She flinched.
The reaction was immediate, visceral, her whole body drawing back as though struck.
“No — no, of course not, my Lord.
Forgive me.
I — I did not mean to—”
“Then wait here.
I will return.”
I bounced into the tunnel without waiting for a response.
The forest swallowed me whole.
The canopy closed overhead like a living ceiling, the ancient trees of the Jura Forest towering so high that their uppermost branches were lost in darkness, their trunks wider than houses, their roots rising from the earth in great arched ridges that created a labyrinth of natural walls and pathways.
The undergrowth was thick — ferns, mosses, flowering plants that glowed faintly in the dark, their bioluminescence casting blue-green shadows across the forest floor.
The magicule density here was staggering, each breath — if I had breathed — saturated with raw magical energy that made my surface tingle and my consciousness hum.
The aura of Veldora extended about a mile from the cave, a sphere of draconic pressure that kept the area immediately surrounding the entrance clear of hostile creatures.
But once I passed that boundary, the forest changed.
The sounds deepened.
The shadows thickened.
And the presence of other creatures — small, medium, large, and things I did not want to think about — pressed against my sensory awareness from every direction.
I was alone.
I was a slime.
And I needed to get stronger.
The realization had been building in me since the herb collection.
Rolling through the undergrowth, absorbing moss, dissolving fungi — the sheer, grinding difficulty of doing anything without hands, without limbs, without a body capable of manipulation, had driven home a truth that the source material had glossed over: being a slime was not easy.
It was not a power fantasy.
It was a slow, tedious, physically exhausting process of adaptation and survival.
In the anime, the protagonist ate monsters and gained their abilities almost instantly.
A quick fight, a dissolve, a notification, done.
What the anime did not show was the actual combat — the terror of engaging a creature three times your size with nothing but a gelatinous body, the trial and error of figuring out which abilities worked and which did not, the near-death experiences that came with every encounter because a slime, even a uniquely evolved one, was still at the bottom of the food chain.
But I had no choice.
I needed abilities.
I needed to level up.
I needed to become strong enough to eventually consume Veldora — not the seal, the dragon himself — and take a form that was more than a dinner plate of sentient jelly.
I found my first target in a clearing.
A Tempest Serpent — a snake-like monster with scales that shimmered like oil on water, its body coiled around a fallen log, its tongue flicking the air as it tasted the magicule density.
It was roughly three feet long.
Not large, not dangerous by the standards of the Jura Forest, but to a slime, it was a genuine threat.
I approached from behind, low and slow, my body flattening against the forest floor, minimizing my profile.
The serpent’s sensory organs were keyed to heat and vibration — I had no body heat, being a slime, which gave me an advantage.
But one wrong move, one vibration too strong, and it would strike.
I contracted.
Launched.
The serpent reacted.
Its head snapped around, fangs bared, venom glistening — but I was already there, my body engulfing its head, my Dissolution activating on contact.
The scales resisted — briefly — before my body began to break them down, the chemical structure of the armor dissolving under the sustained assault of my enzymes.
The serpent thrashed.
Its body whipped wildly, slamming into trees, coiling around my form, squeezing with a strength that would have crushed a human ribcage.
I felt the pressure — not pain, not exactly, but a compression that threatened to deform my body, to split me apart.
「Dissolution in progress.
Estimated time: 47 seconds.」
Forty-seven seconds.
An eternity in combat.
I held on.
The serpent’s thrashing weakened as my enzymes broke through its scales and began dissolving the tissue beneath.
Its movements grew sluggish, then frantic, then still.
The body went limp in my grip, the coils loosening, and I absorbed the remains — flesh, scale, venom, bone — drawing them into my internal storage, breaking them down into their component materials.
「Tempest Serpent absorbed.
Ability acquired: Steel Thread.
Ability acquired: Venom Resistance.」
Steel Thread.
I could produce silk-like threads from my body — strong, adhesive, capable of binding targets.
And Venom Resistance, which would have been useful against the dart that had killed See’s companions.
One down.
I needed more.
The second encounter was harder.
A Black Spider — an arachnid the size of a large dog, with eight legs tipped in barbed hooks and mandibles that dripped with a paralyzing toxin.
It found me before I found it, dropping from a branch above, landing on my body with its full weight, its legs piercing my surface and anchoring into my gelatinous flesh.
The pain — or what passed for pain in my current physiology — was sharp, immediate, and deeply unpleasant.
Each leg created a wound that my body struggled to close, the paralytic toxin seeping into my tissue and causing my surface to harden, to stiffen, losing the fluid adaptability that was my primary defense.
I contracted violently.
My body bucked, throwing the spider off, but it landed on its feet and circled, mandibles clicking, eyes gleaming in the bioluminescent glow.
It charged again.
Faster this time, legs a blur, aiming to pierce and paralyze.
I activated Steel Thread.
Silk-like strands erupted from my body, shooting outward in a web pattern that caught the spider mid-charge, tangling its legs, adhering to its chitin.
It thrashed, tearing at the threads — they held, barely, the silk strong enough to restrain but not strong enough to immobilize completely.
I did not wait.
While the spider struggled, I rolled forward, engulfed its head, and activated Dissolution.
The chitin was harder than serpent scales.
The process took longer — over a minute of sustained contact, the spider thrashing and biting beneath me, its mandibles piercing my body repeatedly, each wound sending another wave of paralytic toxin into my system.
My Venom Resistance helped — it did not make me immune, but it slowed the toxin’s spread, gave my body time to metabolize and neutralize.
When the spider finally went still, I was exhausted.
My surface was pockmarked with puncture wounds, my viscosity reduced, my body thinner and less cohesive than before.
I found a cluster of regenerative moss nearby — the same type I had harvested for See — and absorbed it, feeling the healing compounds knit my wounds closed, restoring my mass and consistency.
「Black Spider absorbed.
Ability acquired: Sticky Thread.