I'm a Stingray?

Chapter 35 - Slithering Plague

Tim floated into a colorful, ghostly cloud. The average fish or even mammal for that matter, wouldn’t be able to see this cloud with their naked eyes because the cloud was virtually invisible, it wasn’t meant to be seen by physical creatures. However, he was traveling around as a soul right now, and he was exploring the world to find specific clouds like this one.

The air was rich with these gas-like clouds that only souls or ghosts could see. In other words, whoever floated out here, floated around either because they had to, or because they were in a hunt for phantomized mana, in order to strengthen themselves. Phantom magic was a branch of magic itself, after all, so mere souls urged to cultivate the quality of their phantom mana, all for power’s sake!

Tim managed to find a purple, gaseous cloud, and since the color of it was so thick, he unsurprisingly found phantomized mana in there. His soul started absorbing the mana right away, and in turn, the same cloud’s rich color, started fading away.

He saw the cloud dissipating more after every beating second, and thanks to such speed, he was reminded that phantomized mana was much easier for one to attain. Tim couldn’t produce it himself, no, but since mana clouds like these were far more plentiful than mana roots, then he didn’t care what he could produce.

Out here, he could just float into a cloud, and reap hundreds of points of phantomized mana in seconds! It was a grand activity for an opportunistic entity such as himself.

Anyway, after about five minutes, he managed to absorb every whiff of the purple cloud there was. He was efficient.

Then, the system announced. [Hello, Timothy. You have accumulated 777 points of phantomized mana, congratulations!]

“This is nothing to be congratulated about, system.” He followed along, “Where are those ghost kingdoms you talked about? I’d feel much more accomplished if I found one of those, or at least, it would be cool to look at stuff like that.”

The system had an answer to this, she said. [Unlike the rest of the world, aerial kingdoms do not have borders. Ghost-based kingdoms are very far away from each other, because they have virtually no reason to be near each other to begin with. You’d have to fly for days to find one of these kingdoms.]

Timothy didn’t have that kind of patience, not at all. He wasn’t willing to fly for days, so he gave up on the idea of finding ghostly kingdoms, entirely. Instead, he decided that it was best to be on the hunt out here for some system points, as this had actually been his original plan. He needed a lot of points.

He thought, “I have a bunch of phantom mana now, so I should use it to hunt shit. If I run into another mana cloud, that would be pretty good too.”

The prior idea was simple but effective. He was to hunt other entities, in exchange for system points, and since he was loaded with mana already, hunting, in theory, should be easy for him overall.

That theory was proven incorrect, however, about an hour later. He bumped into a group of entities that seemed too weird for comfort, he simply couldn’t ignore their prickly, and dark features. When Tim thought of ghosts or souls, he imagined otherwise bland, pale, and blobby figures, so he would never have imagined to see ghosts that were shaped like snakes!

Tim didn’t like snakes, or any elongated animal for that matter. Likewise, he didn’t nearly want to see a two-foot long, darkened entity. He felt intimidated right away, and pictured that this ‘snake’ was a fallen demon of some sort, and for that matter, he started blasting mana against the said demon!

He could summon these silvery, and razor-like balls of mana, so he immediately put those into use. The shots he was firing, behaved a bit like the average mage’s fireball, except, it mainly featured cold razors. Tim shot several of those, until he hit his target.

“Haha!” He celebrated.

Tim had erased the target from his sight. Razors may not be able to hurt a very non-physical entity, but the shots he fired were purely made out of phantomized mana, which explained his success. He had won this short battle, in a bit of a cruel way.

However, moments later, several of that same species suddenly appeared. He got surrounded, and even though he managed to shoot one of these entities down, he wasn’t quick enough to shoot all of them. Tim was approached by them, and then, he got bit, except the bite was just coated with this dark, spooky substance.

Immediately after, the darkness then engulfed the rest of his soul. Tim’s soul was originally colored light-blue, but now it seemed as dark as the night! He felt terrified about it, because not only was he defeated right now, but there was more to this.

This darkness didn’t permit certain things. For example, he didn’t have the freedom to move as he pleased. He could only follow this group of black, ghostly snakes, but that was about all he could do. Tim followed them, as if instinctually, and so, they soared the skies together.

He was free to have thoughts, however, and naturally he was panicking. Internally, he slammed the system with a bunch of questions! It was reasonable for him to be anxious, because what he was experiencing was the textbook definition of slavery, or at least a variant of it.

In panic, he asked. “What the hell is going on, system! They fucking defeated me already, so shouldn’t I wake up all comfy, at home?!”

[No,] She answered, [You’ve been bitten by a slithering plague ghost, and their sole purpose is to infect as many entities as possible. They don’t have leaders, or any social structure at all for that matter, but they do have one goal; To spread their plague!]

“What does that mean? Am I dead?” He asked.

The system was thorough and direct, she said. [No, but you will be floating around for a while, at least as long as these snakes see you as useful. Once they dispose of your soul, you’ll be free to get back to your body.]

“Well, crab shit!” He remarked.