[Perennial Creature Level 3 – Blue]

Type – Undead

Base Damage – 4

HP – 45/45

MP – 10/10

<[Skills]>

[Corondum Bite]

– 4 pierce damage, 5 crushing damage.

[Corondum Claws]

– Slash – Bleed (5 flat damage over 3 seconds. Can stack 2 times)

– Knifehand – Pierce (4 damage. Ignores 50% armour)

[Bone Eater]_.

– Consumes the bones of its adversaries, rebuilding itself.

[Scrimshaw Level 1] (Passive)

– Can use bone to create objects.

[Undeath] (Passive)

– Immune to cold, poison, hunger, stress, fear, pain.

[Shade Vision] (Passive)

– Can still see clearly in the absence of light.

<[Description]>

– An abomination, it’s existence spits in the face of life and death – and they spit back. Flee if possible. Execute with extreme prejudice, burn the bones.

“Wow, quite the boost,” he looked over the stats “and that bone eater skill must be how it got larger. It seems like the bones it consumes change into the same type of silt wolf bone as the rest of its body.”

Satisfied with the skill, Jay was glad that his minions wouldn’t need an endless supply of silt wolf bones. Now any physical damage done could be repaired – if its arm was ripped off, it could simply eat some bones; of course, Jay would still have to mend it to restore its healthpoints.

Jay considered what this meant: “Hmm, so even if it had no arms or legs and was just a skull, it could be full health after I mend it; conversely, even if its body was in peak condition it could only have one hit-point left… interesting… I suppose the latter scenario would require powerful magic attacks of some sort of non-physical nature. Of course, under most conditions, both its body and lifeforce would both be damaged at the same time.”

Thinking about these things as he scratched his chin, he was looking up at the treetops. That was when he noticed something strange.

The tree tops had unusual white tips on top – he wouldn’t have noticed if he didn’t look up, but Jay sometimes looked up when he was deep in thought.

“What the…” he squinted. Apparently every tree in this forest had white tips, but Jay suddenly froze when he noticed that they weren’t white at all, they were covered in spider webs. Some of the trees were even connected together by the webs.

“Well, this is interesting…” Jay began to follow the connections of webs, as they seemed to travel in a straight line, linking the treetops. He looked up as he followed the path, while he had his skeletal escort with him. Blue was in the lead as Red and Lamp both walked on his back left and right sides – a triangle of skeletons with Jay at the centre.

“Oop~ shit.” Jay tripped on a branch, but caught himself before he ate dirt again.

Blue looked back for a moment, but seeing no threat it turned forward again.

Jay noticed the skeletons’ odd behaviour.

“Creepy..” he thought, since he didn’t command the skeleton to look back.

“Perhaps it’s getting smarter too…?” he wondered, periodically glancing at Blue as he continued walking cautiously through the forest, following the silky path above.

Gradually, as he was getting deeper into the forest, the white caps of the trees were slowly getting lower, covering more of the tree – until it covered so much that the trees were dying. More sickly trees passed by, then dead trees, then hardly any trees at all as the forest had been thinned out in this area since no sunlight could get through the thick webs. They eventually found themselves in a clearing covered in white, each step leaving a black hole as the soil poked through, while the web clung to their feet – however, there was a single tree at the centre which had no webs on it at all.

Jay slowed down, moving a little more cautiously now that he was out in the open. He felt like he was being watched; nevertheless he proceeded towards the tree.

“So much for scouting…” he thought, feeling a little bad for not looking out for the others as he was moving closer to the tree in the middle of the field.

The tree was a ficus macrophylla – a sort of tree that had large surface roots. Jay wondered why it wasn’t covered in webs since everything else was plastered in white silky threads. Walking around it, he found that there was a sort of entrance, a dark cavity inside the tree while a trail of silk leading in.

“Huh?…” Jay walked up to the hole.

[Silk Woods – Level 1 Dungeon]

[Unlocked]

[Enter Silk Woods?]

[Yes/No]

Jay couldn’t believe his luck.

“A level one dungeon, out here in the middle of nowhere?” He looked back across the field for a moment, standing in the entrance to the dungeon.

“Hmm, probably an hour more till Anya is recovered… I got time.” A sly smile appeared on his face as he entered the dungeon.

– – –

Looking around, Kel saw Mark and Anya – Mark was sitting on a black log while Anya sat on another mossy rock, though she didn’t see Jay.

“Huh, I wonder where Jay went..”

Kel was the first to finish meditation. As a pure manacrafter, she regularly practiced meditation, finishing only twenty minutes after Jay. She didn’t let the others know, but at the start of this journey she was practicing magic in a nearby forest, which expended some energy – though she still had more left than Anya even after the journey.

“Hmm. Might as well keep practicing.” she thought to herself as she formed a grey orb on the tip of her wand before it hovered in front of her, it was about the size of a human head.

Looking around, she found a stick – tossing it into the orb, it slowed down as it went through it before dropping to the ground.

Kel was a [Time Puppeteer].

She tossed a stone into the orb, yet this time instead of slowing down, it sped up – shooting off faster than any arrow, implanting a few centimeters into a tree nearby.

She continually did this, trying to switch from slowing to hastening time as quickly as she could.

Next, she had the orb float over the top half of a plant.

“Ok, here it goes…” she breathed in slowly, then out again as she focused harder.

The orb turned from a smokey grey to a light red colour – suddenly, the plant began to shrink as the orb released heat; Kel was making the plant go back in time. The further back time went, the more mana she had to use and the harder it was to focus.

After the time manipulation, the plant shrunk a few centimeters and had two less leaves than before. She would have a hard time fighting in a dungeon with these skills, but having the ability to manipulate time wouldn’t somehow make life easy.

Time-based manacrafter classes weren’t considered unique – there was even a guild of time mages in the capital city of the kingdom. Many of these mages played a support role in dungeons or chose to research time rather than pursue power. Of course there were always legends of peerless time mages – though the truth behind these stories were ironically lost to time itself.

“Phew” Kel exhaled as she inspected the plant “Now, it’s time to go back” she smiled, knowing it was easier to move things forward in time than backwards.

She repeated the process – this time the orb turned a dark-grey colour as the plant inside it grew back to normal size.

Kel kept pushing her magic, as the leaves turned yellow and fell off. Eventually it withered since it didn’t get enough sunlight – at least from it’s own perspective. What was left was a dried out twig that was oddly attached to the top of a green plant.

She did this a few more times until there were stones embedded in multiple trees around the trio, while a few random small plants with dead twigs on top were near the rocks around them. A piece of moss was also her victim, turning into a grey, dried-up circular patch in the green canvas which was the rest of the mossy rock.

Satisfied with her contribution to the forest, she had a sunny smile as she went back to meditating again.

– – –

It was humid. There was a sea of ficus macrophylla trees – yet none of them had any leaves. The sky in this dungeon was permanently overcast, casting the land in shadow – the was no wind, and no sounds. A silent forest.

Jay had deathwalker’s sentry equipped, ready to warn him of any danger, while Blue was looking around, turning its wolf skull head left and right as it too was autonomously scanning for threats. Jay looked confused as he peered around the silk woods dungeon.

“What the… where’s all the silk… and the leaves..?”