Aaron awoke the next morning and made himself a quick breakfast, excited to start his day. He left his camp set up, trusting the Beast Repelling Bell to keep his supplies safe. Today he set off at an opposite angle to the previous day, moving into a part of the forest he had not yet explored. He spent the remainder of his morning picking herbs, before having a lunch of pre packaged rations. His lunch was followed by another hour of picking herbs as he meandered through the forest.
He was picking the latest herb when he felt searing agony as something tore into his left side. He was tossed through the air, rapidly disoriented by the world spinning, before he slammed into the trunk of a great tree. Aaron shakily raised his head to see a massive metallic gray bull. The beast had to be eight feet at the shoulder and fully ten or eleven feet long. It stood, snorting in anger, horns curling forward over its snout while the right horn dripped with his blood. The beast, a Mighty Iron Bull, stamped at the ground as Aaron hauled himself to his feet. He activated his arc barrier as the beast lowered its head in preparation for a charge.
A swift bolt rush carried him out of the beast's path, even as it turned slightly. One of the beast’s horns tore a furrow in the tree as it passed, before moving another two dozen feet before bringing itself to a skidding halt. Aaron bolt rushed forward as the beast turned, composing an electric helix drill as he moved. He ducked under the beast’s swinging horns as he came into range. He moved straight towards the bull’s chest, striking with his helix drill before rolling under the creature’s body. He rotated over his shoulder, coming to his feet facing the beast as it began to low in pain.
Feeling a flash of danger, he activated his dancing leaf step and leaned backwards. The wind whistled as the beast’s back hoofs passed through the space his head had previously occupied. He rolled to the side as the beast turned to face him, its eyes reddened with fury. Aaron found himself pushing the dancing leaf step to its absolute limits dodging the enraged bull.
He ducked, dove, and sidestepped as the beast attempted to either crush him under hoof or gore him with swings of its horned head. His head began to swim from the blood loss, the battle becoming one of attrition. Both he and the bull were slowing from their wounds, making it merely a matter of who would collapse first. The beast caught him with several horn swipes as they both slowed leaving shallow bleeding furrows across his arms and chest.
Aaron realized with a sinking feeling that the bull would outlast him at the current rate. Knowing he had no other choice, he bet everything on one final gamble. He spun up a second electric helix drill on his right hand before stepping forward and seizing one of the beast’s horns with his left hand. Gritting his teeth in pain, he could feel both of his arms beginning to fracture under the strain. His left arm trembled and tore from the effort of holding the beast’s head in place for even a few seconds. While his right began to crack under the force of his own technique, which he drove up into the underside of the bull’s head. He stumbled backwards as the beast collapsed like a puppet with cut strings.
Feeling the numbness in both of his arms and the wooziness from his blood loss, he staggered to the beast's corpse. He jerked his torso to fling his barely functional right arm onto the carcass, which he stored in his ring. Aaron stumbled off into the forest, his vision swimming as he searched for a relatively safe place to rest. Time seemed to bleed together, so it could have been minutes or hours before he stumbled onto a cave leading into the side of another bluff. He could see that this cave went much farther into the rock than the wolf den.
He stumbled almost a hundred feet into the cave before he collapsed onto the right wall. Aaron was now profoundly grateful that he had stored several of his more powerful pills outside of their crystal containers in his ring this morning. While it meant a slight reduction in their efficacy, it did mean that he could retrieve them with both arms mostly out of commission. He struggled to bring his right hand up to his mouth, before placing one of his high grade healing pills directly into his mouth. After swallowing the pill, he allowed himself to slide into his internal sight. He knew that this left him vulnerable to predators, but he was currently incapable of fighting off said predators regardless.
Aaron began to circulate his essence as the pill dissolved, releasing its medicinal essence into his system. He cycled his essence as fast as possible, allowing the medicinal essence to reach every part of his body. His own essence was drawn into his wounds to fuel and accelerate the healing process. He completely lost his sense of time, cycling his essence as his wounds slowly recovered. He slowly returned to his senses to find his position illuminated by early morning sunlight. Standing, he washed his skin with the contents of one of his water vessels, before changing into a fresh set of robes.
He was about to exit the cave and return to camp when his cosmic insight kicked in. It directed him back into the cavern complex, which stretched off into the darkness. Now having more experience with the ability, he could tell that it was guiding him towards an object. Retrieving and activating a Lightstone, he set off into the caves. He spent the next couple of hours moving carefully through the caves. The sensation of his cosmic insight slowly grew stronger as he traveled.
Eventually, he came upon a small cave with one wall that glittered under the light. Closer examination revealed a small vein of green metallic ore that snaked off down the exit tunnel. Consultation of his primer indicated that this was most likely Verdant Growth Iron ore. This metal was known both for its exceptional channeling of wood elemented essence and its usage in healing arrays. Forming only in dangerous high essence areas made this ore both rare and valuable. Wanting to know exactly how large this ore vein was, he followed it through the tunnel. The tunnel was some fifty feet long, letting out into a much larger cavern.
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This cave had forty foot ceilings and appeared to be about two hundred feet across. That image was quickly broken as he turned to his right, gazing out onto a truly immense cavern. His current position was high up on one wall, the floor some hundred feet below him. The cavern stretched well beyond the reach of his light stone, lit dimly by bioluminescent moss that grew in patches across the walls and ceiling. The cave widened as it led away from him, forming what appeared to be a rough trapezoidal shape.
Aaron noticed something glint in the dim cave, feeling his heart seize as he came to a realization. The spaces between the various stalagmites and stalactites were filled with a single, gargantuan spider web. He began to slowly walk back towards the tunnel when over a hundred points of reflected light appeared. His slow retreat turned to quick backwards jog as the nearest spiders turned to view the source of foreign light. The cavern filled with a chorus of high keening cries as his view was impeded by the tunnel walls. He turned and fled down the tunnels as quickly as he was able, his steps hounded by the skittering of dozens of arachnid legs.
The tunnels began to bleed together as he fled from the pursuing beasts. His rushing stride turned into a headlong tumble as he shot straight off of a ledge he had not seen. He spun for several seconds before suffering an impact that drove the air from his lungs. His instinctual inhalation drew in only frigid water, causing his heart to pound even faster. Aaron struggled to orient himself for several terrifying moments, before realizing that the entire riverbed was coated in glowing moss. Rotating in the current, he drove himself above the surface, immediately coughing up lungful's of water. He spent several seconds heaving massive gasping breaths, before looking up and seeing that the underground river had dragged him several hundred feet downstream.
The ledge he had fallen from was liberally covered in spiders the size of German shepherds, who seemed deeply unwilling to enter the water after him. His heart sank as he looked for another exit from the river chamber, only to see every tunnel exit boiling with arachnid bodies. These beasts clearly knew the tunnel system better than he did, and had been moving around to cut off his paths of escape. One of the spiders, no doubt driven by fury at the intrusion onto their home cavern, flung itself from a nearby ledge.
Aaron dove as the creature fell towards him, watching from under the surface as the beast crashed into the river. The spider almost immediately began to flounder as water saturated the hairs that covered its body. The extra weight dragged it towards the riverbed as it thrashed. His gaze was drawn past the flailing creature, catching on an area where the ever present azure moss grew up a submerged tunnel forty feet upstream.
Aaron swam as hard as was safe, making slow but sure progress towards the tunnel. He received a nasty surprise as he swam around the dying spider who, knowing that its fate was sealed, pushed forward and seized him. The beast’s fangs were held at bay as he managed to grasp just before its pedipalps, digging his fingers into the creature’s carapace. Weighed down by the still struggling spider, he was dragged back downstream.
Seeing no other option, he began swimming with more strength, compensating for the extra weight and his occupied arm, feeling his bones creak under the force. It took fifteen minutes, and several trips for air, to make it to the tunnel. His strain increasing on the fifth minute when the spider died and ceased struggling. The pull of the current let up as he swam into the tunnel, which took him a further ten minutes to traverse. His lungs were screaming when he hauled himself out of the water, and he took several moments to suck in deep lungfuls of air.
Looking up, he saw that he was in a contained cave with the only entrance being the submerged tunnel. It took him several minutes to pry the legs of the spider's corpse from around his chest. Casting the carcass onto the cave floor he then turned his mind to other matters. He was soaked to the bone, and the cave was far too humid for him to air dry. He considered the issue as he shed his wet clothing and laid it out on the stone floor.
The only idea that seemed feasible to him was to figure out how to use his elemented essence to create actual lightning. While his master had informed him that the feat was possible, there hadn’t been time to teach him the actual method. Luckily, if he could figure it out, he had a small stock of wood in his spatial ring as a contingency. It took him over an hour to come up with a method that worked, and he was beginning to shiver by the end. The method he came up with was born of his recollection of his electric helix drill technique, where the refined and unrefined forms of lightning essence had reacted together. Both forms had created perpendicular wave forms, which likely represented the two fields that create electromagnetic waves.
He held up each hand, gathering a rough sphere of unrefined essence in one and a smooth ball of refined essence in the other. Using the isolated portion of the shocking strike, he elemented both spheres with lightning, turning them olive and neon yellow, respectively. Attempting to combine them at a one to one ratio caused them to combine into a single dual toned sphere. Using a ratio of two parts olive to one part neon created a nearly invisible distortion above his left hand. A quick test with a silver piece caused the coin to lean away from the clearly magnetic sphere. Finally, a ratio of two parts neon to one part olive created a barely coherent sphere of lightning in his right hand which arced to his fingers and palm. These arcs created a brief tingling sensation, but had no other noticeable effect.
Using his ability to create true lightning, Aaron lit a fire in the center of the cave. Within half an hour he was warmed back up, the cavern holding the heat well. The smoke from the fire snaked up through thin cracks in the ceiling. Now warm and dry, he changed into a new set of robes, before moving to examine the carcass of the spider beast. Consultation of his bestiary indicated that the ore cave held a large nest of Obsidian Razorweb Spiders. These beasts tended to be somewhere between the ninth and twelfth levels of the Bestial Power realm. This was equivalent to Bone Condensing and Marrow Cleansing in a human. The Bestial Power realm had twelve stages to the six in Body Tempering. The single exception was the nest’s queen, who would be somewhere in the Rising Mind realm. The nest would likely comprise two to three hundred regular spiders.
Aaron wouldn’t be able to fight off so many enemies, each so much stronger than him. They would not stop hunting him for weeks, perhaps months. He had two months of food in his spatial ring, there was only a small chance that the beasts would call off their hunt before he ran out of food. He would have to cultivate as far as possible, closing the gap between him and a typical spider. He merely had to hope that he would be strong enough to escape their pursuit by the time his food ran out.