So the good news was that I could finally feel my toes again.

It took forever to figure out how to move the Hydro energy inside of myself in a way that didn't just make my stomach feel like it was rushing through a roller coaster a bit too fast, but in the end I figured it out. Though I could tell that Kadoc wasn't particularly pleased that I was already ignoring his warnings about smoothie-ing my insides, given the exasperated shoulder slumps I could feel each time I went through the process.

As it turned out I was actually correct about the energy needing to be twisted in a certain way, though you wouldn't be able to tell there was any real movement just by looking. The manipulation was way deeper than that, basically twisting each little grouping of…well…whatever they were called - protons maybe? - in such a way that they squeezed into each other only to then overlap the other bunches in a sort of abstract artwork.

Naturally I stumbled onto that grand secret by getting annoyed and crumpling shit together.

Of course it wasn't enough to just do that, no no. You also needed to keep a tight hold on each and every little tangled bunching until it stopped, for lack of a better word, vibrating. It took a full day to realize that trying to inject that shit while it was still freaking out was a bad idea.

Seriously, by the time I realized something was wrong Kadoc was ready to toss me into the trees like a live grenade.

Honestly had no clue what might have tipped him off on the fact that I was fucking around more; the extreme building of compounded energy, or the fact that I vomited blood down the side of his neck mid-injection.

It was a miracle he was still letting me hang off his back after that, I sure as hell would have dropped the sorry soul that bled on me!

Still, I didn't stop experimenting with that little compounding twist thing, pushing it in different directions and trying different methods of keeping the energy from building that far ever again. Eventually I was rewarded around try number ninety-eight, or so, with a cluster of bubble wrapped vibrating energy bombs.

Bombs which, after letting the vibrations slow to a stop, quickly found themselves fused into whatever injured body parts they could find with a feeling that I could only really describe as a kind of mental 'schlorp.'

The end result of roughly two days of constantly ignoring sleep in favor of fixing myself up?

The ever so glorious ability to feel again. Which was something. Better than nothing! Granted, I would have loved to be able to walk for myself again 'cause riding on the back of another dude whose voice was deep enough to cause gravel to loosen was…odd. Each time he spoke I could feel each of my ribs rattling from the close proximity.

The voice envy was real.

Of course there were downsides, as always, to Magoo-ing my way into a solution that was probably way worse than the normal product. Namely that while I could now feel, I could also feel just how much pain I was in.

Kadoc really was far too nice to me, after all if some jackass was riding around on my back and they suddenly started to scream themselves horse without warning I'd have dumped them off in the nearest ditch.

Or maybe that was just what the pain was making me feel, making me snappier and quicker to anger as it usually did. Either way it eventually became something I got use to enough to stop screeching like a banshee, though by that point they were more like scratchy exhales than a proper yell.

Obviously my next course of action, once I recovered anyway, was to start fixing whatever it was that hurt so badly as to damn near give me a seizure. So I went and repeated the process over and over again on all of my internal organs, carefully injecting those clusters of Hydro energy into the somewhat functioning pieces of meat inside.

Normally you would think that good, yeah? The hurting would stop, I'd be all healed up and ready to strike back out on my own, be my own man again and all that.

Instead there was even more pain, somehow.

Well, at least my inside-y bits were repaired. Most of them, anyway - just repairing my heart and lungs made me almost pass out so I kind of had to leave the less important bits to deal with it for the moment.

Like my liver.

At least I personally confirmed what my new traveling companion told me, my body did not like having foreign energy inside of it.

Actually, was it even foreign anymore if it was generated from within? My eyebrows dipped down as I reached out for the energy again, finding it ready and willing to jump up into my metaphorical hands.

It certainly didn't feel like anything wrong or weird was going on with it, it just felt like…well…me. Best I could describe it would be the feeling of laying down in a bed you'd slept in for years, you just knew it was yours from the feel alone. There was definitely a better metaphor for it but at the moment I was a little too distracted by just how raw my lower intestines felt as Kadoc once again shifted me higher, the man doing his level best to keep my useless ass on his back like the trooper he was.

I'd really have to do something nice for him once we were back at camp.

Tilting my head back so as to not drive my chin any deeper into the man's shoulder as he walked, I went back to messing around with my radar - any energy stunts being left to the wayside due to lingering pains from last time. There really wasn't much to do until I could walk again, my immobility basically leaving me with the options of everything watching or doing unspeakable things to my squishy bits.

Weirdly enough I did both in equal measure…

Shaking off some of my disturbingly intrusive - and possibly masochistic - thoughts I refocused on the passive detection field, instantly finding my third eye filled with the sights of things far beyond our location.

Twelve birds, seven squirrels, eight rabbits, a pair of grazing deer on the edge, and a small cluster of what I could only assume were slimes - if only due to just how much energy I was feeling from even the small ones. Not a bad amount, a little less than my previous scan but considering we were once again surrounded by the howling blizzard that I'd started to get use to? Honestly I was a little shocked there was still that many hanging around.

Idly I 'watched' one of the birds puke up some kind of mashed up food into its children's throats, the little ones crowding around to be the first one to get the ol' mom smoothie.

Nature was fuckin' weird.

Though considering I now bled light blue I really didn't have much of a leg to stand on there. Really needed to figure that out at some point, pretty sure I still bled red the last time I checked but ever since that fight…

Actually, did that mean my blood was no longer iron based? I vaguely remember the amount of iron in a human's blood being why it was given the deep red color it was so often described with, so what did blue mean? Did I run on cobalt now? Or maybe my blood had been replaced with Hydro energy?

That…wasn't the weirdest theory in the world, though it was still very crazy. Something like that would mean that I was definitely something other than human, at least as far as my genetic makeup was probably concerned. Honestly? I wasn't sure if I was willing to consider that possibility just yet, even if I'd never really held a particularly good opinion on 'humanity' as a whole I still held that as a core part of myself.

I was human. It was a part of who I was just as much as it was a part of anyone else on Earth. It was a little unsettling to have that single pillar of irrefutable truth become so shaky.

Not like I was going to have a breakdown about it, even if that pillar got turned to dust. Human or not I was still me, just slightly different. The only reason it messed with me was because it was like a part of me was falling away. Like cutting off a pinkie or something.

One of the bunnies hopped a little closer to us, its head tilting curiously in my mind's eye as it watched us move through its territory. Cute little thing that it was it just simply twitched its nose before hopping off in the other direction, clearly not wanting to chance us attacking it out of nowhere.

I really needed to come up with a better name for my ability, given that 'radar' was a bit of a misnomer now. It was more like watching through an omni-directional flying camera than some surface imaging thing and the amount of information relayed back at once was far more than some dinky little radar.

When exactly had it changed to be that way? It honestly used to just be pings and positions, and still was when using the bare-minimum amount of energy, but after fighting off Vera and finally using energy externally? Everything was…clearer. Smoother. And in 3D!

Well mostly, it was still in that weird 2.5D that we humans tended to see when looking at an object; still able to tell depth, still able to see proper shading and know that it was a third dimensional object but not really seeing all bits of it. No matter what angle I was showed I wouldn't get the full scope until I just kind of moved the 'camera.'

It was weird.

Still it was useful and kinda fuckin' fun to pretend I was some mystical all-seeing god, like the tribe seemed to think I was, for a few minutes out of the day. Just needed to make sure that I didn't let that kind of thing go to my head, I wasn't a god and that was that.

Gods above I hoped that was that.

Hours slipped by gradually was I was tossed around like a meat backpack by the unflappable Kadoc, who I honestly still had no clue what I was going to do with once we got back. He was a stalker but, well, he kinda sorta saved my life.

He was going to have to be introduced in a way that made people at least kind of trust that he wasn't a threat to them, that he wasn't going to just go all murder hobo on their asses while we slept. Granted I honestly had no clue just how well outsiders would be favored, my own experience being far from the norm, so maybe they'd just shrug him off with some light explanations. Hopefully.

At the very least he'd have my support. Sure he was playing the creepy yandere girl a few days prior but he, as I said, saved my ass. I was willing to overlook a bit of shattered privacy in favor of not having my lungs directly introduced to the open air.

Maybe I could get him in on inventing shit with me? Sure it would take a bit to get him thinking about weird shit that can do other shit, but given how Teyvat wasn't even in the medieval era yet I was expecting that no matter who I talked to. Worst case scenario was that he ended up becoming like Maria or Lev and just became a helper/inventor for what little bullshit I could remember from Earth.

Shifting my head so that I could watch the sun set without continually jabbing my chin into the man's shoulder my thoughts went back to the various designs left on my floor back home.

What could I get working next? Lev already had a good start with the forge so if we could get a steady supply of metals…yeah that could be good for the tribe. Make some proper blades and spear-heads for those so inclined to keep working on their spearmanship. Or maybe I could get them started on actual buildings?

Nails and hinges weren't so difficult to make, my experience as a curious child granted me more than enough knowledge on what made little things like that tick, and were vital to making real homes or businesses.

Hell, there were probably a few friends of mine back home that would have screamed at me for not making sure Inessa had a clean kitchen space to work with yet.

Her and Lev were probably our best bets for building the tribe up into something more stable. Who knows, maybe in a few years we'd have a full on town going on by the lake. Until then I needed to keep pushing shit out and making sure the Snezhnovichs grew as far as possible.

Thanks to my 'radar,' really needed a better name for that, that would be a much easier task. Any bandits or raiders would be found out before they got too close and we could have our own hunters/militia at the ready, and with far better weaponry as well. Though…with actual mystical beings and gods out there, possibly leading those same bandits, it was still little more than a stop-gap.

Thus, better weapons and defensive positions were a priority.

Also armor, 'cause while nobody in-game - bar the various nameless city guards - wore more than a single piece of shoulder armor or some shit I was not willing to let the people unfortunate enough to follow me die because 'herp derp, no armor!'

Thank fuck I knew how to explain the process of making chain mail.

There was also still the paper issue to deal with, eventually I was going to run out of writing space or fuck up and erase something I wasn't supposed to.

Plus I needed a way to keep all of my memories intact in the coming years, assuming I survived that long anyway. Eventually I was going to start forgetting shit thanks to my dog shit memory or because old age decided to kick in so I needed a way to make sure that someone else could fuck with everything in my stead.

Again, assuming I lived that long. Dysentery was a thing and I was going to do my best to avoid it despite knowing nothing of it.

Wait, could elemental healing take care of diseases? That was definitely something to look into later once everything else was pushed through, though as far as I knew only myself and Kadoc were able to use energy like that in our camp.

Which meant that I needed to endear the others to him, just in case he could also heal others.

Snezhnaya, home of Teyvat's first hospital! I could already hear the history teachers droning on to a class of sleeping children.

But before that? Plans. So, so many plans.

—Vera—

It took for-fucking-ever to retrace the path we took.

The thought hadn't even crossed my mind that the journey to that shit-hole from the baby's place took multiple days, which considering my mood could be forgiven, until the sun went down a day earlier. Seriously, couldn't that asshole have picked a closer location to settle in? At least Lord Zapolyarny kept his place in the middle of everything, or at least that's where he said we were.

My point was that it shouldn't have taken a full day at top speed to get to that weird-ass lake of his.

Though now that I was there? Looking down at all those stupid morons going about their days without a care in the world? Well, it almost made ignoring the baby and his soldiers on the way back worth it. Almost. But they could wait until they made their way back. It was safer that way.

I would have to be careful about what I was going to do, there couldn't be anything left to chance if I was going to win. Because if I didn't then I was either going to die or…

A scowl formed on my face at the thought of what would happen if I returned with news of a second failure to do a task that my sister wouldn't even have to think about the first time around. Lord Zapolyarny would be far from pleased if I were to let some dipshit baby god continue to run around in his backyard like this.

Hell, maybe he'd end up throwing me to the slaves instead of the army. Those fuckers were always pretty vicious when they got new meat.

So I couldn't afford to fail again. Both of those traitors would have to die and their shitty god alongside them, preferably in a way that made up for the humiliation I felt for having to go so far in the first place.

There were two ways to kill a god, or so my sister liked to tell everyone, and they were pretty simple when you got right down to it.

The first was to just be stronger than them and gut them like the bitches they were. Obviously that was harder than I was making it sound because, as a rule, gods were just naturally on a higher plane than anyone else on the planet - with a special exception made for the Primordial One in Celestia, though they'd been silent for a couple of centuries now.

But in reality all you had to do was overpower them somehow. Once you closed the gap with whatever tricks or tools you had on you it wasn't all that much harder to kill a god than it was to kill an elemental spirit. Thus was the case with sister, not only was she strong enough physically that she could go blow for blow with the fucks, but her skill with illusions and healing put her easily on par with the mid tier ones and gave her a solid shot at the upper classes as well.

But that was sister.

For someone like myself overpowering a god with anything other than sheer luck was…not a smart idea. The only reason I even managed to get a win over that little prick earlier was because he was new, didn't know how to use his energy properly and because of whatever the hell happened to him at the end there.

So there then existed a second, much more viable option, for those of us incapable of giving the food-chain the middle finger. And all we had to do to achieve it was a little unadulterated mass murder!

You see, a god was only as good as their following - the land and people they controlled - and without that they'd be barely stronger than an elemental. Still strong enough to kill you if you fucked up, but so hilariously easy to take out by anyone with half a brain and access to elemental energy.

Sure some gods were born with incredible amounts of power to them, that one freak of a Geo god near the ocean came to mind, but for the most part they were fairly normal in the amount they had at their disposal without a following. So all one had to do to make things go from 'you fucking moron, run!' to 'I could kill you all day!' was to kill all of the little underlings they had.

Normally that was easier said than done, gods tended to stick around their people for exactly that reason and even if they went out there were their familiars to think about instead.

But these people's god was out in the wild, still at least a day out if that damned tree kept a good pace all the way back.

Plenty of time to make sure none of them got out alive.

I felt my frown twist into something fiercer and more giddy as I took in the various tents and wandering bodies. With any luck I'd be able to kill them and still have enough time to prepare for those two and their merry band of rejects.

And all I had to do, was pick my first target.~

Who would get to die first? The couple making their way back to their tent for the night? Could make for a good surprise while they were working off some stress. Maybe that girly looking guy I'd seen that fucking baby talk to before we left? He seemed important enough to be a nice starter…or maybe I could go for that stooge that stayed behind to play around with the traitor's daughter?

Decisions, decisions.

Then, just before I'd settled on an old woman carrying around bowls of food, a short head of orange hair caught my attention as the boy attached to it sneaking out of the tent that I remembered belonged to their god.

My smile widened a bit as I pumped some energy into my legs, my knees bending to launch myself at the dumb brat.

He was the one that gave me a tour, if I remembered right. The annoying little shit that just wouldn't stop talking.

He'd do.~

An: Sorry this took so long, life has been...life. Which apparently includes minor car accidents and dealing with things I'd rather forget even happened. .

Either way I really am sorry this didn't come out sooner, and thank you all for reading. Have a wonderful rest of your day.