As I raised my awareness and prepared to fight, something occurred to me. Just how exactly...am I able to hear anything? I have a slime body. Slimes do not have ears. How was I perceiving sound? For that matter, how was I seeing anything? I have no eyes. Where...do I get my sensual input?

...I...did not have time for this! But a tingle in the back of my mind told me that this needed to be explored, that I need to understand this in order to grow later on. For now, there were snakes to kill and poison to deal with.

A hint of movement caught my attention, forcing me to look that way. It struck me before I could register the figure, but I had no need to identify it. The fangs sinking into my body told me all that I needed. A meter long and as thick as a human thigh, the brown and gray scaled snake looked like the sort of terror people would not want to bump into in the dark. Its fangs were as long as a human hand, from wrist to fingertip, and wickedly sharp.

If I were made of flesh, that one bite would have incapacitated me. Possibly even if I was wearing proper armor. Unfortunately for the snake, I was the contrary. That did not stop it from trying, though, squeezing the bit of my body it grabbed in its jaws, while whipping its body around either to strike me with its tail or wrap around me, I could not tell.

Ignoring the bite, I stretched out a tentacle to counter wrap the snake. It was hard to handle the winding motions, but in a flash of inspiration I slid the tentacle along the ground, following the path that started from its head. At the right moment, I flicked upwards, wrapping myself around the main body of the snake, and hardening my mana to keep it in place.

At least, that was the plan. What I did not account for was the ball of poison mana at the center of my being. I forgot how much focus I was placing into keeping a mana cyclone around it, and my control over the poison slipped, letting the construct almost completely collapse. As I fought to bring it back under control, I was also trying to attack the snake, which had begun to try to retract its fangs from inside of me. The consistency of my body was giving it a tough time, though, as it must have been like trying to pull a finger out of thick jello. With the snake making extra struggles, both trying to free its head and its body, and me trying to keep it in place along with the mana rotation going, I found myself stretching my multitasking ability pretty thin.

The second snake did not help the situation.

A loud hiss, right next to me, was my only warning as another snake with similar colors, just in a different pattern, lunged into me, jaw wide open. It seemed that it did not learn from its buddy...either that or they simply had no other way to attack. Whichever was the case, I had no attention to spare for it as I was already dealing with too much. My mind jumped from one thing to the next, unable to focus. Keeping the poison ball contained became much harder than I would have ever thought, but then again, I had no experience with magic before today. Or the last few days. How long has it been so far?

Before I could get a grip, a third snake appeared. I was definitely beyond my limit at this point. How was I supposed to fight like this? I should have retreated to deal with the mana first, instead of-

But the snakes struck too quickly, I could not-

I was so stupid for trying to absorb the ambient mana before getting to a safe place, or killing everything around, or-

Just as I was about to reach a full blown mental break down, I realized...I was not. Yes, I was freaking out...but not as much as I should have? No, that was not it. I...did not have the physical reaction of panic. It was only my head…

When humans feel extreme emotions, it is both a mental and physical experience. When someone panics, it is not just a frantic state of mind. The body has its own reactions - heart beating faster, sweat glands overproducing, breathing gets heavier - which feed into the panic, which creates a greater emotional experience. I had the mental component down. My body...could not produce the physical. My body remained calm. Aside from the constant circulation of mana that I was applying to cage the poison.

And that that alone, the realization that I was more in control than I thought, gave me clarity. I understood one thing then. I was fighting stupidly.

I ignored the snakes, entirely. Even as I noticed the liquid that they started to squeeze out of their fangs and into me, the second and third snakes not recognizing that I was not their usual threat, I ignored it still. I pushed all of my attention onto that core of poison. I needed to get that out of the way before anything else, and I doubted that the snakes would have any true capability to harm me before I finished that task.

Once I blocked out all outside influences, I began to pay attention to exactly what I was doing in my own body. When I first thought of pulling the poison out of me, I just gathered my mana as a wave and wrapped it all around the infected area, isolating it from the rest of my body. It was a crude, brute force sort of method that might wreck the body of anything that had a solid structure. I reasoned that the only reason I was not suffering any backlash at my amateur attempts at mana manipulation was that I was basically a dense liquid. My malleability was far greater than any flesh and blood creature could be. Still, that was no reason to continue being so...inelegant.

Of course, I could worry about fine control of mana later. I just needed a good enough grasp of it to disperse the poison and deal with the snakes next. And so, I brought my full mind to bear on the rotation. When I did, I unintentionally created a second ring of rotating mana instead of changing the aspects of the first. Where before, I had what looked like a blanket being wrapped around a ball, the mana shifted until two blurry rings of mana rotating on perpendicular axis to each other formed. I paused in surprise for a moment, examining the effects. Even though the poison should have escaped through the new gaps, no such thing occurred. Yes, the dark substance reached the boundaries made by the new rings, but they did not go past them. Interesting...I wondered…

While a fourth snake joined the others in launching multiple biting attacks at me while encircling me, I pushed to make a third ring of mana. I wanted to see if the extra ring would...perhaps push the poison further in? Make it disperse at a faster rate? I was not sure. But I did manage to create it...only for the whole construction to start to destabilize again. Hurriedly, I wrapped a fourth ring of mana and watched as they worked together seamlessly. At that point, someone could look at the rings from an angle and see a circle sliced into eight parts. The gaps were certainly much smaller than before, and the poison trapped inside was definitely forced into highly agitated movement, but…

I felt as if I was...missing something…

Moving on a hint of instinct, I created more rings, careful to not let the entire thing collapse. I did not make them in the same orientation, however. Instead, I treated the ball as an actual sphere, starting from any point and putting a new rotation in place. Six...eight...twelve...twenty...forty…

I kept going, making more and more rings until I suddenly felt as if all of the mana in my body was being activated at once. Something clicked into place, and I…

Everything felt as if it were being pulled into my center, as if there was a core of gravity deep within me, greedily consuming all. I looked in awe at what I had created. I had no idea what it was, but...it felt...good. Real good. The liquid from the snake fangs, which I reasoned was venom, got pulled into the middle of the high speed mana rotations. As it entered that region, I watched as it rapidly dispersed, same as the-

The poison mana...was gone. I realized with a flash of relief that I no longer had to focus on breaking it down. Once the rings clicked into place, they seemed to continue operating on their own just fine. This left my focus completely freed up for me. I allowed myself to be aware of my surroundings once more, noting with some mental humor that I somehow got entangled in a snake ball while I was focusing inwards. These snakes...were not all that smart. I do not know what sort of instincts they may have had, but wrapping yourself and your siblings around a giant ball of slime that they cannot escape clearly is not conducive to their survival. This lesson...they would not not live to learn.

I shifted my body around, carefully engulfing my newfound outer shell of biting snake bodies. I adjusted my consistency to make it harder for them to struggle their way out, but it seemed like an almost unnecessary precaution judging by the signs of exhaustion I saw in some of their movements. Once I was certain each body in contact with me was fully inside of me, I acted on a hunch and focussed on the Enhanced Consumption ability. For a few moments, nothing happened, but then something changed in my slime. All of the snakes began to...melt away. Dissolving in my internal acid. While they were still alive.

...So that is what the ability meant. I no longer needed to kill my victims before consuming them.

Well, then. I supposed it was time to put it to good use.