I clicked the button and watched in excitement as the dirt in the direction I aimed gave way to an empty space filled by my awareness. I say that I saw the change happening, by in reality, I still couldn’t see a thing. I more felt, or sensed it. My space seemed to be within my senses, like how I imagined a clam or coral could sense the currents of water on and around themselves. I would guess that this was some form of mana sensing.

As I concentrated on the sensation of the air around me, and the... something extra in it, I heard a noise.

*DING* [SKILL ACQUIRED – MANA SENSING]

Ooh, do you see this? I yelled at my human half. He responded first skill! This is awesome!

I clicked on the skill listing in the menu and saw the description:

[MANA SENSING – TIER 1 SKILL – ALLOWS THE USER TO SENSE THE AMBIENT MANA IN THE AIR – LEVEL 1 – 0 MANA COST]

Ooh, I bet if we level this up enough, we’ll be able to create an invincible sword zone like that samurai guy in Hunter x Hunter! Heck yeah we can. Well, heck yeah you can. Hold on a minute, how does this work? Do we share skills? Can you level up and then suddenly I can summon monsters and stuff? That would be broken as fuck.

After a few minutes of experimentation, we found that, sadly, we could not share skills between ourselves, but for basic skills like mana sensing which mostly required an understanding or awareness of a concept or force, it seemed as though it would probably be pretty easy to repeat whatever process we took to get the skill.

I focused on feeling the mana in the air around me. It took a bit more time than I expected, as unlike underground Zach and his hole filled with nothing outside of dirt and mana, I had a whole wide world of competing sensations, including, notably, my continuing mild difficulty to focus on anything outside of how cool it was to have working appendages. A few minutes later though, because I was already familiar with the sensation, I got the tremendously satisfying sound of a

*DING* [SKILL ACQUIRED – MANA SENSING]

And just like that my human side also had a skill.

Ooh, exciting. Now we both can see the Matrix. We’ll be rocking leather trench coats and weirdly spring-loaded Nokias in no time.

Between experiments and gaining skills, human Zach had walked around the hill he arrived on looking for signs of civilization. There seemed to be forest in three directions, broken up by a river that flowed from the forested West toward the plains which dominated the landscape to the East. Far in the distance to the East, the peaks of snow-covered mountains rose out of the earth and looked like the kind of giant rocks folks would describe as “majestic” and rich people would spend their weekends hiking up to take selfies on top of. Probably with captions like ‘such a spiritual experience’, or ‘getting back to nature’.

The flatlands to the East seemed to be farmland for a moderately large city which rose out of the plain some ten miles in the distance. I had my attention focused on the forest to the Northwest however, as there seemed to be a relatively small village in that direction, and as it was much closer than the city, it seemed a much better short-term target.

In the dungeon, I began spamming the [EXPAND] skill. I went from just dirt in my appraisal range to, well, honestly still just dirt, but that dirt surrounded a cavern which had reached nearly seventy square meters, since I had spent seventy percent of my mana. After a quick conversation with myself, I decided that now would be the safest time to find out if running out of mana would cause any negative side effects.

I slowly spent the remainder of my mana on the [EXPAND] skill, pausing after each use to assess my condition. My human half interrupted his walk down the hill toward the village after each use of mana just in case my mana depletion caused any negative spillover effects to him as well.

As my mana well dropped lower and lower, I didn’t feel the expected exhaustion of faintness which I’d been programmed by novels to expect. Instead I began to feel more and more hungry. So hungry. Ravenous. Starving. Hangry. Hungraged.

I stopped spending mana the moment I began to truly understand the vampire species’ desperation for blood. At the moment, I had [9/100 MANA] remaining. I noticed the hunger at thirty mana, but the moment I dipped under ten percent, a qualitative, rather than quantitative change occurred.

Ok, so I can feel the hunger, but only when I move into you. When we’re separated into two people, I can still tell that It's happening, but I don’t FEEL it the same way. This is good. It means that if one of us gets hurt, the other can still function. I bet we could even double up if we had to and kind of dual wield the body or our cave.

Despite my attempt to help distract me, I was still wildly hungry and instinctually cast about with my mana sense.

*DING* [SKILL LEVEL UP – MANA SENSING – INCREASES TO LEVEL 2]

At that moment, with the sharpened senses that my hunger had brought, I noticed a disturbance inside of my newly ninety-one by ninety-one meter cavern. Activating [SENSE MANA] I immediately gasped.

Oh god, I'm full of bugs!