Jack continuously shifted his feet to prevent the roots from having any chance to get underneath his skin again. The aftereffects from the last time were still lingering.

**Skill Up** Mimicry Level 13 **Skill Unlocked ** Through observation, you have unlocked (Class) Vitality Absorption with Mimicry. Would you like to learn this skill? Yes No

Confirming he’d like to learn the skill, he quickly replaced Sneak. While the skill had been useful to him while scouting, he just didn’t see himself sneaking around everywhere. Maybe when he had more skill slots, he’d pick it back up.

With his major goal accomplished, he could easily give the signal and Kai would come extract him. But there was still the side goal of killing the boss.

After how much effort it took just to cut a hole in the stalk so he could escape a pod, he doubted that he could do any lasting damage to it from inside.

While he might not be able to do any physical damage, his new skill just might be able to show its worth sooner than he expected. He looked at the last notification he received.

**Skill Acquired ** (Class) Vitality Absorption Level 1 Absorb (100) points of vitality to increase Skill Level.

Vitality points awarded upon next Level increase. (1)

Current vitality absorbed: 0

The mechanics seemed simple enough, if not incredibly steep. One-hundred vitality absorbed for just a single point of vitality himself. By the looks of the text, that price was bound to increase as he leveled.

It might not be too bad, though. Ten monsters with ten vitality each were all he would need for the first level.

That finally made him realize something he hadn’t thought about. Was he even ok with sucking the literal life out of a creature?

He was so fixated on just getting the skill because he knew it was powerful he didn’t even think about the ethics of it.

Killing drones was easy on his conscience. They were mindless and dangerous.

Kai said that most animals and monsters from a dungeon will attack a person on sight. So he didn’t feel bad about clearing out a dungeon.

As for wild animals, he would need to eat and if one attacked him, he would obviously defend himself. But he couldn’t see himself hunting them just for the experience. It just didn’t seem right to him. Like hunting rhinos for their horns.

Even for the things he had no problem killing, could he really pin one down and steal its vitality until it just gave out? He felt the effects for himself already, and that was only for a second. Was he really ok with doing that to another living creature? Blood Drain was already kinda awful, and Vitality Absorption had to be worse.

Honestly, he could debate with himself later. For now, he knew of at least one creature who he was totally fine with using his new skill on, it definitely could use a taste of its own medicine.

Jack reached out a hand and was about to touch the wall when the roots started to wiggle and reach out for his hand. Pulling back his hand, he took out a knife. Using the blade, he scraped the wall, cutting all the little roots off a small patch.

After watching the bald patch for a minute, he could see the roots were regrowing but slowly. Placing his hand on the wall, he tried to activate the skill. But nothing happened. Yeah, just plain old contact would be too easy.

Cutting open a small hole in the wall, he inserted a finger into the wound. He tried to activate the skill, but still, nothing happened. What was missing?

With Mana Absorption, he was only able to pull in mana when the spell was breaking down. Even then, he could only pull in a tiny amount before all the mana dissipated. He had been doing the barrier training for a week now and only had about one and a half mana collected.

As for Blood Drain, the skill was relatively easy to use. He just pulled the blood out. Though at first, he struggled a little with figuring out how to draw the blood out. Instead of literally sucking with your mouth, you sucked with some other body part. It was kind of like using a muscle he didn’t know he had, but once he did, he could strengthen it and work with it easier.

He’d used the same ‘muscle’ for Mana Absorption and it worked. Why was it not for Vitality Absorption?

He was still trying to puzzle things together when he felt a nudge on his finger. The roots had mostly regrown and were now trying to worm their way into his skin again. He pulled his hand back, and the wound his finger was in started to heal.

So what was he still missing?

Looking to the ground in frustration, something clicked in his mind.

With one skill, he pulls out blood. Something very tangible.

With the other, he pulls in mana. While he can’t physically see it, he knows it's there and can at least picture it when he's trying to pull it in.

What was vitality? As far as he knew, no one part of the body was responsible for vitality. But it was there. All the proof he needed for that had been staring him in the face.

Jack picked up the vine he had cut down the middle earlier. The roots didn’t want to give up their prize, but a quick tug ripped it out of their clutches.

There inside the vine, was the golden evidence of physical vitality.

Placing a finger in the sticky fluid, he tried once again to activate the skill. The effect was immediate.

Warmth flowed into his finger and quickly spread through his body. It wiped away the mild nausea he still had from earlier. A small headache he didn’t even realize he had cleared. The pain in his back from staying in these cramped quarters swiftly faded away.

There was a slight sense of euphoria that he could only compare to the feeling when you wake up after having a nasty flu and finally feel healthy again.

It felt like he could easily slip into a trance of wellness, but the nudges of roots at his feet kept him from doing so. Zoning out while the room you were in was trying to eat you was not a smart idea.

While continuing to use the skill, he pulled up the screen, giving its details. After a full two minutes, he still hadn’t even absorbed one point of vitality.

It made sense that it would take a long time to absorb the life from something, otherwise, it could easily be broken, but there had to be a faster way.

Looking around for inspiration, he was struck with a question. Why are there so many roots? A bunch would make sense, so it could drain from multiple vines at once, but each vine had at least two dozen roots digging into it.

Borrowing from his experience with Blood Drain, Jack manipulated his hair to imitate the roots. Once his hair was dipped into the sap in dozens of different spots, he activated the skill. At once he felt the same warmth, much stronger than before, but not in a way that would overpower his senses.

It was strange to feel warmth from his hair, as if they had nerves of their own.

It didn’t take long before the skill box changed.

Current vitality absorbed: 1

It only took about a minute and a half for it to tick up once again.

Excited, he spent the next fifteen minutes absorbing all the sap out of the vine. Even though it wasn’t even half full of sap, it still gave him a total of twelve vitality before it ran dry.

A grin broke out on his face, and he mentally patted himself on the back for his forethought to collect the vines. Sitting in his inventory right now was a goldmine of vitality. If the vine he just drained was any indication, there were hundreds if not thousands of vitality points just waiting for him.

His smile grew even larger. The other vines could wait; he had a bigger meal in mind.

Moving a small bunch of his hair, he had it touch the wall. Again imitating the boss’s own roots, he tried to have it worm its way into the wall.

Unfortunately, it could not penetrate the hard wall of the plant. He expected that to be the case, since so far his hair had only been able to break through the soft skin in the mouth of a creature.

Using his knife, he cut a hole and had a small bunch of hair go in.

Ok, now to see if this actually works now.

This time when he activated the skill, he didn’t just mindlessly target the vitality. He imagined the golden sap flowing through the plant like blood for an animal.

He could almost feel the warmth of the sap brush against the tips of his hair as he imagined it flow by.

Tapping into that flow like a vein, he tried to drain the sap. The feeling of wellness poured into him once again.

Shaking his head to clear out the distracting euphoria, he pulled out his knife and started to make more holes in the wall to insert more hair.

A problem became apparent when he was chiseling open a third hole. The first one had closed up, pushing his hair out of it. The hair was too soft to keep it from closing in on it.

He tried using just physical contact again now that he had the proper mental image, but it didn’t work. He needed to use some kind of wound in the creature.

Wrapping the hair around the blade and leaving the blade in the wall could work. But he needed dozens of access points just like the roots, or else draining would take who knows how long.

As he was pondering what to do, Lucy alerted him that he only had ten to fifteen minutes of air left. Kai was apparently an excellent keeper of time, and since Jack knew he’d be busy with other things, he was having Kai keep track of his air supply timer.

Even though the thought of suffocating and dying inside the boss was just so appealing, Jack decided it would be best to head back up to a pod to start storing air again.

The trip back up was much easier. The tubes pushed him up and into a pod naturally, so he really didn’t have to do much.

Once inside the pod, he took a deep breath of fresh air. The first in almost an hour.

Sitting down and resting, he filled Lucy and Kai in on what all had happened, his current plan, and the problem he was facing. How was he going to keep his hair in the wall while he drained the boss’s vitality?

Before, when training with his hair to pick up objects, he ran into an issue. If something was heavier than five or so pounds, he couldn’t lift it. The weight of it was too much for whatever ‘muscle’ Hair Manipulation was using.

After some experimentation, he found that if he braided his hair or wrapped it into a coil around itself, he was able to almost double the weight limit.

So maybe if he braided or coiled small bunches of his hair, he could prevent the wall from spitting it out.

Taking his knife, he dug a hole in the wall to try that out. Compared to the walls in the stomach area, this wall was significantly more difficult to dig into.

It seemed to have a harder time pushing his braided hair out, but these tougher walls seemed to heal faster than the inner wall.

He felt like he was on the right track, though. Bunching the hair together made it harder to push out. If only he could corkscrew it in or something. But it couldn’t pierce through the wall by itself.

What if it could, though?

Remembering back to when he first evolved the skill, there was an option for an evolution called Hardening. If he had that now, his hair might be able to cut into the wall.

Resetting his skill to choose a different evolution at level five could work. But the lower-level manipulation was really weak. Plus, he was already really close to level ten. It might cost him a coin to evolve it at level ten, but he could always reset it later and get the coin back.

So he spent the next hour, while he refilled Oxygen Repository, training Hair Manipulation. Trying to push it past its current bottleneck to level ten.

It didn’t hit it at the hour mark, but he felt like it was almost there, spending another twenty minutes on the skill until he received the notification.

**Skill Up** Hair Manipulation Level 10 Hair Manipulation has reached level 10 and is now able to be evolved. Would you like to Evolve this skill? Yes No **Alert** New Skill Evolution Available Choose one Pigment Manipulation Sensations Requirements: Micro-Manipulation

Enhance the natural growth of your hair Hardening

While he needed hardening, the requirements for the second option intrigued him. He knew that most evolutions worked in a tree system, with some special requirements for letting your skill skip tiers or jump to new branches. So it wasn’t too much of a surprise to see he met some additional requirements.

Apparently just making full use of a skill could unlock additional paths. What would the normal evolution have been if he hadn’t hooked his hair up to his natural regeneration?

The evolution itself was also interesting. It seemed like he could gain sensations in his hair. Not just the weird warm feeling from absorbing vitality, but maybe actual touch. That could help in a lot of situations; reaching into an animal's mouth and grabbing something vital, using his hair if he was blindfolded or his vision was blocked, or just making it so he could properly use it in combat.

But all of that would have to wait. He needed Hardening now.

**Alert** Hair Manipulation has gained the evolution Hardening

Testing out the evolution, he came to a quick realization. It was extremely easy to use.

Maybe it was because of natural talent or because he also had Micro-Manipulation, but using Hardening was a piece of cake. At least the basic ability of it was.

While concentrating and kinda mentally flexing, he could alter how hard his hair was. From being very flimsy like thread, to being almost like glass.

When it was at its glass-like hardness, it was also very brittle a slight tap on a single strand would snap it in half.

He didn’t have to change the hardness of the entire strand at once, though. He could make half of it firm but flexible, while the other half was stiff.

The true value was when he braided his hair together and made it harder. It turned into a small spear of glass. Exactly what he was hoping for.

The wall blocking the pod from the inside of the stalk was still too hard for him to pierce through, but he was confident it could get through the walls in the ‘stomach’ area.

Inside the stomach, Jack realized he would look like a sea urchin to anyone who saw him right now.

His hair was stretched out in all directions. The ends were hardened into a corkscrew shape and drilled into the walls. While at the center of the madness was him, shuffling his feet back and forth as he prepared to suck the life out of the boss.

Activating Vitality Absorption, the warm wellness feeling enveloped him.

Watching the absorbed vitality counter go up every other minute, he smiled. It might not be a quick death, but this boss was going down.