I bit my lip.

Surely Edgar couldn’t object to me taking a few of the bulbs, right? I would leave plenty of them growing in the surrounding area, which should ensure the environment was able to make up for the small loss.

Extending a touch of life mana into Enhance Plant Life, I connected to three of the opal snowdrops, gently pushing through the snow to dig them out.

My quarry in hand, I headed back to where I’d be setting up camp for the night, and with the help of a stick, dug out a small space for snowdrops to rest in. I unslung my backpack and marched around the site I’d be sleeping, moving in three large squares, forming Spatial Anchors at the edges, and then connecting them with my tripwire spell.

With that done, I buried the mass of vials from my backpack in the snow, sprinkling them with one of my scent suppression potions, and leaving three out for the morning.

I pulled the spare sticks of solidified death mana back into my spirit, added on the extra layers of clothing, then wrapped myself up in the tarp like it was a massive blanket, bunding myself into a cocoon.

Even with the power of my warming potion running through me, and swaddled in the tarp, it got cold, and it wasn’t normal cold. There was a depth to this cold that I’d never experienced before, forced to sleep on the ground in the middle of winter. There was a bitterness and harshness to the chill that felt every bit as sharp as the bite of a spell in the middle of a battle, but where a fight was a hot, rapid affair, this was a cold, long slog. There was no mercy from the frigid air, even as I continually tried to bury myself deeper

At several points throughout the night, I was awoken by the snapping of twigs as the snow built up. At one point, a clump of snow smacked down onto my face, and I burst up in a panic, thinking that I was under attack.

Worse was when something crossed over the ward lines, and the mental alarm bells triggered. I burst up, teleporting out of the makeshift sleeping bag that I’d made, and spread my Briarthreads out around me, while fueling my Vampiric Senses.

As the darkness of the night faded into a blue-gray that was easier to make out, I felt another alarm pinging in my mind, and then a third, and a fourth. I sniffed the air, but they had no scent I could pick up on. The forest was full of smells, of course, magnified many times over by the power of the spell, but nothing was coming from the direction of the pings.

They were still some ways away, having only broached the first layer of my alarms, but I spread my mana senses out in that direction to get a sense of what was going on.

There were four of them, much like my mana had suggested, but each of them was draped with a mixture of lunar, mental, knowledge, and abnegation mana that made it hard to get a solid grip on their power, like trying to hold a shadow in my hands.

If I’d been in the middle of a crowd in Mossford, I’d have let that be. But as it was…

I slammed into them with the full force of my senses, and while I couldn’t get a sense for the specific spells they had, I was more than able to distinguish their levels of power.

One of them was third gate. They weren’t an especially powerful third gate, far weaker than any of the monsters I’d faced in the idyll-flume, but still a third gate. Another was second gate, on the upper end, ready to break into third gate soon, while the last two were first gate, and only on the upper end.

With my spatial and life sense, I got a general idea of their shape – larger than a fox, but smaller than a wolf. Coyote, maybe?

Interestingly, as I slammed my mana senses against them, they flinched back, despite them having a power advantage. Given their magic, I thought they were likely ambush predators, so I might be able to drive them off by just scaring them.

Channeling Witch Eyes, I chained a few Foxseps forwards, and watched with my mana senses as the forms reacted to my rapid approach. A moment later, they turned and ran, and I let out a sigh of relief.

At least until Edgar’s mana filled the air, and suddenly the coyotes turned and started running at me.

“Primes,” I swore, then began preparing my mana.

As they entered my line of sight, I was glad that I was channeling Witch Eyes, because each of them was coated in a dark substance that made it hard to see them, even Vampiric Senses improving my night vision. The stronger pair was wrapped in an additional layer of purple fuzz that I thought might be some sort of blurring or invisibility spell, but the power of Witch Eyes helped me punch through it.

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I created a Material Echo of my Briarthreads to give me a touch of static defense, then held my ground as they charged. Even with Edgar pushing them, they were still reliant on their instincts, and from the comments Azalea had made, I knew he couldn’t push them forever.

The largest coyote leapt into the air, and I saw purple shadows start to condense on its claws as it fell towards me, but I flicked my fingers and caught it in a three layer Fungal Lock. It crashed to the ground, and the other pack members flinched back.

It bought me only a second, but it let me throw more locks over the other pack members. They were only a single layer, but I quickly threw a second over the second strongest coyote.

The leader struggled to its feet, its claws digging at the locking spell as it scratched, and I waved my hands, sending a gust of my Briarthreads at it. They landed and pierced into the coyote, who let out a howl.

The two first gate coyotes broke free of their locks then, but I didn’t even turn to face them. The first was caught up in my echoed briars, while I used my spatial sense to mark the other and struck it with three Pinpoint Boneshards.

As the second coyote also struggled to its feet, I let out a sigh and spoke. I knew Edgar was watching, or at least could, so I tried to talk to him.

“Do you really have nothing else for me to do than beat up a bunch of kits? Actually, are young coyotes called kits? Pups? Anyways. I really don’t care to go around beating up wildlife.”

As I spoke, I set points in the air over the heads of each of the coyotes, while tossing out multiple Fungal Locks, gradually encasing them in more and more layers of power until even the third gate member of the pack was having trouble struggling to its feet.

It took several moments – Edgar might have to be supervising multiple people, or maybe I just met the criteria for having defeated the pack – but Edgar’s power faded from the air. I waved my hand and released them, but I left the shards of bone floating over them, just in case they decided to keep the fight going.

They did not.

As the pack turned and fled, I recalled my bone and threw a couple of Harvest Plant Life spells over the nearest trees, draining what power I could from them without harming their future development.

I was strong enough now that normal trees only sped my mana recovery a little bit, but it was all I really had access to, so I nestled down in my tarp and closed my eyes. I must have drifted off and lost the construct, though, because I woke up to another snapping sound in the forest not long after.

I was awoken twice more that night, the first time by an arctic fox who I managed to spook away before Edgar could infuse it with his beastial control, and the second by a flock of stink bugs. Each of them seemed to have a small, weak core of mana within them, which was what had triggered my alarms.

The moment the bugs caught… Sight? Antenna vibration sense? Spiritual sense? Whatever they used, the moment they spotted me, they dove, moving right at me. Edgar’s magic filled the air a moment later, though it was barely needed.

This was going to be annoying.

I flexed my mana and cast the spell that cut off my olfactory senses, then launched into battle against them, my Briarthreads whipping out around me. Each strike downed a stinkbug, and I considered how strange it was as I moved.

I did feel a slight twinge of regret from smacking down these bugs, but it was nowhere near the level of compassion I had for the coyotes. Was it a simple matter of mammalian bias? Humans tended to like mammals more than they did other types of creatures, after all, and I was a human. At least, mostly. I wasn’t sure how my dragon eyes and energy-infused body altered that, but I wasn’t a biologist.

“No, I don’t think so,” I said to the cloud of stink bugs, then immediately gagged as I got a mouthful of bug guts. The faltering allowed several of the bugs to slide past my spell, where they landed and stung me, which cause me to let out a sharp sound of annoyance, and

I teleported away and spat into the ground several times, wishing I’d brought something to rinse my mouth out with, but the swarm narrowed in on me and I snapped my mouth closed, drawing more briars out from my spirit and diving into the fight.

It was also probably not a good sign I was already talking to Edgar and to a bunch of bugs, but I was sure it was fine… Probably.

Still, I thought I had a point. If I had a bunch of mammalian bias, I wouldn’t have fought to defend the slipshark, or chosen to let the troll go, instead of finishing it off, or chosen a lot of things, honestly.

Was it intelligence?

That felt more likely to me. Sharks and trolls and estragon and coyote might not be fully sapient, but they had intelligence, at least after a fashion. More than a bug did, at the very least.

That answer still didn’t sit entirely right with me, though. I didn’t think it was incorrect, but it still felt incomplete. Maybe it was because bugs were a nuisance? That was at least partly true.

Then there was also the fact that the stink bugs didn’t seem to show any desire to run. They were throwing themselves at me, and getting shredded by my briars as quickly as I could. That definitely played a factor, but I wondered if it went back to the intelligence problem, just in a roundabout way.

Then again, I had to draw a line somewhere. I felt like it was reasonable to only feel a little bit bad about killing stinging, stink-empowered bugs, especially when they wanted to attack me.

I finished dispatching the swarm, then retreated back to my camp and let my smell-neutralizing spell fade away.

Even at the camp, I could smell the pile of bug guts, and I let out a sigh, then used a pulse of Internal Pocketwatch.

It was only about two hours from dawn, so I started packing up my campsite, destroyed the anchors and wards, dug out my potions and plants, then went out to continue the hike.

I took it very slow at first, since it was still dark, even under the power of my powerful senses and the ingrained effect of Vampiric Senses, but as the dawn rose over the trees again, I started to pick up the pace, shifting until I was moving at the comfortable speed of eight miles a day, faster than my minimum speed.

After all, there was a chance there would be points awarded for getting there early!