Xaren, dressed in roughly skinned wolf pelts tied together, carried a small rabbit-sized monster on his shoulder as he ran on the hot ground, carefully observing the area around him.
Walking through the forest darkened by the tall tree canopies, he twisted his body to avoid the branches of distorted trees.
In his vision, these trees gave off faint demonic energy and he could tell that they were demon plants. If he mistakenly touched them, they'd come alive and wrap around his body to capture him and suck the life out of him.
He'd seen no small number of demons suffer this fate.
'But they give off demonic energy so I can tell them apart from regular trees.'
Such a thought crossed his mind as he moved through the dark trees and spotted a location with dense black spiderwebs.
'There's a spider demon here now?'
Xaren understood that a new demon had made a lair in the area he was in, and just then, he spotted the creature hanging atop a tree, watching him with its eight crimson eyes.
"…"
"…"
The two engaged in a silent stare down and after a minute, the spider demon slowly retreated into the cover of the trees, having discerned that fighting Xaren was not worth it.
Xaren turned around and retracted his demonic energy, continuing on his path, coming to a huge tree at the edge of the forest.
This huge tree was already dead and decayed, but there was a naturally formed hole at its roots, which had become Xaren's residence.
Xaren arrived at the tree hole and spread out a wave of demonic energy, scanning it to find out if anything had entered while he was away.
'Nothing. That's good.'
He retracted his energy and entered inside it, before putting down the prey on his shoulder and letting out a long sigh of relief.
"Day 15: Begin."
Like Xaren said, it had been 15 days since he had awakened in this place and he had adapted to life here.
Although there were dangers in terms of the environment—like the demon plants—he could avoid them if he was careful.
In the past two weeks, Xaren had made small progress in getting used to his new abilities.
For starters, his energy circuits had completely awakened and he could sense not only his own energy, but the energy of other beings, provided they didn't have methods to conceal it completely.
With it, he once again affirmed that he had far more energy than a level 50 should have, and noted that in addition to demonic energy, he still possessed magic power.
'Devouring those souls helped a lot…'
The four souls he had devoured on Day 1 had been key in allowing him to awaken his energy circuits by night-time, and he guessed this might be the reason the little demons instinctively fought each other to gain souls.
His Energy Control skill really gave him a lot of energy manipulation assists, allowing him to get the hang of using demonic energy for basic things in less than a week.
Since he had magic in his previous life, he knew how to manipulate it even better than what the Survival Guide stated, and was able to recover that ability in less than half the time it took him to get used to demonic energy.
The next thing he focused on was increasing his combat power.
Although most of the demons he had encountered here were all lower level than him, he was surely not the only level 50 as there were tens of thousands of little demons scattered all over the massive forest.
'Those demons behind that wall…'
That thought reminded him of when he was exploring the forest, trying to find a new place to sleep on Day 3. He had sensed demonic energy activity up ahead and peeked through some bushes to find out what it was, and to his shock, he discovered there was a translucent wall right in front of him.
The reason he was shocked was because although the wall was clearly made with demonic energy, he didn't perceive it until he saw it with his eyes.
Behind that wall, he saw two demons fighting and the energy they gave off put them at Level 80 at minimum by his estimation.
One of them immediately sensed his gaze and Xaren didn't hesitate to turn tail and run. He'd been the victim of a situation where two opponents stopped fighting each other just to take out a third party together so he didn't waste a second.
However, this time, the demons did not follow him. It wasn't that they didn't want to, but that they couldn't!
The translucent wall he had seen prevented them from getting to the section of the forest he was in, and conversely, Xaren could not enter that section of the forest.
The demons were separated for some reason Xaren didn't know, and he didn't spend time trying to find out why.
Instead, he focused on trying to level up but this was a herculean task. The reason was that his level was far higher than everything he encountered.
From gauging their energies, Xaren estimated the demons he encountered were all Levels 20-25 and this was a problem for him as he couldn't gain EXP from anything less than half his level.
So, they needed to be above level 25 for him to gain any EXP to level up.
Because of this, Xaren only went out to forage for food like he had just done, and spent most of his time trying to get used to his new skills and magic.
'My magic power efficiency is higher than in my past life, but my demonic energy efficiency is off the charts…'
Such a thought crossed his mind as he removed the rope where he hung demon horns on his waist and placed it on the ground, before constructing a small fireplace with sticks and using basic fire magic to light it up.
He'd been attacked by many demons during his hunt for food, and those demons served as training dummies for him to test his new skills and magic, with him taking their horns as trophies and spare weapons.
"My Fire Magic is Tier 1 now."
Xaren looked at his status as he skinned the wild monster he just killed, remembering his attempt to cast the basic fire magic spells he knew.
"I succeeded so easily I was dumbfounded."
His previous magic affinity had been abysmal, but this High-Demon body of his had a good talent for magic, at least from his perspective.
Xaren's flames generated with fire magic took on a dark red hue, and when he was done experimenting with fire magic and used darkness magic, they changed to black!
Using Darkness magic wasn't hard as that seemed to come instinctively to demons, but he was surprised by the change in his flames.
"Never expected to use dual elemental infusion so easily either."
The black flames were a result of mixing the Darkness magic with his Fire magic, and this was a technique that according to some soldiers who could use magic, was pretty advanced.
The most Xaren could do with it was shoot fireballs and spears though.
He didn't know any spells besides Tier 1 Fire spells, and all his uses of Darkness magic besides infusing it into his flames were for restraining opponents and firing darkness projectiles.
Xaren had seen Darkness mages do this before, so he tried to copy them and was only able to succeed in doing those two.
As for the Gravity and Spatial magic, Xaren had zero idea on how to even start with those ones.
He tried to use his skills and they worked the same way they did previously.
"Energy blast is strong enough to fell multiple large trees. It took me five days, but I finally managed to get Gravity Sphere to work. The results were very gory."
Xaren remembered how the little demons he encountered were squashed in the sphere of energy, along with the lethargic feeling that hit him right after.
"The Gravity Sphere skill consumes a lot of energy, probably because of how powerful it is. I tried to see if I could use the feeling from using Gravity Sphere to work some Gravity Magic but I had little success.
I was able to activate the Child of Gravity skill, but merely activating it took 30% of my demonic energy, and consumed a little bit of it to keep active."