Morning broke over the Clear Stream River in ribbons of pale lavender and gold. The bamboo water chute sang its gentle, melodic song as mountain springwater tumbled smoothly into the shaded stone pool. It sent cool plumes of mist drifting through the wild jasmine arbor.
Lin Xiao awakened from his sleep feeling remarkably refreshed. Sleeping as a slime was a discovery: no awkward neck kinks, no dead arms from sleeping on your side, and no dry mouth. You simply settled into a soft, flattened disc on a smooth stone, reduced your internal fluid breath flow to a peaceful simmer, and drifted away.
Beside him, nestled against the warm, sun-absorbing quartz stone floor, Old Ba was still snoring peacefully, his heavy leathery snout whistling like a kettle with every exhale. In the clear pool, Xiao Long was already awake, performing graceful underwater loops through the watercress roots.
Breakfast, Lin Xiao thought cheerfully, stretching his jelly-like mass back into a floating, ball-shaped dome. A proper morning meal is the cornerstone of great realm. We have clean water and mountain tea, but we need fresh greens. Let’s see what the riverbank has to offer.
Rolling smoothly off the quartz path, Lin Xiao bounced toward a rich, muddy inlet seventy yards downstream where the river curled around a grove of ancient weeping willows. The damp soil was covered in lush, vibrant beds of wild river cress, tender fiddlehead ferns, and crisp water chestnuts poking through the clear shallows.
Extending two delicate azure pseudopods, Lin Xiao began harvesting the crisp green stems.
“Target identified: Wild Emerald Rivercress,” the Omniscient Dao Spirit chimed softly in his mental sea. “High in natural chlorophyll, stone iron, and mild wood-element qi. Highly beneficial for liver spirit veins and digestion.”
Crisp, peppery, and fresh, Lin Xiao noted, plucking a generous bundle and stashing it into his clean, non-stomach storage pocket. Tossed with a touch of sesame oil, rock salt, and wild garlic, this will make an incredible cold appetizer.
Suddenly, the calm morning chorus of forest birds went dead silent.
A faint, sickly-sweet scent drifted on the mountain breeze. An odor reminiscent of decaying meat masked by heavy, cloying honeysuckle. From the shadowy canopy of the willow trees above, thick, mottled green tendrils began to go down with eerie, silent deliberation.
They weren’t ordinary tree branches.
Thick as a python’s body and covered in glistening, violet-tipped barbs, six massive vines uncoiled from the upper boughs. The mottled bark of the vines was wet with a thick, amber slime that dripped onto the moss below. It hissed faintly as it melted holes through fallen leaves.
In the shallow reeds twenty yards away, a family of wild river otters froze in sheer terror. The mother otter instantly shoved her four pups deep into a muddy burrow. Her dark eyes were wide with dread. The Viper Vines! The Flesh-Eating Stranglers of the Lower Ravine! For years, every beast along the river knew to give this grove a wide berth. Entire charging boars and armored river badgers had been snared by those poisonous thorns, numbed in seconds, and dragged into the canopy to be dissolved alive.
And right now, a fully defenseless, squishy blue ball was sitting directly beneath the hunting nest, happily picking watercress.
Whoosh!
Moving with explosive, hungry speed, three thick Viper Vines whipped downward through the mist. Their serrated barbs caught the morning sunlight like curved iron daggers as they lashed directly around Lin Xiao’s azure body!
SQUELCH!
The barbed coils slammed into Lin Xiao with enough force to shatter a granite millstone, instantly wrapping around his midsection and cinching tight with bone-crushing torque.
The mother otter squeezed her eyes shut in horror, anticipating the sickening spray of fluid and the painful shriek of a dying creature.
Instead, a remarkably calm, mildly annoyed voice rippled through the clearing:
“Well, that’s rather rude. I was just harvesting the cress.”
The Viper Vines tightened with ferocious violence. He tightened their grip to forty sea-weights of crushing pressure.
Under normal living physics, any mammal, reptile, or insect caught in such a vice would have had its ribs crushed and its organs burst in a split second. But Lin Xiao possessed neither ribs nor organs. He was an incompressible, non-Newtonian stretchy fluid matrix held together by ancient chaos water’s skin.
As the vines squeezed, Lin Xiao’s body simply twisted.
His round honeydew shape smoothly yielded, extruding upward and downward like a squeezed tube of blue toothpaste. Within two seconds, he had turned into an even, hourglass-shaped dumbbell. The serrated violet thorns scraped against his outer membrane. But rather than piercing his skin, the barbs merely slid harmlessly across his slick, self-healing surface.
The acidic amber sap weeping from the thorns began to pool against his membrane.
“Alert: Corrosive paralytic toxin detected,” the Dao Spirit reported with cold and exact nonchalance. “Chemical structure: Neurotoxic peptidase blended with organic formic acid. Host’s Primordial Void has started automatic neutralization. Toxin pH normalized to 3.8. Flavour profile: Tart, aromatic, high acidity. Comparable to packed kaffir lime juice.”
Wait, it tastes like lime? Lin Xiao blinked his sense nodes. Lime vinaigrette?
The Viper Vines seemed genuinely confused. For three hundred years, their hunting strategy had never failed: strike, paralyze, crush, and eat. Yet this strange blue substance was not breaking. In fact, the harder the vines squeezed tight, the firmer the blue substance became!
“All right, that’s enough hugging,” Lin Xiao said. “My cress is getting muddy.”
Lin Xiao focused his will. Channeling the refined iron-marrow qi he had digested from the poacher snare, he stiffened his outer edge into dense, impact-hardening stiffness.
Then, he activated his [Smooth-flowing Water Jet].
Instead of firing a single straight stream from a front nozzle, Lin Xiao opened six circumferential micro-orifices around his mid-belt outer edge. Within his internal void, forty gallons of high-pressure river water surged into motion. It spun at twelve thousand turns a minute.
“Outward Hydro-Saw Array: Calibrated,” the Dao Spirit announced.
SHRRRR-WHIRRRRRR!
Lin Xiao spun on the spot like a diamond-tipped sky circular saw.
Six razor-thin sheets of high-pressure azure water erupted radially from his body. It whistled through the air at nearly three times the speed of sound. Running with razor-sharp-angled care, the high-speed hydro-blades sliced through the constricting vines like a hot wire through soft butter.
Thump! Thump! Splat! Splat!
Dozens of cut vine segments, each thick as a man’s thigh and still twitching with dying reflexive spasms, rained down into the shallow mud. The leftover canopy vines recoiled in wild agony, retracting toward the treetops like scalded serpents.
“Oh no, you don’t!” Lin Xiao called out. “You don’t drop into my salad bowl and then run away without paying!”
Lin Xiao hopped forward. He opened his Primordial Void Maw to a five-foot width. He let loose a powerful gravity vortex.
GLOOP! SHWIP! GLOOP!
The cut vine segments, the dripping pools of acidic sap, and even the retreating root clusters clinging to the lower willow branches were sucked cleanly into his boundless void dantian.
Inside the timeless empty pocket of his internal void fire, the chaotic origin qi engaged with roaring ferocity. The barbed thorns were stripped of their rotting intent. The tough plant fibers were broken down into flexible, high-pulling organic polymers. And the acidic sap was purified into crystal-clear organic vinegar.
A ringing bronze chime echoed through Lin Xiao’s mindscape:
Lin Xiao shuddered with pleasant fullness.
A golden warmth spread through his fluid mass as his training broke through the barrier into High Qi Gathering. His maximum fluid volume swelled by nearly thirty percent. That let him grow from a honeydew melon to the size of a large pumpkin whenever he desired.
More importantly, he felt a remarkable new fluidity in his outer membrane. By contracting the newly blended plant polymers within his mass, he could now effortlessly sprout up to eight long, muscular azure tendrils. Each tendril was as flexible as an octopus arm yet capable of lifting sixty pounds with ease.
Testing his new ability, Lin Xiao whipped out four slender tendrils, effortlessly scooping up the dropped bundles of wild watercress, three wild water chestnuts, and a smooth flat river stone to use as a serving plate.
Talk about convenient, Lin Xiao thought with a satisfied chuckle, retracting the tendrils back into his smooth ball-shaped outer edge. Eight prehensile arms that don’t take up any space when not in use. Slicing vegetables, flipping pancakes, and stirring tea all at the same time is going to be easy.
And the vine sap! Within his void frozen stillness storage, thirty pounds of tangy, aromatic green dressing rested in perfect preservation. It was crisp, bright, and intensely citrusy, with just enough herbal heat to wake up the palate.
Next time I make cold noodles or a fresh river salad, this dressing will be total perfection. A little wild honey, some crushed mountain peppercorns, and this tangy vine essence... The immortals have no idea what they’re missing.
In the reeds twenty paces away, the mother river otter slowly poked her whiskered head out of the burrow.
Her round, glossy eyes were wide with pure, blank shock. The terror of the lower river—the ancient strangler vines that had devoured countless woodland creatures—had attacked this solitary blue sphere. And what had happened? The blue sphere had turned into a spinning water-wheel, chopped the monsters into kindling, and eaten them like a bowl of wild scallions!
The otter pressed her paws together in front of her chest, squeaking in trembling respect before scurrying back into her den to tell the other river folk that a living Mountain Deity of the River had taken up residence at the willow bend.
Lin Xiao, fully clueless to the otter’s existential revelations, bounced merrily back toward the campsite, humming a cheerful mortal tune as his see-through body glowed with morning sunlight.
Good food, fresh greens, and eight brand new arms, Lin Xiao thought. Today is shaping up to be a truly productive day.