We left the open area where this whole group meeting was being held. Several students tried to follow us, but a single glance laced with bloodlust was all it took for them to back off. Getting as far away from the other students was our current goal so I could go back to being myself for the last two days of the trip. I was itching to stretch my wings again. It felt so good to be myself.
This whole trip was turning out to be very relaxing for me. Once we were alone I wandered off by myself, and switched back to my real body. Not long after we started to see ships flying overhead.
"They got busy," Savannah watched as another passed by overhead.
"They're clearing out the canyons," I tracked the ships with my infrared, "Burning them."
"What?" Savannah looked at me.
"They're burning the canyons," I repeated, "It won't kill everything though. There's too many caverns that lead to the other canyons. The flames aren't going down into the tunnels far enough for me to see all of them, but I can see the openings of quite a few of them."
"What makes you think that they lead to the other canyons?" Savannah asked.
"I think that this whole planet is a honeycomb," I switched back to my normal vision, "A lot of the creatures they showed us at the whole assembly thing were nocturnal. Some were so highly sensitive to light that coming up to the surface during the day would be extremely harmful for them, but if they can't come to the surface then how do they have such large territories?"
I let Savannah think that over for a little while as we walked. I headed towards the canyon slowly. A part of me still wanted to go down there, and I wanted to see just how effective burning the canyons actually was. Well that, and I was getting hungry. There would be a lot of wounded beasts fleeing from such an inferno.
If there were too many of them there for me to handle while eating then we could always fall back. It was hard to see much with infrared as we got closer to the canyon. All I saw ahead of me was a wall of heat. All that hot air coming out of the canyon forced me to rely on my normal vision. I didn't have super good hearing, but with how heavily I was armored I didn't think I would need it.
Even if something managed to startle me it would have one hell of a time actually doing any damage. My tail twitched as I tensed up into a crouch. Ready to strike as soon as I saw anything edible. System my XP.
11150/12400 XP until level 16.
A beast crashed through the trees, and I struck without giving it a second thought. Biting into it's head, and twisting sharply until I heard the pop of it's neck breaking. I'd gotten in the habit of ignoring most of my notifications so I didn't actually pay attention to how much XP I got from the beast. All that mattered is it wasn't enough for me to level up. I pulled my kill in close, and started trying to pry bit size pieces off of it.
It's flesh didn't tear easily. It felt like I was eating leather as I managed to get a strip off of it. The burnt sections were even tougher than the spot I was gnawing on right now. Another beast burst through the trees as I was trying to eat the extra leathery part of the first one. I jumped it.
Slamming it's massive bulk into the ground as I swallowed the leathery chunk of meat that was already in my mouth, and bit down into it's flesh. Injecting venom into it. It screamed as it's flesh turned to stone. Writhing around in pain, and thrashing until about a minute later when it turned completely to stone. I felt myself grow slightly as I leveled up, but I wasn't really paying attention to that since I felt kind of bad about killing something that way.
"Let's not do that again," I looked at Savannah with grimace on my face.
"Yeah no," Savannah nodded in agreement.
Pain flared through me. Making me flinch, and hiss.
Two headed earth lizard killed 500 XP. Venom absorbed mana +5.
Venom absorbed mana? What the hell does that mean?
Basilisk venom is capable of sending mana from killed beasts back to user, and expanding users mana capacity. The effect is useless on beasts with less than 100 mana.
So basilisk venom adds to mana capacity?
Correct.
How much mana?
1 mana for every 100 mana target possesses.
So this guy had five hundred mana when I poisoned him?
Correct.
That made me wonder what Basilisks used their mana for. There had to be several creatures that they killed with more than a hundred mana.
"Wyatt?" Ethan patted my shoulder, "You alright?"
"The basilisk venom absorbed mana from my kill, and expanded my mana capacity a little," I shook off the stunned feeling I got from that, "But if that's a passive effect of basilisk venom then what did basilisk's use it for?"
"Basilisk are earth elemental creatures," Ethan answered, "They're highly inefficient when it comes to mana usage."
"So it doesn't really matter how much mana they have because they waste a lot of it?" I scanned our surroundings quickly.
I couldn't stop paying attention to our surroundings because we were having a discussion. That would be dangerous, and stupid out here on an unknown planet. I started peeling meat of the leathery beast I'd been eating to start with, and debated on whether or not I should use more of my basilisk venom. I'd used about half on the beast I'd just turned to stone, but the mana gain I got wasn't all that big, and that was a horrible way to kill anything. The inner conflict of killing something like that roiled around in my gut for a while as I ate.