I Am A Carnivorous Plant

Woohoo, we’re going to the sea~!

I’ll get to kick my legs in the water, and splash around!

I might even get to catch and eat a shark or two!

Wooooo~!

 

Okay, I say all that, but I don’t really know if that’ll piss off the Water Spirit or anything, so maybe I won’t. Supposedly all things that live in the water are like its, so it probably wouldn’t appreciate me treating its fish like a free buffet, huh? And that probably goes doubly for its special little creations that left behind the blue stones that I’m trying to eat. The elves told me that I just had to make it to the sea, and the ‘Reflection of the Water’ would come to meet me, but like what the heck does that even mean?! It’s basically the most abstract instructions they could have possibly told me.

 

Honestly, I’m starting to think that elves just suck at giving directions, now!

 

What really solidifies that thought for me is the fact that Fen’s instructions were sooo freaking good! It was so easy to find his hometown, just like he said! Sure, it took me like two weeks, but that’s barely freaking anything when you consider the distance I traveled! Of course, I couldn’t go in to the town, considering, you know, I’m a whole entire plant monster and all, but me just finding the town in the first place basically meant I was riiiiight near the sea, so that’s pretty great already! From what Fen told me, it should only be another few days before I make it to the beach!

 

Oh, and before I forget, I’ve got something special to reveal!

Just two days after I left, my flowers finally bloomed~!

 

I now have six black little ‘bleeding heart’ flowers ringing my head! I even have a cute little fancy frond on each side connecting them! It’s like I have a pretty little flower crown on my head now! Or maybe a flower diadem is more correct with where it’s placed? They’re honestly a little bit lower than the other flowers…

 

But they’re beautiful, and the black color makes them look very very evil in a way!

 

I obviously tried to figure out what their special little perk was after I finished fawning over them, and it actually took me a pretty long time to figure out, although I’m honestly not surprised now that I know what it is. See, it needed a special little activation word, just like most of the magical crap I do, which was what took the longest. Luckily, or maybe it’s just how nature works, I guess my instincts or my seed or whatever led me in the right direction. Took a bit of fiddling to figure out the intricacies of it, but I’m proud to announce I’ve now gotten the grasp of these interesting little bleeding hearts of mine now!

 

Okay let me stop stalling and tell you what they do already, hehe~.

Oh look, here’s the perfect opportunity to showcase how cool this is!

 

See that bear over there? That doofy looking bear who’s just wandering around? Well watch this!

 

I plucked three of my little bleeding heart flowers, letting them fall to the ground, and as I stared at them intently, I told them to ‘live’. After a second, the flowers began to wiggle wildly, and the little ends of their hearts began to glow and swell slightly before they all began to drill themselves into the dirt. After 10 seconds, little mounds formed in the dirt from the spots they drilled down into, and soon small, plant-like creatures burst forth from the ground, like zombies being reborn from their graves.

 

Yeah, ‘zombies’ is a pretty topical thing to call them. After all, two out of the three of these plants should be very very dead. I know because I killed them myself!

 

The first of the plants rushed forward, although rushed is quite the relative term. Slowly he made his way towards the bear, his thigh-high form attracting the bear’s attention with his movement. At first the bear didn’t look like it really cared too much about the odd, stump-like creature that was coming towards it past a little curiosity, but when the thing suddenly started stabbing towards the bear’s face with the sharp twigs that branched off of it, the bear quickly snapped and snarled, opening its jaws wide in a threatening manner.

 

And the little stump-man took that opportunity to jump right into the bear’s mouth.

 

As the bear wriggled and squirmed around, desperately trying to figure out a way to dislodge the veritable log that had lodged itself into its mouth, the second of my plant-creations brought itself into play. Looking like an adorably leafy trash can covered in tentacles, it used its twig-like little feet to hurry over towards the bear, and its viney tendrils wrapped around the bear’s legs, pulling them all together and tying them up with its various tight loops. The bear had been thoroughly disarmed, unable to bite anything but the thing stuck in its mouth while its legs were hogtied, forcing it to collapse onto the ground uselessly.

 

Which means it was time for the third one of my little babies to deal the finishing blow!

 

The little bush that had been waiting for its moment suddenly sprouted four small legs, and ran the fastest of the three plants. It jumped onto the bear’s neck, and the small jaws hidden inside of its foliage opened wide, showing off the small rows of squirming, chainsaw-like teeth that were waiting inside. Even the bear’s thick neck didn’t stand a chance against those awful teeth. I’ll save you the gorey details, but the bear totally died by the time the bush was finished carving through it.

 

With the bear dead, the three untangled themselves from it and hurried back to me dutifully, almost like they were all looking for praise from me. I gave them each a pat with one tentacle, appreciating the look of them for a while before forcefully pushing them back down into the dirt. Their bodies barely resisted, crumpling like a sandcastle before blowing away as ash in the breeze, just like all corpse plants seem to do when they die.

 

Honestly I would have loved to keep the little guys around with me full-time, but it seems like that’s a bit too hard for me to do currently. I only just got this ability, and I guess new things that I’m not used to drain me a lot more than stuff I’ve done a butt-load of times. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure the fact that I’m steadily able to store more and more magic and nutrients inside of me also totally helps me to just brute force my way through my skills, but it seems that the more practice I get doing stuff, the better energy efficiency I have with it, if that makes sense. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to keep up with all those trees and vines I had to grow to defeat the lizardmen at all, you know!

 

So yeah, I’m hoping that with enough practice and nutrients I’ll be able to keep my little corpse plant minions running around for a lot longer, but for now it really just sucks the resources right out of me. They’re useful, and as you saw they can totally take down a bear on their own if they work together, but for now it’s kind of a waste to use them outside of practice, since I can honestly do their job better myself with much less of a cost. Of course, I tried getting them to eat to see if it could maybe reduce their resource costs, but everything they ate just returned right back to me. Useful, but not really the best right now.

 

But Mellily, I hear you ask. Why are they all so small?

 

Well the obvious answer is that I’m trying to keep their resource costs down! They’re horribly expensive, since they immediately suck a bunch of nutrients out of me and then chug at my magic. It’s the only thing I do that requires both of my resources to run! So long as I keep them in that child-like version, they’re still manageable. For the record, I actually can grow them into their full glory adult forms that I’ve met and killed them as before, but even just one of those makes me almost completely barf up everything I have just to summon, and about half a minute of keeping them running would probably starve me to death. Yeah, I tried it once. Don’t ask me how miserable I was afterwards.

 

Yeah, summoning the three little ones is wayyyy more worth it right now.

 

You know, it’s really interesting to see the little baby versions of the other two. Well, okay no, actually all three of us have basically the same baby version. We’re all just small teensy little bundles of leaves, like what I looked like when I grew on my mom. Even the treant looked like that. How surprising. Still, they’re functionally useless for fighting as babies, so I don’t summon them like that. Gotta go with the little kid version for sure if I want them to do anything. But yeah, it’s really cool getting to see the treant as his little baby log-looking self, and the bush-dog… Well, the bush-dog honestly doesn’t look too much different than those little bushes of its that I got swarmed by before, really, so not too much of a surprise there. And of course there’s the little trash can version of me that I fondly remember, right before I managed to grow half of my 'head'. Wow, what memories~!

 

Of course, I’m not very creative or any good at naming, so I literally just call them ‘treant’, ‘bush-dog’, and ‘little me’. Honestly, I should at least come up with a name for the little version of me, since it’s a little confusing calling it the way that I have been. I’m leaning towards maybe naming it ‘Lily’, like a little nickname of myself. Maybe that would be nice? But if I gave her a proper name, then I’d feel bad for not giving the other two names as well, you know? Ehhh, but that seems like such a hassle! I guess I’ve got the time, but… Ahhh I just have so much on my plate already! My mind’s not cut out for naming things!!!

 

…Well anyways, yeah, I can make little clones of the corpse-plants I defeat. Guess it’s weird to phrase it like that, since I can also make a clone of myself. But yeah, you get the gist, right? So it makes me wonder… If I find even more corpse plants and defeat them, will they also be added to my clone force? But I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, considering that the Spirit of the Forest needs those guys to help fight off invaders... Maybe in the future when I’m bigger and scarier I’ll go and ‘recruit’ them then? I mean, if I get strong enough, the Forest Spirit won’t even need so many other corpse plants. It can just have me as its defender!

 

Yeah, maybe one day in the future I’ll do that. It’s a long way off though, with me only able to use this very limited time baby group. Hopefully after successfully eating a bunch of those water-rocks and getting a lot stronger I’ll be able to use them more effectively. Then I’ll think about ‘recruiting’. For now though I’ve got bigger fish to fry (Haha)!

 

I can see the beach in the distance~!

 

***

 

The Serpent’s eyes gleamed. Its tail left almost no wake as it swam through the water, and dozens of fish and ocean creatures swam along with it in harmony. It could hear the mermaids, far off into the distance, singing songs to praise their protector’s greatness and the Spirit's wisdom.

 

As it often did, the Spirit of the Water spoke to it.

 

‘That child is coming.’

 

There was a mix of happiness and displeasure in the voice, balanced perfectly as it always was. The Spirit of the Water’s avatar, the Reflection of the Water, moved, ready to follow its creator’s will. Its existence was unbalanced, a tipping of the scale, a wave on previously calm waters. It was truly heresy, a being that went against all of the Spirit’s harmonious principles. And yet, for some reason, the Spirit of the water loved it. And so, it always did its best to follow the Spirit’s orders and make things right.

 

The Serpent, buried deep in the depths of the sea, rushed towards the shore.

 

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patreon.com/user?u=63286737

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