****************************

Unnamed Dungeon, Day Four

****************************

After a bit of trial and error, Nellie found a relatively simple way to have the cave filled with the lichen.

She was able to sever with her mana strings a small part of the lichen at the very edge and transplant it to the soil on the floor. Once the fungi were situated into the soil, Nellie began to pump as many purple sparks into the lichen as she could and watched as it grew to cover about ten centimetres of the soil before stopping.

So she repeated it.

At first, targeting any ledge or crevice that could hold only a tiny amount of soil, Nellie placed whatever she could on them. Slowly, she went from ledge to ledge and crevice to crevice, taking small pieces of the lichen and growing them onto the next sight.

Many of the bryoria had little room to grow, so they hung down, growing towards the floor or along the floor if they reached it.

She continued across the floor once Nellie had all of the crevices and ledges filled out.

However, before she continued growing the bryoria, Nellie did a bit of rearranging.

There was still quite a bit of soil left over from her excavation and planting the lichen along the walls and ceilings. So Nellie decided to do a bit of landscaping to make the cave just right. The first thing she did was leave the pile of soil that already had some lichen on it and make sure that there was at least 20 centimetres of soil on the floor. With the rest of the soil, she created some hills throughout the cave.

With the soil ready, Nellie quickly started filling out the room with the lichen.

As the last lichen’s enhanced growth finished, Nellie turned towards the ice.

It’s about time I try to crack it. Thought Nellie as she decided that now was the time to figure out how to manipulate the ice.

Mana strings with purple sparks twirled around her fingers as she reached for the ice surrounding a small crevice, only one centimetre long and half a centimetre wide.

But before she could begin any experimentation, a blue screen caught her attention.

You have learned the skill: mana string manipulation.

And with that, the ease with which she used her mana strings became a lot easier. More natural.

They flowed the same throughout her territory, both Inner and Outer, but when she grabbed a string and played with it, the string was much more willing and less resistful. It was almost like the mana string became a lot less passive and seemed to want to be manipulated.

Either way, the mana string manipulation skill made actively manipulating mana strings a lot easier.

She wrapped the mana strings around her hands as she started to try to carve chunks of ice out of the walls, just like she did with the soil. But it didn’t work.

Ice is a lot harder, so it makes sense why it didn’t work. Well, back to the drawing board. Sighed Nellie.

So, she went back to her very original usage of manipulating her environment. She let the mana string wrapped around her hand loosen and fall off into her palm. With the mana string in her hand, she pushed it into the first centimetre of the ice and held it there.

Nellie wanted to see what would happen, so she just held the mana string there and let the purple sparks circulate through it.

She sat and watched. And after the first two minutes, something different started to circulate.

Light blue, almost white, sparks, the few she had within her nebula, started to circulate in that string.

Nellie pulled back the string and looked at the light blue sparks along with the purple sparks.

Maybe this is what I needed? Thought Nellie.

She placed the string with the light blue sparks back in the ice and pulled.

The very act of pulling allowed small cracks to form in the ice. Nellie wrapped her hand with the string with light blue sparks and began pulling small chunks of ice out of the walls. Very small. But at least now she knew that there was a way to manipulate ice, crude as it is.

But as of now, Nellie was happy with this.

Quickly, she extracted all of the ice that was riddled with cracks. The crevice turned into a small cave, about five centimetres wide and seven centimetres tall.

When she released the string, some of the light blue sparks circulated back into her nebula. The rest, though, continued to circulate in the ice parts of her Inner and Outer portions of territory.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Nellie watched the light blue sparks circulate when something clicked in her head.

The light blue sparks, are they ice mana? Or representations of ice in her mana?

She pondered this thought. If the light blue sparks are ice mana, then are the purple sparks her own? What about the dark green sparks? What do they represent?

Honestly, it was kind of confusing, but she knew this. The light blue sparks allowed her to crack the ice when she couldn’t before. And now those that are circulating are only circulating within the ice sections of her territory.

So, she continued to experiment with the light blue sparks. Grabbing a string with a light blue spark and a chunk of ice, she sewed the ice chunk back into the wall. The ice slowly fused with the wall as the sparks circulated through that string. When Nellie pulled the string out, the ice was fully fused to the wall, like she had never carved it out in the first place.

Wrapping the string around her hand, she grabbed another ice chunk. Instead of fusing the ice back onto the wall, she decided to try to affect the ice differently.

****************************

POV Mila Bergeron

The Shards, Day Two

****************************

Rain crashed down on Mila as she sat huddled in her small cave.

It had been a rough day.

Ever since that squirrel creature thing attacked her, she’s been on edge. Always alert, always listening. She knew she couldn’t risk being attacked again. Mila knew that she was unlikely to come out of a fight as well as she did.

The Shards, at least the area where she was located, was very different from where she grew up. The forest that surrounded the beach was huge. She wasn’t brave enough yet to venture out of view from the beach, but she knew that the trees were ancient. Most were as wide as she was tall. And Mila knew that meant they were hundreds if not thousands of years old.

But many things along the edge of the forest were useful.

The best was her home, her cave. Mila had found it soon after she dashed away.

She was exhausted after fighting the squirrel creature, and running away, she stumbled across a pile of large boulders. Hidden between two of the boulders was an entrance. Mila wasn’t originally going to even attempt to go in there, but a couple metres away, she heard a twig snap.

And without thinking about it, she lunged into the hole and crawled as fast as she could into it. In hindsight, what she did was very stupid, but she was living off of adrenaline. Luckily, there was nothing in the cave, and she finally felt safe. Bright enough to just be able to see but dark enough that she was obscured from anything looking in through the cave.

It was her safe place in this new world, as safe as she could have it at that point, a place to rest and heal. And from the cave, she centred her operations.

The first thing she did after finding a safe spot was find something she could defend herself with.

She found a large, thick stick at the edge of the forest. It was relatively straight and small enough that she could lift it easily.

Mila dragged it back to the boulder cluster that held her cave and found a rock with a sharp enough edge. Quickly, she started scraping off the edge of the branch. Soon enough, she had a spear with a sharp enough tip that it would hopefully impale anything that would attack her.

With the spear at the ready, she reached out to one of the large trees and started pulling large chunks of moss growing along its base.

Mila remembered from a TV show, Alone, that moss was a good natural insulator for body heat. The chunks she pulled off the tree were large enough to be small blankets, and she stripped them enough to fill her arms.

Hauling the moss back to her cave, she lined the floor along the back of the cave and laid the rest on top.

With a little sleeping area set up, Mila curled up underneath the moss with her spear right beside her.

****************************

The light of dawn pierced the cave as Mila jolted awake.

“Where am I?” Murmured Mila confusingly as she didn’t recognize her surroundings. It took a couple seconds before she groaned and fell back into the moss bed as the events of the previous day flashed in her mind.

The cuts along her stomach twinged in pain as she lay on her back, staring at the ceiling.

As she lamented her fate, her stomach began to rumble. Not the basic hunger rumble, but the rumble and twinges of not eating or drinking anything for a day.

She had her shelter all set up and a weapon to defend herself with, but Mila knew that if she didn’t find a food or water source soon, it would all be for naught.

Crawling out of the cave, she began to wander about the forest edge. Within a couple of metres from her cave entrance was a small bush. A normal-looking bush with palm-sized green leaves and small bunches of pink berries.

Berries!

Hunger overrode her as she rushed to collect the small pink bundles. A voice-like instinct sounded at the back of her head as she was about to eat one of the berries.

Those are deadly. Whispered her instincts

It warned her that they were bad.

Mila quickly dropped it to the ground,

She quickly turned and walked away before spotting more black berries growing on a vine. As she approached them and studied them, nothing nudged her that this was a bad idea.

“It’s now or never.” Breathed Mila as she popped one into her mouth. Chewing and swallowing quickly, she squeezed her eyes shut and waited for something to happen.

But nothing happened immediately.

As Mila prepared to wait, a boom of thunder sounded close. Within seconds, rain began to pour over her.

She quickly stripped the vine of all the black berries she could carry and ran back to her cave.

Drenched in water, she huddled into the back of the cave and waited out the storm.

Hours passed, and nothing happened to Mila. The berries were safe.

With a stomach growling in hunger, she inhaled the rest of the berries.

Mila continued to wait for the storm to end, and as she waited, she began to think.

The System had gave her two skills: basic dodging and basic gathering. Mila had already experienced the basic dodging skill go into effect, was the instincts telling her that the pink berries were bad, the same? Was that instinct the basic gathering skill?

As she thought about the consequences of the skills she gained, MIla stilled. The hairs on the back of her neck began to stand up as she heard a rustling sound just on the outside of the cave’s tunnel. She scurried to a crouching position and grabbed her spear. Taking a deep breath, she readied herself for what was to come.