Sleeping had become infinitely easier after the wolf managed to fall asleep for a short minute and mess with its cochlea to turn off its hearing.

The constant vibrations and [Restful Awareness] helped a lot with putting it at ease, because there was a constant reminder that there was nothing walking or alive within three hundred feet.

That human was so absurdly strong that the wolf was starting to reconsider how easy it would be to hunt humans for food. There had to be a reason they were the dominant species in their own nest, right? It couldn’t just be numbers.

Something to consider when it got out of here, because truth be told, it was utterly terrified of that man, and the thought of being as far away from him as possible only spurred the wolf towards escape with more urgency.

But, it had to rest, fix its hands, and mess around with its new mana cells for a bit first. Just until the human was sufficiently far away and unlikely to come back to kill them for accidentally tailing him.

That time of rest also gave the wolf a lot of time to think about and theorize changes to itself, most of which were put on the mental backburner for later, with the exception of a few small ones like, putting a thin film of cartilage at the entrance of its ears to stop its eardrums from bursting by the machine when it walked past it. Then it checked its moss-fur changes, which would still take about two more days to finish, much to its disappointment.

That left it with a body that was half-furless, because it hadn’t considered to check how much time those changes would make, so it quickly put fur back on its body, and nudged the [Devourer] Skill into naturally letting its fur fall out when the moss would emerge and grow from underneath.

After it had finished checking itself and applying changes, it mentally prepared itself for the likely arduous task of figuring out how its mana-cells would work.

It was wrong once more, and it couldn’t be more thankful. It was actually very easy.

The wolf felt the mana in its body if it focused, a faint sensation of something being there, and all it had to do was focus on its mana-veins, and try to sort of visualize them sucking in mana instead of pushing it out, like they were used to.

That took three minutes of intense effort, but it figured out how to do it. Its mana veins couldn’t pull mana from the air, no matter how hard it tried, but the mana cells? Not only were they made to store mana from their ambient surroundings, it seemed like for one reason or another, that mana was converted to be the wolf’s mana. So taking mana from these cells felt as natural as breathing.

It wasn’t exactly sure of how it could tell, but it could. The human had different mana to itself, and the air did too. So did the moss in the rooms below. But the mana cells could somehow convert that mana.

Maybe it just wasn’t smart enough to understand the absurd complexities of the mana cells, but no matter how much it scrutinized one, it just couldn’t quite tell how it did it.

Half an hour of messing around with its mana cells later, it got a light mental prod by the symbols, and with a sense of groggy confusion, it turned aside [Devourer] and let the symbols spread out over its mind’s eye.

-Acquired Skills:

You have gained the Skill [Mana Conversion - Level 1]

A mental prod at the Skill gave it a vague understanding of taking mana and converting it to be its own, more felt and conceptualized than with actual images.

It paused, and reached for the mana veins in its throat.

And with as much focus as it could muster, it pulled.

It was like trying to suck in sentient slime through a thin straw, constantly trying to return back into the greater world and pulling itself away.

But it could feel that foreign mana, interact with it, try and exert control over it. It didn’t know how, why, or what changed, but it could.

And as the wolf held on, keeping the foreign mana in its throat and trying to suck it into its mana heart, something quickly changed, the mana somehow becoming less… thick, easier to move. The Skill was doing something but it wasn’t sure what.

Shortly after the mana began moving through the mana veins in its throat, through its physical flesh, it came into contact with its mana cells. Within seconds, the Mana was sucked into its mana cells, and the wolf felt that mana become its own, the cells almost buzzing with energy.

It hurriedly sucked that mana out of the cells and into its mana heart through its phantom veins, allowing them to continue the process, watching in wonder as a steady stream of mana trickled into its phantom heart.

A stream which stopped within mere seconds, as that same phantom heart was completely full of mana already, the mana pooling in its veins instead.

Without much thought, it activated a full body [Echoes of Oblivion], just to burn some energy, and was almost snapped out of its rest as the sensational equivalent of a billion worms crawling through its flesh into the open air repeated itself, the mana veins quickly moving through every tiny bit of its extra and added flesh.

It had forgotten that it hadn’t activated the Skill on a lot of its body for a while.

It couldn’t help the way its body twitched and curled in discomfort, but it managed, just barely, not to wake up.

And then it was over, its body wreathed in pitch black.

The way the mana veins interacted with the mucus in its back was especially interesting. It was like they just… melted together into an incoherent, easily changeable blanket.

The wolf kept the Skill running to burn mana, and continued practicing how to suck in mana through the air, trying to make the difficult process something it could do on a whim, while doing other things, such as fighting. If it somehow ran out of mana, completely, it wanted to be able to use this to quickly recover something.

It was honestly not nearly as excited as it should have been for something this monumental. [Echoes of Oblivion] was a very cheap Skill to use, mana wise, and the only Skill it could actually pour any substantial amount of mana into was [Sonic Blast], which was more of a suicide attack than something it could genuinely use in a fight.

It considered the possibility of pouring all of its energy into a single blast, and then adding on the mana storage it had in its body, and then holding the Skill in place while it sucked in mana through the air and continued to pump it into the Skill.

The ball of air and sound probably wouldn’t even leave its throat before detonating and turning its body into a messy pile of gore. It was already difficult holding it all compressed when it had one fifth the mana capacity, back when it fought the ‘Roof-Tumor’.

So yes, it wasn’t particularly excited about potentially quintupling both its mana capacity, and regeneration. Useful to have just in case, but that was about it, really. It was more excited about realizing that practicing while it slept was something it should have been doing a lot more of, considering how many Levels it got from just one nap. Its mind felt a lot less well-rested in comparison to its body by the end of it, but it was worth it.

[Restful Awareness] had gone up to Level nineteen from seventeen, [Mana Perception] and [Mana Manipulation] had gone up a Level, to Level twelve and Level eleven, [Echoes of Oblivion] went to Level seven, which simply made it feel a bit more fluid and faster to use, and its new Skill had gone up to Level two by the time its body decided it had to get up after doing the same thing for hours in its lucid dream-like fugue.

It fixed its cochlea to turn its hearing back on, and after squeezing a bit of adrenaline out of its stomach sack, it opened its eyes to a familiar room, its head still half-wedged beneath the human’s shoulder for protection from the noise.

After a short moment of wondering why everything looked strange, it remembered that it had [Echoes of Oblivion] still running, and quickly cut it off, confirming for one final time that there was nothing alive for hundreds of feet.

Wow its lower body was absurdly itchy. Growing moss was painless, but still annoying.

The human, unfortunately, did not have the luxury of being able to control her body, so she’d been awake the entire time, and it showed. Even the way she moved her mana felt sluggish and tired, half-aware. Like someone half-heartedly stirring liquid.

The only difference that made to the wolf as it quickly laid on her front and attached her to its back, was that she provided not even the faintest grumble of disapproval, sighing out a ‘Finally!’ sound in a relieved sort of tone.

After rolling over onto its feet, it began moving towards the machine in a hurried trot.

“I’m getting motion sickness…” The human groaned in complaint and it chuffed in acknowledgement, speeding up its pace. It too wanted to get out as soon as possible.

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“Oh you- you cheeky shit. I bet you understand me and you’ve just been fucking with me the entire time.” She grit out with a strained, odd voice, lightly flicking its ear.

It ignored her this time, only flicking its ear back at her to smack said hand in revenge, and simply continued moving across the room, mildly flinching with every explosion, feeling the human hiss and trying to maneuver her arm to cover both her ears, to little success.

It paused for a moment, its trot slowing, and extended a couple of the larger mucus veins to her head.

The human jerked her neck inwards as if to hide it between her shoulders with a yelp, and it grumbled, knowing full well that her eardrums would definitely burst if it just walked her past the machine.

Much to its annoyance though, the human was squirming and trying to brush away the veins. It grumbled, and wrapped them around her tucked in neck like a collar, before snaking smaller veins up to her ears and enclosing them, making sure the mucus wouldn’t melt too deep into her ear canal.

It wasn’t sure if that would do anything to her fragile human biology, but it would definitely be annoying.

As was the human, with her constant gagging and squirming.

“This ssoooo fuuuucking gross,-” She paused for a dry heave. “F-Fuck this is so weird. And you’ve fed me blood through a vein-straw. I should probably stop talking to myself actually. Can you just... grumble at me at least, so I can pretend we’re talking? Not sure that I’d hear it but I can feel it through your back.” The human slowly rambled, almost sleepily, gesticulating randomly with her arm.

The wolf ignored her, passing one, two, three machines, and then it turned to the left, clumsily stepping over tools, and climbing up the makeshift ramp of rubble that led to the jagged hole in the wall.

Part of it was curious and wanted to look at the machine, what was making that massive bang, where exactly that light was coming from in the machine, but another, bigger part of it, was fairly sure it had felt an exit in the form of one of the humans’ smoke-spewing pipes, at the very edge of its sensory range.

It had been boosted by the human, and it was brief, but it roughly remembered where it was. And was thus very invested in leaving as soon as possible to get there.

As it stepped out of the room and into a pitch black, twenty foot tall and wide tunnel, its nose was assaulted with the familiar miasma of sewer filth and rotting corpses. It paused, realizing all those odd lumps on the floor were the rats it had been feeling before the human came along.

And they were all dead, perfectly intact, besides the dozens of various flies and insects slowly eating them apart. Even if about half of them were on the other side of the tunnel, and thus, were about ten feet of sewer water away, sprawled out on the stone walkways flanking the waters.

It turned its head to the right, deeper down the tunnel, even seeing some of those odd, glowing acid-flies, all busy melting a rodent the size of the human’s head.

Greed and hunger warred with impatience.

The victor was clear in seconds.

It reached down, bit a rodent, shook off a bunch of the insects, flies and various other weird crawling creatures that infested it, to the best of its ability, and using its rather large teeth and its left hand, it held onto the rodent, biting off large chunks of it at a time, brackish blood dripping down its chest.

The human jerked on its back, swatting at the air, and it twisted its head to the best of its ability, feeling how she was trying to mash her forehead into the back of its neck.

After a short moment of incomprehension, it realized the problem.

Insects, and open, fleshy holes. Not a great combination for the living. Or the dead. So it extended two mucus veins to cover her eyes, making a squishy, slimy blindfold.

The human let out a strange grunt, before gritting out a ‘Thanks’ sound, and the wolf returned to its snacking.

Eating with human hands was so much easier. It could just hold onto the thing with one hand, twist it around however it wanted, bite off chunks. Not having to waste half its eating time to maneuver or hold down its food against the floor was so nice. And it had to deal with much less dirt and waste on its already filthy food.

Maybe it should add a pair of long, thin, human hands, try to find someplace comfortable to tuck them into, keep them out of the way until it had to use them. It would be nice to be able to fiddle with human devices and hold onto its food like this, once it changed its hands back into paws. Grappling with things in a fight would also be easier.

Another idea for the backburner.

Eating all the rodents in the tunnel would take way too long, so for once, despite its greed, the wolf darted to the ones that seemed the least bloated or chewed through, scarfing them down with impressive speed, feeling that soul-deep hunger be ever so slightly sated.

After the tenth of the fifty or so rodents it felt, it decided that it was already wasting too much time, and reluctantly turned away from its free meal to quickly move down the tunnel.

Just a hundred or so feet down the square tunnel, it split into three different paths. To the right was an open door that led down to some kind of room that transitioned into a tunnel which gently curved around and under the sewer floods. In the middle, the tunnel simply continued, with no seeming end in sight, and to the left, just across the door, the tunnel split.

The likely exit to this place it had felt was somewhere to its left, so it quickly half-ran to a rusty little bridge, curving over the sewer waters below, the only ‘safe’ way of crossing the sewer stream.

It was rusty beyond belief, but as the wolf tapped its knuckles against its base, it felt both thick and sturdy, so it quickly clambered up the two steps and made its way across.

“Wait, nonono! Wrong way! Turn around!” The human said in a hurried voice as she curled her body to the left to point behind them, her voice barely audible over the explosion’s echoes and trickling waters. and it stopped in the middle of the bridge to briefly check its surroundings for threats.

Nothing. It wasn’t sure why the human was getting worked up and it didn’t care at the moment.

Her protests to turn around grew ever more annoying as it continued down the tunnels, trying to use her hand to grab its snout and turn its head around, tugging and pointing back with urgency.

But there was nothing behind them.

Frankly, she was starting to piss it off. But maybe she was hallucinating, so the wolf tried to be a little more patient than usual, only letting off warning growls and grumbles in reply to her constant pestering.

Until she grabbed onto its ear and tried to yank its head around.

It stopped in its tracks, a sharp snarl rumbling out of its chest, tensing in warning. Even if she couldn’t hear the snarl, she would damn sure feel it.

The human’s hand jerked back, a faint scent of fear in the air, quickly retreating. She mumbled something, sounding defeated, and finally seemed to give up, going limp against its back.

It curled its lips back down to cover its teeth, and pushed forwards, consciously deciding to forget about her annoying paranoia episode, or whatever that was.

The tunnel continued for a while, eventually starting to curve upwards, the flat stone beneath its hands changing to carved steps. The rushing rivers and trash they carried raced past them as they quickly made their way up to the strange room it had felt.

It had quite a few encounters with stray packs of rodents, but they were barely worthy of note. It just had to wait until they were close, and then it swept them aside into the water to be carried away by the stream. And if they were on the opposite side of the tunnel to its right, they would do it by themselves, throwing themselves into the water without thought.

The tunnel curved right after a couple hundred feet, and started to slowly flatten, the slick stone turning flat once more. There were various random tunnels and doors along the way there, all leading to rooms seemingly designed to just… exist, empty and without purpose besides maybe being useful for taking shortcuts through the immense amount of stone around them, rather than following the tunnels. It didn’t go into any of them.

It paused to punch the floor, hard enough to wince, all of its antennae writhing against the floor. Its head shot up, ears rigidly pointing up.

How did it not notice that before…?