It was morning and I had been training my new skill for the last few minutes before I sat down drenched in sweat.
"Ugh... This is a lot harder than I thought."
I had tried to finish the technique to an at least acceptable level, but completing the technique was harder than I had previously thought. Why? Because didn't have the level of control over my power I would need.
It wasn't that hard to cover me and my surroundings in darkness, but the more darkness I tried to control the easier it could be seen through.
The technique I tried to create was something, which was supposed to fool a monster hundreds of times stronger than me. It wasn't really an urgent matter, after all the thing that is lurking somewhere in these mountains could be so much stronger than me that it wouldn't even notice me, but I should still create a technique like this to have a last resort in case I am completely overwhelmed by an enemy.
But I am not proficient enough with this technique yet and I don't know where the ending of these mountains would be. It could take me weeks to travel through here, after all I don't know this world enough.
"Let's just get moving."
I had recovered my strength enough and didn't necessarily want to be stuck at one place for too long, so I got ready to continue my journey and began following the river until I would either meet it's end or encounter some kind of change in the environment.
"This should be a good opponent to use."
I saw a young bear, not taller than myself walking around the trees, probably in the search for food.
I had my bow in my hand and grabbed an arrow with my other hand. I was training with my bow, something I had to give up upon while I was in the cave.
It's a skill I should definitely train, because it could come in handy, but the normal arrows couldn't really hurt the big bears, so I had to focus on beasts with a weaker defense and this young bear should be good enough.
It was about 50 meters away, but I was confident that my strength alone is sufficient to hit the bear the only problem is my accuracy.
Nonetheless I just gave it a shot and the arrow flew at the bear with a loud noise.
It heard the noise and tried to escape, but the arrow traveled the distance way too fast and it hit the young bear into his right front leg.
It wanted to flee, but wasn't fast enough with the wound from it's leg. I quickly grabbed another arrow and shot it, but this time I managed to hit the place I was aiming for. I cleanly shot the arrow into it's head, which lead to the immediate death of the young bear.
I ran up to it and looking down onto the bear I felt a little bit of remorse. It was easily killed in two shots from a weapon it probably never encountered before, from a person it couldn't even see and although it had probably only been a few weeks after it had been born.
"I'm sorry it had to be you, but this is how this world works."
I knew this from the moment I left my previous world, no, even before coming to this world, when I was imagining myself doing exactly what I am doing right now and even more. I know that this world isn't fair, nor is it good, but this word just works into my favor so I need to let go of my worldly feelings or anything I have already done and what I am about to do would be worthless.
"Rest in peace."
I grabbed the arrows and pulled them out of the corpse, which resulted in the blood sprinkling out of the lifeless body. The sun was shining upon it and it seemed like the corpse itself was shining, leading the soul away. Or not, who am I to now anything about how life works.
Anyways I didn't look back and began to go back in the direction of the pleasant splashing sound of the river water endlessly crashing against the rocks inside of the river.
I arrived at the river and began to sit down and train my dark powers. It's important to move on too, but in order to attain better control over my powers it was best to fully concentrate on my magic.
I could feel the mana streaming through my body, I had become a lot better at feeling the magic since first interacting with it. I felt like my understanding of the darkness had already reached a way higher point than before.
I looked at my shadow and tried to expand it and tried to bring out more and more of the darkness. I looked at my hand and moved it over my shadow and tried to match the depths of the darkness in both, my shadow and my hand.
"Concentrate!"
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes concentrating fully on the darkness inside of me. The two targets of my power, I wanted to make them both the same and I imagined the darkness flowing into each other, making it seem like it was one individual darkness.
But when I opened my eyes it was not perfect.
"Damn."
I tried this many times before always getting one step closer, but I could never achieve the full illusion, it was always different, easily distinguishable.
"Well l shouldn't sit around here for too long."
I stood up and began to follow the stream once again, simultaneously trying to maintain a steady flow of darkness, making myself even more familiar with the energy.
Like this one day, two days and a few more hours passed until I finally met the one thing I wanted to encounter the least in these mountains. I only wanted to move around a mountain blocking my path, but then I suddenly saw something out of the blue in a distance of several kilometres away.
It was a monster straight out of stories parents would tell their kids to scare them. But the difference was that the thing in front of me was more terrifying than anything someone could ever think of.
It looked like someone glued together multiple gigantic trees and took multiple tons of leaves to fill most of his body. It had what seemed to be three big arms around his body and a few other arms, half the size of the big ones around the body. It had nothing you could call legs, instead it had one big tree, but the tree wasn't only one individual, but rather thousands of gigantic roots all wrapped together and they somehow all seemed to move at the same time. But at the top, the head was probably the most terrifying thing I had ever seen before, it seemed like the mouth was one gigantic hollow tree trunk, which had been perfectly rounded and couldn't be closed. It didn't seem to have eyes, but there were multiple tree trunks coming from all around his head, which could maybe be that things ears.
And although that in itself was extremely scary it was only topped by the fact that the whole thing was half the size of one of the gigantic mountains, it was multiple kilometres big.
But I couldn't even really concentrate on the whole Individuum, because there was one thing that stood out even more, something that could give someone a trauma just by looking at it.
It was his mouth, or rather inside of his mouth, there were thousands of tree trunks shaped like teeth, which were getting sharper and sharper..
These alone wouldn't be the cause of the amount of fear I felt in that moment, but rather the fact that from these "teeth" there was something dripping down. From afar I wouldn't normally be able to know exactly what it was, but it had a deep blood red colour and it made it even more terrifying to see the thing in front of me revealing another few rows of teeth coming from the back of his mouth, they looked like they had fresh meat still on them and the whole back of his "mouth" was shrouded in the blood of another big beast, which had been torn to pieces by it and seemed minuscule compared to the thing eating it right in front of me.
And the worst part was that somehow I got the feeling or rather from my perspective... it seemed like it was smiling.