Chapter 117: Chapter 117

I’d meant to give you a fun surprise, but instead I was the one taken aback when the tears fell from your eyes.

You wrapped your arms around me and held me close. "I’m okay," you said in my ear and a shiver went down my spine as your hand found the small of my back.

It had been so long since you’d touched my skin.

I hadn’t parted from you for even a single day since our escape from The Unity headquarters yet it was like I hadn’t seen you in years. Loong have eyes and ears and taste and smell, but they’re still different from a human’s and even the inputs tickle different parts of the brain. I’d thought you were pretty as a loong but now I found you unbearably delectable.

Your lips were chapped but still soft and you still tasted the same, just with a dash more sea salt.

Your fingers tensed in my hair and I heard the beginnings of a moan in your throat. Impatient, I moved lower, kissing down your neck, to see if I could lure it out.

I lost my head at that point, and I’m pretty sure you did too because it was only half an hour later, as we both lay under the blanket, that you finally asked me the question.

"You okay?" you asked.

"I like your hair," I replied instead. Two years had passed and your bleached hair had long since stepped aside to your natural dark brown. "I’m okay," I continued.

"Is the transformation stable?" you asked.

"Yeah, though..." I saw your eyes flick to the far more obvious green-blue horns that now sprung up from my head. Not only were they larger but they were branched like deer antlers.

"If it’s just visual, then that’s alright," you said. Even when I hadn’t been able to speak you’d somehow been able to figure out what I wanted to say, always have really and you didn’t need to say any more. I knew you liked my horns and tail and my scales and claws, even if that last one caused me a little bit of worry.

I traced a reddish mark my sharper, black claws had left on your skin.

"Does it hurt?" I asked.

You grasped my hand and kissed my fingers. "No."

"I have a lot of things to say, you know," I said.

You chuckled, your lips brushing against my knuckles. "I can imagine."

"I know. You’ve just spent two years only being able to think and not be able to talk. For a talkative boy like you that must have been hard."

It was a joke, but also not. It was hard to describe what it was like to be trapped in that particular way. While my situation had been similar to the other beings who’d lost their human forms, for them, they were merely returning to their original form, whereas for me, I was being trapped in a new one, at least to my own memory.

I sighed and hugged you closer. It wasn’t the same, but you’d had your own kinds of losses. Not the same, but they still resonated.

But before I could get even more soppy, there came a knock from the other side of the closed door, then a voice called out. It was Zhan’s.

"Hey. You guys done yet?" ɴᴇᴡ ɴᴏᴠᴇʟ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs ᴀʀᴇ ᴘᴜʙʟɪsʜᴇᴅ ᴏɴ n͟o͟v͟e͟l͟f͟i͟r͟e͟.net

While love making wasn’t a problem, suddenly getting up and walking on two legs was way harder than I expected. Two years of distributing my weight horizontally made going vertical disorientating and it took me a few tries to even get up on my two feet.

One plus from all of this though was that I now had the perfect excuse to hold your hand, or as it turned out more often, put an arm over your shoulders and lean against you. To both our surprise, I’d grown another three inches and was a firm half head taller than you even when I wasn’t completely up straight.

And similar to how things had gone when we first arrived at the this secret settlement of Whale Toes and SSD, our time was suddenly full of meetings.

I still harboured some bitterness about how things had aired out last time but you seemed to either not care or were oblivious to it. Or maybe you were over it all. Either way, your calm, measured attitude did wonders to keep me grounded. In my defense I also think that, despite being human (or mostly human) at this point, a lot of the instincts that had become ingrained when I was a loong were still in force, so it shouldn’t be too surprising how often I boiled over.

And the same was true for everyone else who’d been stuck in a non-human form for the past two years.

The process used on me, and then used on them, wasn’t perfect, it still left clear non-human vestiges in everyone (like my horns and tail, or Helen’s dense fur), but it was a massive help to everyone, stretched emotions regardless. Helen told me afterwards that to finally be able to do things without constantly thinking about food was such a relief that she had to have a little cry by herself.

But perhaps the happiest among all the recently humanoid again beings was Tuesday. For two years she’d been unable to touch a computer for fear of getting them wet, an absolute jail sentence for a computer nerd like her and she wasted no time in making up for lost time.

"Okay. Run through all the details for me again," said the jiaoren, hands poised over her beloved keyboard.

"Actually, no. Give me the theoretical framework first. I think I should get that down first."

"Over to you then, Bran."

The attention of the room shifted to you.

"Okay. Put simply, we all know that magic and spellcrafting works on the principle of having an inscription, a medium, and an energy source. If we use computers as an analogy, it would be source code, the computer itself, and the electricity powering the computer. You need all three to have anything happen, however what we didn’t know was that there is actually a fourth element to all of this that we were not aware of before.

"Using the computer analogy, this fourth element would be the power grid that the computer is connected to and all the processes that go into generating that energy to begin with. You can think of it as the the meta-environment of the computer.

"Bringing it back to magic, we’re calling it the ’meta-flow’ for now. It’s basically large flows of energy that move around the world without any of us realising because we live in the centre of it."

"It’s like how fish in the ocean don’t realise they’re swimming in water because it’s just too big and all around you," I added.

"Right. And it was this macro-level flow that The Unity, somehow, stopped from flowing. No movement of energy, no electricity coming from the power grid, no power for the computer and for running programs."

"Or spells..." Tuesday muttered, still tapping.

Tuesday finished a paragraph, hit enter twice, then turned to you again.

"Okay, what’s your evidence for all this? How do you know this is true?"

You turned and gestured to Yidi.

"A few months after we moved here," he began, "we captured a low ranking member of The Unity and were able to clone his phone. From that, we set up an air-gapped environment to test and figure out how The Unity’s app works." He flipped to the next page of his notebook. "From that, we discovered that there are essentially two basic functions going on apart from the spell crafting. The first function is to create like a pylon to allow the centralised network from within The Unity to maintain the stagnancy of the world’s meta-flow."

Tuesday made a note of that. "And that’s why it’s important to get people to stop using The Unity and uninstall it entirely since it may reduce the meta-flow’s stagnancy."

"Right. If we can reduce their user numbers, then the stagnating effect of their network will be weakened, making it easier for us to create our own energy circulators and get them working in a localised area."

"Do you have evidence that your theory about the stagnancy is true?"

"We were able to help all the non-humans regain their human form." This was you speaking. "We built discrete energy circulators that can excite the meta-flow in a localised area based on this theory and, well," you gestured to Tuesday herself, "it seems to have worked."

A smile hovered at the corner of her mouth though she was able to remain her cool attitude. "Indeed." The report she was writing while useful to circulate through their command, was not strictly for her own records or even the SSD’s. Rather, it was an accounting that the government hoped to release to the general populace in the future when peace had returned. "You mentioned you found that the app had another function. What was that?"