Just like with the arcane inspection I had undergone earlier, I felt a novel emotion, pain.

Only this pain wasn’t mild or invasive, it was horrendous and direct.

The pain was utterly agonising.

If I was capable of it, I would have let out a screech of my own that would have put all of the human's shrieks to shame.

But I couldn’t do that, for I had no voice with which to scream, or lungs for that matter.

So instead I suffered in harsh silence, after grabbing and ripping the insolent bandit apart of course.

But their death brought me no relief, I had to dig the longsword out of my eye.

It was a gruesome operation that left me feeling even more agonised than I had been when the longsword was just left alone.

The one time I stopped being cautious and I suffered the consequences.

Why had I not made sure everyone was dead? How could I be so foolish?

The worst part of this whole awful experience though was that I couldn’t seem to regenerate my eye.

At least not subconsciously, but maybe I could attempt to regenerate my wound consciously?

At this point I didn’t have much of a choice, if I didn’t fix my eye then I simply wouldn't be able to continue with my task.

And so I tried drawing on every bit of energy left in my battered body, flexing my tendrils and tentacles in the process.

And then with a mental war cry, I tried to shove this s mana into my wound.

Of course, it didn’t work.

I wasn’t a healer but that wasn’t going to dissuade me, I was made out of mana after all, so surely there was a way to fix my eye.

The second time I tried guiding the energy into my wound gently in pulses, sort of like a beating heart pumping blood around. Only this was a one directional blood flow.

Yet again, I encountered failure, thankfully I seemed to be getting closer to the right path though.

The pain had eased slightly, figuring out what I had done to ease this pain would require further experimenting though.

And so I spent the next few minutes trying to figure out how to close my wound, I tried different intensities of drawing in the energy and when all that accomplished was making me hungry, I tried to draw on my excess energy instead.

And this time while I still failed to heal my eye, I at least managed to not feel more ravenous from the failed attempt.

After a full ten minutes, I finally succeeded in starting up the regeneration process on my eye.

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The pain had abated by then but the brutal wound still remained, blinding me.

So although the prior panicky desperation to heal my eye and get rid of the pain was gone, it was still a necessity for me to spend so long trying to heal it.

And even though I would have preferred to not have been stabbed with that cursed blade in the first place, I had to begrudgingly admit that the fact I had figured out how to consciously regenerate was rather valuable.

The secret lay in the pattern used to draw the mana in.

If I replicated a heart for instance, then I would be able to more naturally draw the mana towards where I wanted it to go by using the pulses.

But I didn’t have a heart or even really know how one worked, so that pattern failed, a pattern I did know though was an ocean pattern.

Likely due to a few factors such as me being based off of marine life and having spent time in that strange ocean, this pattern allowed me to manipulate my mana with ease.

All I had to do was replicate the rising and ebbing tides of the ocean and controlling my mana became as easy as controlling my physical body.

I had to make a choice though, I had two types of mana I could use, passive and active.

The active mana was quite literally what made up my leathery flesh, using that mana meant that I was killing myself.

The passive mana on the other hand was sort of like the dead skin cells of normal animals or the dead leaves of a tree. It was just the unneeded and waste product that came with being alive.

Though in my case it actually served a purpose, regenerating any lost tentacles, tendrils, or flesh. It also just acted as a sort of lubricant, replacing the naturally depleting active mana and keeping my body functioning.

If I used the passive mana I would quickly start to waste away but if I used the active mana I would have to sacrifice entire sections of its body to survive.

The choice I ended up deciding on was to use the passive mana.

It did mean that I would starve to death very soon but it also meant that for the next little while I would be at my peak, as my passive mana would be rapidly depleted to heal all my wounds.

In just a mere few seconds tendrils regrew their severed halves and in another dozen seconds, my tentacles were all fully repaired. Regenerating my eye took the better part of a minute though.

But now I was back to its prime, I was perfectly healed.

But I didn’t have much time left, I had to quickly hunt down the surviving bandits and cleanse the rest of the base.

A likely impossible task given that I would be dead from starvation soon but I would still strive to complete my creator's wishes.

That was the purpose of my creation after all.

And so I began to hunt down the survivors, throwing aside my previous caution as I slide through the tunnel. Hurling myself forward with my replenished tentacles.

And in less than a third of the time I had taken to traverse this tunnel originally, I was back at the main chamber.

My eye had been supercharged by the passive mana, granting me increased perception. Allowing me to more easily scan the chamber for any blood stains or scraps of fabric.

There were plenty of blood stains of course, but that blood was from the initial battle and was beginning to dry up. That wasn’t what I was looking for.

After a brief examination though, I did manage to find what I was looking for, a series of blood droplets which lead down one of the five tunnels.

And this blood was still wet.

But before I could pursue them I suddenly collapsed.

I was out of energy, already?

And I was disintegrating fast, tendrils that had seconds prior been perfectly healthy dropped off me in droves.

And in an instant, the interior of the cave began morphing into flesh and bone and for a third time, I watched as reality became unmade.