“So you are that… more powerful ant’s boss?” Buck questioned, not liking how silent it was. After being aware of him having very direct contact with a very powerful entity, the Druid did not feel like being that rude anymore. It had thought that might have been some other creature that could talk but was under the currently-dead ant. That would have put them on the same level and therefore more casual. Not whatever this was. The master of a master? Something like that.

‘Yes. Untense your back to stop momentary pain,’ the writing on the wall commanded. Previously, Buck would have done it without thinking about who exactly was making those orders. Yet when it came out that the entity he was communicating with was able to squash him like a bug? It suddenly got a bit harder to breathe right.

He untensed his back, yes, but pretty much every other muscle was ready to do heavy-lifting. His heart was beating like a rock that needed to be dodged within a millisecond, his lungs were burning even without doing anything but lying down, and his mind was getting ready to self-implode. Just a few days ago, he had evaded death. He wasn’t about to put a stop to that record by not following orders.

“That is kinda cool, I suppose,” Buck said, ending it off with a nervous kind of laugh. It wasn’t helped that he could feel his inside moving about, making twists and turns with every second. It was a fight and a half to not swipe at his back. “Is all those improvements of yours that necessary? With how you need to warn me not to move, it seems like there are too many risks attached to this whole thing.”

It took a while to respond to that. Buck was half-afraid he had somehow pissed the entity by questioning it. Yet that seemed to not be the case somehow, the entity etching an answer onto the walls after what turned out to be a moment of deliberation.

‘I am saving you from dying in a situation where your muscles would have given out,’ was written out with no regard for how utterly lacking the message was of context. But, the Druid supposed it had to live with that. There was no real chance it could get anything done if it had to explain to its underlings every step along the way. Buck could certainly not remember any real point in his life where his bosses had wanted to explain their orders. One was expected to fulfil them and that was that.

Not wanting to get on a bad list just yet, Buck did try to relax after that point. There weren’t any more questions to ask. Nothing important enough that he wanted to anger the entity asking it, at least. So, on the ground, he lay, doing his best to think about nothing at all. Which was hard seeing as there was so much going on. Not in the room that he rested, sure, but outside it there had to be many events starting up. The Dungeon had now been searched through so it was likely going to get people entering near-daily soon. Merchants would likely try to sell their wares and buy whatever seemed valuable, researchers would come to study every piece of meat that was brought to them, and perhaps there would even be some form of restaurant opening up. The one thing that was so often ignored was the requirement for more-than-stale food around places where one could die.

Oh, how Buck wanted to go out and have a look. The sights that were likely to be seen the moment he walked out… thinking about it, the man was likely to be detained the moment he tried to leave. There wasn’t anybody who had seen him enter so leaving would very likely alert guards that had been stationed near the Dungeon. And why did Buck know there were guards? Because who in their right mind wouldn’t put some there? The Dungeon was supposedly a fountain of fortune. Any person who knew its location before anybody else could sell it and earn enough to live lavishly for the rest of their lives. Instead, a prison had taken over it and was more than sure that nobody else would be allowed in. Or out.

It wasn’t even like he could get out yet. The so-called Bond between him and his superiors wasn’t as fully formed as they liked, making it so that the distance they could have between each other was limited to some form. Technically, they should have been able to stay kilometres apart without issue yet ‘there was no reason to risk such things.’ It was cosy inside the cave at some level, the light set-up creating a pretty decent ambience. But even with that, staying inside for days on end without much interaction other than with a talking ant who was currently dead did back things to a living mind.

That damned bond… was a slave-oriented one, created by consent from both parties. Normally, it shouldn’t even have been possible without a high-level [Mage] present to allow it to form yet that hadn’t been required this time around. The fact that was possible was something many [Slavers] would be happy to know about, the fees to higher those aforementioned magic casters being harder than most could afford. Not that they were going to be told, though. Buck wasn’t really in a state of being where he could just sell any information he wanted.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Digressing from his hate of not being able to make financial gains, however, the bond was quite powerful. It took a while to form, and any real pushback could cause it to break during that time, but once it had settled it became near-impossible to remove. Those with it would be the loyal servant of whoever was on the other end of that bond. It was a life that could come with many benefits and many curses. One was the laws in place to make sure that slaves were treated right. Another was the fact that pretty much any [Slaver] worth anything ignored those laws. If the exploitation of sane minds wasn’t allowed, what good was there in the world? Not that slavery was allowed in the country Buck was currently in, however. Tensions a few decades back had made sure of that.

A burst of movement under his skin made Buck hiss. It was as unpleasant as anything else. Even when trying as hard as he could to distract himself, it was still too much. Idle thoughts had no real power when compared to the torrent of sensorial information that came from having one's insides manhandled by a being able to crush his head without any warning. And there was no real chance of anything being more distracting than that.

…

Or was there?

“How much time do you have left before you’re finished with these improvements?” Buck asked into the empty air, thinking the wait between the questions had been long enough that no serious offence would be taken. Impatience was not a positive quality to have but it had to be used at some points in life to get things moving.

‘Twenty minutes,’ was the weirdly even response. Just how well-thought-out was the whole improvement scheme that the core was running? The Druid wondered for a moment how much was being changed inside of him before stopping himself from thinking along that route. He was still, at his core, the same as before. Some of the details had just been changed around a few times.

But, twenty minutes? It wasn’t as long as Buck had been expecting but he supposed it was long enough to try out something he hadn’t done for some time now. During his initial close encounter with death, his [Mana-Node] had closed themselves up after so little was truly spent inside of them. Now with a fully healthy body, the man could perhaps open them up again, to experience the feeling of an actually-working Mana-Pattern.

Buck had been born with the ability to sense Mana, had been forced from an early age to distance himself from the sensation lest he got overwhelmed. That wasn’t what he tried to do this time around. As he opened up the floodgates that had run dry for so long, there was no attempt at stopping the wave of responses that began to riddle his body. The Druid never focused on a single one, just letting it flow through his mind as it was as normal as day. There wasn’t anything different about him with the energy present, nothing that changed his personality.

And with that acceptance in his head, he began to expand his senses outside his mortal shell, letting the waves of Energy around the room be felt with extreme lack of trepidation. It was mere energy, pieces of Mana not yet forced to do one's bidding. It could be harnessed as a weapon of mass destruction and it could likewise be turned into a healing energy, capable of even letting the dead walk anew.

It was the best feeling in the world, that peacefulness of it all being more intoxicating than any substance Buck had been able to get his hands on for a long time. It was as if the world accepted him at some level, as if it wasn’t lashing out at him for wanting to explore the air around him, see deeper than any eye could muster, and unravel the secrets that held it all together. There was no pain, no time, and no distance. He was everything and everything was him. He felt a sense of [Equilibrium].

Then another force came in like nothing before. It was powerful, more powerful than Buck by a long shot. Veins shot out into the air wherever it looked, different from the blissful slide around all the Druid practised. It was unrefined yet it had so much power that one could not deny it.

And then the force looked at Buck. It saw what nobody but him should have seen, felt what nobody but him should have been able to feel. It was the state of fear, anger, and anxiety that no living creature should have been forced to be put through. Yet… at the moment where Buck felt himself be at the bottom, the force moved on, travelling upwards with no hesitation. A moment was spent wondering if he wanted to see where it would lead but another decided that Buck had gone through enough for his first dive in a while. If he went further in, he could have lost himself too easily.

It took a moment to find his own body, even if it was mere meters away in the real world, but Buck felt his senses reconnect with those that his nerves were trapped too. His soul had taken a walk and his body hadn’t enjoyed the experience of being vacant. All felt like pins and needles, nothing happy about the too relaxed state he had lied in. But on the bright side, there weren’t any more feelings of things moving inside of him. It seemed that those twenty minutes had passed before the man even realized it.

A [Skill] has been improved!

You have understood [Astral-Projection] more deeply

That wasn’t the worst thing to see. Buck supposed that those so-called improvements weren’t too bad anyway.