Day twenty-six started with Eren staring at his own hand and trying to make it disappear.

At least he was trying to make a part of his body invisible and if it was possible at all.

The answer was, no. Partial invisibility was impossible which wasn’t the end of the world for him. Eren just tried to test the limits of the op skill.

He’d been sitting on his platform since before dawn, eating the last of the wet cardboard mushrooms while mentally poking and playing with the Invisibility skill.

His mana pool was 50. The skill cost 10 mana per second. Simple math that even his failure math student days version could handle.

I get five seconds of invisibility before I’m completely drained and visible again.

Five seconds was nothing. He timed it against his own breathing. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale. Done. That was five seconds.

Eren did that too many times till yesterday and could time it almost perfectly now.

I’m supposed to survive in a magical death forest with five seconds of turning invisible. It’s a surprise elementa atttack option on the top of hiding..

But he had to test it in real situations before using it dangerous moments.

He focused on the skill the way he focused on any active skill, a mental push toward the word "Invisibility" floating in his head. The mana started draining immediately. He felt it leave his body through his skin like warmth escaping through tiny little open windows. Like little pores all over his body was doing something and he had to sustain it with using mana like gasoline.

It was kind of cool but also draining.

He looked down at his hand and saw nothing. It was gone. Not translucent or blurry like he would expect from cgi movies showed on Earth.

Even he couldn’t see his body or find his nose with his fingers.

It was a disorienting and claustrophobic experience.

Alright. I guess I need a lot of practice fighting with this. Or to avoid bumping the trees with 80 km per hour..

He didn’t how fast he was running with the latest Flex Runner upgrade but he was really fast. Faster than Usain Bolt by a few times already. And crashing to a hard subject with that speed would kill him!

Eren tested a few different posses. And his arm ended at the wrist and below that was empty air with the bark of the platform showing through where his fingers should’ve been.

He waved the invisible hand in front of his face and saw nothing.

Okay that’s terrifying.

He dropped the skill after three seconds because watching-or-experiencing his own body vanish was making his stomach turn. His hand flickered back into existence and the mana drain stopped. He checked his pool. Down to 20 from 50.

Thirty mana for three seconds. And now I have to wait at least an half an hour for it to regenerate before I can use any mana skill again.

His mana regeneration was pathetically slow. Maybe one point every few minutes?

He’d never bothered to time it because until yesterday he didn’t have a single mana skill worth using. The Mana-Infused Stabbing was a joke at 50 mana.

But Invisibility wasn’t the same and quite the opposite it was! It was pretty epic to use it in this forest.

Even five seconds could save his life if he used it at the right moment. Sprint past a predator, go invisible for five seconds while changing direction, then reappear fifty meters away running in a completely different direction. The predator would lose track of him entirely.

The problem isn’t the skill. The problem is my mana pool. If I had 500 mana I’d get fifty seconds. That’s almost a full minute of being invisible.

He’d been putting every stat point into Strength for weeks. That strategy had kept him alive but now he had a Rare skill that scaled with a stat he’d been ignoring.

Do I start splitting points between Strength and Mana? Or do I keep everything in Strength and hope I find another fruit that boosts Mana directly like Perception?

He didn’t have an answer yet. But for the first time since the system gave him that stupid Love class, one of his mana-based abilities was actually worth investing in.

He tested the skill two more times after his mana regenerated. Once while standing still on the branch, once while climbing down the trunk. Both times worked perfectly. His body vanished completely, his clothing(shorts) vanished with it and even his sharpened stick disappeared when he held it tight. The skill covered everything in direct contact with his skin.

But there was a problem he noticed on the third test. When he moved while invisible, the leaves and branches he touched still rustled. The ground still crunched under his feet.

He was invisible but not silent. Anything with good hearing would know exactly where he was even if it couldn’t see him.

So it’s visual-only. No sound dampening, no scent masking. A wolf with a good nose would still find me in three seconds.

Still useful but not the game-changer he’d hoped for, not yet in the low levels.

..

He climbed down for his morning water run and his brain kept circling back to the same question that had been chewing at him since the ant battle two days ago.

How do I sleep somewhere other than this tree?

The giant oak-pine hybrid he’d been living in for almost four weeks was safe for reasons Eren still didn’t understand. Nothing climbed the inner trunk. Not insects, not predators, not even the territorial lizards that attacked anything within spitting distance of their territory.

The fire birds nested in the outer branches and screamed all morning like broken car alarms but they stayed away from the core too. Whatever was keeping the main trunk clear had been protecting him since day one and he had no idea what it was.

He wasn’t about to question it. Free safety was free safety.

But if he wanted to explore further north, toward the mountain where he’d seen a dragon circling two weeks ago, he’d need to sleep in other places.

Yes, he saw a fu*king dragon in his day-10 or something.

I still don’t believe I saw it. Dragons for fu*ks sake. They can’t be real..

He have been thinking about if that dragon was related to his coming this forest or if the dragon could help him.

And going to that giant northern mountain meant he had to travel insane amounts of terrain. Too many different, alien and weird dangers, abominations, who knows how many different Orc, Salamander, poison butterflies and other deadly things.

And sleeping around those creatures without this safe tree meant being unconscious and defenseless for over ten hours in a forest where the most dangerous things came out at night.

Whatever makes my tree safe doesn’t extend to other trees. If I leave I’m on my own. And nothing I have right now is scary enough to make predators avoid me while I sleep.

He suddenly thought about the battle from two days ago while carrying his usual morning water job and while making a number two behind a small clean area. Pooing around other trees or dense places was making him vulnerable to most dangers, so usually he would come to this clear area and do it in record time and run away immediately.

He cleaned his ass after coming to his safe tree and used his precious water with it and then" he wore his old shorts.

Meanwhile he was also thinking about the fight. Like how electric cats had terrified most of the smaller creatures but the bigger ones didn’t care about them at all.

The centipede had crushed a dozen of them. The giant beetle had scattered them like toys. And it was also hunted by giant orcs or some purple skunk if he didn’t see wrong that time.

Everything was countering others or had some abilities to hunt. But there was an exception!

The only things that made everything in that clearing keep their distance were the creatures Eren couldn’t even measure with his Observe skill. That tiny rainbow-colored bird sitting on a random tree near the battlefield had terrified every predator within range just by existing.

The ghost-deer had walked through the carnage without a scratch. Things so far above the local food chain that their presence alone kept everything away.

He’d thought about that bird a lot since the battle.

It was barely bigger than a parrot but it had swallowed a two-meter electric cat in one gulp and every creature in the area had avoided its tree like it was a taboo. If Eren could become even half that intimidating, sleeping in the open or on the journey might not be a death sentence. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

So either I get strong enough that mid-level predators are afraid to approach me or I find another way to survive the nights.

He continued to fill his empty water rocks in this time.

His enhanced Perception made the trip feel different than before. He could hear a beetle digging underground about ten meters to his left.

He could see the heat shimmer rising off a rock that had been sitting in the morning sun for thirty minutes. A spider web between two bushes thirty meters ahead caught the light and he spotted it before he was anywhere close with who know what magical hunting ability was used on those nets.

Everything in this forest was deadly no matter how tiny and harmless they looked!

Fu*k this shit. I will go back to home!!!