Did I blank out? I’m pretty sure I was focusing on coating myself with mana, but I don’t remember for how long I was doing it. What woken me up was a massive impact on my back, Felicia I presume. And who was that who said cats can’t fly? Well, she can’t too, but she’s pretty close, I would just prefer if she didn’t fall on me every time she tried to land.

Suddenly I smelt a burned meat, and looking for the source I saw the dragon holding it’s charred claw. Just how did that happen? Was he testing if he could hurt himself with his breath? I had no idea and was shaking my head at the impossible sight.

I tried returning to my training, but for some reason, no matter how much I tried, no mana came out where I intended it to. I was surprised at this outcome, because it was pretty easy for me to coat my limbs before, and now I couldn’t even do that.

I quickly appraised myself, only to see that my mana pool was completely empty. I was pretty shocked to see it, since I had quite a lot of mana, and didn’t use that much, but appraisal didn’t lie, and it would easily explain why I couldn’t use mana if I simply didn’t have it right now.

There was no reason to continue training if I couldn’t really do it, so I decided to eat something. We still had the food from the camp in our shadow storage, but as it was mainly for Felicia, I didn’t want to eat it. If I did, then she would be forced to eat monster meat like me, and it wasn’t exactly tasty, more like disgusting, and its nutritional value was dubious too.

I asked the dragon before, if he had some meat to spare, and to my positive surprise, he actually had. I returned to the cave using the stairs he made by using earth magic. He was so proficient at it, that he managed to make a nice flat platform on the mountain side to train on, which was located just under the cave entrance.

In the cave I found the meat laying randomly under one of the walls. I didn’t know which monster it was from, but it looked like it was hunted very recently, and cut up nicely into multiple parts, likely by the dragon’s claws. I picked up one of the larger parts and started eating.

Yup, disgusting as ever. I didn’t mind the meat being raw, but it was hard enough for me to have problems biting the parts off, and I couldn’t just swallow the whole chunk. Just eating it felt like a muscle training for my jaws, and I was pretty sure that if I kept eating meat like that, someday I could use them to chew through steel.

[Obtained enough experience. Level risen to 28]

What? Did I just level from eating meat? Confused I stared into the wall, trying my best to somehow explain what just happened. It took me a couple of minutes to remember about a skill I gained recently.

[Devour] – A skill to gain energy from eating. But the amount should be dependent on the actual energy inside the meal, so if I wanted to gain something I should rather eat something strong. To gain a whole level just from eating was pretty insane. Unless I lacked less than ten points to level, but still, to be able to gain experience from eating was simply broken.

Well, I wasn’t going to complain, free levels are acceptable. The only thing I was wondering about, what was I actually eating. Because if it wasn’t true that I was close to leveling up, to contain that much residual energy, the monster this meat belonged to must have been hellishly strong.

I was tempted to ask what did he give me to eat, but if this was one of this floor inhabitants, then even if this put me on disadvantage, I just didn’t want to know. I was horrified at the thought of having something like that attack us when we would be blindly going around the mountains in search of the stairs if the dragon didn’t adopt us.

Well, at least I managed to confirm that my [Devour] worked correctly. If I had a way to obtain the [Energy control] like Felicia, then it would be even better since it would let me level up skills easily. I wasn’t sure if this was correct thing to do, since training was essential part of the skill usage, making them better to understand and all.

It would feel like cheating to gain all the skills for free. I’m not even sure that if I leveled my [Thread mastery] all the way to the max, if I would be actually able to use its full potential. Just having a way to swing in your head doesn’t even compare to having the muscle memory and development.

I will have to make sure that Felicia doesn’t overuse this feature. She’s been leeching on me since the beginning, and didn’t actually get any combat experience, but knowing her she would take just a couple of seconds to overcome anything. She’s a genius after all. Maybe it would take some time, but I was sure that she alone wouldn’t have that much problems from cheating the skills a bit.

And again, maybe I am overestimating her. How do you even manage to bury your head in a wall? Of the dungeons cave wall at that. And wasn’t she outside a second ago? One would think that a cat’s head would lose in terms of hardness to an actual stone, but apparently it wasn’t the case. Just how fast was she going to dash past me unseen and get stuck like that?

Remlin379

I will stop uploading on the patreon for now, since it didn't blow up anyway. I think I might have been a bit too enthusiastic about that. Also, patreon sucks, the instructions about how it works are so unclear that I still don't really know what policy I set there. Additionally the money I receive equals to between 60% and 80% of actual paid sum, so quite a bit is lost to the taxes and the site itself. Maybe you already knew that, but well, it sucks so I'll just leave it hanging.