"Finally back in Elysium." Lohan thought contentedly, breathing in the fresh air and enjoying the last rays of sunshine before night fell.
The time in Elysium and on the planet he lived on were very close, with night in Elysium arriving just a few hours after night fell in the real world.
On his way home, Lohan noticed that the boy from the Lower Zone with the Rare Base was occasionally looking at him, but Lohan wasn’t in the mood to deal with it today, so he just leaned against a wall on the bus and continued to focus on improving his Mana control.
The two hours he had to spend on the bus to get home couldn’t be wasted, so he found this good way to pass the time.
With so much time available, his progress in controlling Mana was very good. He went from being a complete novice in the morning to a decent level of proficiency.
He was still far from the level he had as Halon in Elysium, but by the standards of the real world he knew, he felt he had made good progress.
Physical exercise was not avoided either. As soon as he got home, Lohan did as much exercise as his body could handle and only then entered the game.
On his friends list, Lisa was already online, probably killing monsters somewhere far away.
[Halon: Hey, good evening, have you been playing for a long time?]
Lisa took a while to respond.
Meanwhile, Lohan didn’t stand still. The Mana Stone that Aeliana had given him two days ago was finally about to be consumed.
Lohan was shocked at how long it took him to digest it completely.
Considering how high his digestion speed already was, he thought it would only take a few hours to digest everything, but adding to the fact that he couldn’t spend the whole day in the game passively digesting it, and the fact that he had to pause the digestion for a few hours the day before to get evolutions from the humans and monsters he killed, it made sense.
Fortunately, the waiting time came to an end.
After a few seconds with a digestion rate of 53.13 Biomass per hour, the Mana Stone disappeared.
[New Digested Matter — Magic Weaving]
[Evolution available.]
Lohan didn’t even see the notification because an intense memory instantly came to his mind, causing him to lose consciousness.
Suddenly, all Lohan saw was darkness.
Soon, he was thrown into a cold consciousness, where his vision was a chaos of gray blurs that occupied almost his entire field of perception.
While getting used to the Slime’s 360-degree vision was natural, the feeling of having eight eyes was very strange.
80% of what he saw was nothing more than shapeless blurs, while he felt pure indifference to anything that wasn’t food or a threat.
But when the 20% of clarity reached Lohan’s mind, the impact was brutal.
In those moments, the spider’s vision focused like a high-precision lens, revealing details he had never noticed, even with his enhanced Slime vision while using [Monocular Telescopic Vision].
Lohan felt the creature’s legs digging into a tree bark, but what really put him in a trance was the internal flow he was feeling.
He felt the Mana being compressed in the spider’s abdomen, passing through glands that transformed the pure energy into something solid and viscous.
The process was intoxicating... he felt the tension of the Mana being stretched into translucent threads that remained under his control even after detaching from the body.
In one of the clear sections, he saw the target: a Unicorn.
The creature, which exuded a pure and dazzling energy, was stretched between four trees, completely immobilized by a network of threads that barely reflected the light.
Lohan felt the spider’s euphoria, with each time the Unicorn neighed and tried to explode with magic to free itself, the threads glowed blue and absorbed the impact.
Surprisingly, Lohan could taste the prey’s Mana traveling through the threads and entering the spider’s body.
It was a constant drain that transformed the victim’s resistance into fuel for the web itself to grow stronger.
Seeing that mythical creature reduced to an organic battery, trapped in threads that Lohan now knew exactly how to make, made something snap inside him.
A frenzied sensation began to take hold of Lohan.
The hunger for power and the clarity he felt when absorbing it were like a drug!
He wanted to feel that pull, he wanted to feel the Mana of other beings flowing into him through invisible filaments. His mind was working at full speed, superimposing the image of that web onto his own clones and tentacles.
Suddenly, a loud "Ding" sounded in his mind, leaving him confused and making the memory that had been perfectly clear moments ago now blurred again.
When the memory finally dissolved and Lohan returned to his own Slime body, he was panting, or the equivalent of that for a Slime, with the bluish mass vibrating incessantly, expanding and contracting at an erratic pace, while small sparks of Mana jumped from its surface.
In his frenzied state, Lohan opened the game menu and purchased this evolution directly, ignoring the exorbitant price of 100 Biomass, and fired five thin threads toward the surrounding trees with familiarity.
Feeling the tension and perfect grip, a dark and satisfied thought crossed his mind... only to be interrupted again by another mental ’Ding’.
That second whistle finally brought him back to his senses, and he was shocked to realize what he had done.
The act of purchasing the skill and immediately starting to use it was not something he did on purpose, but actually something he did instinctively!
’Damn, it was as if I wasn’t thinking like myself!’
That feeling was so horrifying that Lohan was even afraid to use this evolution again.
Remembering the sound he heard twice that woke him up, he searched for the game interface where it came from.