Since more of them are probably coming, let’s continue to experiment before they reach me. It’s better to do this now than later when I will be inside their domain. Edward took his dagger and tried to cut the thread anchoring the web to the ground without using aura. He sliced his dagger but it bounced back against the web without cutting it. Edward raised a brow in appreciation of the web resistance. Then he didn’t slice his dagger, but he put it directly against the thread and saw at it. This time the thread was cut in two.

It is but a thread, but honestly, with how durable it is, I should consider it more as a rope. Now let’s check the sticky part of the web. Edward walked closer to the forest until he was standing in front of the web sheets covering everything. He tentatively pressed a finger against the web before pulling it back. The web was still attached to his finger and was following it, expanding in the process until the web couldn’t stretch further. At this point Edward felt resistance, he tried to remove his finger while using all of his force, but it only agitated the web. The web formed a cohesive whole, and Edward’s force was transmitted to the rest of it. Instead of having to force his finger from a small part of a web, it was as if he was trying to rip the entirety of the web with only a finger.

With this system, they can catch prey much larger than themselves. There is no way a beast can tear the entirety of the web by itself. The further it struggles, the further it will get entangled inside the web, and each struggle will only alert the spiders of its presence inside the web, just like a carp drawing on a fishing line.

Edward didn’t waste any more time and used his dagger, coated with his aura, to cut the web. The dagger slice through it without resistance, but although separated from the rest of the web, a small part of the web was still stuck to Edward’s finger. Edward shook his finger to no avail. This is annoying, I feel like an adhesive plaster is stuck to my finger. Edward pushed his aura, forming an aura armor around his finger. His aura appeared as a thin layer between his armor and the web. To his surprise, Edward felt a slight pull from the web, as if it was trying to absorb his aura. The pull was too weak to actually absorb Edward’s aura, but Edward doubted that would be the case if it was pulling the remnant aura of a deceased monster instead.

Great. So, their webs are exceedingly resistant, burn fast enough to prevent the rest of the webs to catch fire, and can also absorb remnant aura.

Edward retrieved his aura, and the small piece of the web that had been stuck to him fell on the ground now that it wasn’t attached to anything anymore.

Any more good news? Edward thought.

That’s when another wave of wolf spiders arrived from the woods. They were even more numerous that the first wave. Edward dived into the battle, activating his acceleration power, and swirled between them, cutting a spider in two with each attack. However, he realized that eighty percent of the spiders were fakes. After thirty seconds, there wasn’t a single real spider near him, but the fakes kept coming.

They are hiding in their webs while sending illusions at me. All right, if you want me to drag you out of your hideout, let’s do it.

The webs delimited the spiders’ domain and had holes big enough to let them through but not enough for a human to fit unless he wanted to crawl through. Which would be a terrible idea with giant spiders on the other side.

Edward projected his aura senses piercing through the webs. To his surprise his perception was weaker than usual, it didn’t reach as far and it felt blurry. Those webs are absorbing aura, they are able to weaken my perception. However, even if it was weakened, it was still enough for Edward to teleport past the first wall of webs.

He appeared in what felt like another world. The light was dim, crossing through the webs only with difficulty. The sky wasn’t visible being fully eclipsed by the spiderwebs. The forest was unrecognizable, the previous majestic trees were all dead or in the process of dying due to the absence of sunlight. They stood upright, leafless, and covered in webs. The webs covered the canopy and came down alongside the trees, with a faint mesh of silk threads also covering the ground.

Edward analyzed his surroundings at a glance, although it had turned from full of life to dead and gloomy, it was still an open space in which it would be able to fight. He looked for the wolf spiders who were still sending illusions to fight him. He spotted a few. They weren’t on the ground but rather suspended in their webs. Some were hiding in the trees, others directly above him, suspended to the webbed ceiling.

Edward stayed in motion, with his aura perception weakened he didn’t want a spider to drop on him when he wasn’t expecting it. He ran to the nearest tree, running vertically on the trunk and slaying the spiders on it with one slice of his daggers which were elongated to the length of a sword thanks to his aura. Immediately the number of illusions assaulting him dropped. As for the spiders that were out of reach on the webbed ceiling, Edward cut them by throwing aura blades. It was a little more taxing, but it was within his tolerance.

Edward fell back on the ground, he had just penetrated their domain but he already had to deal with two waves of wolf spiders. All right, now where to go? I guess I should head deeper for now.

Edward felt the stark difference compared to the forest he used to know. The world felt stiff and restricted. With everything covered in webs, no wind was able to blow inside the forest. Apart from the dim light and the webbed ceiling, what stroke him the most was the silence and the emptiness. Edward couldn’t see any animals, the small shrews that had inhabited this forest had all vanished and no birds could be heard singing. Instead, he could see at regular intervals wasp spiders working on their webs. He let them be, he wouldn’t be able to kill every single spider, and he needed to find their nest first. The spiders themselves didn’t react to his presence, only caring about their webs. Anyway, they were too far away and too slow to catch up to him even if they wanted to.

Edward stopped using his aura senses and restrained his aura instead. Due to the webs, his aura perception was too blurry to be of use. His regular senses had been enhanced along with his body when he had increased in rank, and his sight was able to see clearly even in this dusk world.

It was only after running for several minutes that he realized another point that was bothering him. The mana density was abnormally low. Edward looked around him reflexively looking for what was causing this phenomenon, all he could see were webs everywhere. Of course, their webs must also absorb mana on top of aura. The spiders are heavily dependent on their webs, but to get rid of it-Edward gazed at the absent sky replaced by spiderwebs. -is just overwhelming.

Edward was still running blindly ahead when he was intercepted by another squad of wolf spiders. A group of thirty of them was heading in his direction. Edward sighed. Well, I can’t say this is unexpected, but seriously how many of them are there? The thirty spiders multiplied, turning into a hundred spiders with the addition of their illusions.

Edward used his acceleration to deal with them. He could have killed them without it but this would have been dangerous, those spiders were fast and numerous. Edward dashed in, slashing his aura blades left and right. Every time he managed to kill a real spider, its illusions disappeared with it decreasing the pressure on him.

After killing them, Edward took the time to absorb their blood essence. From the short delay between the waves of spiders, he wouldn’t have the time to rest, every bit of blood essence he absorbed was important to conserve his energy. However, those spiders didn’t have mana in them, and every time he was using his acceleration Edward was using his own mana. Due to the low density of the ambient mana, he wasn’t able to rejuvenate the mana that he was losing.

This is going to become problematic. Should I just spend the time burning the webs around me so I have access to the normal amount of mana? But doing that will also use my mana with the fire rune. The other solution is to find where all the mana that the webs are absorbing is getting stored. Edward grinned. Actually, this is a good idea, wherever the mana is going there is a good chance that this is where there are building their nests. The monsters need mana to accelerate their growth. He looked around at the empty area except for the webs and dead trees around him. And they probably feed on mana as well. This is not a forest anymore but a graveyard.

Edward stopped in his tracks and watch the webs carefully, trying to decipher some order in the seemingly apparent chaos. The mana must go somewhere. After watching the webs carefully, Edward realized that while the webs were all-encompassing, some threads among them were all aligned in the same direction. This is it. Edward changed his direction to follow the threads’ alignment.

The more he progressed in this direction the more active the spiders became. The number of wasp spiders crawling on the webbed ceiling increased to the point of making Edward uneasy. Those spiders appeared to act more as architects than soldiers, but having numerous huge spiders above one’s head wasn’t reassuring. Additionally, the faint mesh of threads on the soil densified until it became a full carpet, the soil only briefly appearing between webs cracks. As both the sky and the ground turned into spiderwebs Edward felt a sense of alienation. He felt as if he was in a bad dream and not in reality. The surroundings had become so strange that it was hard to consider them real.

Even the trees had become rarer and the ones he saw were so covered in spiderwebs that their bark was barely visible. They appeared as white columns connecting the webs on the ground to the one forming the ceiling. With spiders both in front of him and above him, and with the landscape turned into a massive uniform web, it would even be hard to distinguish up and down if not for gravity.

More wolf spiders came to stop Edward, they didn’t come as a pack, but as a stream, single spiders coming from every direction and surrounding him. Edward shook the horror that was building inside him. At least it seems I am in the right direction.