Chapter 2: Culling the Herd
The forest was alive with a damp mist, heavy with the scent of earth and moss. Corvin moved through the undergrowth with methodical caution, his senses stretched taut. Every muscle, every breath was controlled. The ingrained instincts of a soldier on hostile ground.
He wasn’t simply walking. He was patrolling, clearing, mapping. Old habits from Earth, sharpened through blood and violence, came back like faithful wolves.
First objective: Understand the enemy. Or, in this case, the environment.
Corvin experimented with his ability while mapping his surroundings, Shadow Siphon. Curious, he attempted to latch spores onto the ancient trees towering around him, twisting giants whose roots seemed to drink the mist itself.
Nothing.
No skill. No knowledge. No siphon.
"Not intelligent," Corvin muttered under his breath. Conclusion: Only sentient or at least conscious beings could be harvested.
Next came range testing. He sent out a pulse of spores, pushing outward. The delicate, invisible feelers stretched, ten meters, twent, thirty... and then around fifty meters, they began to wither, dissolve into nothingness.
"Fifty meters," Corvin noted with a grimace. "Not a sniper’s reach, but manageable."
A clear limitation, one he would have to solve later.
He turned to magic next, flexing the new alien energies coiled within him. His first attempts were... unfortunate.