New way to get mana, and something else

Will returned to the forest, he tried exploring the plain a little, but some kind of bull tried charging him. So he opted for staying in the forest for now, no point in being chased around by an enraged cattle built like he ate steroïd every morning.

Once in the forest proper, Will found himself not knowing what to do next. He could not just go back to the village right now, it would probably freak out the inhabitants, and… ‘I can’t ever hear, even if I know their language, which seems not probable, I won’t hear it.’

‘Wait, I really am dumb!’ Will exclaims in his mind. ‘I don’t know how to grow things or make them stronger, so I shouldn’t have to know how an ear works to form one!’ This realization really made his feel stupid for not thinking about it earlier. ‘I could have made myself ears while in the village!’

Not focusing on the anger he felt for himself, Will began thinking about just where to put ears on a giant spider. ‘I don’t think the spider has any brain parts to understand sound though. Well, I made it’s brain bigger, it should have enough space to integrate sound understanding. Now, where to place the ear?’

‘Not on the legs obviously, the head seems already packed, then in the abdomen. But where on it? It already has openings for its respiratory system, and it would be uncomfortable hearing it breath constantly. So I think one earhole on each side, not too close to where the legs pass. Yeah, it should work well.’

Will moved the innards out of the way, many had grown bigger but were not any more useful with a bigger size, so he just shrunk them. When his new ears were finished, he could hear, but all came as unintelligible morsels of sounds. It felt like hearing things, but everything seemed distorted and nothing had any sense.

So he tried making some brain matter connected to it with the intent to filter and interpret the signals the ears send. Finally things became smooth, what before felt like horrendous squeals appeared to be birds whistles.

Will felt great, happy to recover a sense he did not have for some hours. And now that he could hear them, Will wanted to get some birds! ‘I WANT to know what flying as a bird feels like!’ He tried catching some, first by climbing trees. But the spider is too big to keep it discreet enough for the birds not to see him coming.

Then he used the spiders’ ability to make high jumps, and it was immediately better. except for the fact that he came too quickly towards the birds and killed them by mashing them on his exoskeleton. ‘That is bullshit! How can they be so fragile?’ He thought, frustrated already.’

The method that saw him capturing a living bird was using adhesive threads and making a net with it. Then jumping with the net weaved between his four frontal legs. He quickly got one and made sure to entangle it to prevent it from trying to break free and possibly injuring itself.

‘Finally, now I just have to force my mana inside it and turn it in my slave!’ One thing was sure, have slaves does not bother Will at all. So he began channeling mana inside the bird, mixing it with the bird’s. It took much, MUCH, more mana than it took for the spider. The spider’s original size was evidently ridicul compared to the bird’s.

To mix the two types of mana, Will stirred it, as a mixer would do, creating many little spirals. It was difficult to do with all the focusing it needed him to do, but not tiring. Will reached the half-mark point where the mana inside the bird was as much orientated to him as the bird, and he ran out of mana.

‘Oh come on! I have been gathering it for so long already, and this bird can hold at least 2 times that?’ Not happy but also not able to do anything but continue getting as much mana as he could, Will got the webs off of the bird.

At first it tried to flee, but when Will sent him the order to stay with him, the bird flew in place for a time, and then flew back to land on the spider’s abdomen. ‘Hehe, you’re already my slave!’ Will thought without sending his thinking.

Will then began inspecting the bird, to the spider’s eyes it seems to be dark blue, with a lighter blue on the underside and at the end of its tail’s feathers. With the mana inside the bird being partly his, he could also feel its insides. That did not feel particularly useful, but at least that way he could tell it is female.

He could also feel the fertilized egg growing inside of it, and that made him think about the possibly easier to assimilate egg embryos. ‘Nest?’ Will sent his question to the bird, and it took flight towards its nest. When it flew above the forest’s foliage and Will lost its whereabouts, he sent it to guide him to its nest.

It worked better, the bird flying branch to branch, waiting for Will to come near before it flew to the next branch. ‘It took some time, but at least I’m here. There better be eggs already in there.’ Will thought, not pleased about having been charged by a boar. It had overturned him and nearly smashed him in the ground.

But climbing a tree and staying in it was enough to not have to go back down to face it. And talking about climbing trees, Will did just that too to go to his half assimilated bird’s nest. But he failed to take into account his weight, and when he tried to place weight on the branch the nest was built in, it broke.

The nest plummeted to the ground. Will dropped down to the side of the nest, there were indeed eggs inside of it, but now what was once inside them is spreading itself on the forest ground. Will displaced the nest to see if one lucky egg survived, but none did.

Will felt something from his mana, he couldn’t tell what it was until his assimilated bird began attacking him. Pecking his exoskeleton, aiming for his eyes. He tried ordering it to stop, and he felt the mana in the bird begin fluctuating. He felt his mana being rejected from the bird, the two mana types being separated into his and the bird’s again.

He tried mixing it back inside the bird’s mana, but now it resisted him on a different level compared to before. ‘So, rejection is possible. Yeah, that makes sense. Or else I could just enslave anything if I had enough mana.’ Will thought while preparing a web net with his back legs. He then swated it on the bird, catching it.

He tried sending the mana he gathered inside the bird, trying to force the assimilation. It did not work, not until the pressure rose to a level twice the bird’s current mana pressure. ‘Or is it density? It feels like one is the product of the other, like pressurized air.’

Unfortunately, Will saw he would not be able to assimilate the bird, mixing his mana with the bird’s increased the bird’s total mana, and while it reduced the resistance a little, it was not enough to counter it. The required mana pressure increasing with the bird’s total mana. Will could stall for him to get enough mana to do so though as his explused mana would get back to him.

So he did just that, for at least half an hour, and then stopped when the bird died. Will did not realize the increase in the bird’s heart rate when he tried forcibly assimilating it. ‘The forcible assimilation seems quite brutal all of a sudden. Did I just torture the bird to death after killing all of it’s offsprings?’

The notion made him have a silent laugh. ‘Ah, yeah, always loved dark humor.’ He did not care about animal cruelties and such, he did long ago, but quickly found it the way the world was anyways, so he stopped caring about it. What he cared for though was the mana inside the bird, it would be roughly equal to what he gathered since he woke up as a sphere.

Will took control of the mana inside the bird, it was now part his and part not his. He could not tell if it was still the bird’s, but he was certain a part of it wasn’t his. He dragged it out of the bird and then inside him. He felt something mixed with the mana, it was a feeble feeling of a difference, something not quite mana, but connected to it.

He finished getting the mana inside him mere seconds, the feeling of the thing mixed in the mana vanishing inside him. ‘Was that the bird’s soul or something? Will it haunt me now?’ Will gave himself a quick chuckle before eating what he could of the eggs and then the bird’s corpse.

Then he set out to find more wildlife to see if he could assimilate them, and in the case he could not, they would get him more mana. With his webs he could make traps, use them to ambush and immobilize his targets. And with the cheer size of them, he doubted the boars would be able to escape if he used enough.

Will lost his perception of time, all his attention on chasing birds, deers, boars, and wild cats… Well not really cats, they look similar enough, but are a little bigger with sharper and longer teeth and claws. He actually lost part of his left front-most leg when one bit it. Will felt the pain, but it seemed distant to him, like it was not his. It permitted him to completely ignore it.

While hunting, he discovered that the size of an animal was not directly corresponding to the mana it would need to assimilate the said animal. It had to do with the mana inside the animal, and it had natural mana in it, but only the animal’s mana seemed to count towards the needed mana quantity.

When Will caught his first boar, roughly 1 hour after a dear managed to lose him, he tried assimilating it. And to his surprise, it resisted him like the bird did before. Will tried forcing the assimilation, but without any part of the boar’s mana as his own, the resistance he felt was like trying to dig through a metal wall with nails.

So he gave up trying to assimilate it, at least while it was completely awake. Will injected it a good amount of paralyzing venom, expecting to make it easier for him to force the assimilation; It did somewhat feel it become somewhat easier, but it was only on the surface. The mana deeper inside the boar totally refused to mix, and at the rate the surface one was doing, he would kill the boar by fasting it before he would take its mana.

Will was angered by the boar’s resistance. ‘You want to resist so fucking much? Okay, no problem. You want to end my attempts, I will end your life!’ Will used his mana to form a bubble around the boar. He compressed it as much as he could, and the action took nearly all of his mana, and then ended the boar’s life by injecting his dissolving liquid inside its neck.

As the boar died, mana began leaking out of him. It would take at least a day for it all to get out of the body, and Will did his all to try and harvest it all. He tried using the spider’s body to drink some of the boar’s insides and then collect the mana from inside the spider, but the body of the spider seemed to consume it to heighten its density capacity.

Will tried absorbing as much mana as the boar was leaking, but it had no tie to him, which made it difficult to control it. Fortunately Will thought about it in advance this time, using his mana in the air to keep the boar’s mana from just leaving. It did redirect the mana towards him when the pocket was full of the boar’s mana, but Will’s capacity to absorb it was inferior to the rate at which the boar leaked it.

So to avoid losing any mana, he used the spider to eat a big part of the boar’s innards. It took time for them to dissolve and the mana pressure raised enough to exit the pocket, but it was minimal, so Will did not mind too much. What puzzled him though was the mana inside the spider’s body.

It is basically his mana, as well as the spider’s. 100% his and 100% the spider’s in some equilibrium state. And right now, when the boar did not leak mana anymore, which took around 8 hours to empty itself, The mana on the upper abdomen started abnormally increasing its pressure. It was the exact symmetrical spot from where Will embedded his spherical body, while he was in the under side, the mana concentrated in the upper side.

Will tried fixing this by mixing the mana and letting the pressure even out. But it did not work, as if the mana wanted to build its own pressure in this exact spot. He thought the spider was doing it, but felt it was not. So after some time he deduced he could not do anything about it and redirected his focus on something that interested him more at the moment.

When he killed the bird, he felt something mixed with its mana while he harvested it. At that time it was so small he could barely feel anything, but with the boar it was much more evident. Will could not tell what it was, but whatever it was mixed with the boar’s mana and he felt strangely good absorbing it. The better part about it was that just like when he first harvested mana, he felt like he had a limited reserve for this kind of thing. ‘Will it make me change again if I fill it up? Well, I'll discover that soon enough I think.’ Thought Will, already searching for his next prey.