To the First test if this is all real, or if this is indeed an alternate reality that my mind has created due to the stress and craziness of my past, I screamed 'ACTIVATE!' in my head… sorry, mind, hoping that it would work. It didn't. I wondered why and then I realized that not every Isekai has a call-out word or phrase that makes all their Skills magically work. Wishful thinking is what I call that.
Hard work is how I survived, not some trivial things like hope or expecting salvation. Just thinking of relying on someone again makes me feel like throwing up. Anyways, I instead focus on every other spore that has landed in my area, which is probably, for human scale, less than 1/200 of a millimeter, so you can see how a mile-wide cave could take a while to Imprint, as I will now dub my second sight. After painstakingly taking into account how different the size is of regular rocks, which I can see by the way, to myself, it took quite a long time and total concentration of willpower on finding the other slightly lime green orbs of chitin around me into a haphazard line.
Why check to see if there are spores? Because out of all the Novels I have read, I know that there are certain perks too, *ahem*, merging with the same components as one's self. Such as armor sets or item sets. My second reason is that I know the correct size, mass, and weight, so I thought the easiest thing to try with was other things around the same size as me.
The third reason is that it just popped into my mind that if I gathered enough I could turn into a giant boulder or even a humanoid figure. The final reason is that I could try to gather enough of myself to make a sort of launching mechanism out of the spore I collected to get to other places. I know I said that I covered the entire cave, but the truth is I did that, but that's it. There is no way I could accurately find out everything in this cave but by bumping into a rock and launching myself who knows where.
So I decided after I collected all the spores I could from where I was onto the mushroom that I would keep launching myself to different parts of the cave to see what I could find. The first thing is what anyone would not expect. It had nothing to do with the launching mechanism, but the growth of the mysterious mushroom I came out of. Since I have figured out that this is a cave, all I have to do is use the spores I have collected and use it as a whip to implant some spores into cracks in the corner of the cave walls, as I realized that was what my mushroom was growing out of.
Thinking of how mushrooms usually need decomposing organisms or dirt at the very least, I knew this mushroom was a very adaptable species, so I used the spores and implanted them to see how long it would take for them to adapt to the new place I put them in and grow. I could estimate about a couple of days at the least, and a month at most, due to the quick growth of regular mushrooms and other fungi I have studied. The reason I did this before I created the mechanism is so I could have time management to do two things at once.
One is the test to see if my hypothesis was correct and that my species is a very adaptive one, and also to cover as many minor details as I can while waiting for the mushrooms to hopefully grow. Just as a side note, I could keep track of how many spores I connected to, even though I don't know-how. I counted in total about 1,327 of them. And by the way, any other material I try to pick up and count does not work for some reason. I guess I will just have to wait for more info about it. Anyways, hold tight, because this is going to take a while.
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After I had 'planted' all of the spores, which amounted to around 69 for no particular reason, I set my sights on building the mechanism I needed to fly, supposedly. Since I knew I could only use things my size, mass, and weight, that only left me with the most stable things that I found; spores. Although 1,258 spores seem like a lot, it would only amount to about 1/190 of the pebble I used to launch myself onto every surface in the cave. Using that knowledge, I tested durability and flexibility.
The durability test was pilling little pieces of rock dust onto one spore to see how much weight it could withhold. Turns out, the durability is pretty high. It took precisely 1,143 rock particles to flatten one spore completely, concluding the durability of a single spore. Now onto the flexibility.
I did this one with a simple whip of a connected row of spores, releasing the last one at the peak of the arc the lash made, which indeed needed a lot of precision. Took quite a lot of tries to get it as accurate as hitting a wall in around the same spot twice. As I don't have an exact measurement of time, I do not know how long it took, but somewhere between 4-5 days. But no need to worry, because I have infinite stamina and could go on like this forever.
As to why I have this much stamina, I could not say. Back onto the task at hand, I flung the spores like an athlete with a javelin. It sailed through the sky like a rocket and when it hit the wall, it suppressed and bounced off with about ¼ of the force it took to launch it. With that test also done, I started to design what the machine had to look like.