My eyes open to the light of the room.

Ah, shoot.

I wasn’t able to keep my autoscan active through my sleep tonight.

Getting up quickly, I try to remind myself of my plan. Back in my old world, I had a lot of trouble remembering things and needed a planner to keep track of things. Strangely enough, since I’ve been here, I could only feel myself thinking clearer.

Could it be the healing constitution? I should probably do some testing to see how much I’ve improved.

Still, I only feel comfortable with my schedule when I have a planner of sorts. Though I may not need it, I’d still like to have one… but back to what I planned.

Today I will work on my workouts, the wall running/shadow boxing testing, pushing my scanning limits, and awareness training. I must make my workouts, scanning workouts, and awareness training something that I complete daily. I’ve never been one for working out and always have been a late sleeper, but recently I’ve been able to get up early, with no issues.

Getting on with my day, I use my scan to practice my awareness technique and also activate the half a meter autoscan. Once I have those up and feel comfortable enough to concentrate on other things, I head out of the bedroom to check out some small rooms near to this one. In the room three down from this one, I can see quite the interesting sight.

Laid out in front of me, in the room's corner is Gong, with her spider legs curled in, but her human side resting with arms sprawled out and softly snoring, on a sloped web wall.

Ah.

Since I took her room, she probably slept in here instead. When she wakes up, I’ll see if I can take another room. It wouldn’t be right to take over her room like this, especially for the long term.

Trying not to wake her up, I quietly head back to her bedroom. Arriving back with no issues, I begin my workout. Keeping up the awareness and autoscan for training. Starting with pushups, I try to remember the correct technique, as I try to complete. Starting with one, I complete it easily. Once I get to 50 pushups is when I felt the burn. I don’t think I ever have completed this many pushups in my life at one time. I ‘push’ myself and keep going. Even as I continue, I can feel my body recovering and allowing me to go further and further. And so I push. And push. And push.

Three thousand pushups later, I feel tired from the exertion and collapse on the ground, snot running down my face and heavy breathing. I can’t even twitch my arms; I feel so tired. Even as I lay here for a single minute, somehow, I can feel my energy and body recovering, to where I felt like I only took a light jog. Not only that, but I felt my control over my awareness improve, as I strained to manage both my workouts and the technique.

What the heck is going on?! I haven’t even turned on the healing aura yet and I’m already feeling like I can do three thousand more! If this is how the healing constitution is… what will it be like if I use the healing aura?

Somehow, the thought of that scares me a little.

Nonetheless, I continue on with my workout.

Cheering me on in one corner, are the flying insects from last night. I have them doing weird arm waves in time with my movements. Funniest part about it, though? I’m starting to not have to focus on them doing the movements, since they are getting used to it.

When I catch my groove of pushups, exhaustion, and then continue, it feels like I am managing around 35 pushups a minute. When I reach around 6000 total pushups, I change to another workout. Moving from pushups to sit-ups, I similarly manage to get above 6000, before moving on to squats. From that point, I try out other exercises I vaguely remembered (and refined using scanning), but not in the same quantities. During these exercises, my shoes and socks felt pretty uncomfortable, so I took them off. As I was in the middle of a rep, I placed them to the side quickly.

In the corner of my eye, I could have sworn I saw Lin and Ai watching. However, just as I was going to turn my body to talk to them, I could see them already heading out. I could just overhear Ai, “He must be practicing some type of technique. We should leave him to it.” “W-wait, I want to…”

Eh, they are sort of right. I guess I don’t have to correct this misunderstanding. Plus, I need to finish this up. It feels like I’ve been doing this for days.

After collapsing in exhaustion, I rest for what feels like a good half hour. Once I feel completely recovered, I finish up by testing the shadow running and fighting technique.

Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

Pretty straightforward. I got my butt kicked by my own shadow.

When I finally had enough fun through punches in the air at nothing and experiencing repeated headaches, I sat down for a rest.

Taking a look around the room, I realized something. It’s actually quite difficult to figure out how much time has passed.

With all of these lights in the cave, it constantly feels like it’s daytime. My biological clock is definitely saying otherwise, though. Because of my healing constitution, I barely feel any genuine need to sleep or even eat. Mentally, though? I’m so ready for sleep.

I’m curious. Maybe I should check outside to see what time it is…

With this in mind, without putting my socks on, I grab my shoes and head up to the entrance to take a peek outside. As I head upstairs, I can see a river of spiders moving beneath the layer of webs. It reminds me of the animal shows from back home, about ants. Where you could see lines of ants flowing over and around different areas.

Maybe Gong was onto something with these spiders. If they can act like ants and are actually stronger in this world, then it might be scary to see what they could accomplish.

One the more interesting things that happen as I stare out at this river, is that I see a spider pop out, look right at me, wave, and pop back into the stream. It happens so quickly, that I blinked… and it was gone.

Did I really just see that…? Was that a hallucination?

I use my intuitive scan to see if I can find the spider, but I end up discovering something else. All along the walls, there are slight holes that reveal small, child sized tunnels. What is disturbing is that all of these tunnels have the bigger spiders traveling through them, with various things attached. Items ranging from cups of water, to eggs, are all moving within this area.

This is their ‘supply chain’.

While all of them are still tamed by me, it brings me a slight shiver to feel via the intuitive scan, the large spiders moving over and around each other.

I’m pretty sure that most spiders from my world were not social creatures. Seeing something like this makes me wonder, were they always like this or did Gong influence them? Obviously, the transportation part is Gong’s idea.

Or… was it?

Maybe, she just adapted it to her own purpose. What if these spiders were always social creatures, even if they came from different species. The signals I get from them make it feel like they never had issues between them.

I may be looking too deep into this.

With that thought in mind and a shiver in my bones, I move on from the search and discovery.

Finally reaching the main room, I pass by the room that Ai and Lin were staying in.

At a glance, it looks like they were just here. I can see in the corner, a spider places some cups of water. Without looking up at me, it heads back between the webs, into the wall.

The rest of the room appears to have blankets, cushions, and a variety of items from the shack. In separate corners are Ai’s and Lin’s stuff. The blankets on one side are laying sprawled out, like they were recently left like that. The other looks like it is well put together. I normally would think the mess side would be Lin’s, but hers is actually the neat side.

That’s a bit of a surprise. Maybe it’s because she had to help Ai around in different aspects…

Regarding Ai… Well, it looks like our worlds aren’t that different. I used to forget to fix my blankets before starting my day, as well. Though, it’s strange that Lin wouldn’t have helped Ai with hers…

Pushing that from my mind, I head to the entrance, extending out my awareness to around 10 meters, to be sure there are no dangers.

Feeling nothing, I head out to the opening of the cavern. Taking a quick glance out, I can feel my brow minutely furrow.

Oh my God, it really is nighttime. Have I been down here all day…?

Just working out and practicing things? Well, at least I feel I can go quicker with this, as I get better at working out.

Guess I should head back to the room to grab some sleep.

As I head back inside, I reduce my autoscan back to the sustainable distance.

When I do so, I notice something that had caught my interest earlier.

Looking closely at the ground, I can see the transparent lines of web I had noticed on the way in. Utilizing my new and improved scanning, I map out where they are in the room.

This could be useful in practicing to avoid walking into traps.

Using this as a goal, I try to avoid as many of the transparent lines as I can.

Somehow, I successfully avoid them all until I get to Gong’s room. As I get closer and closer to the room, I’m able to smell the thick musk of sweat emanate from that direction. It’s pretty clear what it was from.

Oh no.

I totally didn’t consider how bad it would smell when I work out in a room, especially with the intensity of the workouts I did!

God, I’ll need to figure out how to air out this room.

Double timing it to the entrance of the room, I hear strange sounds coming from the room and am shocked by a disturbing sight.

Rolling around in the portion of her room that I was working out in is Gong.

When I say rolling around, I mean literally. She seems to be in a revolving pattern of rubbing her legs on the ground and then bringing her face to the floor… Which she then rubs her face into, with loud sniffs.

I can just barely hear her whispering to herself.

*SNNNNNIIIFFFF*

“Ohmigod, it smells so good. What the heck is this?! And why does the whole room smell like this?” *Snnnniiiifff* “Seriously, what is this?!”

…

I am so shocked by this sight that I just stand there without moving. As this continues, without her noticing me, I finally decide to head over to the room she slept in previously.

I… think I’ll just sleep here for the night.

As I walk over to the room, as I get to the entranceway of that enclave, I realize I just stepped on one of the transparent lines. Almost immediately, I hear the noises from Gong’s room stop.

Ah.

So, it is what I thought. This must be an alert system for Gong. It’s a good thing I didn’t trip any while I was in that room…

Heading into the room, I can feel myself burning up a bit.

Making sure to go through the nightly ritual of maintaining my awareness and the autoscan, I nod off to sleep in a position not unsimilar to Gong the night before.