I let Lizzy have the body and start looking around for another beast, which takes a few minutes. This time, I use Drain Touch on the beast and then watch to see what happens to the essence. Drain Touch takes all of the beast’s life force, but it does not affect the essence in its core.

  That bleeds out and dissipates just the same as it did with the beast that I killed. That tells me two things, the core protects the essence and my Drain Touch spell isn’t as good as it could be. To improve the spell, I am going to need to study essence a bit more, so I continue hunting.

  1 Snailboar defeated! 250 Exp gained!

  As soon as the thing hits the ground I rip its core out and surround it with mana. Then I watch to see if the essence still dissipates or if my mana can hold it in place. I watch for a few minutes, but the essence doesn’t move, meaning that I can contain it.

  I let Lizzy have the body as I focus on the core and try to understand how the essence works. Unfortunately, the essence is just sitting there, it is not doing anything, probably because the core is dead. However, I don’t think that I would be able to study the core of something living.

  Then again, I might be able to, I just need to stun or paralyze it long enough to cut it open and take a look. If I am careful, it might live for a few minutes and let me study a living core. That will be my next step, but first I want to see if I can extract the essence.

  I play around with the core for a few minutes, trying to figure out how to extract the essence. However, I don’t have any luck and after playing with it for a bit I accidentally break the core. As soon as the core breaks, the essence comes gushing out and is captured by my mana.

  Now that the essence is out of the core, I can finally get a good look at it, but it is tiny. If I use the mana to press it flat, it is about the size of an adult human’s thumb nail. I wonder if that is normal, or if it is just because it came from such a weak beast.

  I will figure that out as I study more examples, for now my focus is on the essence itself. If I have any hope of fixing myself, I need to learn everything about the essence. The first thing I notice is that even though it is made of life force, it doesn’t act like life force.

  Of course, that might be different if it is inside a body, it also might be different with a more potent essence. There are a lot of things that I need to learn and I can only do that by studying and experimenting. Just the thought of all the experiments that I need to try has me really excited.

  Lizzy finishes eating the beast and then just watches me as I play with the essence. Even after playing around with the essence for a few minutes, none of it has dissipated. That means that as long as I keep it contained, I can store it at least for a while.

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  I let it float in an orb of mana just above my shoulder and go looking for another snailboar. I want the same type of beast to make sure that the essence is the same. Then I will find a different kind of beast so that I can look at the differences between them.

  Instead of just wandering aimlessly, I ask Lizzy to track me down another of the boars. She is happy to help and she kills several other beasts before finding me another boar. When she finds one, I rush up to it before it can run and hit it with a very weak electric shock.

  It is weak enough that it doesn’t kill the boar, it just paralyzes it, but it won’t last long. I form my mana into a blade and carefully cut the boar open until I can see its core. I move as quickly as I can to fully expose the core because I don’t want to torture the boar.

  As soon as I can see the core, I start examining the essence to see if anything is different. The essence looks exactly the same as the one stored in my little mana orb, not what I was expecting. Unfortunately, just like before, I can’t do anything to the essence while it is inside the core.

  I carefully wrap the core in mana and then gently crack it open to remove the essence. As soon as I crack the core open the boar spasms a few times and then it dies. I don’t think that I did enough damage to kill it, so it must have been the core cracking that did it.

  1 Snailboar defeated! 250 Exp gained!

  Whether it was the core actually cracking, or just the shock of it that killed the boar, I don’t know. I let Lizzy have the body as I bring the two pieces of essence side by side to compare them. As far as I can tell, the two pieces of essence are absolutely identical to each other.

  That should mean that essence is determined by the type of creature rather than anything else. It would also mean that essence would be interchangeable between creatures of the same type. Not that that information is particularly useful right now, but it might be at some point.

  I move the two bubbles of mana together and then let them merge so that the two essences touch. They instantly merge together and as soon as they do it is impossible for me to tell they were separate before. I don’t have any way to measure the essence, but it seems to be bigger than the two I put into it.

  Lizzy says “Now what? Do you want me to track down more of them?”

  “Yes, but you can just kill what you find. All I need is to collect the essence from their cores.”

  Lizzy brings her saddle back out and insists that I mount up so that I don’t get in her way. While she is faster than me on the ground, I don’t think that I would get in the way or slow her down. However, it is not worth the effort to argue with her, so I just do as she asks and climb into the saddle.

  As soon as I am in place she takes off and her speed through the trees is impressive. The ride is perfectly smooth, despite her occasionally bouncing between the trees. Something as big as Lizzy is should not be that quick and maneuverable, it is scary.

  Just the thought of fighting her, or trying to run from her, in the forest is terrifying. I think that I am currently stronger than Lizzy, but I don’t think I would necessarily win in this terrain. If I did win, it would be by slowly wearing her down and counting on my own regeneration.

  Lizzy says “Do you just want the boars? Or should I kill everything in the forest?”

  “For now I only want the boars. However, you can kill anything that you want to eat. If you find something stronger, then I might want its core too.”