I moved away from the strange root growth that still covered the wall, and presumably, my exit from this place. I still had things to do here. Though that wasn't my largest concern at the moment. I had found that I couldn't get back to my human form. I'd tried several times. I couldn't be sure if it was because I simply wasn't doing something correctly, if there was a cooldown on the skill or any number of other things. The not knowing was the worst; it played on my mind, making me wonder if I'd ever be able to go back to my human form. I had spent more than a few minutes skittering around the area in agitation as I slowly worked through the issue.

  So much therapy after I get out of here. So, so much.

  In the end, I distracted myself by moving on to the next task, like a bird with something shiny, my mind thankfully latched onto the new goal with gusto. I needed to be heading deep into the jungle to see what I could find. More monsters, more loot and there was still another creature here that I needed to defeat if I wanted to leave this place.

  As it turned out, staying in my spider form had its advantages in the jungle; it was beyond easy to scale the trees, leaping from trunk to trunk as I made my way deeper into the forest. All I had to do was avoid some of the denser sections where my bulk would restrict my movements. The strange sort of muscle memory I had in this body had kicked in well and truly; my spider limbs reacted exactly as I thought they should, even though it should have been the single most uncoordinated and clumsy experience of my life. It was disconcerting at first, but I was rapidly adjusting to my ability to move my new body around with a slightly perplexing degree of coordination.

  On the other hand, what had ended up being the single most uncoordinated experience in my life was when I figured out that I could actually produce webs, and not just from the place you would expect, either. I am not at all ashamed to admit that I attempted to mimic a certain comic book character. I'd been completely unable to resist the flight of childish fantasy that came with the opportunity to recreate things I'd grown up watching and reading.

  It. Did. Not. Go. Well.

  At any rate, I learned I could produce thinner lines of webbing from glands that resided in each of my eight legs, and from the rear of my abdomen, like most other spiders I knew of. I also learned that the weight distribution of spider bodies is not conducive to swinging through the jungle like Tarzan. The weight distribution left me hanging in awkward positions that made it difficult to see where I was going around the bulk of my spider body, and even harder to target a new place for a web line. Instead, it was far better to use a web line to sort of 'yank' myself in any given direction rather than swing. This worked fairly well thanks to my increased Strength and Dexterity attributes. A little too well when I was first learning. Which had ended with some, overestimating, of my strength.

  That experience was both painful and embarrassing. Which made me quite glad no one was around to see it, and I had checked. There were no witnesses to my early failures.

  None still living, at least.

  After that debacle, I spent hours, endless hours criss-crossing the jungle searching for my target while I practiced with my newfound ability to traverse the jungle with web lines. The perpetual lack of a need for sleep or sustenance, combined with the lack of any kind of day and night cycle, made it impossible to judge how long I spent searching the jungle. It could have been days or weeks, and I wouldn't have known the difference. I preyed on the smaller or weaker creatures constantly. Juvenile Serpent Roots and giant root snakes were easy prey for my spider form. Nothing came close to challenging me. The raw power of my Strength and Dexterity attributes while I was in my spider form made that nearly impossible. I was faster than most of the creatures inhabiting this place could hope to react to and physically more than strong enough to rip them to shreds. Overkill, in this place, I was overkill. Of course, it was entirely possible that something could have had a Skill of some sort that might have given them a better shot at hurting me, but nothing was revealed. No matter how many I killed, there was always more, and they had nothing new to show me.

  Despite the reduced experience that came from killing things that were my own level or lower, I even managed to pick up a couple more levels, pushing me up to level nine. Unfortunately, I was gaining less and less experience from every kill as time went on. It seemed that the amount I received diminished if the creature was too much weaker than I was. On the plus side, there was no shortage of the creatures, so by volume, it wasn't terrible, though it was increasingly becoming less worthwhile to stop my search to hunt the smaller creatures.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Over the indeterminable time I spent searching, I had covered approximately eighty percent of the jungle; the only place that was left to search was the heart of the jungle. I had avoided searching there so far, despite all indications to the contrary, simply because it was a much tighter environment. It would be much, much harder for me to move freely with the bulk of my spider body. Nope, nothing at all to do with all the loot and EXP I was getting farming lower-level mobs.

  Nothing at all.

  I made my way into the heart of the jungle, carefully navigating my way into the tight pack of trees above. There was no jumping, leaping or swinging from trunk to trunk here; there simply wasn't any space for it with the largest gap between tree trunks being about eight feet, maybe less.

  Down below on the forest floor, I could see a bloom of blue light, which leaked between the trunks of the trees, casting rays off in odd directions. My pace slowed to a crawl as I focused more on avoiding detection. My battle with the [Serpent Root Sentinel] had more than taught me the worth of doing a little recon. If I hadn't waited in the trees then, watching, I might have had the same end as the giant root snake that had revealed the presence of the serpent root sentinel. As a human at the time, it was entirely possible that the creature would have killed me on the first strike from ambush.

  I crept through the trees like a wraith slipping from trunk to trunk, a couple of dozen feet above the jungle floor, with only a whisper of sound to mark my passing. I was focused entirely on not being detected, every movement, every whisper of sound that came from my body as I moved, I tried to reduce down to nothing.

  I immediately activated the new Skill with a push of will, noting that even the whisper-quiet noises I had been making previously had all but vanished. More interesting was that activating the Skill seemed to have given me a sort of sixth sense. As I moved closer and closer to the glow, there was a constant feeling in the back of my mind each time I chose a new place to move to, that it would be better or worse than my current location. I found myself moving differently than I had been; it wasn't a huge difference, just barely enough to be noticeable, really. I was placing my legs differently, and my weight often shifted just before or just after I thought it should. It was then that I realized what was happening; the new skill had imprinted a form of muscle memory on me, similar to how I had the muscle memory to move my limbs and complete other tasks in my spider body. There were implications to this, big ones. However, I didn't want to delve too deeply into it while I was in enemy territory, so to speak. I shoved those thoughts aside, instead focusing on getting closer to the source of the blue light that I was fairly certain was my target.

  I weaved through the tree trunks with ever more ease as I adapted to the combination of muscle memories coming from my spider body and my new Skill. For several long minutes, there had been conflicts that had nearly frozen me in place. It was an odd sensation, like when you were doing something by rote, and then you thought about it just a little too much and froze, unable to remember the next step. Or when there was a word on the tip of your tongue and it just wouldn't come to you, so you stood there and stuttered.

  The blueish glow only grew stronger as I moved deeper and deeper into the heart of the jungle until it reached a peak, and a clearing came into view. Creeping around the trunk of a massive tree, what I assumed was the object of my search came into sight.

  It was by far the strangest thing I had seen so far since arriving in this place. The nightmare Rex, the giant spider, the weird vine-snake creatures, this thing was the weirdest.

  I was staring at a massive tangle of pitch black roots, veins of shimmering blue running along each and every root in erratic patterns that seemed to crackle with energy. The massive bundle of roots shuddered every second or two in a way that made me think of a sort of heart, a creepy, cursed, evil tree heart hidden in the center of a jungle filled with root minions. One that shuddered and jerked and twitched its way through life as if its entire purpose was to be as disconcerting to watch as possible.

  Yeah, this doesn't seem like something out of a horror movie at all. Not even a little bit.

  Of course, that was the moment it got worse. The strange root heart swelled to nearly double its size, the vines and branches that made up its body creaking and groaning under the strain. The swelling continued for several long moments until it reached an apex. The blue patterns lit up all at once, going from dim shimmers to nearly blinding, like staring into the sun. In the next moment, it came to an end, the root heart, as I'd decided to call it for now, rapidly shrank back down to its original size, disgorging a flood of bright blue fluids on the ground around its base from within the depth of its body. In moments, writhing creatures appeared from within the flood of blue liquid.

  Serpent roots.

  Dozens of them, though they were smaller even than the [Juvenile Serpent Roots] that had chased me through the jungle originally. This creature was apparently where they were born, and it explained their numbers. If it pushed them out in batches dozens deep like this, there could be untold hundreds and thousands of them. Thankfully, I imagined the giant root snakes and other creatures probably preyed on them when they were this size, which helped keep their population in check. Otherwise, I imagined they would have overrun the entire jungle a long time ago, through sheer weight of numbers if nothing else.