A couple of hours later, I felt a lot better than before. Funny how important a full stomach is to one’s perceived well-being. I am sure I would have been fine even without the food for another day or two, but it would have felt… miserable.

The fruits had turned out to be incredibly juicy and sweet, which went nicely with the somewhat bitter taste of the burned mushrooms and the bat skewers that were dripping with fat. I wished I could have taken more, but for a first foray, it had been a success.

For a little while, I had been worried that the goblins would swarm the area and conduct a room by room sweep, inevitably flushing me out. But none of that happened. Yes, for a few minutes, I could hear goblins screaming in the grand chamber and, based on the sound of boots and the clanging of weapons, running back and forth, but soon enough the hubbub died down, and I was able to relax a bit – a luxury, lately.

For about thirty minutes, if not longer, I just stared into the darkness, listening to the constant dripping noise of the water on the floor, and the few odd sounds coming from beyond my little safe haven. It was almost meditative and was the first time in a while that I had done simply nothing.

Sure, when I had been stuck in my wheelchair, there had been many such moments, but that had not been by choice and almost felt like an eternity ago anyway.

So I actually enjoyed the peaceful moment.

…

At least for a little while.

…

…

I was kinda boring, though.

…

…

And sitting around was not going to get me out of here either. What I needed was a plan that extended beyond gathering food.

On one side of the dungeon was the king with his guards and the shaman. And while the king seemed like easy pickings, fat as he was, the rest were decidedly less so. But perhaps manageable if I was able to surprise them somehow. Maybe even another one of my spore traps would do the trick.

The kitchen side of the dungeon was too populated with goblins for my taste, so I had to stay away from there unless I needed to get food.

Which left the cave above, and the wide hallway leading into the darkness that I had been reluctant to explore out of fear of another shadow cat. The cave had all kinds of crawlies and bats and such, none of which was particularly dangerous by itself, I felt, but in great numbers and with their stealth posed a significant threat. Not nearly as dangerous as the shadow cat, but I was sure that there were giant bats and spiders up there and had no idea if there was another cat…

Fuck.

I just did not know.

Is that how true adventurers felt? All fucking uncertain and bumbling around in the dark? It sure did not feel like that in the stories and movies.

But I still had some time. With all those goblins potentially on high alert, I was not going to risk running around aimlessly and getting myself caught and roasted on a spit.

With nothing better to do, I decided to experiment a bit more with my mana. I had a few spells by now and figured that it was a good time to find out the limits of what I could do with those, or if, perhaps, I could evolve them into different versions, just as I had done with Shadow Skin and Midnight Skin.

First, I decided to consider once more shadow mana. Back when I had first experimented with it, I had noticed that it seemed to slightly decrease the weight of the limbs in which I accumulated the black mana. And while I was not entirely sure about how useful that might be, I decided to experiment a bit more with that.

I began by pooling the black mana into the little finger of my left hand, hoping to see a marked change in the weight. And while my pinky changed to a swirling mass of black in my mana vision, I realized that I had no fucking clue on how to figure out if the weight had changed at all.

Even if I had a scale that would not have helped me since I had no intention of cutting off my finger just to weigh it.

And holding it up… yeah, it seemed slightly lighter, but who the fuck knows? Hard to tell with a pinky. It is not as if you need like superhuman stamina to keep your little finger up for a while, even if it weighs its usual weight.

But if it indeed were lighter, yet covered the same volume, that would imply that it had to be less dense, right? Unless standard physics did not apply because, hey, it’s fucking magic.

Less mass would imply less kinetic energy if hitting something at the same speed… so what if I just whipped myself with my little finger.

Like a finger whip.

That sounded seriously weird.

Feeling awkward, I slapped my left hand with the pinky of my right hand to establish a baseline. When I repeated the process with my left pinky, I was amazed at the difference. It was almost as if I had touched my right hand with a soft grass stalk instead of slapping it with my pinky. There was a bit of resistance from my shadow-infused pinky, but otherwise, it just flowed, for lack of better words, past my palm.

Which was freaking me out a bit.

Immediately, I withdrew my black mana, hoping that my pinky was fine.

A few seconds later, I sighed in relief when I realized that nothing terrible had happened to my finger – as far as I could tell, the transformation was a purely transitory state.

Morbidly fascinated by the strange feeling of my finger being there, but not there, I poured black mana back into it. This time, rather than trying to slap something with my little finger, I instead grabbed on to it with my other hand. Or at least I tried to. It was as if I was trying to clutch at… I did not even know what to compare that to. It had a tiny bit of substance, so I could feel that there was something, but it merely drifted out of my way when I tried to grasp it.

And even when I managed to get my hand around my finger and squeezed, I could see shadowy bits and pieces of my pinky ooze out on top and the sides, like one of those jelly putty slime thingies the kids so love these days. The sight made me a bit squeezy, but I only felt a mild amount of discomfort, just like someone might when stretching stiff muscles. That feeling, though, intensified when I grasped my pinky closer to the point where the shadowy part turned into a normal, fleshy finger. At that point, the feeling turned into something close to pain, and it got exponentially worse the more pressure I exerted.

All of this confirmed that there was still substance, but it was less dense, kind of like a gas. So no walking through walls for me, but maybe drifting through bars or even a keyhole.

And I still had feeling in my pinky, but it was like through a cotton wad – any tactile sensation I might usually have was muted to such a degree that I could understand that I was touching something, or something pressed against my little finger, but nothing beyond that.

Fucking weird.

So did that work with other body parts as well? And what would happen if I infused the middle part of my finger with black mana? Would the tip of the finger just drop to the floor? Or dangle somewhere, attached by a thin smoky thread? And what would happen if I forced a smokey finger or hand through a keyhole and then released the mana? Would the keyhole explode? Or would my hand be squished to fit the size? Or both?

Based on what I had seen with the shadow cat, it seemed likely that my body would adjust to the surroundings and not vice versa. Granted, the ability of the shadow cat to jump through shadows was different from what I was experimenting with, but it seemed somewhat related.

Sticking to the safer part of my trial and error process, I tried pushing black mana into my foot to see how what would go. Alas, it turned out that I had already completely exhausted my black mana reserves.

Using this ability was an absolute mana hog! Filling my pinky twice and doing some experimentation and all mana was gone!

Which also severely limited the usefulness of the spell.

I had already envisioned changing myself into a diffuse cloud of black mana and drifting through the hallways, happily ignoring any and all creatures that were prowling the dark corridors.

No such luck.

I would need like fifty times the mana I had right now to make any meaningful inroads toward that. Or seriously level whatever spell might allow me to do that. Or better both.

Despite the lack of tangible results, I could not help but smile happily. I wasn’t gonna lie… experimenting with mana was pretty great.

Weird. But fun.

It seemed like the possibilities were endless. If only I had a fucking clue how this all worked. Then again, I had always been the type of guy that wanted to figure out things for himself. Reading instructions? Nope, plug, and play.

But for now, I needed to recover my black mana and then perhaps start exploring the rest of the dungeon. After all, I could experiment all I wanted once I was in safety, not in the middle of a freaking goblin tribe.

A couple of hours later, my mana was fully recovered, and I felt a lot more energetic again.

And a bit cold.

While running around and fighting, the lack of a shirt did not bother me overly much, apart from feeling a tad awkward. But sitting in a damp and moldy, partially caved-in room, it did start to get a bit chilly.

Just another item on the list of things I needed to do.

And some type of armor would be nice as well. Nothing clunky like plate mail… but some boiled leather or perhaps some ring mail would be great. Really anything to protect me somewhat from the random cut or stab with a dagger or sword.

And a grande chai tea latte. With extra foam.

Fuck, I’d kill for that. Literally.

Daydreaming of a hot cup of Starbucks chai in my hand, I slowly made my way out of my little hideout and into the grand chamber. It was abandoned and quiet, just as it had been for the last two hours.

Did that mean that it was more likely that more goblins would show up soon or less likely? I had no idea. But I did know that I could not sit in hiding the whole time. I needed to find a way out of here, and that was only going to happen if I explored. Or if I killed every single goblin. And at this point, I did not overly care about which one of the two.

Of course, even if I killed all the gobs, I still would have to explore, so there was that.

---------------------------------------------------

A few hours later, I returned to my hiding spot depressed and, I had to admit, somewhat scared.

I had followed that wide tunnel into the darkness and had quickly realized that the area I had explored so far was just one small portion of the dungeon – numerous hallways branching off to the left and right indicated a size that was at least a couple of square mile rather than measured in acres, as I had secretly hoped.

And while most of it looked and felt abandoned, I saw tracks in the dust and debris on the floor and heard the unmistakable noise of shouting goblins too many times to count.

In the hope of finding the entrance to the dungeon, I stuck to the wide hallway, even though I was getting more and more paranoid about encountering and potentially being trapped by random groups of goblins pouring out into the corridor.

Luckily no such thing happened, and I ended up finding what I thought to be the entrance – a set of massive gates on the opposite side of a wide-open square.

At first, I had been delighted, already envisioning myself stepping out into the sun and leaving this cesspit of violence and stinking goblins behind, but I quickly realized that there was something weird going on. The closer I got to the square, the more I had to fight some kind of resistance. As if there was a stiff breeze pressing against me, only that there was no air movement whatsoever. And that breeze yet non-breeze quickly increased to hurricane strength as I tried stepping into the square. Try as I might, I could not push past it. And laying down on the floor and crawling did not do one damn thing, apart from hurting my dignity.

It was not a purely physical resistance either. At least not one that could be explained with a standard natural science cause and effect. The pressure was, with differing degrees, on every part of my body, even, and this felt really weird, inside of me. There is this expression of having a heavy heart… I actually felt a heavy heart at that moment. And it is even less fun than it sounds. I understood that if I tried to push even more, I might actually endanger my life because internal pressure on sensitive organs is no laughing matter.

Eventually, I had to turn around, resigned to the fact that I had to find another way out.