it. I was out in the wolf valley when you told me, and I dropped everything."

"You were hunting again?"

"Yes," she admitted, looking away with an air of knowing she was going to get scolded. "Since five in the morning."

Lohan sighed, and one of his hands went to his forehead, or the place where a forehead would be, in a gesture of theatrical weariness.

That was what she had been doing for the past few days. After he started leveling faster thanks to the clones, Lisa had entered a kind of silent race, determined not to fall behind no matter what, and the result was that she hunted far more than any other guild member.

Even when Lohan was offline, in the real world, she would enter Elysium alone, sometimes in the middle of the night, and spend hours hunting as many monsters as she could, returning only when mental fatigue forced her to log out.

And when he finally connected, he would join her and help her even more, with clones and biomass injections, which kept her pace insanely high.

Because of that, she was only a few points away from Level 20, with her bar almost full, and he didn’t even have the courage to ask her to slow down.

"I told you you weren’t going to leave me behind," she said, with a stubborn little smile, dropping onto the pile of cushions he had prepared and looking around with a curious expression. "Is this for me?"

"It is," Lohan confirmed, and felt a little silly admitting it. "I figured you’d end up pacing back and forth."

"You know me way too well," she murmured, but her tail swayed with delight as she nestled into the cushions.

The two of them stayed there for a while, in silence, while Lohan finished the last adjustments to the room, and Lisa watched his hands work with an admiration she didn’t bother to hide.

"They’re a lot better than last time," she remarked, finally. "Last time, you looked like you were wearing oven mitts."

"Thank you very much for the honesty," he replied, and one of the hands took an exaggerated bow, with two little fingers pretending to be legs.

Forty minutes passed like that, between light conversations and comfortable silences, while Lohan’s clones, scattered across the map, accompanied the guild groups on quick hunts.

He followed all of it in the background, effortlessly, with the Synaptic Sync and his new mental perceptions bringing in each small piece of news as if he were simply reading a game’s scoreboard.

The experience bar advanced bit by bit, a tenth of a point at a time, and with each kill, Lohan felt the number go down.

Zero point four. Zero point three. Lisa had stopped talking, and the two of them kept watching, saying nothing, as the number reached zero point one, and then, with one last group of wolves taken down by a clone of his alongside Kai and Jenny, zero.

Then he felt it.

It was a familiar energy, warm and deep, that rose from his core like a tide, running through every fiber of his gelatinous body, and a floating message appeared before him, shining with a soft, golden light.

[Congratulations! You have reached Level 21!]