The hive didn’t utilize sunlight in the same way it did with moonlight. The pillar darkened again during the day, with only the damaged sections of the hive allowing the sun's rays inside.

  With a stiff push, Lillian unsealed her cell and stretched her aching limbs. She had spent much of the night reviewing what Renaxxus had taught her, and his final message repeated itself in her mind the most.

  “Cultivation will require you to take. Take as much as you can from as many as you can. If you need a better location to cultivate, take it! If you need a better weapon, take it! If your mana channel is damaged and you need a new eye…”

  She chanted the message like a mantra.

  Lillian scoped out the interior of the hive, taking note of the resources the hornets had left behind. The Queen’s room held something that tickled her nose. The scent of a purple jelly-filled cell beckoned her. She began involuntarily salivating as the sweet aroma of the jelly wafted in her direction. With a force of will, Lillian pulled herself away from the strange smell and fled back towards her cell.

  Just because my body wants it doesn’t mean it is good for me.

  Lillian slapped her cheeks to psych herself up for what she planned to do next. Her mana network needed repair sooner rather than later. The more powerful beasts, like Genius’s mother, could use mana to communicate. Renaxxus would have been able to do the same if her body wasn't faulty. The poor Scale was forced to speak English with a mouth full of daggers.

  Lillian began the grizzly task of dissecting the spider, which was still whole. Her practiced hands carved the body like a butcher. The larger spider was in pieces on the floor as Lillian followed each vein that had run from the core into the arachnid's body. She cut away the offal and ichor, exposing the mana veins of the spider. Every one of the creature’s mana veins had a singular purpose; some went down the legs, others to the spinnerets at the rear. The ones she was interested in were the delicate veins that led to the back of each eye. There were large differences between the spider's mana network and hers. Each one of her eyes had one vein, but the spider had two primary veins that branched off and controlled four eyes each. Without her painful method of tempering her body, she would have been in the dark about the location of her own veins. Every painful step she took with the stump seared the pathways in her veins as poison raced through them.

  Sweat dripped from Lillian’s brow as she removed her eye patch and felt her worthless eyeball with her fingers. The harsh life she had been living since the bombs fell had hardened her heart. Her first day back, her entire body shed its skin. Then she fought the very hornets that built the hive she had claimed, getting pierced by a stinger and bitten several times. The worst pain she had felt so far had been from the swarm of snails.

  Lillian tried to mentally prepare herself. What she had planned was a step above the passive pain she had subjected herself to. The girl gritted her teeth and dug her fingers into her eye socket, scooping out the dead eye. It wasn't painful, but having the orb between her fingers felt unnatural. She gently pulled it out of her head, making sure to expose the root connecting it to her body. The optic nerve was there, but she could feel the mana bleeding out as it tried to enter the eye. There wasn’t much pain, but the act of pulling out one's own eye was unsettling, to say the least.

  Lillian’s mind wandered as she held the dead part of her that had always held her back. If not for this malformation, this curse from the very land she was born into, she would have been tempered by the Sect. Instead, she was thrown to the wolves. Fate was a cruel mistress. A nuclear disaster ruined her body as a cultivator, yet a nuclear disaster also allowed her to cultivate in the first place.

  With a swift swing of her stinger, she severed the malignant growth. Lillian released a gasp as the cancerous eye separated from her. She thought the action would be more difficult and painful, but the nerves were long dead. The spider's core, which she had ingested after the battle the day before, began releasing mana to repair her eye. It pumped through her heart into the veins that lead towards her head, but the mana bled out of the vein into her hands instead of rebuilding the eye. She had wondered if the passive healing properties of mana would restore missing limbs, and judging by this test, it would not. She wasn't disheartened by the revelation; if the solution to her problem was that simple, the Sect would have fixed it themselves.

  Her hands dug through the mess of veins she had extracted from her kill and pulled one pitch-black spider eye out, comparing it to her own dead eye. Five attempts. Five failures. Each eye she tested was too large, too brittle, too foreign. Until the sixth. A quick pull cut the connection on the back of the eye, separating it from the other three, and she hesitantly placed the mana vein up to her own optical nerve.

  Time seemed to slow as the two ends of the nerves connected. The ends brushed against each other, causing her caustic mana to flow down the mana vein that led to the spider's eye. The poison spread through the connection and liquified the eye in seconds. Lillian dropped the burst husk and frowned as she pulled another eye from the spider and attempted to join them again. The second eye fared no better, as it too became a putrid puddle on the ground. Her mana was far too volatile to inhabit the spider’s eye. The only other source of mana she had available to her was inside the cores she had gathered.

  The mana from the spider core needed to reach the spider eye. Mana flowing through her heart seemed to change its nature, causing it to have a tinge of poison. The fragile eyes were not forged from the same stuff that she was.

  Lillian brainstormed ideas of how to make the mana connection work while tossing the spider’s core between her hands. She had an idea already, but the risk of the surgery required gave her pause. The short time she spent searching for other options eroded her concern. She had a path forward, and the only way to learn was to take a chance.

  The mental blocks stopping her from cutting into herself were the same as the ones that prevented her from biting through her fingers. The human jaw was strong enough to bite a finger off as if it were a carrot, but the brain restrained itself from allowing such an act to occur. Her plan required her to expose her heart. The heart was her engine that allowed mana to flow through her body. Each pump pushed the neutral mana from the air into her blood, which transformed into her own personal mana during the process. Her body had already begun being rebuilt by the poisons she ingested, and her personal mana had changed as a result. If she could power the vein running to her damaged eye with another source of mana, like the spider's own core, there was a chance that the eye would survive and allow her to use it.

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  The bullshit Sect couldn’t be bothered to show me the way.

  The embers of hatred she held in her heart burned a little brighter.

  A quick count of her stockpile of cores hammered home how dangerous her actions would be. The pocket now only held three cores. She would only be able to attempt this once before she would have to go hunting. The cores would help with any healing she needed, but even mana had its limits.

  Lillian’s resolve wavered for a moment before she pressed the stinger to her chest, tearing a line in the skin. The flash of pain from the cut was nothing compared to the pain she felt as she dug her fingers into her chest. Lillian forced her mind to focus on sensing the mana within her. The panicked beating of her heart rang in her ears as she felt the organ brush against her fingertips. Her dainty digits forced their way between her ribs, and she grasped the mana vein that led to her eye and tugged the fragile vein free from her heart.

  The spike of pain left Lillian reeling on the ground as the bile in her gut rose. The sickly-sweet honey was nowhere near as pleasant the second time. The spider core inside her collapsed as the mana within flooded her heart. The hole left by her actions wiggled and stretched with every pump of her heart. Her awareness blurred as her body struggled to keep functioning. The burst of mana from the core closed the gap, but the repair was flimsy and weak. Through the debilitating pain, she could feel the vein in her fingers losing life as the mana within dispersed.

  No no no!

  Her shaking hands dug into the dwindling pile of cores and fished out the remaining spider core. Pressing the core to the vein fused them together after a small pulse of mana from within the core reacted to the vein. Mana flooded through the vein from the core, shrinking it rapidly. The mana within the core was leaking out the other end. Lillian scrambled for another eye as her bloody chest beat wildly. Her shaking hands pulled another eye from the spider and connected the severed veins together, which finally stopped her mana hemorrhage. Finally, the circuit was complete. Core to vein to eye, all avoiding her own mana usage to function.

  The eye came alive as it filled with mana from the core. The dilated pupil adapted to the light slowly. The eye rolled around in her hand before freezing as it focused on the corpse that was dissected before her. The arachnid’s eye moved of its own accord and turned in her hand to look at her. A strong sense of rage radiated from the core nestled near Lillian’s heart.

  The mana held within the eye grew, and the core that sustained it dissolved. The malice-filled eye expanded like a balloon overfilled with air. Before Lillian could even react to the quick change, the eye detonated, littering the chamber with tiny chunks. The blow threw her head backwards and left her on the ground, disoriented.

  The vein began to wither once more as Lillian held it in her palm. Her experiment had failed. She positioned her stinger over her heart before sending a short jab through her ribs. The tip broke open the recently healed wall, and she reconnected the vein. The mana in her body seemed to flow in reverse as it pulled from the muscles and mended the connection in her heart. The body's natural defense mechanisms would bankrupt itself to repair the organ. Lillian swallowed her remaining cores as her sight turned dark. Weakness was spreading throughout her body as it tried to repair the damage she had done.

  Lillian drifted in and out of consciousness as the cores dissolved and her heart tried to force the mana to pump through her veins. The damage was far more severe than she had predicted. Remnants of the spider's malicious mana attacked her at the source and slowed down the organ's healing. Her heart—both core and engine—couldn’t draw mana from the cores like the rest of her body. It generated the flow; it was the flow. There was no flow pulling the mana from the core while the heart was stopped. The gems sat in her gut, inert, as the small streams of mana from the air kept her alive.

  Every time she began to drift off, the heart would pulse out its remaining mana and jolt her awake. She needed to get her heart more mana, or she would die. She tried to use the breathing technique, but the mana flowed back out of her with each breath. She had broken the system that allowed her to take mana from nature.

  Lillian crawled on the floor of the nest in search of salvation. The multitude of pods holding the larvae blurred together as she dragged herself into the queen's antechamber. The lord of the hive had fallen during the battle against the crows, and the room was empty. There were several vacant pods, and some weren’t covered at all. The attack had come too suddenly, and the hive was interrupted during their daily routine. Lillian’s candle had nearly flickered out when she felt the call of the purple jelly. One of the opened pods was filled with purple milk that somehow resonated with her. She had grown accustomed to the tinge of poison mana during her tempering and knew that the purple liquid would be her only chance at survival. She reached her hand in with the intention of taking a mouthful but tumbled into the cell face first as the strength in her body left her.

  The purple milk was the royal jelly that the worker hornets made to feed the Queen. The substance was suffused with mana and held many vitamins and nutrients that allowed the Queen to produce offspring. The jelly held a type of poison that was new to Lillian. It seemed helpful instead of harmful. This poison caused growth instead of destruction. Her open chest took in the substance, washing over her heart which mended in seconds and began beating once again. The skin fused together, and scabs appeared before falling off. The wounds on her back and wrist that had been staunched from by the cores the day before healed completely and not a scar remained. The small amount that entered her body through the wounds dissipated as her body greedily absorbed the poison as her body greedily devoured the poison and began to knit itself whole.

  The moment the jelly hit her stomach; she involuntarily took a deep breath of the jelly into her lungs. The sensation of drowning assaulted her as she floundered in the vat of royal jelly. She sat up in the diminished vat and coughed out some of the lifesaving liquid as the rest spread through her veins like a cancer. She could feel the insidiousness of the jelly as it took healthy cells and made them grow and absorb greater and greater amounts of mana, causing malignant tumors to grow in its wake.

  Her body was saturated with the royal jelly and had taken in far more than her veins could handle.

  Adrenaline flooded from her chest as she leapt out of the cell. She began circulating the mana through her veins like she had with the mixture in the clearing. To her horror, the veins were already completely saturated. Pockets of flesh began growing off her body as the jelly ran rampant through her. She needed to break down her muscles fast or the tumors would kill her. She began a mad dash around the room and stabbed her arm with the unlucky stinger that had been instrumental in her experiments. The wounds sealed up at once and the mana levels in her body did not seem to change.

  Lillian panicked. Her mind raced as she dashed back to her sleep cell and grabbed her spear. There was no time to think things through anymore. She needed to fight, to bleed!

  The poisonous mana leaking from her empty eye socket quietly seeped into her brain all the while. Her rational mind faded into the background once more and a more primal version of herself surfaced once again.