Dane's regeneration was slow because of the mana-starved status effect; his recovery rate was ten times slower than usual. He expected a headache or decreased health when overexerting mana, but it was not like draining physical stats. The best way he could describe it was that whatever had tethered his soul to his body was weakened when he overexerted.

  Dia said nothing, but he could feel her tugging him to keep him centered. If he had gotten mana-starved without her here, he wondered if he would be an ethereal spirit wandering around the dungeon until his three days were up.

  He had nothing better to do, so he lay practising mana manipulation. Having the practice downloaded into his brain matrix style was one thing, but feeling out his pathways was another. Spirits were mana, so it was much easier for them to wield magic. He had to force it through channels and could feel it slowing down depending on where he was pushing it.

  Dia was frustrated and gave up trying to give him instructions, because "you just got to feel it" wasn't enough of an answer for him. Still, he was making progress with pure mana manipulation. Master Prospector was a physical class. Dane wondered if he would ever get a chance to have a hybrid class.

  Acquiring skills/spells outside intervals of the standard ten levels was rare; his danger sense was an oddity. You still had a chance to develop skills without them being a gift from the system, but you need an innate talent for them, and sometimes years of practice before anything concrete would materialize.

  He felt the flow and tried to form basic shapes; Triangles were the easiest, but anything with more than three sides grew increasingly complex, and when he tried to add a third dimension, he would constantly lose the spell. He wanted to increase his mana pool, but Dia told him that the only way to do it was to use it and recover continually. If he had chosen the Magi class, he would naturally have a bigger mana pool at each level.

  He still dropped his unassigned stat points in an even spread to avoid neglecting one area. His charisma was lacking, and he figured he should get that up to snuff in case he ever had to sweet-talk his way out of a situation.

  On day two, he got an idea to create mana strings and try to use them to pull things towards him. If he couldn't move, he would at least be able to search his immediate area. The hardest part about the strings is that they were thin, but if he made them thick enough to pull larger objects, he wouldn't be able to extend them far enough to grab most of the things near the edges of his room.

  He began to braid the strings together, making a mana rope. The durability he gained was outstanding. However, he lost the ability to push it under things. He began stretching it and thinning the mana towards the tip, which solved the issue of being unable to shimmy it underneath stuff.

  On day three, he began to feel dizzy every few minutes. His lips were chapped, and his skin felt tight. He was dehydrated. He needed to drink something, or he would die on this platform.

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  He saw the corpse of the Abyss wolf lying about five feet from him; it was too heavy to drag using the Mana rope. The headaches and dizziness from dehydration made him lose his mana more than once. Just then, he got a brilliant idea: what if instead of using the mana rope to pull things to him, he made the rope inside his body and used it to move? It wasn't easy to wrap his head around it.

  He could feel the rope stretching out his mana channels, an agonizing feeling, but he was desperate. He could finally fill his body with mana rope, but moving was unnatural. He had to start small by willing his arms to fold on his chest. The hardest part of the ordeal was dragging his hips up so his knees would slide as he inchwormed to the carcus. The freezing, jagged stone floor scraped at his skin, eroding the first layer of skin, leaving the front of his body carpeted with burns.

  It took him two hours of sliding on the ground with about fifteen breaks in between before he reached the body. He forced his head to lie in the black blood. It was a weird sensation; he was in control of his body, but it still felt like he was making someone else do it. In a way, that's what he was doing, but it was still weird. For example, your breathing is automatic until someone mentions it, and then you start consciously inhaling and exhaling.

  He began to lap up the blood from the dismembered canine. He wished he could say he was disgusted with the taste, but he was delighted after almost four days without anything to drink. The scarlet liquid that tasted of pennies went down like a fine wine. It was a great feeling to have something in his stomach finally, but it still gave him an ache.

  Dane couldn't hold it in, and he began to retch; the vomit looked like old coffee grounds. He figured he had drunk too much too quickly.

  "Dane, I know we are dying and all, but you are repulsive." Dia chimmed in while he drank more.

  The following day, he woke up and was finally able to stretch. He quickly learned that it was a mistake because, though he had pretty literally feasted on the blood of his enemy, he was still dehydrated and began to cramp in every single muscle that he inadvertently flexed out of habit.

  Dane stood up after coaxing his muscles out of their flexed, aching state with mana rope massages. He gathered the mushrooms he had picked for his makeshift torch and noticed they were entirely dry, feeling more like wood than a dried mushroom. He used his skill to identify them. Mushrooms of Langourous Intent: This bioluminescent fungus contains a potent neurotoxin that causes a paralytic effect when picked. The effect will remain until the spores are exhausted and the bioluminescence fades.

  At least he wouldn't need to worry about getting paralyzed again. His stomach ached with hunger. He tried to bite down on the mushrooms, but his efforts were only met with a chipped tooth. He looked at the wolf corpse beside him, but he could already see maggots and insects picking apart the beast. He had done some disgusting things for survival, but that was where he drew the line.

  If he had to eat the gross meat from the wolf, he would need some way to cook it.

  He began to look around the cave to see if there was any quartz he could use as a striker to try to ignite the mushrooms, so he could at least cook one of the less maggoty areas of the wolf. He found what he was looking for, though it wouldn't spark like flint; you had to make do with what you could get. Adapt and overcome, as his father always told him. He tried to spark the mushrooms with his pickaxe head and the quartz, but couldn't get the woodlike shroom to ignite.

  He then started to rip out all the fur from the beast and used that as a makeshift fire starter. After several strikes, the fur caught flame, and with a couple of heavy blows, he was able to get a good fire going.

  The wolf meat tasted acrid, like something that would poison you. But, he had to regain his strength, so he greedily ate his fill. The best meal he'd had since the apocalypse started.