Chapter 30 - White ants

Adam stood motionless as the world faded to black. He didn’t need to lay eyes on the group of ants since his soul energy ignored any physical obstacles made of non-soul energy. Therefore, as he stood hidden in his tunnel, he watched several lights appear in the distance. The souls of the ants were rather distinct, at least in size as two clearly larger and denser souls were visible to him compared to the smaller and thinner silver flames surrounding the two.

He remarked on how poor his sight was compared to his newly now crisp and detailed mana sight. He didn’t notice it before as both his vision methods were somewhat blurry and his soul vision didn’t give him much to compare against considering the darkness that surrounds him in this state. But the difference between having a spell and not is night and day.

Vision enhancement has been his most successful area for magical augmentation and yet he still hadn’t got a soul-sight spell.

But he quickly turned his attention back towards the moving silver lights in the distance. He summoned his soul mana and attempted to shape it into a spike. It was still very difficult to shape but not as hard as the last time he did this. It seems his core advancement had helped somewhat in that regard.

He didn’t think he would be able to kill enough of them before they scattered to look for him if his soul mana only killed one ant at a time, so he wanted to avoid burning their soul entirely.

He had considerably little experience in the effects of soul mana against other souls but knew that its effects could vary based on his will. He wanted to make it act closer to standard mana and puncture the soul of the ants like a bullet, thus allowing him to kill several of them with a single blast.

He had never tested this before but he didn’t really have a choice. He focused on condensing the silver mana into the shape of a needle and slowing the flowing nature of the mana. He constantly imagined the shape and effect of a laser while shaping the mana in hopes that that would somehow inform the magic to the effect he wanted it to have.

The result wasn’t as different from last time much to his disappointment, but he did manage to significantly slow the waving and burning effect of the silver mana, and that allowed him to condense it much more than he would otherwise have been able to. The only thing left to do was hope it didn’t burn up when colliding with a single soul.

Adam launched the condensed silver flame toward the group of souls marching some distance away. He didn’t need to worry about the thick stone wall that separated them since the soul mana passed through all things without issue. He couldn’t even see the world outside of souls so he didn’t even know that his silver magic traveled straight through five-meter thick mana-infused rock, a feat impossible for any mana.

The speed of his magic weapon was slower than his standard mana but now much faster than before his core advancement. It moved uncontested between the void of emptiness to Adam’s eyes at the average speed of a thrown rock. He was somewhat mesmerized at the movement of the light since it appeared to simply glide through space without even recognizing air or gravity as forces that should be interacting with it. Or should they?

The soul attack reached the first small soul a moment later and Adam tensed as the projectile collided with the soul of a soldier ant. Adam had hoped for the best but still somewhat expected the worst when the two lights merged.

His connection to the launched energy hadn’t visibly diminished, unlike standard mana which is impossible to control once it leaves the user's perimeter of control. The ant soldier's soul didn’t completely spontaneously combust, instead, a large hole appeared in the center of the silver light.

A loud screech could be heard as soon as the injury appeared and he watched as the light squirmed for a second before the soul's previously rounded shape became twisted and morphed into a dim gaseous cloud. His attention didn’t linger on the strange outcome but instead focused on the silver projectile that hadn’t been destroyed yet.

It actually appeared to be a little brighter after the collision with the first soul. Through his connection with the silver mana, he felt it grow stronger as the piece of soul was slowly consumed to intensify the spell. The projectile didn’t stop on the first soul either. He smiled in victory as the projectile continued to travel toward the second soul on its trajectory.

A domino effect ensued as soul after soul was pierced. He couldn’t properly control the spell after it had burned a hole through several souls. The silver flames consumed a small portion of the foreign soul as energy, but in doing so also expanded the flame and caused it to lose its more compact shape.

The rapid and frequent change in the ethereal silver projectile caused it to lose its shape and become uncontrollable. He formed a second soul projectile to replace it and sent it out again. The ants didn’t seem to understand what was happening, their souls all simply froze, and only a couple actually moved away from the attacked ants.

It only took four more soul projectiles before he had gotten all the ant soldiers, all in under a few seconds.

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He switched back to his standard mana as his eyes refocused. The ants' souls hadn't burnt up like that of the wolves, but they were still dead either way.

He turned the corner once more and lay eyes on the scene he had created. Bodies were lying all around the unmoving white giants. He had been correct about the passive nature of the larger white ants. The smaller soldiers were all slumped over with none left alive.

He was a little confused about what happened to their souls after he pierced them. He saw the souls morph from their previous shape and turn into an amorphous silver cloud similar to his soul mana.

He momentarily reactivated his soul vision in order to scan the corpses and was surprised to see three of the souls still hovering close to their corpses.

“Wait, are they ghosts now?”

He felt bad about doing that to these ants, but he had come this far already.

While he was at it, he stretched out his hand and touched the closest floating blob of the dead ant's untethered soul. He obviously couldn't actually see his hand but rather his own soul following the rough shape of his body. The energy of the silver ghost reminded him of his own out-of-body experience. Was this what the dead ant was experiencing?

But it was also distinctly different, more chaotic and wild than his tamed and controlled soul. He could also see that the soul was shrinking at a visible rate. Before it disappeared completely, he pushed out a tendril of soul mana and infused some mana into the floating soul. By doing that, he was able to slow the decay of the soul and actually gained some command over it, allowing him to shape it slightly. He calmed its rapid and erratic movement and made its shape a more spherical form compared to the mess it was before.

What really struck him, however, was the feeling of sadness he felt when touching the soul. It wasn't something he could describe other than a heavy feeling that emanated from the silver ball.

His mind refocused on the two large ants still alive when one of their souls moved. He reactivated his mana sight and was greeted by the white ants staring right at him. They appeared lifeless as if they were robots rather than living beings.

He didn't question it too much though since nothing he had seen in this world wasn't weird in some way. He took out a handful of crystals from his new pocket and tossed them on the ground in front of the first giant ant.

The creature still seemed to move in slow motion as if deep underwater as it looked down at its feet. Several moments of awkward silence passed as nobody moved. Until the large ant actually moved its head down and began swallowing the white crystals.

The large white ant's body began to glow in rhythmic patterns as the light intensified and calmed over and over again. It was somehow digesting the mana from the crystals so he emptied the rest of the crystals onto the ground where the other slow-moving ant could also reach.

The giant white ants illuminated the space around them as their bodies worked to presumably process the crystals. They only ate a few but the rhythmic light emanating from them showed no sign of slowing. Nor did the large ants seem to notice him or the soldier ants' corpses littering the tunnel.

Adam was curious about their nature and behavior but didn't want to push his luck. From the light the white giants were emitting, it seemed that his process of imbuing the crystals with all those cores had actually had an effect.

Despite the large quantities of mana inside the creatures, they were surprisingly weak. Simply from their movement, you could tell that they weren't strong, but the true surprise was their lack of a mana core. He didn't know if it was simply hidden by the large quantities of mana in its body, but it made sense in a way.

If these white giants were truly processing machines, then having a core would actually be a negative. After all, they had bodyguards for fighting and protection and he assumed having a core would be bad for the transport of mana back to their hive since it would naturally consume mana reserved probably for the queen or elites.

Adam had seen many different species and various adaptations for survival, some tap into a resource others can't instead of hunting. Like the grasslands of the buffalo or these ants and the crystals. It wasn't too surprising that not growing one's personal strength in favor of nurturing the more powerful for protection is a valid survival strategy.

He picked out the best mana cores from the dead ants while he waited for the white giants to finish their task. It didn't appear to be something they could accomplish rapidly so set about using his mana blade to extract the early grey cores from the guards. Half had only been black cores so the combined mana from all these ants wouldn't be much to him. He would probably need hundreds of late grey cores to evolve into a red core and the strongest ant was a single middle grey core.

Since he had nothing better to do and the ants were showing no signs of movement, he decided to practice optimizing his absorption rates and his body enhancement spell. He had discovered his poor mana conductivity thanks to the oasis and its magically charged waters and now understood how inefficient his mana handling was.

The various available cores that all contained pure mana were therefore a great source of practice. He pumped mana from his core and had it circulate through his body. After a few minutes, his mana had saturated his body so he moved on to the next step. He pushed the abundant mana within him from the center and towards his skills.

He had to repeat his entire process several times since he would accidentally push the mana too far and have it exit his body. Once he got it working, a thin barrier of dense mana was present across his upper body. He eventually decided against including his head and legs in the construct since they were too difficult to include and would always cause significant mana leakage.

With his mana barrier in place and surrounding the inside of his torso and arms. He placed a mana core in both his palms and began absorbing the mana. The change was significant as he could sense the mana accumulating on the barrier. All that mana that would otherwise have dissipated out of him was now mostly locked inside and ready to be absorbed.

Despite his optimizing method, it did cause a significant mental drain as his mind was required to focus constantly on repairing the damage to his barrier as well as having his core absorb the new mana.

He lost track of the large rhythmically illuminated tunnel as he focused entirely on the absorption process… Until a loud cacophony of nightmarish tapping and screeching woke him from his concentration.