Bloom

Math isn’t my strong suit.

Take for example the problem I’m having now.

Four bodies.

Five souls eaten.

Somewhere along the way…

A body went missing!

I admit, I’m a rather young tree in terms of height, but I could swear I shouldn’t have memory issues this soon in my life.

The energy pouring out of the central part of the grasslands makes it hard to extend my senses around.

With that in mind, I have to go low tech.

Over the course of the time spent in the Shattered Plane, I made a few upgrades while sleeping. Each of my thousands of leaves is a very distinct spatial pocket dimension, the better to keep things in order. Even numbered leaves are living creatures, and odd ones are non-living. For this particular problem, I open the space leaf holding a set of tiny creatures allowing them to fly out.

That’s right!

Without any shadow of a doubt can there be a better seeker of missing items with blood in them than a Chaos Mosquito?

Definitely not!

Without a doubt this bloodsucking monstrosity that’s only the size of a grain of rice is the answer!

Granted the swarm I’m using is several thousand strong, but that shouldn’t cause any lasting problems. It isn’t like a monster right’s organization is going to blacklist me for carrying out mass hunting.

Not if they know what’s good for them at least.

The swarm itself is controlled by a singular ‘emperor’ mosquito, one with enough changes to make it able to understand language.

I mean, if one is making minions, they have to at least meet a minimum standard of intelligence. Not bright enough to be a threat, but not stupid enough to electrocute themselves in the testing chamber either.

It’s a delicate balance, true, yet worthwhile to pursue.

Regardless, after issuing simple instructions to find the missing corpse, I sit back down to wait.

Thankfully, the #4 sleeping gas is working fantastically on Dryad. Sadly, due to her Chaos form, it will only work once, and at a limited amount of time. I’ll only get roughly another two months out of the gas before it stops working.

That’s not a problem though since I already have a perfectly logical explanation ready to go.

I’m going to blame the sleeping guy that didn’t make it through right away with us. I’ll claim he dropped by when Dryad was sleeping and as a result of affinity, she slept longer than normal.

Crazy things happen around a Chaos Tree so much so that even a half-baked excuse like that can fly.

I’m still unnerved though, how in the Godly Gardener’s nimble nuts did someone, or something sneak a corpse away from me?

I’m distracted while eating, yes, but this is another level. This is like super ninja spy secret thread cutting ribbon dancing level.

Irritating.

No, no. I can’t get worked up.

Next thing that would happen is I just get angry, and melt things till the screams stop.

I can stay calm even with Dryad out.

That’s right.

I’m a master of my flying artifact, I’ll just let the mosquitos do their job, and patiently wait for results.

…

….

…..

These little guys…are slow.

At least until I have another chat with the leader.

I explain to my Chaos Mosquito emperor a few simple truths.

Truth one, I will not kill any of them if they do not speed up. I will simply starve them for the next ten years on a strict diet of experimental test subject blood.

Since, some of that stuff is expired even, it won’t be a pretty picture.

I didn’t even need to explain the other truths to the intelligent insect leader…

Tsk. I had them all planned out from one to forty-two with bar graphs and sliding metrics as well.

Hah!

Nothing beats the speed of these results, within moments another True Blood Vampire Ogre is brought before me. This one is slightly paler skin than the previous ones, and his hands are clamped around the missing corpse.

Ah, I see what happened here. This fellow has a connection with this corpse…

Well, I guess I can just stick this partially eaten soul back in, twist a few Runes with soul binding, and, viola!

True Ancestor Vampire Ogre #1, Chaos Ogress is born!

I’m sure if they are truly in love, he won’t mind the small horns, slightly darker skin, and glowing veins.

Even if he does, too bad, she’s probably about a thousand times give or take a few tens up or down, stronger than before.

Hmph, lucky Dryad wasn’t awake for this. I’d never hear the end of it.

The other corpses though didn’t have anyone dedicated enough to come save them, so…

Crunch.

They aren’t going anywhere except my stomach.