It had taken hours, and a lot of concentration but Jack was finally done. He’d set up almost all of his hair to regenerate. A break from messing with his Hair Manipulation was needed.

Feeling way less naked now that he had hair though, he looked at the huge mess from the Blood Drain fiasco. He shook his head in disappointment, there was no way he was going to try that again. At least not with his mouth.

While the leeches used Blood Drain with their mouth, that didn’t mean he had to also. Well, he hoped he didn’t have to. He’d used skills in different ways than the monsters he’d learned them from.

Hell, the skill just said ‘drain blood from a target’ nothing about sucking it out with his mouth. A realization he wished he’d had before.

As he cleaned up the area he pondered ways he could ‘drain blood.’ Theoretically, a butcher would drain the blood out of a cow. Could it be thought of as just a bleed ability? Something to just promote blood loss?

If that was true then using the skill should be as simple as cutting something and letting it bleed out. But the ‘instincts’ that came from Mimicry made it seem like an active effect.

That actually brought up something that he’d been needing to figure out. The nature of skills.

Some needed to be activated like Hydraulic Leap and Focused Senses.

Then there were passive ones like Researching or Staff Mastery.

Impact Resistance was originally just a passive effect, but Rejection gave it an active effect as well.

Naturally, the active ones he had to do something to use them. Hydraulic Leap he rushed his blood through his body to quickly move his body. They all seemed to have a cost of some sort. Stamina or some sort of mental energy.

He vaguely remembered the Depression affliction referring to Mental Strain. There wasn’t a way to track it, but he could feel it when it got low. He’d get a headache or become mentally tired.

The simple thing about ‘active’ skills was that he always knew when he was using them. Leveling them up was relatively simple, just keep activating them.

‘Passive’ skills were always on and he had no idea if he could even turn them off. As far as he knew, they didn’t seem to cost him in any way. Being always on wasn’t the same as always using them though or else they would be leveling up much faster than his active skills.

For example, Researching it’s for studying materials and sources. Wasn’t he technically always studying his surroundings? What was considered material? Physical things? Could his current thoughts be considered studying?

**Skill Up** Researching Level 5

Practically yelling at the ceiling, “OH, HA. HA!” Whatever controlled the level ups must really be happy with themselves.

The sudden outburst startled the busy spider near him. Who popped her head out of her nest in the wall. After seeing that nothing was actually wrong, she went back to expanding the web.

With the convent timing of Researching’s level up, its evolution could very well help him understand how skills work.

**Alert** New Skill Evolution Available Choose one Ancient Knowledge Guiding Hand The Mind's Library

Well, Ancient Knowledge could be exactly what he was looking for. There isn’t too much to go on, but maybe it will just give him knowledge. Although the system didn’t seem too keen on just downloading information into your head. It might function in a similar way as Identify.

Guiding Hand? Maybe a way to help others. A bunch of scholars gathering together and helping each other could possibly compound a bonus it gave. Like group casting, but for learning. It might be something else entirely, though.

Now The Mind’s Library reminded him of something, but he just couldn’t put his finger on it.

Jack racked his brain for a few moments until he recalled what it sounded like.

A mind palace! It was a memorization technique. There was a show about Sherlock Holmes that had mentioned it once, and it made him want to look it up. It was all about visualizing the thing you wanted to remember inside a room of a palace. So maybe The Mind’s Library was something to help your memory.

Out of the three, the only one that seemed like it might help with understanding the system was Ancient Knowledge. While he loved the idea of a way to memorize things around him, that won’t help him comprehend them at all.

**Alert** Researching has gained the evolution Ancient Knowledge

After a few moments of waiting, he concluded it wasn’t just going to give him information.

Using Identify on Lucy and his magic items failed to give him any new information.

Hoping the purpose of the evolution would reveal itself eventually he moved back to his thoughts about skills.

So Blood Drain active or passive? Based on the Instincts that came with the skill he would have to say active. So the questions are, how to activate it and what does it cost.

Hydraulic Leap’s activation felt like he was trying to flex his chest, while Hair Manipulation was like trying to bend an imaginary finger.

Thinking back to when he sucked the blood out of the rabbit- He suppressed a shudder- He was mostly being guided by the muscle-memory that Intuition gave him. There was a moment right when he pressed his mouth to the wound, where it felt like his lips were inhaling.

It was a strange concept to him, even though he was the one who did it.

He attempted to recreate the feeling. It took him quite a few tries, but eventually; he felt that inhale-sucking feeling in his lips for just a second before it stopped.

After repeating the action several times so that he had a good feel for it, he tried doing the same thing but with the end of his index finger. Amazingly he felt the same sucking feeling from the tip of his finger still only for a second before it stopped though.

With that minor success, all he wanted to do was a test to see if it actually worked. The problem though is his guilt about killing helpless rabbits. Especially after that last one. He didn’t know if he could kill another one.

Although there could be a way to test it without killing a rabbit or fighting a drone.

Grabbing a knife, he made a medium-sized cut on the fleshy part of his palm. Wincing in pain, he watched his hand bleed for a few seconds before moving his other hand’s index finger to touch the wound.

Activating the ability, he immediately saw a quick surge of blood flow out of the wound. It only lasted for a second and he couldn’t hold the sucking feeling longer than that.

More interestingly though was that the blood almost seemed to climb the tip of his finger while the skill was active. It was as if the blood was not just being pulled out of the wound, but up his finger as well.

It took a few more uses of the skill before he lost a single point of health.

He was practically bursting from excitement. Not only was he able to use the skill that a few hours ago he thought he might never try again, but he also didn’t have to use any other creature to practice the skill on. Not until it started doing enough damage that he couldn’t use himself as a dummy and by then he could possibly use it in a fight.

After twenty minutes of using the skill, Jack realized he was practically starving. He stopped to briefly eat before getting back to train, but after another twenty minutes went by, he was hungry again.

It could make sense that the ‘cost’ of using the skill was needing more food. If he used the skill how it was supposed to be used that probably would work itself out.

If that was the case, he was going to run through his food supply very quickly. He decided to do a quick inventory of his stock.

Around 40 lbs of cooked owl meat.

Around 10 lbs of uncooked owl meat.

20 lbs of angler bulb

30 angler bulb berries -Delicious-

4 full rabbits for a total of around 15 lbs.

8.5 calorie bars.

That should be able to last him two to three weeks at the very least. Even if he took into the extra food he’d need to train Blood Drain, there was very little chance he’d run out of food before the dungeon broke. After that, he could just hunt for more.

With the knowledge that he could pay for the cost of the skill, he continued his training.

The over next two days Jack spent his time split between three main projects.

The first was leveling up his various skills.

The second was attracting leeches and killing them. Using himself as live bait wasn’t the most pleasant task in the world. Even more so now that he was practically immune to the leeches poison making him feel every little bite made vs him.

They were just too easy to farm for him not to bear through the pain.

Around the time both Jack and Lucy made it to level seven though, the leeches were becoming harder and harder to attract.

When Jack came out of the river once with only six leeches he knew that tap was about to run dry.

With the leeches mostly gone, that encouraged them to move on to their last project, fighting their way deeper into the dungeon.

While at first Jack thought the blooming drone variants were more dangerous, with their reaching vines, ranged toxic needles, roided physical stats, and ability to call in other drones to the area. Their extra power came at the price of durability.

A single solid hit to the skull would take out almost all of the blooming drones with the tougher ones only able to take two or three max.

Identify said that the plants were draining the hosts of their vitality, which caused their bones to be very brittle.

Most fights against the blooming drones started and ended by Jack quickly leaping in and smashing in their head before they had a chance to call anything else.

It was after one of those fights that Jack was standing over what looked to be a five-foot-tall mole. He was reaching down to cut off its vine when at the very edge of the fog; he spotted a similar-looking vine wrapped around a tree.

The vine was enormous though. It was nearly six inches thick in the middle and was missing the signature flowers and buds all the drone’s vines had.

The thin end of the vine curled around a branch near the top of what he could see of the tree. The rest of it was coiled around the trunk getting thicker the closer it was to the ground. It separated from the tree at the base laying on the ground where it led deeper into the mist.

The entire thing gave him cthulhian vibes and if that wasn’t enough of a red flag, Identify activated on the vine.

Blooming Corpse Titan Level: 30 [Boss] This beautiful calamity is known to have its army of drones wipe out entire cities to feed its insatiable hunger.

Highest Skill: (Class) Vitality Absorption

If that was just a part of the monster he was not looking forward to seeing the main body. He was confused as to why he could only see one skill before he realized that it was over level twenty-four. He’d only seen a few creatures with level’s that high and none of them showed him any skills at all. Maybe his new evolution just increased the number of skills he could see in general. Turning one to three and zero to one.

The boss’s tentacle-vine showed no reaction to his presence, even though he just killed one of its drones. He reached down and cut off the vine from the mole and stored it with the dozens of others in his inventory.

He had no intention of fighting the thing right now but felt he could reasonably get a peek at the thing before heading back.

Staying far from the actual vine he crept towards the direction it led into the mist.

As he shuffled forward he noticed that for the first time in the entire dungeon the mist disappeared. The mist did not clear up, but there was an entire area completely devoid of it. He could see the entire area had an unnatural barrier of fog like the one he just passed through.

The clearing was the size of half a football field. All around were both kinds of drones of all types of animals.

In the very center of the area was a gigantic forty-foot tall plant.

It, like the flowers found on the drones, resembled a sunflower. The entire face of the flower was fifteen feet across and faced towards the ground. The five-foot-wide stalk was bending at the top as if it could barely hold the head of the flower. The petals were a toxic looking purple, and the black needle pods were the size of his head.

The stalk was the same blood-red color as the huge vine he followed here. Which made sense because the vine let straight to the stalk connecting to it about halfway up.

Attached to the stalk were a dozen of these emerald green orbs that reminded him of a five-foot brussels sprout.

The shock of seeing the plant only lasted for a second but that was enough time for several of the drones to spot him.