Lucas seemed to be either baffled or speechless.

I don't blame him. That was a pretty good protagonist entrance, even if I say so myself.
If I read this in a novel or saw it in an anime, I'd tear up a bit probably. Yup.

Though I probably should've been less stingy with the mana I used again for my magic speech, I just accidentally called him luck ass.

5 mana seems to be enough to get the point across though, so I'm reluctant to waste any more of my precious mana on communication…

The 2 leftover rat dragons shot their terrifyingly instant-cast fireballs at us.

I quickly create a shield by summoning thick roots out of the ground that lift up the corpse of the rat dragon that's at my feet.

The fireballs forcefully blast the corpse before exploding on impact

(GO TO SLEEP!)

*Don~*

Using my improved presence detection, I managed to focus on just the 2 rat dragons, ignoring the presence of Lucas.

The overgrown lizard's eyes go white as they collapse to the ground.

It actually worked!

I approach the rat dragons that have collapsed and extract their mana crystals using a thin wooden spike.

Both mana crystals are woven into my arms using wood magic.

I feel like I wasted way too much time hunting blobs now… 

This is way more efficient.

Now for the next step.

I poked a hole in the glowing sac that dangles under the lizard's chin.

Blue liquid began leaking out of the hole.

No doubt about it, this is definitely the stuff Elena used to make the crystal that's attached to my groin.

I open up my arm, revealing one of the crystals embedded in it.
Whilst holding the crystal inside my arm under the stream of liquid, I attempt to mould mana into the liquid that's poured onto my crystal.

I'm attempting to mimic what Elena did a while ago when she created the crystal embedded to my pelvis.

Hmmm…

(Am I doing this right?)

Nothing changed to the crystal inside my arm.

"You need to… *ugh* focus on the capacity… of the crystal." (Lucas)
Lucas got up at some point, he's barely managing to stay on his feet.

"That's what… he… told me once…" (Lucas)

He's looking at what I'm doing.

The capacity?

I begin moulding mana again and focus on the delicious 50 points of mana inside the crystal.

(!)
This is it!

◇◆◇

 

I'm jogging through what's apparently known as the second layer right now.

(Hmmm…)
I focus on just the level of the demon that looks like a feral wolf.

Just another flunky…

I've been looking for big shot demons for what feels like an hour.
This place is stupidly large, so it's been a pain trying to track demons down honestly.

Fortunately I've got presence detection at least.
It would've been impossible to find anything here in a timely manner otherwise.

I retract my arm that I had turned into a wooden spike to stab the flunky wolf. (PR: It's like Tom Hanks' transition in FedEx's Cast Away)
A mana crystal wrapped in my roots was attached to the side of the spike. 

Worse than the one from the rat dragon huh?

Going down lower in this cavern doesn't particularly mean the crystals inside the demons will be better I guess.

I grab one of the many vials made out of wood from my chest.
The inside of the wooden vial is lined with the skin from the sac of a rat dragon.
This is so the liquid mana inside the vial doesn't slowly lose its lustre and eventually dissipate. 

I pour the content of the vial onto the crystal.

Perfect.

The vial is placed back into my now neatly organised chest.
I've created a small drawer-like shape inside of my body where my pelvis would be.
It's divided up in rows and columns. All the vials filled with liquid mana are stored there.

I take the crystal and place it in another section of my body.
And this goes into my temporary mana crystal core.

I've got all my crystals neatly split up by mana capacity.
This way, I can easily dispose of excess crystals when I find something with a much larger capacity.
Keeping hundreds of crystals that are only worth 10 mana points is grossly inefficient after all.

I've disposed of all the empty crystals that I depleted during the battle with the sugar tooth disaster.

Fortunately, Lucas gratefully took all those mana crystal with him.
Now I won't be chased for littering empty mana crystals everywhere at least…

Lucas mentioned he'd be able to pay for someone to use a recovery spell on Julia's corpse with them.
So they've gone for a good cause.

Now all that's left to do is for me to earn another full potion-
As I was finishing that thought, I came upon a familiar character.

A lone black bird-like demon was desperately flapping its wings aggressively at an enormous pack of wolves surrounding it.

The wolves with drooling snouts seemed to be constantly launching invisible blades of wind at it.

It's Ferdinand. The bird that Elena fingered.
Somehow I keep running into this fat little guy.

I was wondering where he'd flown off to.
Last I saw him, he was getting the life squeezed out of him by that idiot noble.
Why'd he even bring this bird down here with him?
Emergency food supply?

Ah- one the blades of wind seems to have cut its wing.
I guess I should probably do something before it dies?

After all, this little bird is imbued with a soul just like me.

And more importantly-

The particularly large badass-looking wolf with scars all over its body looks like the big shot that I've been looking for.