"Ruby, I think I am going to need your help now."

Ruby appears next to me in the inner world, she is in her human form and she looks well rested. She looks at the tangle of thread and then turns to me.

Ruby says "You have made a lot of progress, how can I help?"

"I want you to try and hold the rest stable as I free the thread. It keeps tightening and it is getting harder to untangle it."

Ruby says "Okay, I will do my best!"

I go back to slowly pulling the thread free inch by inch, Ruby has some trouble at first but figures out how to hold the rest in place after a few tries. With Ruby keeping it from tightening I am able to make a lot more progress.

I stop twice to channel my mana into the Armatite bar but other than that I keep steadily unraveling the blind spell. With Ruby helping I am able to get it down to about a quarter left in a couple of hours.

That is when things start to go wrong, the thread I am untangling starts to fray. It is quickly fraying faster than I can free it, soon the whole tangled mess is fraying and tearing itself apart.

I manage to free a few more sections before the entire thing goes haywire despite me and Ruby trying to hold it together and it explodes. The explosion knocks me out of the inner world and out cold.

When I come to, I still see nothing but darkness, I am lying on my back and my head is resting on something soft. I groan in pain as I feel how much my head and face ache.

Ruby says "Hold still, don't try to get up."

"Ugh, what happened? Why am I still blind?"

Ruby says "Well, the last bit of the spell went wild and exploded."

"Yeah, I remember that part."

Ruby says "Well, the explosion burned your face.....and destroyed your eyes."

I can hear the sadness and concern in her voice. Can my healing regrow my eyes? Or am I going to be blind permanently?

"Are you okay?"

Ruby says "Yes, I wasn't hurt. I'm sorry, I couldn't hold it stable."

"Don't blame yourself, we were doing something risky right from the start. I don't even know if that is how a spell is removed, it was just a guess."

From the way her voice is coming from behind and above me I finally realize my head is resting on her lap. I reach out blindly and she grabs my hand and squeezes it.

"Don't worry, I am going to try and heal my eyes through meditation. All hope isn't lost yet."

Ruby says "Is there anything I can do to help?"

"Just stay with me and protect me."

I settle down and enter the inner world, once inside I can't help smiling knowing my head is still resting on Ruby's lap. I shake such thoughts clear of my mind and turn to take a look at the damage. No wonder Ruby sounded worried, my face is a mass of burns and where my eyes should be are just sunken pits.

I start with the burns, healing them and regrowing my fur. That is the most visible thing and I am hoping that seeing it heal will reassure Ruby that I will be fine even though I'm still not sure myself. When all the burns are healed and my fur is back to normal I turn my attention to where my eyes should be.

First I heal the damage to the optic nerves, this relieves my headache and makes it easier to work on regrowing my eyes. My understanding of how eyes work is fairly basic, luckily I know my body contains the blueprint for how it is supposed to be.

So all I have to do is focus on restoring things to how they are supposed to be and let my body do the rest. It takes a few hours of intense concentration but I am able to help my body regrow my eyes.

I drop out of meditation and blink rapidly several times to get my eyes to focus. The first thing I see is Ruby's upside down face smiling down at me, I smile back.

"Good to see you!"

Ruby laughs and says "It is good to be seen. Are you all healed now?"

"Yeah, everything is back to how it should be!"

Ruby says "Good! I was really worried!"

"Yeah, to be honest, so was I. But all is well now, except I am starving."

As Ruby laughs I reluctantly remove my head from her lap and sit up. As I stretch I catch a whiff of myself and realize I am filthy.

"I am going to get cleaned up and get some food, then I will probably sleep for a while. You can go rest if you want and I will call you when I am ready to return to that cave."

Ruby says "Okay!" and gives me a fierce hug before she disappears back into the amulet.

I quickly locate the cleansing stone and clean myself and my clothes, then I go looking for food. Unfortunately, the gator meat I had has gone bad so I end up going fishing.

After catching a couple of fish I toss the rancid gator meat into the river, then I set about making fish and mushroom soup. While I am waiting for it to cook I grab the poker and update the map with what I learned of the cavern and the cave under the lake. After I eat I climb into my hammock and go to sleep.

After I wake up and have the leftover soup for breakfast, I do some stretches and make sure everything is working and moving properly. I decide to try out an experiment or two before heading out to the cave. So I grab one of the enchanted pikes and move to sit in my practice area. I enter the inner world and take a look at the pike, I can see the mana woven into it but it is nowhere near as complex as the blind spell was.

I leave the inner world and fetch the bar of Armatite, it is about half golden now, then I return to the inner world. I carefully unravel the mana thread within the pike trying to channel the mana into the Armatite at the same time so I don't get overloaded. Doing both things at once makes it a much slower process, but I figure I will get better with practice. I am able to completely remove and absorb the mana thread from the pike without any explosions.

*DING*

Congratulations! Skill Disenchanting has progressed to level 3!

Disenchanting

Level 3

Int +6 Wis +6 Mana +30

You can remove an enchantment and recover 15% of the mana.

When I open my eyes I see the wooden haft of the pike is intact but the metal head is gone. I also notice the gold on the Armatite bar has grown noticeably. This will work, I have tons of things I can disenchant for mana. It is kind of time consuming though so I should move all the enchanted stuff to the forge room and disenchant it there later.

As I am getting up to do just that I notice a pile of grayish dust, when I take a closer look I figure out that the steel pike head didn't disappear, it just broke down. I collect the dust to take with me and start moving everything to the forge room. It takes me quite a few trips to move all the weapons and armor and stack them neatly.

I will wait till later to start disenchanting them. I want to finish exploring the cave under the lake first. So I make my way back to camp, as I enter the cavern I hear a loud roar echoing from the direction of camp.