After a night of reflecting on a disappointing day yesterday where none of my tests showed any results, I figure I should probably start enhancing my spider during the night. Then I will have an entire day for testing. First, I cycle through my current spiders and look for the one which currently has the most potent venom.

I settle on one of the smallest hunter spiders around. I can tell that its venom sac has been fed the most mana by far and it must have been hunting using that venom as it does not seem physically imposing enough to have caught prey any other way.

Slowly during the night, I pump 0.1 units of mana into the spider and direct it into the venom sac. The sac does not get larger per se, but the muscles surrounding it get stronger and I can tell that the venom produced is changing, hopefully for the better.

With the mana taking effect and showing visible results, I cant wait to see what the venom can inflict on its prey. As my default method of passing the time is to practice my mana unit measurements, I may have been practicing right above the enhanced spider. And what do you know, the water drop not only wakes it but sends it scurrying about. Well, I guess as it is awake now it might as well go hunting, right?

And unfortunately, that too does not seem to be the case. I wonder why my animals hate me and keep refusing to do the things I want them to do. Yesterday the rabbit took forever to eat the grass I was guiding it towards, and now the spider doesn’t take to me waking it up and finds a more sheltered place to go back to sleep.

So I guess I do actually have to wait for the morning to come before it will hunt on its own. Perhaps at some point, I can attract some spiders who are active during the night. That way, I would be able to alternate between day and night spiders?

Come morning, my newly enhanced spider goes hunting. Naturally, it hunts for its regular prey. I am not sure if it knows that its venom is now stronger or not, but I know that it isn’t killing anything outside of its norm. So now how do I get it to hunt?

And come to think of it, what should it hunt?

I can try my trick with the walls again and see if I can lock up my new killer spider with a rabbit and have them fight it out.

Having decided that a rabbit versus spider arena, in the confinement of my mana walls would be the most expedient method of testing, I now create the stage with two hallways towards it — one for my spider, and the other for the smallest of my rabbits.

Naturally, neither of them follow the hallway, and I keep having to create new corridors towards the arena. And when finally the spider has entered, the rabbit has left already and does not seem to want to go back.

Exasperation seems to be my newest state of mind. I think I am going about this all wrong. Rather than do tests and hope for the best, it may be better just to start enhancing. If I were to create my own powerful army here that could kill anything that comes by, perhaps that would be the way to go. Even if I don’t know how mighty exactly something is, stronger is better.

As my zone contains an additional five hunting spiders, I enhance all of their venom sacs with the same amount as I had with the one test subject before bringing my total to 6 hunting spiders with varying degrees of enhanced venom sacs.

Luckily I am now aware of how the mana evolutions work, and by bringing the mana percentage of the venom sacs up, it increases the mana that will go there in the future as well. This way, my hunting spiders may be smaller, but they will also be more dangerous.

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An added advantage here is that if the issue of my first hunting spider test subject were that its body size needed an amount of food it couldn’t provide anymore, this issue would be solved this way too. It would be like catching two flies in my web, one would be to see the improved killing power, and the other would be to have eliminated one of the options that might have been the negative side effect.

I also use this time to enhance the web making abilities of all my web spiders. Here too, I use 0.1 points of mana as enhancements. They won’t be able to catch a bird or anything more substantial than what they are preying on now, but perhaps if they were to eat more, they would get more mana and enhance themselves further.

With these minor upgrades done, I go back to testing myself. I doubt my spiders will be doing anything noteworthy with their current updates besides be slightly more successful hunting. And considering I hadn’t been keeping score with how successful each of them was before, I wouldn’t even notice a difference.

So first things first, Looking at myself I hold about 500 points of mana that is me but compressed a lot. The atmospheric mana currently not in use, based on the observed areas would be about seventy points right now, but based on my previous experiment if it were to drop too low, I would lose the ability to feel the mana.

I also know based on feeling that before I created the mana wall around my zone, I was losing about ten mana per week due to the gravitational effect of the mana of the surrounding areas. That means that if I hadn’t built the wall when I did, I would have been out of mana in less than five weeks and even fewer if the drainage is exponential.

My spiders have about one point of mana stored in them without my interference, but now they are at 1.1 points of mana. During my first spider experiments, I pumped about five points into them in a short timeframe. That might have been part of the issue, too much in too little time.

This fact was especially overkill considering that by merely changing the current configuration of mana in their bodies, I can guide their future growth. It seems like I am too rushed. I have already ensured a status quo, and can now take my time growing right. I also need to make sure that I don’t get into a situation where a species dies out in my zone from too much experimentation.

Just taking stock, I currently have a family of five rabbits in my area and a total of 12 spiders. Split in the middle between web and hunting, and hunting further split between venomous and overpowering with the venomous ones remaining small. Insects come and go, and die quickly but also have a high reproduction rate, so I think I can ignore their numbers for now though they are reasonably ample battery of mana as a whole.

My five trees, though towering behemoths and far overshadowing anything else, merely hold twenty-five mana points total between them. Flowers are relatively rare in my area, so a mere four points are stored between them, but the most significant storage of mana is in the grass. Each blade holds little, but there is so much of them. If I were just to cull one area of the field that alone would make me significant stronger. But it would also impede my future options of attracting mana, and it would force some of my current residents to move on.

I think for now I will do one enhancement of 0.1 points per spider per day for this week. That should make them significantly stronger by the end of this week, and perhaps then the effects would be noticeable. That would then lower my available points by the end of the week, if nothing unexpected were to happen, down to 65.

I will also keep three points in reserve in case either a rabbit gets pregnant, or one of the spiders lays eggs so that I can see if enhancing a creature before it is born will have a stronger effect. At the very least I should be able to guide their future evolutions right from the start that way. Unfortunately, I seem to be unable to change a development that has already happened by detaching the mana already attached. It appears that once mana has attached itself, it will be stuck there as long as there is life.

So unless something happens, this will be my life for the coming week. Spend a short time upgrading my spiders, pay attention to possible reproductive activities of my spiders or rabbits, and spend the rest of the days and nights wasting time. It will be boring, but it will be productive.