Tear A Path

For now he needed a way to deal damage but he wasn"t really sure the way the system worked. What he understood was the way his traps worked. While he kept charging everyday he still couldn"t gain access to the flow of energy that moved from him to the rune. But he could feel the rune itself. It felt like a mold, and all the energy he charged into it, filled the mold until it was made into the form of his Wrap Trap. The more he charged it, the more dense and solid the Wrap Trap became in that form.

Although he couldn"t access the flow itself to understand what it was, he could manipulate it a little. making it slow down and speed up, making it curve and bend as it entered the mold. Maybe, he thought, he could manipulate the flow and condense it into a form of his own.

But first he needed a form and function. Unlike the wrap trap whose function was already established, he needed to understand how to induce the function in his own traps. Problem was he had a deadline.

The Clay Eaters would arrive in less than 3 weeks, and the village would move when the beasts were at most a 3 days away. This gave him little more than 2 weeks to figure out what he was going to do and prepare himself. Against monsters of those size and who he didn"t know as much about, that wasn"t a lot of time.

For now he could only keep doing trial and errors. He no longer left to hunt as he had enough food to last him a month at the least and still a few more smoking. Everyday he"d be up on the hill but he"d spend half of it unconscious. This was because he was literally throwing himself against the wall as he kept accessing the flow, even though it"d keep overwhelming his mind and knock him out within a few seconds.

But he felt like there was improvement, only a tenth of a second after knocking out more than ten times on his first day period, and a quarter of a second after 40 trials at the night period. By the 3rd day period, even he didn"t know how many times he knocked out, but he was getting deeper and deeper.

It felt like he was looking at a microscope, from the outside he could only see a string like a vein, pulsing a deep blue light connecting him and the mold. As he got closer he could see more and he was going deeper and deeper into the vein with every try, until it was the microscopic level. But just before it almost came to focus, he"d black out.

Once the 5th day period Zhao Wei couldn"t sit around anymore. He begun to practice with Panda again. Even if he knew that he needed a new trap to give him an edge, he still needed to keep himself in tip top shape, else his reflexes and movements would dull. Although the attributes he had made his abilities almost superhuman, there was no replacement for reflex training and the minute control he needed in fights.

Without those it would be like giving a car a super powered engine but matching it with a driver who just got his license. The attributes didn"t help him with those, fighting did. Even with speed and dexterity, if he moved into a defense or attacked thoughtlessly it would be easy for any of the beasts whose attributes were leaps ahead of him to attack. Only when he made his moves, strikes, swings and dodges as efficient as possible would he be allowed to keep his life.

Especially on this hunt with the variable of the new hunter. Even without it, he would already have a ridiculously hard fight against two humongous Clay Eaters which even until this moment he did not know how to deal with. If the hunter came and he wasn"t at the peak of his game, he was sure to lose his neck in a lapse of judgement.

Somehow he wasn"t really sure why he was fighting such a futile fight. Why did he need to put in all this effort. It wasn"t his home per say being destroyed. It wasn"t his people, not even his race on the line. He had only met them by pure chance. If things had gone a little differently, it"d either be him or the primates on the other one"s plate. He"d known them for less than a month, in the old world, if they were people, he"d barely consider them acquaintances.

But maybe, it was for himself as much as it was for them. When he"d first entered this new world, in a way he felt completely forgotten from his kind, as if he was ripped from them. His one consolation in this environment was Panda, even until the day he was reunited with his own kind, he may never be the same again. And the only one to understand his loneliness would probably be this rabbit. He wasn"t even sure if she actually understood him, but he told her many things that he himself thought and felt, and that was enough for him to let go of his burdens a little.

The apes, had somehow been pulled together into one spot by this crazy world. But they"d lived, they"d striven as he did, and they found their place in this mad world and he didn"t want them to lose it. If they"d left, many of them were sure to be separated and some would be ripped away from their kind just as he was. And if they could find and keep their place in this life of constant battles for survival, maybe, just maybe, he could too.