I spent the first good portion of the night tossing and turning. Unable to get comfortable now that my pillow was missing. I never realized how much of a sleep aid it was, but I really did like and need my pillow.

I woke up and it was still dark out. My arm is on fire due to pins and needles. I somehow managed to fall asleep on it funny and I can barely move my fingers. After the initial panic of me possibly doing permanent damage to my arm. I find that I am slowly regaining feeling in it.

I’m tired but awake. The initial panic of something wrong with my arm has my mind racing, but my body is so tired.

Peering up at the pure darkness knowing that the ceiling to my room is up there I wonder to myself if the forced darkness of my inner realm would be similar to sleep or not.

I can feel my spinning inner self at full capacity. Dawn is nowhere close to coming up and now that I am thinking about my inner world, I cannot help but have an idea.

I turn over to the edge of my bed and start feeling around on the ground. I am able to make out my clothes from the day before, bunched on the ground. I grope through them until I feel the hard lump and pick up my pants and fish out my runestone before tossing my pants back on the floor.

Jessica had gotten her rot weed further along than me by half a stage. She grew it yesterday and planted it. I’m not that competitive, but right now I am sitting in the dark with full mana and an itch to try something out.

Akira had mentioned that we’d essentially start off with a single ember’s worth of mana, or something to that effect. I wonder if I could gauge my growth in these past few days with that.

My mana is full and placing the runestone face down in my palm I clench it tightly and bring it to my breast while I close my eyes and concentrate.

All my mana, I need to use all my mana in one go. I seem to only be able to manage a single hook off of my spinning ember, so I’ll need to do this quickly.

I start spinning my inner world faster and faster and imagine that on every revolution that the hook if not present will become available again.

Feeling for my runestone, I can feel it dangling hooks vaguely.

Spinning my mana realm, I reach out and connect the first. Remembering that I need to compress it. I feel the first one gets torn off and while focusing on compressing it I feel the second get ripped off almost as quickly.

I realize that it is going fast, too fast. I try compressing harder instead of slowing down my spinning inner world.

A third through fifth are ripped away and now in my palm. I’ve stopped breathing. I think I now know why it takes my breath away, this rapid feeling is hurting a bit. With each one being torn off, my inner self almost stops and then resumes back to the initial speed just to have it stop, go, stop, and resume again. It is that action that is really difficult to bear.

I try my best to ignore it and just focus more and more on my palm.

Compress, compress, by the devourer compress faster.

This is all happening so fast. I’ve lost count and simply focus on compression. I will everything into compression and then I finally feel it.

The void has settled in around me.

Opening my eyes, I see a bright ember in front of me.

Looking around in the void I think I kind of see some faded twinkling stars off in the distance. I somehow know that I was successful in my compression and these are the results.

Counting them, I’m pretty sure there are twenty of them clustered together off as stars in the void. I am thankful that they are all together, though if I accidentally roll around, would they fall onto the bed or floor. Damn, I might lose them… I hope everything will be alright… I kind of forgot about where I’d put these small embers if I was successful but unconscious.

Looking around some more I am shocked to see another cluster of something off in the distance. Not quite stars, but more like dust vaguely in a grouping with a very slight tinge of my ember’s color.

Focusing out there in the void, it seems so far away. Almost infinitely further away than my cluster of twenty stars. However, now that I know what I’m looking for, I vaguely see that the grouping looks like a rounded triangle.

Reaching out from here to those stars or that ember dust cloud in the distance, I’m unable to do anything to them. I cannot reach or influence them it seems. Maybe I’m too far away or I am empty on mana.

While looking off into the distance, the corner of my eye catches a small blaze that by the time my eyes shift to look at my ember in front of me. Acting innocently, my ember is just glowing gently, pretending that nothing was amiss.

Watching intently, after maybe a bit more than twenty seconds, I see a slight spark or crackle from my ember as it flares up and then rests.

Feeling it spinning, I’m positive that it might have increased in brightness by a tiny amount.

Not sure what this crackle is, but every twenty-three seconds that I count, there is a new crackle.

Odd, but at least it is something new. As boredom kicks in and the ticking, every twenty-three seconds of my ember is really starting to grate on my nerves.

*fzzt* … … *fzzt* … … *fzzt* … … *fzzt* … … *fzzt*

After getting fed up with the inane ticking of my ember. I try to pull off a gossamer thread from it and succeed. Playing with it a bit too aggressively, it shears into three parts, I panic a bit, asking ‘what if I broke it permanently?’ However, after another twenty-three seconds … *fzzt* … the crackle happens and almost as if an invisible wave propagates out from my ember, the gossamer thread reforms and tries to lazily float back to my ember.

Trying another experiment. I try ripping it up as much as possible and I’m surprised to find that I can divide it into exactly a hundred parts before the smallest pieces seem to dodge the tearing action.

An even hundred. Ten groups of ten float around me. They seem to be afloat and kind of drift about on their own, always slowly being pulled into my main ember.

Compressing them individually creates dim specs of ember dust in my inner world and I force them to spin like my main ember. Most seem to be slowly inching towards my central ember, however, every now and again, a few seem to move at an odd angle away. As if there is an invisible gust of air that they briefly touched before dodging away.

I’m really confident that if they reach my main ember, that on the next crackle, I simply know that they’d fuse back with it.

I spin off another five gossamers from my main ember and repeat the process. I seem to be unable to take any more off of my main ember. I now have six hundred of these little guys floating around me. Looking at them, I’d say that they are no longer embers, but more like motes, floating in the devourer’s abyss.

I also found something interesting. While I cannot see myself at all. With so many motes of light dancing around me, I can actually almost see an outline of my hands. They are pure black, devoid of light, almost as if I am a shadow within the abyss. Something that light dodges around but does not touch.

My main ember shines through it, however, these smaller motes seem to dodge or I bend their weak light around myself. Kind of creepy, being a shadow of yourself within yourself.

Now that I know that I might be able to make out possible shadow objects in the abyss. I try scattering the motes out further and further and still further.

After pushing the six hundred out in all directions, I’m certain that after a certain bit, they’ve become more energetic, drifting on unseen currents while seeming to drift inwards towards my core.

I push them out even further and finally, I discover something in the abyssal darkness. The motes that I pushed out the furthest have actually managed to hit a wall and stop.

If I was to apply distances, that wall feels like if I was walking it is maybe as far away as the longest street within our little city of Denvetti. It would be a fairly long walk at a leisurely pace to try and get there. I’m also unable to float or move closer. I always felt as though I could move in here, but I seem to be unable to leave this central place.

I start to collect the dust onto that one wall the furthest away and form a line across it heading left. After using all six hundred up I borrow some from my starting position and continue on to the left, noticing that the wall seems to have a slight curvature to it. It will take a while to examine it, but maybe I’m in an oblong cylinder of some form.

Interested in finding out more, I keep following it and manage to find a giant inverted nub on one side. This is on the flatter side of the cylinder and to the left and right it curves in pretty fast on the sides.

Following along the back on the other side of the nub, I find an odd, long, reverse ridge that goes up and down. Following it down the ridge begins to deepen and on either side, it actually starts to balloon away from me, even further away.

I seem to be seriously lacking enough motes, to truly explore the limits of my cage, but I also feel more secure now, knowing that the dark abyss does not go off into the maw of the devourer itself, but that there is something out there, that I cannot see, that is protecting me.

It was during this exploration that I snapped awake into the real world. It is a bit bright out and certainly past dawn at this time. I feel pretty good, as though my mana realm is full again. Possibly two or three hours must have elapsed since my experiment.

MY EXPERIMENT!

Trying to move as little as possible, I look down and manage to find on my chest, while the stone slipped away, I do find twenty little embers glued to my sweat between my breasts.

I carefully collect all twenty and feel relieved at not losing any off the side of the bed or anything of that nature.

After getting dressed, I go downstairs and collect Akira on my way out before heading over to see Jessica again.

I find her in the back, having just finished taking her plant back to its seed form.

“Ah!”

I let out an involuntary noise as something finally falls into place for me. As I look at Jessica’s seed that is in her hand, it is a rounded triangle shape. Thinking back to my inner world, that giant dust cloud off in the distance was the exact same shape.

I wonder if I had it as an actual plant, buried outside if I would have seen something like that instead.

The three of us grab a late breakfast together and I tell Jessica about my experiment and my hunch on the stars in the distance and the large seed that was even further away.

We head back to the lake from the day before and take a slightly different path. We followed a different small brook that was feeding the lake.

Armed with some better knowledge of how to find caterpillars, we managed to find a couple of caterpillars high up in the trees on some leaves overhead.

Settling into a good pace, we are chatting about different foods and what we should possibly look to have for supper. While on this adventure, we are making embers in groups of five and we seem to be comfortably regenerating the mana for these fine every hour.

After I found that I could make twenty in a single, all-out attempt, this seemed pretty good and was helping us to better understand our limits. That entire ‘know thyself’ quote from bad bard tales.

It was after finding our seventh and eighth caterpillars as a pair together. Jessica is ripping off the mane from one while remarking:

“These manes don’t actually seem to be attached to the caterpillars at all.”

I look down at my freshly de-maned caterpillars and not sure what she means. The little guy seems to be bleeding a bit from where we removed it. Well, bleeding is a strong term, he’s gooey there, like a peeled scab.

However, it certainly does not appear to be in pain at all from the removal. Looking at the mane area, it is an odd segment on the body, slightly raised, denoting a section of the body that is different from all the other segments of the body.

“What if… Hold on, give me a second here.” Jessica seems excited about an idea that came to her and she fishes out her runestone and places it face down in her palm along with an ember and she puts the caterpillar on top of the runestone.

After a brief moment, I’m awed to see that the mane that was just removed from the caterpillars is starting to come back like peach fuzz at first and then it slowly lengthens back to the full size that was there initially.

“Did you just fucking grow a caterpillar’s hair? You… L-Like actually manipulated a bug instead of just a plant!?” I asked incredulously, having to pick my jaw up from the floor.

“Actually, no. I think the mane is actually hundreds of tiny little thread things. If I had to guess, they… I don’t know… They make me think of hundreds of tiny mushrooms. I think it is a parasitic fungus or maybe they are beneficial, as the caterpillars don’t seem harmed or being hurt by them. I think it is more like silk mushrooms are growing out of the oily substance on their necks.” She says as she removes the mane and while possibly still fueling the mana manipulation, another set of peach fuzz starts to grow and lengthen.

I myself am excited by this discovery and immediately give it a try as well. I pull out my runestone with an ember and try exactly what Jessica just did.

After spinning off a gossamer thread from my mana to force the ember to do what I want it to do, I can see that the peach fuzz appears on my caterpillar as well, and in a short amount of time, it grows to a full mane before almost naturally stopping.

I take the mane off and for whatever reason, a new one starts to form immediately as peach fuzz again.

I start to laugh and laugh as I think we just found a way to literally grow money in the palm of our hands.

As I pull off the second mane that I grew. I can feel the gossamer thread and ember weakening. If I had to guess, I should be able to make five manes off of the ember and gossamer thread pair. So perhaps two and a half manes are possible from each, but they need to be used in conjunction.

We are pretty excited by this discovery and after each making five manes off of the caterpillars, we start jumping around excitedly, trying to figure out how much this could be worth to us in just completing our first requisition and possibly doing it repeatedly.

After carefully stowing our caterpillars away, along with some nearby leaves that could be their preferred food, we try to work out how much this could mean for us.

While we can make five embers an hour and recover the mana, we need to mix an ember with a gossamer thread from ourselves. This means that we’d have to go through double the amount of mana. After getting a feel for it, we feel that we could maybe manage using three embers an hour and using three gossamer threads to comfortably grow these manes.

“Hmm… So if we can make five manes from a single ember and if we can do three embers at a time before we wait to fully recover, that means… what? We’d grow fifteen manes each? An hour?” I ask Jessica to verify my math and we are pretty certain that we are really close with the feel of it.

“Yup, so if we complete the requisition, we are making one Den each. Then we’d be essentially making fifteen Dens an hour. We’d be able to make 60 Dens in four hours or 180 Dens in a day maybe?”

After counting up the numbers two or three times, we excitedly turn around out of the forest and start to head back.

We are not sure if we are harming the caterpillars, or if there is a max amount of manes that can be grown off of them. We curse ourselves for not keeping the other six caterpillars that we came across and on our way back we try to backtrack and see if we cannot find new ones or find those that we released.

We figure that if we had multiple, we could rotate them around to hopefully not hurt or tire them out, but they seem content to simply much on leaves, if not at a slightly more voracious speed.

We managed to make our way back and were able to find two more caterpillars each. So we both have three to our name and a collection of leaves for their diets.

I’ve never had a pet, and Akira does not count. Hopefully, we can manage to keep the little guys or girls alive. Jessica and I settled on naming all six of them Denny, as it is our hope that they’ll be able to help us literally grow Dens.

We manage to make our way back to the guild by late afternoon. After our discovery, it has been about six hours and we’ve managed to produce 90 manes each.

We manage to go to the back of the foyer where the requisitions are and turn in to the surprise of the clerk our 180 manes.

“You two gals must have found a breeding ground or something, you picked this requisition up only two days ago? Mind telling me where you found them all?”

“That’ll be a trade secret for the two of us,” Jessica responds back, grinning from ear to ear as we are handed a lead badge plaque, about the size of our palms. On the front, it is just four quadrants with a slight relief of the four mage schools with a raised fire emblem in the middle and a number in the middle that probably represents us.

The clerk gave it to us and just randomly hammered a tiny set of five characters. Just a tiny set of arrows pointing to each other and four odd funny-looking symbols. The clerk explained that the first character was denoting that we completed a fetch requisition and the other four symbols are a reference to the requisition itself.

“Also, don’t try to fake any requisition stamps. We check them periodically and forgeries are often found out and the fines are pretty hefty. Or they’ll just ban you and then you are pretty much shit out of luck as only dark guilds will accept you. Also if you are caught trying to do guild work while not a part of the guild is a great way to be labeled a dark guilder and hunted down by even your friends for the possible merits.”

We take our plaques and after turning in our extra manes, we leave with 100 Dens each. 95% of which we grew ourselves. We left the guild and decided to go out for an early supper to celebrate our first completed requisition.

We find a little restaurant that is not busy at all and we sit down for a nice little dinner.

After eating some soft flaky bread with various little jams, we pay 30 Dens each, as the total bill came out to 60 for the three of us.

I feel guilty that Jessica insisted on paying half, considering me and Akira ate two-thirds of the food. I’ll get Jessica back for the ten Dens at some point soon.

On our way back home, we are passing some of the shops on this street.

“Look over there,” Akira says while pointing to a handsome older lady who’s out in front of her shop taking down a fold up sign that she had outside her little shop. It was possibly one of the richer stores as she actually had glass windows, large ones at that in the front of the store.

In one of the little windows, there was a little wood plaque that was showing a crude drawing of a caterpillar or maybe a turd with an arrow pointing to the symbol for Dens.

Looking up at the name of the store, there is none, but there is a nice relief carving of a bobbin, yarn spool, and a needle in it.

“Excuse me, the sign in the window, do you know if the shop is looking for caterpillars or perhaps their manes?” I ask the lady who turns around and gives the three of us a kind smile.

“Oh yes, the buggers are finally out now for maybe only a moon or two. If we do not stock up now, we’ll not see any until after next winter.”

“If the store is buying, do you know for how much? We just turned in a requisition for a bunch of them.”

“Why thank you for taking our requisition, we were worried that nobody would maybe do it. We buy the silk manes from the guild at three Dens a piece. The greedy bastards probably give you almost nothing right? If you bring them to us directly, I’d buy them from you at two Dens a silk mane. I cannot give the same price as the guild or they’ll come down on me hard, but if that helps, I’d be willing to take as much as you can give me.”

She says while showing genuine gratitude for us taking her store’s requisition.

“Really? As much as we could provide?” Jessica asks.

“Oh yes, there is demand, but no supply. Just between us, after I weave the silks into a bolt, we can sell it for about ten times the guild rate that we are being them for. If we dye the bolts of silk, we can possibly get anywhere between fifteen to thirty times the price. Lots of work, but nobles do like their silks.”

We thank her for the information and continue along the road back home while thinking about a new problem.

“So… We can get paid dirt but complete requisitions to the guild, earning us merits and maybe raise our status quicker out of lead.” I start off by saying to Jessica.

“There’s no guarantee that they’ll raise our status at all though. We’re plant mages to them and that may not work with the pecking order. I think we could maybe end up targeted if we stick out too much in the guild, we’d also be losing out on double the income if we go directly to that shop owner instead.”

“Agreed, if we turn in everything through the guild, we’d be giving away free Dens, especially if we can essentially grow them. If we don’t, then we are not making any merits either.”

“However, if the two of you only focus on either of those two paths, your magic growth will stagnate.” Akira chimes in, adding another concern.

If I started off at only being able to generate a single ember from full mana just a few days ago compared to my twenty from the exercise this morning. Maybe we give up on some Dens to maybe continue with that growth to maybe make more in the future. Short term gains versus long term ones…

“True, we also don’t know if the Denny’s can hold up to being used that much to create the silk manes, so balancing continued growth might be a bit better?” Jessica asks while looking at me.

“I… ugh…” However, before I can complete my thought, Akira dumps some cold water on us.

“If the manes are difficult to acquire and you show up with an inexhaustible supply of them. The envy of others could have people following you to find where your stash of caterpillars are located and could end up with people trying to steal or destroy what you’ve acquired.”

“The people of Denvetti wouldn’t do that…” Jessica starts to stay.

“Nonsense. People will kill others for less, especially if you have something unique. Secrets are the most tempting prizes.” He says to the two of us.

“Well, that’s dark,” I say while contemplating how bad it could possibly get?

We make our way back home. We discussed these issues of trying to balance money, growth, merits, and how to possibly not draw attention to ourselves. We figure that we managed to turn in 90 manes in two or three days. We could possibly reduce that to just 60 once every three days to keep our merits up. To show that we are dependable.

At 60, we’d have dropped our collection rate by a lot and possibly sell another 30-60 to the shop directly to make some Dens.

We bid each other a good night and head in for an early evening.

Dad is pounding away at something and Akira turned down my 30 Dens that I offered him in case he wanted to spend the night in an Inn, in a real bed. However, he just smiled at me and patted my head as if I was a lost puppy and said that he’d be fine.

I froze at first when he did that, before he jumped away quickly to his beam, out of reach, as I swiped at his hand that he used to pat my head. After he left my range of retribution before I could enact it, I stomped up the stairs to my room.

Looking over at my bed, I realized that my mana was full after or during dinner and we had forgotten to continue creating embers, due to distraction. I subconsciously gave my bed a dirty look. My mana is full and if I use up all of it, it would probably refill entirely in three to four hours, meaning that sleeping would possibly cost me… fifteen times eight hours at two Dens a mane… That was like 240 Dens is what it cost me to sleep.

Unless I could wake up in the middle of the night to continue generating embers, that was lost potential money and a fair bit for me and Jessica.

I guess I could maybe try using up everything at first and maybe only lose out on 4 hours' worth. If Jessica and I could both grow silk manes at all times, I think that would be like 720 a day between the two of us.

If we did that, maybe we’d break the market or drive the prices down more? I could certainly see it be suspicious for that many silk manes to appear every day out of thin air. I think we’ll need to be more careful going forward.

Or maybe we could grab a requisition that takes us to another town? If we can turn in the requisition in a few nearby cities or perhaps find more shops to spread it out, it could maybe be more feasible. I’ll have to bring that up with Jessica tomorrow.

We should probably stop into the guild to check what other requisitions there are that could maybe give us some cover or a reason to go between towns.

Lying down in bed, I went over what we accomplished today. We managed this morning to use about 24 embers to make our plants go through three cycles of rebirth and they certainly look really healthy and with the change in colors, they almost look like something you’d maybe find in a royal garden.

I managed to squeeze in a fourth cycle for myself because I had the extra embers from this morning. We then got distracted with the silk mane growth operation. That allowed us to exit the forest early and stop being eaten alive by bugs. We made 90 manes and were able to make some Dens and have a nice celebratory dinner together.

Feeling my topped off mana, I grab my rune stone and figure I’d give making embers only another shot to see what happens.

I followed the same motions from this morning and the process seemed a lot smoother and perhaps more efficient.

By the time I entered my mana realm, the motes of dust were still floating about but had made a large portion of the journey back to my core.

Looking out, I could see my seed was definitely brighter than this morning, so that was something to be happy about.

I was so focused just a little bit ago on compressing my mana that I was not able to see how much was actually generated. However, sitting here in the soft glow of my ember and some motes I found two clusters of embers in the distance.

The one that was furthest away, there seemed to be twelve and I figured those were perhaps my leftovers from today, as I did not use up everything. As for those that we're closer, I counted them up and double checked and triple checked, however, I managed to count 30 of them.

Shocked, I tried going over everything that happened in the day and we really did not do a lot of practice. Just making embers throughout the day and my big expenditure this morning when I did this experiment. I’ll need to double-check this, maybe there was something else impacting it, but I now had much more to think over.

I tried creating motes from my core again and while I could not count up the motes off in the distance still. I think that when all was said and done, I managed to get maybe a total of 700 motes out.

So some things grew much faster than others. I’m certain about it.

I used all of the motes to continue exploring the surroundings.

I found the reverse ridge from this morning that ballooned out and continued to follow it. I spaced the motes out more and more to simply try and get a general idea of what I am looking at.

Oblong cylinder, with a divot over there and a ridge on the other side that balloons out and where the ridge deepens.

I keep following and tracing until a set of shapes start coming into focus, much to my horror.

No.

This cannot be…

I keep tracing and I start to race upwards with the motes and confirm my fears and insecurities.

At first, I panicked because the cylinder with a nub and a ridge started to look more and more like the outer circumference of a torso. The crevice gave way to a buttocks. I feared at first that I was in the devourer’s belly itself.

However, I traced the interior up and down realized that the devourer is female with moderate breasts and a perky toned buttocks. I avoided certain other nether regions, though after figuring out that it was female and that it oddly felt familiar, I came to the realization that this cage was in the shape of my own body.

This is me, I’m so big… Or maybe I’m actually so small in here. As for where I was in relation to my giantess self, it seemed to be pretty low down in the body. I’ll need to ask Jessica about this.

Now that I realized that this cage was my own body, I really did not like my initial feelings that I was within the devourer’s maw itself. I decided at this point in time, I would spin up as many motes as possible and keep my inner being lit up as much as possible, to keep the darkness at bay.

700 motes is a far cry from enough. However, I now have another goal and this one may be a lot more tied to my own personal growth if I can increase the number of motes I can have at my disposal... I could perhaps keep the darkness at bay. That seemed like a good thing to me and the idea just resonated with some part of me deep down.

I spent the rest of my time here, exploring my body from the inside, trying to feel around or see if I could feel myself… Perhaps the soul pouch or the soul book that Akira mentioned would also be able to help.

*fzzt*

“AH!!!”

Fuck that scared me.