New Craft (1)
"Ugh... that was a seriously weird dream..."
I must have had some kind of bizarre dream. Bugs crawling over my body, slipping down between my legs... things I really, truly did not want to remember.
Except, contrary to what I'd told myself, what I'd taken for a dream apparently hadn't been a dream at all.
A message hung in the air in front of my eyes, and standing at my bedside—or rather, stretching straight up toward the ceiling—was Colony.
"..."
Colony's growth has been completed.
Resistance to cold and water has been acquired.
Knowledge has been received from Mother's embrace.
The insect knowledge Mother has obtained is shared as well.
Colony dipped its body in something like a greeting, and my head spun.
That... wasn't a dream? You were actually... inside my stomach?
A headache rolled in. I grabbed my forehead and shut my eyes. No. It had just been a feeling. It hadn't really happened. Yeah. No way. It had just vanished for a second and then shown up again.
Colony drifted toward me, and I reached out a hand to stop it. A little... yeah. That.
It cocked its body like it had no idea why, and I let out a sigh. Honestly, I wasn't even sure Colony had done anything wrong. Looking at it just put me in a foul mood.
Call it the feeling of something collapsing in me as a man. My body couldn't really be called a man's anymore, but my heart still was, so it wasn't easy.
"...Hah. Fine. So we can actually talk now?"
Colony shook itself in answer, and unlike at dawn, meaning came through. We could communicate. If we hadn't been able to talk even now? I genuinely wouldn't have known what to do. It wasn't all that different from a swarm of bugs, so... what would I even have done?
"So what can you even do?"
The instant I asked, carapace surged up over Colony's body with a rasping shrrrk, and I blinked.
Was that all? Then Swarm, who could cover a wider area, would be more...
Whether it had read my mind or not, Colony startled and twisted itself around, so I waited. It looked like it had something else it wanted to show me.
Colony's back stretched long, and in the next moment it had become a pair of wings like a butterfly's. Then, as if to demonstrate, it slowly beat those wings and lifted into the air, and I remembered what the message had said.
It obtained the insect knowledge I had gained. Which meant both the carapace and the wings were things I had understood at least once.
It looked surprisingly useful. The stronger I got, the stronger it would get right along with me.
Put another way, though...
"So that's all you can do for now?"
Colony shuddered as if to say that wasn't true and started reshaping itself again, and I honestly wondered whether that thing even counted as a bug. No—where in the world did a bug like that even exist?
It wriggled, then stretched out long like a tentacle, and my mood soured. There had to be plenty of nicer forms. Why that?
I found out soon enough. At the tip of the tentacle, a sharp spine had grown—one that looked just like Moth's mouth.
"...A bloodsucking stinger?"
Colony waggled the tentacle like I'd gotten it right, and I had to admit it was going to be different from Swarm. It couldn't move on as large a scale, but the fact that it could use the knowledge I'd obtained meant there would be all kinds of ways to put it to work.
The problem was...
"Do I even need that right now?"
Every transformation vanished as if the words had wounded it, and it slumped across the floor. I snorted a laugh. After looking at it for a while, it was kind of cute.
A bit like jelly... slime? Something like that. If you looked closely it was wrapped in a mucous membrane with all sorts of bugs living inside, but as long as you didn't look that closely, it was just jelly, and that was fine.
"...But you... no, there's a bunch of you. You're going to climb back onto my skin, aren't you?"
It stuck to my foot like that was obvious, and I pinched it off and dropped it. I didn't even let Swarm cling to my skin. I couldn't allow Colony. Worse, there was no telling what else Colony might try. If another incident like this morning happened, I might actually die of self-loathing.
"...You can stare all you want. Not happening. Absolutely not."
It didn't have eyes, but I still got the feeling it was gazing up at me with big sparkling ones, and I turned my head away. I still needed my heart to settle. Sticking Colony to my body... wouldn't sit well with me.
The silver lining was that I could immediately understand the Colony Mother skill. The start had been a little... unfortunate, but it was still better to know now than to find out later.
"...Hah."
To calm myself down a little more, I tore at the leftover lettuce from yesterday and flopped face-down on the bed. Still. I really... seemed to be getting weird.
Awakening hadn't changed my old daily life all that much, and yet something about it felt off. I didn't know whether the changes were good ones, but at least they hadn't been bad. Compared to living until I died without a single thought in my head, climbing the Tower, growing, and having a goal had definitely helped.
"...Okay. I can't just sit here."
I swallowed the last of the lettuce and got up off the bed. First I needed to set a goal.
The first goal was...
"Getting the hell out of this dump, right? Ideally before Sword's Metamorphosis is done."
Saving up money and escaping the house before Sword finished metamorphosing seemed like the biggest goal I had. I didn't strictly need to move, but something in my gut said I was going to need a bigger place. The bugs were definitely not going to stop here.
Even now, with just Swarm, Moth, and Colony, the room already felt a little packed. I liked a spacious house too. Rather than cramped... wide and humid... wait, no. Not humid.
"Tch. I really am getting weird."
Insect traits seemed to be showing more and more, and the feeling was strange. At this rate, was I actually going to end up crawling across the floor?
...Well. That was never going to happen. Still, I let the absurd imagination run as I opened the Hunter Gallery.
It was time to check what kind of gear people were looking for. If you wanted to sell something, market research came first.
"Hnn. Tch. It's already shifted this much?"
Maybe it was the influx of new hunters as time went on. The posts filling the Gallery right now were less about weapons and more about armor, or items that restored you. Even just opening the newest thread was enough.
I'm not even kidding, I just awakened as a newbie hunter and the Tower is way too hard.
Monsters barely die no matter what weapon I hit them with, and every time I get hit it hurts like hell.
How am I supposed to deal with this?
Not lying. I actually almost had to leave the Tower today because something punched a hole in me.
"Hnn."
Scrolling further, there were plenty of posts looking for armor even from hunters who weren't newbies. I wasn't sure how a trend could flip from weapons to armor in a single moment, but this was the Hunter Gallery. It could change again the second someone started talking about a different item.
Which meant I needed to get ready fast.
Armor, huh.
The only armor I'd ever crafted—if you could even call a bug armor—was swarm bugs, so I wasn't sure how to go about making it. If I tried to make Swarm Bug Mk. 2, I wouldn't be able to produce many of them for the points it would eat...
Something that might help right now...
"The chest?"
I'd been planning to open it at a more important time, but thinking about it, wasn't this the important moment? I was trying to make money and move out. I couldn't exactly call that unimportant. If this didn't count, what would?
I kept turning it over, but my hand still reached for the chest. If I opened it, the whole problem might just... solve itself.
"Ah, screw it."
I couldn't hold back, and I opened it. Folding that easily on my own decision? I really was something else.
Brilliant light burst from the open chest, and I squeezed both eyes shut. Looking probably wouldn't have been a problem, but like when I'd picked the Tower's difficulty, I had the sudden feeling I might go stupid for a second, so I had no choice but to look away.
Even through closed lids I felt the light fade, and something light settled into my hand. What had come out? Heart lifting with anticipation, I opened my eyes and checked.
What I saw was...
"Huh?"
A needle. A little large to call it just a needle, but it was definitely a needle.
Why would a reward chest give me a needle? Suspicion prickling, I used Appraisal. It had said it would give me what I needed. A needle was what I needed?
◈ A needle created by Shion, Archmage and genius tailor.
◈ Can weave mana into thread for tailoring, and imbue magical effects.
"...Huh?"
I genuinely hadn't seen that coming. If you asked whether it was useful... I honestly had no idea. My crafting method was making bugs take the form of items. Where was I supposed to use a needle? If you thought about it simply, the bugs just mimicked equipment.
Was this actually... useful for me?
"...More importantly, mana?"
The description said it turned mana into thread. Didn't that make it even less useful for me? I hadn't even been able to learn Fireball because I had no mana.
A chest could actually roll a dud? For real?
"How am I supposed to use this?"
I truly did not understand. Still, it had come out, so I figured I ought to at least try it.
No mana.
"Aigoo, of course it wouldn't wor—"
Holy Power detected. Using Holy Power in place of mana.
A whoosh of something draining out of my body, and when I looked at the needle, a thread of pure white light was stretching out from the eye.
What? Why did this work?
I scratched my head at the needle that was, for some reason, actually functioning.
"Holy Power?"
Holy Power being used in place of mana. I gave the needle a little shake. The thread swayed, soft and lazy, and I had the odd feeling I could fall into it.
...Why is a mere thread this pretty?
Even so, I didn't think anything would really change. I wasn't the one crafting equipment by hand anyway. It was basically the same as getting a pretty thread generator.
"...Aigoo. All I did was waste the chest. Tch. I'll just craft the usual way."
It was a shame, but it looked like I was going to have to make things myself. Better to spend this time thinking about what item to create. What to make.