I don’t know if there is a consciousness controlling the world, but it felt like it was finally helping me.

Just a single day after I expanded the jobs I could give my spiders, a family of seven squirrels entered my area.

Now I may not have immediate access to the mana inside the squirrels, and the webs my spiders made won’t be powerful enough to catch them, yet, but perhaps my spider assassin can kill one or two. Or maybe they would be willing to stay here and become an addition to my little ecosystem.

Seven squirrels are holding a similar amount of mana as my seven rabbits, my former most expensive animal, so having an expansion of my larger animals is also a plus.

I first spend some mana to do my daily spider enhancements on my four spiders, and then immediately excitedly move my attention to my new residents. For now, they are exploring two of my trees. I have little hope that they would be able to find something there that would be better than what they could find in the region they came from. But I am hopeful that they would be able to sense that there is also very little danger here. Having them live here and hopefully bring food from other areas would be a very welcome improvement to my situation.

I look at their bodies and immediately see how they have been improving and what else I can enhance. For now, they have been focusing on arm and leg strength. Probably an automatic result from always being on the move and climbing trees, and these improvements should have made them much faster.

Less than five percent have been going to their teeth, and I can’t see any other weapon on them so I doubt they would be a decent fighter or protector. At most they can run away when they sense something powerful nearby.

Ears are receiving a minor boost, and their eyes and nose should not be entirely useless. Perhaps I should send some mana into their fur too so that they could survive an ambush or first attack before they manage to run away. I also wonder if I were to add mana to their bones if that should make them denser to increase strength, or lighter so they can run faster.

I again think of something I should start practicing sooner rather than later. I can control where mana goes, but I can’t do anything about how it reacts. I have seen that it slows down the rate that particles move when I attach it to water in the air. And I know that if I add it to matter, it will take on the properties of that matter, such as can be seen with the venom sacs. But that also means that mana can have different reactions.

There is a lot of water in the bodies of the animals I am improving, but those particles aren’t slowing down when reacting to mana, it just expands as the other parts do. From this, I might infer that either a combination of my intent and the recipients will form the result of the mana boost, or that mana reacts differently depending on the environment as well as the material it is attached to.

If I could control what mana does better, I could probably choose to have mana become more bone leading to a size increase or have the bone contract increasing density and therefore strength and maybe even add hollow parts to reduce the weight of the bones to enhance speed.

Perhaps I could use mana to change color to give my spider assassin and spider stalker some camouflage. I have been ignoring the senses of my spiders as they are good enough as they are, but what if I were able to add ears to my spiders so that they can sense prey or predators coming from further away before they can see them. It would be an option of camouflage turns out to be impossible.

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As I keep dreaming about doing things that I as of yet am unable to do, I notice one of the squirrels getting very close to my spider assassin.

I have not seen anything that the squirrels have which would be able to counteract poison once it is injected and I am sure that the assassin who holds the most potent venom of anything I have seen in my life, could kill or at least severely hurt it if it can be injected.

I am not sure how I feel about this, though. I did hold some hope that leaving a safe impression of my zone on the squirrel family would convince them to stay here. But as there isn’t much mana going around I very much feared them moving on without leaving anything behind.

Should my spider assassin kill one, it would both guarantee some profit as well as significantly lower the chances of the rest of them staying here. I guess certainty trumps chance. Though there isn’t anything I would be able to do either way, anyway. 

As I had little hope for the webs, I have noticed that one of the squirrels got “caught” in a web of one of my spider webmakers I hadn’t enhanced further. As expected, the web does practically nothing. Maybe it slowed it down for half a second, and perhaps the threads cause some irritation on the skin. But that is it. I think my spider has been hurt more by this than the squirrel was. And annoying it both reduces the chances of it wanting to stay here and doesn’t bring me any benefits, so it is a double loss here.

I am now focusing back on my assassin. It has hidden on a low branch of a tree between some leaves. With its dark color, it sort of blends into the shadows, and the squirrels haven’t focused on their senses anyway. As it is, I would expect this ambush to be successful.

As before with the test with the rabbit and the grass, exciting myself does not mean time moves faster nor would any creature, either my own or one of the squirrels, move according to my will. I don’t want just to sit here watching so I choose a blade of grass, my cheapest upgradable living being and only see if I can do anything with mana.

My first few tests should be in seeing if mana reacts to my will. In the past, I had seen that most of the mana was used for growing, so I figure that should be where its instincts would be telling mana to go. First, I enhance the mana around the blade and immediately notice that I was wrong. The mana is mostly flowing to the stems, which is where the mana after my enhancements is most prevalent.

The next test should be with grass grown after my improvements. I don’t know if it is a result of meddling with their parents or if it is mana reacting to my subconscious desire, but new grasses are following my previously desired growth path. This is interesting. I have opened up different progressions for my spiders, and if my subconscious is allowing for growth, then whatever causes the initial differentiation in my creatures would probably lead them down one of the preset paths.

As such, most likely my will, being the controller of mana, creates the environment and possibilities. And something within living beings individually would be the one choosing the possible path.

To test this, I need to start watching new grass and change about half of them to a new type. This should open up a second path, and theoretically, that would mean that a certain number of grasses would have enhanced growth, and a certain amount of them would have the new enhancements.

I should choose an improvement tomorrow, and this sounds like the tests I will do tomorrow instead of my spiders, provided my spiders today prove to be strong enough.

While my attention was entirely focussed on the grass, the spider assassin had ambushed the squirrel. The fangs could barely break the skin as is, but it got through deep enough to be able to inject about a third of the venom that a normal attack would.

It didn’t immediately kill the squirrel, but it did cause the squirrel to fall off the branch, without the spider, and start twitching on the ground. Slowly the spider assassin moved towards the squirrel and bites again.

This time without any jerky movements, the spider can inject a full load of venom killing the squirrel. I sense five points of mana flowing into my area, which was a necessary move after the spider upgrades for my sense of safety.

I also see that just over half a mana point flows into the spider which upgrades its venom glad twice and its fangs once. I hope that this sudden increase doesn’t make it die again like with my first tests. However, we can undoubtedly conclude that we have a successful build here, unlike the web spider.