I needed to find a way to kill those spiderlings. Now that I could use my arms, I could potentially dig my fingers into the wound and rip out the little creatures, or rather eggs at this point, but for obvious reasons, I was not too keen on that idea. I shuddered at the thought of pushing my finger inside of my body and dig around my raw flesh for little spiderlings.

Perhaps a measure of last resort, but certainly not my first choice.

I focused my mana vision on the swirling energy around the spiderlings. It was hard to make out details, but it almost looked as if some of the flesh around the area the little spiders were in was starting to absorb some of the black energy. More specifically, there was a cone of darkness, reaching from the spiderlings toward my chest. The stream of silver mana that was running through my body, curved around the affected area, as if pushed away. And as I watched, the black area slowly, almost imperceptibly grew bigger.

Bloody Hell.

Things looked even worse than I had thought.

The black area was like a dead zone that my mind could look in on but couldn’t pierce. Cursing violently, I hammered my will against the darkened area. But to no avail. It was not a barrier like I had encountered in my neck, but just a void that took my mental prodding and simply drained it into nothingness.

Now furious, I decided to go after the source – dead area or not, if I couldn’t get rid of the spiderlings, I was doomed. In my previous attempt, I had already learned that shooting the spiderlings or trying to stab them was not going to be successful unless I prevented them from drifting out of the way.

The obvious solution was to create a restriction of my own, a barrier that I could tighten to crowd the spiderlings together and then shoot or crush them.

After some thought, I drew strings of silver mana out of the mana cycle and started weaving them into a tight lattice around the spiderlings. It was surprisingly tricky because I had to superimpose an image of strings on the diffuse ethereal mana clouds, slowly forcing them to elongate by exerting a ridiculous amount of mental pressure.

Hard enough with one or two strings, but I needed a shitload of them.

At first, I attempted to create multiple threads and then start weaving them together, but I quickly realized that the cords weren’t stable – the moment I reduced the focus on one of them to create another string, the first one would start dissolving into the mana’s natural form.

But it turned out that once I started weaving strings together, forming a structure, the mana held the shape a lot better - it was still deteriorating, but at a much slower pace.

Once I was done with my improvised barrier, I started tightening the lattice around the spiderlings, careful to avoid the darkened area. Immediately, the little creatures began to squirm in my net, clearly agitated. I kept on pushing relentlessly, despite the mounting resistance, all the way until the spiderlings were tightly crammed together.

Rather than forming a bullet, I decided just to keep pressing down on them.

Hard.

I wanted the little fuckers to squirm, to feel a bit of the desperation and panic that I had to suffer through. I was going to grind them to dust under the heel of my will.

The pressure kept mounting until one of the little spiders suddenly stopped moving and released a tiny cloud of dark energy. Immediately, I ramped up the force on the remaining spiderlings and one after another, like 4th of July crackers, they started spilling their mana.

Once all the spiderlings had stopped wiggling around, I slowly released the lattice, and the mana that I had used slowly drifted back into the cycling movement.

“Take that, you suckers!” I shouted elatedly.

But then, startled, I noticed that the black mana that had been released by the spiderlings seeped into the darkened area and drove the cone ever closer to my heart - what had been a somewhat comfortable six inches distance, suddenly had shrunk to only three inches.

I had no idea what would happen if, or when the black mana would reach my heart, but I didn’t want to find out. With sudden urgency, I once more created a barrier of silver mana, but this time, I tried to corral the black mana and push it away from my heart.

At first, the force of my will pushed the black mana back fairly easily, but it became exponentially harder the further I tried to push it back. And it required me to keep the pressure up permanently, because the moment I relaxed my focus, the black mana rushed back to the area it had occupied previously.

At an impasse, I tried figuring out what I could do.

And then I noticed my silver mana somehow… binding with the black mana. Or at least interacting in some way. I had not noticed it before, but the mana at the edge of the cone slowly became somewhat dimmer compared to the rest of the silver mana. It was hard to make out, more of a feeling than anything else, but it got me worried.

I stared closely at the edge of the cone and noticed that the black mana in the cone somewhat lessened at the same time as my silver mana grew dimmer.

So… what did that mean? Was the silver mana reacting chemically, or rather magically, with the black mana? Was there some process that changed both manas?

Reluctantly, I put another couple of points into Mana Vision. It felt bad spending all my points on that particular spell, but I would need it anyway to find my way in the dark through this damn cave. And upon reaching level 5 in the spell, it felt as if there was a magnifying glass inserted into my vision, which allowed me to see more closely what was happening with my mana. Rather than the silver mana absorbing the black mana or somehow binding with it, the two seemed to twist around each other, forming something akin to a braid, or perhaps a double spiral.

And, surprisingly, it was beautiful.

The black mana that I had perceived at first as something evil turned out to be stunning in its own right. It had a dark shine to it, and a shadowy consistency, that made it look simultaneously sinister, mysterious, and alive.

I wanted it. Badly.

From what I could see, the amalgamation of the two types of mana was unstable. Whenever the silver mana would twist around the black mana in a sinuous dance, followed by the same movement of the black mana to form the beautiful structure, inevitably either the black or the silver mana would start fraying or twisting the wrong way, and the whole structure broke down.

Was that a good thing or a bad thing? I really was not sure. But my gut feeling told me that if the structure got completed, I would bind the black mana to myself. Which was what I really wanted.

There was a risk that it would replace the silver mana or perhaps become a new mix that represented something altogether different… but I was willing to take that chance. Sometimes one must take a gamble in life, and if I wanted to get out of this cave alive, I needed every advantage I could get.

With my mind set, I narrowed in on one of the silver strands that just had started its beautiful tango with the black mana and began to subtly guide the twisting and turning strands. Whenever the silver mana moved in a different direction, I would gently push it back, and when the black mana went astray, I forced the silver mana to bend and follow its lead.

Slowly the mana structure grew, and, instinctively, I began to guide it into my mana cycle. Immediately, a massive rush of silver mana entered the structure, elongated it and spread it out over my whole body, and, in the process, pulled along the remaining black mana that had not yet been incorporated.

The whole process had perhaps taken a couple of hours, but I felt as if I had just completed a few chess matches in a row - I was absolutely drained mentally.

At the same time, I was extremely excited to see what the impact of this was. And I felt a bit of dread as well. More than a bit, in fact. After all, I had kind of played some Russian roulette there. If things had gone South, I was as good as dead.

I reactivated Mana Vision and looked into my body. And there it was. A beautiful, twisting stream of silver and black mana, organically interacting and flowing through my body.

I breathed a deep sigh of relief.

My Mana Vision worked just as before, so at least I was going to be able to see something. Now the only question was what the black mana did and how I could use it. Tentatively I pushed a few wisps of black mana from the cycle toward my hand and waited to see if there was any effect.

Alas, nothing happened.

I then pulled in some more mana, to see if that perhaps would cause some effect, but no such luck. However, I did notice that as I added black mana, my hand, almost imperceptibly started feeling lighter.

Gravity magic?

That would be amazing but somehow didn’t feel right.

For lack of other ideas, I started pushing the black mana into all different body parts, with mostly the same effect – the body parts grew almost imperceptibly lighter. The only difference was that when I put it the eyes, it significantly increased my sensitivity to light. Even the tiny amount of light coming from the overhead hole in the ceiling was enough to sufficiently illuminate the area for this more sensitive vision – a skill that still might come in quite handy, even if it was less than exciting a the moment.

All of this testing was good and nice, but it neither got my ass out of danger nor provide food and water, which was going to be an issue rather sooner than later, as my rumbling stomach and parched throat reminded me.

And, worse, I still had those spiderling corpses buried in my arm. I didn’t even want to think about it, but if they stayed in there, it was going to get infected and probably kill me anyway. Taking out the bodies with dirty hands would kill me as well if I even could stand the pain of doing so in the first place.

So I was on a tight timeline.

I focused my energy on getting up or at least into a crawling position. Anything that would allow me to start moving. After a few unsuccessful attempts, I finally stood on my wobbly legs.

Despite my unsteady legs and the cramps, I could already feel coming, a huge smile was plastered on my face.

Hell yeah! Four years since I had done this the last time.

Someone who has not been through what I had been through wouldn’t understand the feeling. Indeed, in my position, most people might have been scared, depressed, or even fatalistic, given the overwhelming odds stacked against my survival. But I was just happy to be walking, of being in command of my own life, regardless of how much in peril I was right now.

I sure didn’t want to die… but frankly, if it was to happen, I at least had the pleasure of staring death into its eyes, spitting on the sickle in defiance before it would reap my life, instead of laying on the ground, waiting for the end to come while my bladder slowly released its content, drib by stinking drib.

I scanned the surrounding area for anything useful or a clue on how I could get out but was not able to see much of anything. The most direct route would be to climb out the way I had come in… I pulled black mana into my eyes and inspected the rock going down from that little speck of sky that was visible from the bottom of the cave.

It turned out that there was a chimney going down, which was, in principle, good news. I had done rock climbing before, so perhaps I could shimmy and wedge my way up there if it was narrow enough. But upon further inspection, it looked as if the walls were rather smooth and slippery, mostly covered with a thin layer of wet moss that was not going to provide sufficient handholds, even if I had been in top shape, which, clearly, I was not. Worse, the chimney only started about ten feet off the ground – way too far to reach, even if I piled up all kinds of debris as an improvised ramp.

Disappointed, I cast Mana Vision, which by now extended to about ten feet, and inspected the rest of the cave. It turned out that it was perhaps fifteen yards long and about five yards wide. On the far end of the smaller side, there was a crack in the wall that might lead to a tunnel or a different cave. The ground that I had been laying on was covered by a thick layer of soft earth and plant debris, which was probably what had cushioned my fall enough for me to survive with only a few major bruises.

Speaking of those bruises… surprisingly, they felt somewhat better. I figured that my cycling of the mana had something to do with that - healing my whole body to some degree, which explained the reconnected nerve connections in my spine, the decreased pain from the bruises, and the vastly reduced headache.

The rest of the cave looked mostly like smooth limestone. There was some organic debris, like twigs and what looked like bones of mostly smaller animals. And poop. Big and loads of it. So that was something to look out for. Apparently, some big creature frequented this cave. Make that plural - big creatures.

I bent down and dug through the pile of sticks and branches to see if there was anything that might serve as a weapon to defend myself. After a bit of searching around, I was able to find a solid stick, about two inches across and perhaps a yard long, kind of like a truncheon. It was not ideal, but better than nothing. In addition, I also took a longer, somewhat thinner stick to serve as a cane.

Feeling somewhat better equipped, I moved towards the far end of the cave where I had spotted the crack in the wall, hoping that I would be able to squeeze through and that it would lead to somewhere else. Images of me being stuck in some narrow passageway, neither able to move forward, nor able to back out again crossed my mind, but I quickly banished them from my thoughts.

Luckily, the crack turned out to be a reasonably spacious passageway that was leading down for a few minutes before leveling out again. Eventually, the tunnel started widening until I couldn’t make out the other side any longer.