Chapter 4: Worship

When Yun first arrived to the monastery, it was via a luxurious and spacious helicopter. All others but her staff traditionally journeyed to the monastery via a long and winding path of stairs down the mountain. Feeling adventurous, that was the route Yun decided to take down. After all, she would absorb this entire planet in time. It’d be the only chance she’d get to make the proper journey down from the monastery grounds--before absorbing all there is, of course. Yun worked under the assumption she’d be all-powerful then. It seemed to make sense.

Also, not as though she could easily fit on a helicopter either. The thought of her 25ft self trying to squeeze just her head into one had Yun chuckling.

Thankfully, her rather large scale wasn’t too wide for the steps. The stairs down the mountain were wide enough to accommodate dozens of monks traveling side by side. Each long flight of stone steps was hand decorated with all sorts of tiled patterns. They were each a unique piece of art, and each was crushed by Yun’s meter long feet on her way down.

The enlightened woman was anything but ‘light’ at 25 feet tall. Yun’s in-tune-ment with the universe afforded her some curious control over her body, but not quite all of physics yet. She still weighed over a couple metric tons. Yun’s first time down these steps would also be the last time anyone could traverse them. This would be true even on the off-chance someone thought to visit the monastery on-foot before Yun absorbed the planet--as she planned to.

She ruined the priceless functional art the stairs were. Her stamping feet left behind only smooth prints from where she absorbed the masonry into her being. The monks of the monastery would weep, if not for the fact that all their beings had already been dissolved.

The mountain wasn’t too tall for a mountain. Yet, even the smallest mountains can be quite the towering feature. The winding nature of the stairs didn’t help to cut back travel time either. Still, Yun was something of a mini-giant now, and well within an hour she got close enough to the base that a town came into view.

It was a fairly modest and simple village on the surface. There wasn’t a single building more recent than the 21st century, and there were more walkways than roads or rail tracks. Indeed, it was the last stop on one of the train lines.

Looks can be deceiving though. The villagers were quite intelligent despite the rural locale. They had an arrangement of sorts with the monastery. They’d provide supplies in the form of basic food stuffs, extra water, blankets and so on. In exchange, the village became something of a neat little tourist destination. Yun made out a few foreigners among the rabble while crushing down the stairs towards an open area of the settlement. The village inhabitants certainly saw Yun in turn. The sound of crushing stair-stone made for quite the attention-grabbing ruckus.

The black-haired woman still wore those brown-orange simple robes that scaled up with her. Her thin aura of absorption was always on, creating that sort of shimmering outline to her form. With such perfect skin, overall beauty, and the unnaturally immense stature she looked something like a god descending from on high as she stomped down the last step from the mountain.

A circular courtyard of trod-earth lead to the steps up the mountain. Yun’s next steps had her bare feet settle onto soft dirt. If not for controlling her absorptive powers, she would’ve ‘sunk’ into the ground as her aura devoured the land beneath her. Thankfully, she restrained herself there.

The last of the people still inside the nearby small stores left the buildings to see the sight outside. Yun smiled as a small mob formed before her. Both the village residents and villagers chatted among their groups. There wasn’t a language used that Yun didn’t understand: from past studies, not even from her recently discovered property of being one with the universe.

“What is that--she.”

“She’s huge!”

“Is this some kind of trick? Some monastery event?”
“No, she looks too real.”

“Look at that glow. Is she... some kind of god?”
“No it’s not that kind of monastery.”

“What else could she be?”

“Wait, I know the face. That’s that business woman from the city. Yun!”

“Could it be?”
“I know her! I used to live in the city. She foreclosed on my store. Cunt.”

Through it all Yun simply smiled. It was amusing to watch their confusion and shock. One middle-age woman--looked to be a resident--cautiously approached Yun’s towering 25ft form. Yun wasn’t that big all things considered, so her peds were just 1ft in width and 3ft in length. Still, it was enough that a normal human’s hands, side by side, were less wide than just one of her pale and perfect feet. Yun was certainly big enough to loom over these people with ease.

The less distance between the two, the more that woman lowered her form. A few inches from Yun naked toes, and the villager hunched over. With trepidation, the middle-aged woman in simple, modern clothes reached out towards Yun’s big toe. As though afraid of getting shocked, she quickly tapped it much to Yun’s amusement. In the absence of any negative response, she set her hand to the perfectly manicured, unpainted toes and patted them. That done, she lowered her head to the dirt and bowed.

It was clear this woman didn’t listen the gabbing of the others. The woman saw a fairly giant, glowing woman and made the assumption that she was an auspicious deity of some kind. Yun smiled, and decided to play the role for a bit.

“Good.”, said Yun. Her voice, by virtue of her size, had an authoritative volume to it despite the deceptively gentle and light tone. She stared right down at the bowing woman beneath her, smile warm.

She turned to the rest of the mob.

“Come.”, she said. “Bow before me and receive your blessing.”

The villagers, despite their distance from the city, were quite secular. Education spread rather far in the country. Still, Yun had quite the convincing claim to super natural abilities looking as she did. Even if this was just some technological trick, it was worth a bit of their time to try and increase their fortunes.

‘After all’, many thought. ‘What was the harm?’

Another villager joined that commoner woman in kneeling, then another. Even some among the nearby tourists joined in. One by one or in small groups, members of the mob walked into the circle and knelt before the statuesque Yun. She smiled, fingers interlocked, and waited till everyone who wanted to prostrated themselves before her.

She always had a certain hum of euphoria around her since that fateful meditation session. Her bliss only increased at the sight of these ‘mortals’ bowing to her superiority. To be worshiped liked this had appeal. Still, she reminded herself of her task. Getting people to bow for her, even before her ‘awakening’ would have been easy. She could have bribed stadiums of people to kiss dirt before her gaze, and it wouldn’t have cost her even a tenth of a day’s profits.

‘No.’, she thought. ‘I mustn’t get *too* distracted.’

She let the moment linger for a minute or so in silence. Some people seemed to grow impatient. They expected something to happen, expected her to do something.

Yun didn’t disappoint.

“Wonderful.”, she said.

Yun lifted her right foot above that first woman to bow before her. The villager stirred a bit, looking up to see the delightfully soft looking, inexplicably clean sole above her.

Yun stepped on her back. Still, the villager bowed, assuming this to be a test of some sort. To be fair, the woman was correct, as Yun was testing the human’s ability to resist pressure.

At 25ft tall, Yun’s foot was a little over half that woman’s height in its length. It was more than enough to pin the villager, and 25ft of giant height carried more than enough strength to start cracking the woman’s bones. As the crowd gasped in horror, and the woman beneath gasped in pain, Yun pressed down.

The villager’s midsection was crushed to a smear. Her body was flattened down the middle so as to lacerate her into two halves, the upper of which flailed wildly. The crowed erupted into screams. The worshiping ones sat up from their bows. Yun laughed.

“Wonderful indeed. Hmm? You’re all squeamish are you?”

Yun pivoted her foot on its heel. The crowd winced, expecting the sole to be lined with gore. Instead, the bottom of the angled foot was completely clean. More confusion stopped them from fleeing right away.

Yun curled her toes, then slammed her foot back down.

“See, not a drop on me, only in me. It’s the best blessing I can give to you all; the chance to become a part of someone greater. Well, less of a chance and more of a certainty.”

Yun raised her foot and lifted it above the still crawling severed torso. She stomped down, showering some of the crowd with bits of blood. Not a speck stained her skin.

Now people started to run.

“You’re afraid. I see. Typical.”

Yun decided to get a big bigger. Since she was holding back at 25ft, she decided to let loose some more. The ground shook as she doubled up to 50 feet tall in height. In the process, her toes overtook the next closest worshiper that was too slow to get up and bail in time. They were but another ‘self’ for her to absorb.

Next, the giant woman pulled her arm back, robe ruffling, as though she were gonna throw an imaginary discus. Instead, the mini-giant ‘threw’ her entire arm out. At the motion’s completion the limb, still tethered to Yun’s body as its ‘root’, surged forward as a semi-solid tide of flesh: like putty. It lost its shape and flowed out to the densest bit of fleeing crowd she saw.

Fair-skinned flesh splattered over a small group of the village-goers. The impact knocked them to the ground. At first mostly liquid, the targets tried to wipe the flesh off, but it quickly grew more and more viscous till it became like snot, then clay in its cloying nature.

Yun turned her head and repeated the gesture for the other biggest mass of the mob she could find. That done, she started to ‘reel-in’ in arms back towards her body. There, they joined into a fleshy mass with the people’s legs and heads sticking out. At Yun’s current height, she couldn’t quite hold them all in hand.

She looked down at her catches, smiling in twisted delight. Her flesh moved them so they all faced her whether they wanted to or not.

“I can imagine how intimidating this must be for you. I won’t lie... I’m quite enjoying it~”

The weird flesh blob her arms had melded into shifted. Some strings of skin-colored flesh crept over her prisoners. As it covered their faces, it looked like webbing--as of a net or a spider’s trap. She was gradually engulfing them.

“Don’t worry though, that woman from before is still within me. Well, at least her ‘self’ is. Her essence if you will. ‘Spirit’, some might call it, but that could be a bit too super-normal for my tastes. Then again, I’m one to talk right?”

She laughed again.

“Now, take a look~”

Grinning Yun, lifted her head a bit and some of her flesh formed a lump just above her chest: on her collar. It gradually shifted to a naked torso exactly the same as that of the middle-aged woman she stomped on earlier--the first worshiper. It formed slowly, face last, but once finished the woman from before screamed in shock. Her arms reached out, flailing, before she pressed them against the skin of the giant neck she was attached to. Futility, she tried to push herself out of Yun’s body. Yun spoke.

“I didn’t dissolve her ‘self’ yet. Once I do, she’ll be well and truly a part of me, instead of simply being stuck inside me. Still, feeling her thrash around like this is fun, but I should finish absorbing this little fragment of the universe. I can’t get too attached to these sensations. They are but caltrops to slow me down as I move towards my goal.”

The woman attached to her neck started begging the others to save her. She did this in spite the fact that the people in those flesh-fused former-arms were a bit trapped themselves.

Yun continued.

“Why, this isn’t even even her body in a sense. I just used some of my own flesh to perfectly replicate part of her body. Then, I put her ‘self’ into it. Anyways~”

Yun focused and started to dissolve the woman’s ‘self’. This would be the first time she did so while a victim’s mind had a means to express itself. To the horror of the captured village-goers, the woman’s face twisted into an expression of agony. She let out a very unearthly sounding scream. Then, that woman’s eyes rolled back, arms slack, and the entire little upper-body protruding from Yun’s collarbone-area went limp.

“Ah, interesting, though not so surprising.”, said Yun. Smiling she bobbed her neck a bit and the protruding body, now unoccupied, flopped and floundered like one of those inflatable car-dealership mascots with the wavy arms and buckling bodies. Desires may have slowed her down, Yun admitted to herself, but going too fast would have her missing fun moments like this.

‘Balance’, she thought. Then, giggling, she reabsorbed that bit of her body. Her neck was back to normal.

“Now then.”, said Yun.

“Let’s get you all settled within me. I’ve got a village worth of people to add to my being. I can’t focus on just a dozen of you for too long. You understand I’m sure~”

All the creeping flesh upon the people in her fused arms grew rapidly. It inundated the people, squeezing and suffocating them despite their protests. Soon, the light from the sun disappeared as they were entirely covered by her body. Trapped in darkness, they felt the squishy slimy nature of their new quarters. There were screams and tears as some scorching juices started singing flesh. Many utterances were silenced as horrid tentacles forced themselves into the mouths of Yun’s victims. It was all unseen in the dark of Yun’s malleable body, but they could roughly tell what the appendages were was from the grotesque feelings and sounds.

It wasn’t long till they were gone: bodies and minds digested over the span of seconds.

Yun reformed her arms, looked to the buildings at her sides, then smirked.