A small white snake crawled on the rocky ground as waves of spiritual energy echoed in a high-pitched noise.

“A for Ad-hesion. B for Blood. C for Charm and D for Death . . .” And of course, for special dramatic effects, Death echoed a couple of times more.

Shan found the most efficient way to train his Spirit manipulation skills. Yeah, you guessed right! Say, what’s the most difficult thing to do with spiritual energy that’s not any bit destructive and needs a very limited bit of energy? Well, of course, at a low level, it's none other than manipulating spirit energy waves to create noise.

Since he didn't have a vocal cord, why not train to talk by manipulating waves? He already found a fully sentient spider. Who knew what could this world offer?

Shan has been practising exactly that inside the hole for hours, even after that sassy empathic spider left. Well, using the map, he could tell, it had gone for good, and there was no predator nearby. Still, he didn’t take chances, thinking she or something else might be hiding in the surrounding area.

Well, it turns out he was paranoid for no reason. Still, it was better to be paranoid than dead – his master’s word.

But it turns out everything was fine. There was nobody, no spider, centipede, or any bugs. That kind of spooky in its own way, but Shan continued to singing along in a hitch-pitch tone. Question: if the voices didn't come from the mouth, could it be called singing?

“E for Ember, Earth, Ec-lipse,” Shan paused, finding an eight-legged corpse, “and also, E for Em-pat-hic spider.”

The head of the six-foot tall monster was gorged out, with everything else in the body intact. From the way it looked, it seemed whatever killed it, did it with ease. Is that why it is so vacant everywhere? Shan crawled closer to check for anything he could find. He even turned on his Golden view to look for the residual energy flow, however, he found nothing to conclude anything else.

It was hours past to leave any residual flow for him to take notice of. Then something clicked inside his head. He hesitated for a moment before attempting Loot on the corpse.

[Purified Monster flesh has been added to your inventory]

[Empathic Spider Silk has been added to your inventory.]

And that’s it. Shan waited for several seconds, but he got no confirmation of any evolution points or the monster core. He tilted his head and pondered. Could it be because I didn’t kill this thing? Well, it did seem like someone or something dug the monster core out of its head after killing it. So there was that. There was no point in pondering on that, as it didn’t seem he would get to any conclusion in a short while and these few clues.

The rocky ground didn't seem to leave any particular marks for him to judge either, but he found more clues anyway.

What was tragically comedic was that he found a dozen more corpses of spiders and centipedes in about a couple of minutes. He looted their corpse too, but like before, he gained no monster core or evolution points. That's a bit heartbreaking, too, and I feel for the spiders. Man! that means the system wouldn't give me any evolution points for others' kills.

Seems like one shortcut was out of option. Shaking away his broken heart from the lost spiders (Evolution points!), he moved to examine the corpses.

He concluded after examining a dozen or so corpses that the cunt or cunts that did it were human. Oops, I shouldn't badmouth strangers for no reason.

Well, some spiritual beast or monster does become sentient and intelligent as they age and grow. Look at the talking spider he met a few hours back. Well, it didn’t use the vocal cord to talk, but the sheer intelligence startled Shan. So they do have the intelligence to collect the monster core hidden from the monster’s body, but the way these lots were killed was too clean.

Some human or humanoid thing did it. Shan remembered the few mercenary men he met just after hatching. Those silver rankers could do it easily, or there could be others.

Oh, boy! Am I a magnet? Shan wondered. By the way he was attracting higher ranking things towards him, it seemed way abnormal. Or was he just being narcissistic? Well, that must be it. The mercenary didn’t see him, and that spider even told him to leave in a condescending tone. Yup, it's all in my head.

Should I just leave? Yeah, that seemed like the best thing to do. Well, it would take hours since he got quite deep into the cavern, but with the feature of the system, he wouldn't have any problem getting out. As far as Shan could tell, this cavern would provide him with an opportunity to complete the quests. Yes, quests—plural.

Other than lots of monsters to kill, that would help him in two quests. Shan felt the secret the system wants him to unveil was somewhat related to this cavern.

Anyway, Shan thought better of it and turned, navigating the mapping feature. Yeah, he would be a smart reptile now, rather than wage his life.

To keep him busy, he started that exercise again.

“F for Faith. G for . . .” What was it again? “Yeah, Gravity. G for Gravity and H for Hell-fire. . . .”

Shan got bored with the exercise pretty quickly. Not to mention, it exhausted his mind quite a lot, which didn’t seem a good state to be in a place like this.

However, all of that was not in vain. In the middle of his practice of spiritual chanting, he met the requirements of the next sub-rank and advanced to copper - 0.3. Yippee! Another step closer to . . . I don't even have a freaking step! Perhaps, I should improvise on the phrases too. Alright, its another turn closer to . . . Freedom? Yeah, that seemed good.

[Congratulations. You have advanced to copper (0.3)]

[1 attribute points each has been added to your four attributes. You have gained 1 free attribute point.]

[Congratulations! Spirit Manipulation has reached Copper - 0.5.]

That’s another progressing thing. He still got like a bit less than twelve days to finish to reach Iron. He might just make it in time. Well, he got that covered, but any kind of time limit made him nervous for no reason at all. Copper was the novice rank. It's as if there was no requirement at all. Well, Shan wished he could say the same the first time.

He moved for half an hour and from what showed on the map, it seemed, he hadn’t covered even one-fifth of the dungeon. Maybe he should raise his speed a little or study the map carefully to find the easiest way out with no detour. The dungeon tunnel-like way was no less than a maze, after all. However, as Shan was pondering on the quickest way, the ground shook.

His attention moved from the map to the shaking ground and then to where it was coming from. It was as if a storm was rising in the ways, approaching right at him. Though it was far from the level to collapse the dungeon, it seemed dangerous even to be a genuine threat to Shan.

Maybe he was the magnet, after all.

Sucking in a chilly breath, Shan turned and crawled at the top of his speed. About a dozen more seconds later, Shan found out what was causing this earthquake. No, it's not a natural one, nor was it caused by one or two spiders. There were fucking a thousand of them.

Spiders of different sizes from half a metre to a metre and a head stormed the tunnel ways of the dungeon as if they were sprinting in a fucking marathon. Shan didn’t know if it was a thing in the spider community or not, but it fucking looks like a marathon to him. And I’m fucking participating in it.

Even though he was on top of some leads, it didn't make him feel good. Even if there's a prize, I don't want to participate.

However, it didn’t seem like Shan would be able to keep his lead with how crazily those storming fools chased after the starving snake. Or perhaps they didn’t even notice the small snake on the sides. They were all in the area of the tunnel top, bottom, left or right, each one doing its best to beat the other, squeaking and screeching their way.

If this wasn’t madness, then what?

Or perhaps something was chasing after this legion of spiders?

However, Shan got a different answer after several seconds, crawling in the midst of spiders.

“You stupid snake, why haven’t you left yet?” A familiar telepathic link was made into his mind, breaking through his natural protective mind barrier. “I swear, if you lay a hand on these kids, I’ll eat you alive.”

Well, now it seemed he wouldn't even get a consolation prize for participating in the marathon.