Adon focused again on that orb of light he had felt within himself.

The round orange light that floated suspended in a field of darkness reappeared before him.

He pulled at the orange light once more, and he felt the warmth again. This time, he pulled a little more out, and he felt it flood through a larger section of his body.

Maybe this is something I could use to stay warm in the middle of Winter, he thought. A sort of internal heating system. He was pretty sure the warmth was real, and was not just the way that harnessing Mana felt.

I suppose I’ll have the chance to actually test that one day, though, he thought wryly. The days were getting just slightly colder, in his very brief experience. The trees had begun to lose their leaves. Winter is coming. I’ll probably need to evolve by then and migrate or be prepared to keep myself warm through a long, cold, lonely Winter.

By harnessing Mana, he could probably do it, but he’d rather not.

Then he shook his head.

Damn it! He’d gotten distracted thinking of the weather, of all the boring things! And in that brief window of time, a little of the Mana he had gathered had dissipated somewhere. It wasn’t back there in his core, either. Just gone into the ether. Wasted.

Focus and become the magic caterpillar you paid to become, he told himself sternly. Remember, do everything, and you’ll win. Getting sidetracked thinking about the future is the opposite of doing everything you’re supposed to be doing in the present.

Adon returned to the dark place where the orange orb hovered in the air, and he pulled a little more away. He was fairly certain that he could use it to enhance his physical power. That was one of the most basic uses that he’d learned from the System’s brain download on Mana Manipulation. It should be easy to figure out how, since it was so basic, and since he also had Magic Perception.

Once he had a fistful of the glowing orange energy, Adon began moving it around his body. Based on the information the System had given him, this should be the magical equivalent of rudimentary exercise. Moving Mana around within one’s own body was the most basic of the basics, like learning to stretch before you did intense exercise.

The little spark of Mana moved from Adon’s core to his right forelimb, then through his chest to his left forelimb. Up to his head, all the way through to the tip of his left antenna before it moved back through his brain and into his right antenna. Then the spark started to glide through the top part of his back toward his tail end.

At that point, a fly flew by in front of him, and Adon lost focus. The spark disappeared. The fly buzzed away, oblivious to how distracting it was.

He had to begin again, but he didn’t curse at having lost his focus this time. He felt a sort of inner peace had descended over him. He could tell he was very quickly improving. Developing understanding and control. Distractions would ultimately only help build his capacity for focus.

There’s something immensely satisfying about progressing at anything, he thought. And I can just feel that I’ll move forward by leaps and bounds if I keep going the way I am. Distractions and all. So thank you, little fly. Thank you for forcing me to become a little bit better.

He returned to the dark place inside himself and pulled at the orb of light again. This time, he very consciously tried to take the smallest amount of energy from it that he could grasp and hold onto. If he was at risk of losing whatever he grabbed as soon as he lost his focus, he would take as little at a time as possible and stretch his little bouts of practice out for as long as he could.

This time, he managed to complete a full cycle of moving the little spark of Mana around his body, from the tip top of the antennae on his head to the thread cutters on his Silk Spinner. Adon even managed to keep hold of the spark of Mana for long enough that he could return to the glowing orb and return the energy he had taken. He hadn’t used it for anything, and it seemed that nothing was lost.

What next?

His mind searched for the next exercise. There weren’t many that he’d been given, and his memory in this life seemed to be better than it had been in any of his previous incarnations. So the information wasn’t hard to find.

He pulled slightly more than the minimum amount of Mana that he could from his core, and he dispersed it throughout his body in multiple moving sparks similar to the single spark he’d been manipulating earlier. This was meant as a sort of divided attention exercise. Could he split his focus enough to control multiple moving portions of Mana at a time?

This time, a noise startled him. A sound that reminded him of a motorboat engine, coming from somewhere in the space behind him. He let one spark fly off as his focus faltered, but managed to keep hold of the other four that he was moving.

I’ll count that as a victory, he thought dryly.

He turned around to try and see what the noise had been, continuing to juggle sparks of energy as he rotated his body. It had been loud, and the sound made him nervous in an instinctive way that he could not easily explain. But there was nothing there. No other bugs walking to and fro that he could see.

Then the sound came again.

Adon almost jumped, and he retreated a couple of steps back.

His head shot up. The noise was coming from somewhere above, he now realized.

Then he saw it. Flitting about with incredible speed and dexterity. Its wings fluttering too fast for Adon to see them as anything but a shimmer. A long, graceful body.

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Dragonfly, he thought. He took a couple more steps back, trying to get closer to the cover of leaves near his birth plant. He didn’t want that thing to spot him. The dragonfly wasn’t as large as the bird that had chased him yesterday, or even the bat he had killed last night, but Adon found it intimidating nevertheless.

He knew that dragonflies would always be a potentially deadly threat. They were a predator even to adult butterflies. He felt an instinctive aversion to that noise for a reason. Even with his current power, he wasn’t certain he could survive an encounter.

Dragonflies killed with speed and precision movement through the air. This thing would flit around his Spine Shot and probably avoid the projectiles completely if they fought. Then it would suddenly appear beside Adon and try to kill him with a single bite to the head. The only positive for Adon in this situation was that he was almost certain dragonflies usually tried to hunt flying insects. That was why their speed and power were so specialized for use with precision flight. Still, he hoped it hadn’t noticed him.

It’s a deeper test of my divided attention, Adon thought nervously as he ordered all of the spines on his back and sides to stand on end.

He kept the sparks of Mana circulating around his body even as he watched carefully for any sign of aggressive intent—though despite his best efforts, Adon could usually only track the dragonfly for a few seconds at any given time. It would zip around from one place to another. When it accelerated or radically changed directions, that was when it would make that loud motorboat noise that Adon had noticed. In the moment when it did that, it seemed to disappear from view completely for a moment or two before Adon spotted it again.

It’s not using any special ability or anything either. That’s just how dragonflies maneuver all the time. That sheer speed… Adon swallowed.

If the bird had been a lumbering Godzilla monster, and the bat was a fighter plane that could be shot down, the dragonfly was like an iridescent assassin that had somehow mastered the power of flight. There was no outmaneuvering it. No running from it. No exploiting the weaknesses in its patterns of attack. It was too fast for any of that.

By the time it had attacked once, Adon thought he might very well be dead, without having even realized he was its target. That kind of speed—how would I even counter it?

Finally, the creature flitted out of sight. It seemed the dragonfly was pursuing some other prey. Adon breathed slowly, in and out. He felt as if he’d dodged a bullet.

I don’t think I have any real defense against that thing, he thought, except that my body is hard to attack with all the spines sticking out, and I might be hard to see if I used Color Change. He wasn’t even sure the latter would be effective against a dragonfly, though. He seemed to remember that they had excellent vision to accompany their high level of speed and precision in the air. It was possible that Color Change would not be enough to fool those eyes, if the dragonfly had some sort of temperature-based or movement-based perception capabilities.

Well, at least I’m doing pretty well at juggling multiple sparks of Mana at the same time, he thought. And he had continued even as he was scared to death of the airborne assassin.

That was a real victory. It hadn’t been as much of a drain on his brain as he’d expected, either. Easier than using Telepathy to rapidly transmit messages to one target after another, at least.

Maybe magic will be my counter to the scary dragonfly.

The next exercise was to concentrate Mana in different parts of the body to produce a strengthening effect. He found it surprisingly intuitive.

The movement to a specific area was what he had just been rehearsing. It took focus, but he knew how to do it. When the Mana got there, all Adon had to do was condense it. Concentrate it in a single part of that area, with a specific intent. He tried it with his mandibles, and he felt that they were stronger.

To prove to himself that this was no illusion, Adon turned to the nearest plant beside his birth plant, and he tried to chomp down on the main stem. At first, he made only shallow cuts on the thick green stalk. But after a few seconds of trying this, he realized he needed to make a slight adjustment.

Rather than focusing on making them stronger, he shifted his intent to something more specific. Make the blades sharper.

He felt an instant change. His Mana concentrated itself on the edges of the mandible blades. He closed them on the stalk once more—and they chopped through like a hot knife through butter. The plant tumbled to the ground in front of him. Easy. I can’t believe it’s so easy. I used to live on a plant just like that—and now look what I can do to it!

He thought back to his bouts with the Ladybug Larva and the Leafy Bush Cricket. Those would have been complete cakewalks if he had access to this Skill back then. The bluebird was probably too big of a target for him to take on with his mandibles in any case. And the dragonfly was still much too fast for him to even hit, let alone have time to concentrate Mana into his mandibles and then chomp down.

But the bat—couldn’t I have chomped through the glue that bound him to the log and just taken his whole body with me if I had practiced with this Skill before? Adon couldn’t see any reason why not. He would have certainly escaped the Exploding Carpenter Ants without having to negotiate over the bat’s corpse if he’d known how to do this back then.

He felt very glad that he’d started now.

Maybe I could even have enhanced my exoskeleton so it wouldn’t be damaged by the exploding ants’ goo, he thought. Perhaps he was about to become a tank. I’m going to be the terror of the garden…

Adon felt the Mana charging his mandibles run out. He used his Simple Eyes to gauge the position of the sun. Before he tried any other experiments, he needed to consider the time. There wasn’t much left, it seemed. The sun was definitely in a different part of the sky.

Midafternoon now, he assessed. Time flies when you’re having fun!

He made a split-second decision to break off the magic training for now. He still wanted to find Goldie, and it was time to stop putting it off. Now it was only partially for what she could teach him. He clearly had an incredibly potent Skill to train, and it wasn’t clear he really needed to learn how to use silk better, though he still wanted to.

But talking to the princess, even if it had only been two words from him—and even though it had been nerve-wracking—had whetted his appetite for social activity. Goldie seemed like a decent option for that. The aura he’d observed around her body suggested to him that she was special somehow. Connected to his past life, or her own past lives, or his future life in some way, perhaps.

Besides magic practice, Goldie was the thing on his agenda that most excited him right now. And something could happen to the spider any day.

Or what if she just forgets I exist? The chances of her forgetting him—if she still remembered him at all—only rose the longer he remained absent.

Whereas the magic would wait. And he knew he would come back to it.

Beyond controlling his physical temperature and temporarily improving his bodily attributes, he wasn’t sure what else he should be able to do. But Adon was determined to find out.

He ascended to the top of his old plant, aware this could easily be the last time he ever visited it. He found landmarks that showed him which direction to move in.

Then Adon climbed down and started walking.