Explorer of Edregon

It turned out, Kark hadn't been kidding with that last comment about Neurol being an artist. After giving directions to Alka as to where she could find the monsters and dropping Scule and Reginald off with Bourges, a rather spindly looking merider with colorful dots all along his spider abdomen, Kark brought Shia and Vin over to Neurol's nest.

Unlike Kark's own bachelor nest that barely had a speck of color, the inside of Neurol's looked like someone had chucked a rainbow in a blender and forgotten to fully close the lid before turning it on. Vin slowly turned around in awe, taking in the myriad of vibrant colors coating the spherical walls of Neurol's home.

"Like what you see?" A merider that had to be Neurol asked from directly overhead. Vin started when he realized the man was hanging upside down on the ceiling, grinning down at them. As the runeweaver carefully made his way down to the ground, Vin got a good look at him, and he quickly recognized him as one of the meriders he'd seen from afar while admiring the web.

His spider half was a deep blue so dark it was almost black covered in small bristles, which blended in near flawlessly with his hairy torso. From the waist up, Neurol looked like a muscular ape with four arms, somewhat similar to the trogums. However, unlike the trogum's delicate features and frail appearance, Neurol looked like he could bench press a pickup truck with two of his arms tied behind his back.

Unlike Kark, he wasn't wearing a shirt either. Because of that, he had splotches of colorful paint all over his furry chest, and he showed off some extra large fangs as he grinned at the newcomers.

"What brings you here, Kark? Showing some new faces around?"

"Indeed! They were interested both in your rune weaving, and in the fragment you lived in before joining Pendet!"

"Ah, they were, were they?" Neurol asked, looking more carefully at the two of them. Despite sounding just as weirdly chipper as Kark, Vin thought he caught the hint of a frown for the briefest of moments before it was quickly replaced with a broad grin. "Just leave it to me, I'll take good care of them!"

"Excellent! I was actually in the middle of repairing part of the eastern path, so I'll be getting back to that!" Kark gave them both gentle pats on the back with his front two spider legs, and Vin tried not to shiver as he did so. "I hope to see you both later!"

After they both thanked him for his assistance, Kark waved goodbye and slipped out of Neurol's nest. Once he was gone, Neurol sighed, placing his paintbrushes on a nearby table and turning to look at them. His lower two arms were planted on his hips, while his upper two were crossed.

"Before the two of you ask, the weird, upbeat attitude seems to be a genetic part of the meriders for whatever strange reason," Neurol explained, smiling even as he did so. "Most of the others don't even realize their emotions are being influenced by this point, but my merger was only a few months ago."

"I was wondering about that," Vin admitted, peering at him. "Doesn't your body forcing you to be happy all the time ever make you…"

"Angry?" Neurol finished, laughing at the confused realization on Vin's face. "And now you see the problem. Far simpler to just accept it as a quirk of the new body rather than try and fight it. Besides, why go out of your way to make an effort to be less happy?"

"Fair point," Vin said, scratching his head.

"As strange as that is, we were hoping to get a more up close and personal view of your rune weaving," Shia butted in, unable to hide her excited grin. "Can you show us?"

"Sure, I don't mind! However, I'm sorry to say I don't believe you'll be able to copy the technique unless you become a merider yourself. For one, our unique webbing is made within our own bodies, so I doubt you could duplicate it. And as magical beasts, we don't actually have attributes anymore, but if I had to make a guess, I'd think my dexterity when it comes to weaving webs has got to be somewhere around a hundred or so. Maybe more."

"Hundred?!" Shia repeated, her jaw dropping at the insane figure. "Are you serious?"

"See for yourself," Neurol shrugged. Motioning for them to take a step back, Neurol darted around the room, quickly laying out the foundation for a small web in the center of his nest. As soon as he had something he could comfortably stand on, he gave them a quick wave before getting to work.

Just like regular spiders, the meriders had large spinnerets located at the back of their spider halves. Using four of his spider legs to stabilize himself, the remaining four grabbed the silk threads spooling out of his spinneret and got to work.

All Vin could make out was a dark blue blur.

"See what I mean?" Neurol chuckled as his spider legs jerked around faster than anything Vin had ever seen before. Despite all his efforts to watch on what was going on, his focus just couldn't keep up with Neurol's weaving speed. Before his very eyes he watched as a rune quickly took form within the web, and less than thirty seconds after he'd begun, Neurol finally finished.

The silk had been woven masterfully into what Vin now recognized as the identical rune Kark had spoken to them through while they were lost in the forest. After seeing it woven together in real time, Vin finally understood just how insane it was that the meriders were able to weave runes like he would knit a sweater.

"That's incredible," he muttered, peering more closely at the rune and wondering how he'd managed it. "You weren't even looking at it!"

"It's hard to explain, but I can functionally see my own webbing in my mind," Neurol explained, grinning at their stupefied faces. "Maybe it's a quirk of being a magical beast. Anyway, now do you get what I mean? Even if you were somehow able to replicate our incredibly mana-dense threads, you don't have the nimble fingers required to weave the runes, or the spatial awareness to ensure everything is in the exact right position. What you do within your own mana, I do here with my own webs."

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Cursing under her breath, Shia frowned at the finished rune. Vin had no doubt her dreams of nursing a small spider army to create spells all around the Sacred Forest was quickly crumbling around her. "There's really no way we could do this ourselves? Even slowly?"

"Speed isn't the issue, it's the awareness," Neurol repeated, leaning down with a finger and placing it against one of the hair thin strands making up the rune. "If even a single strand is just a little off…" He plucked it, and the entire rune jerked out a pulse of mana, sending a strange vibration through Vin's chest. "…the whole thing fails."

New magical affinity discovered! Vibration affinity. 11,000 exp gained.

Magical Explorer lvl 32!

+3 attribute points

+1 skill point

"What's the rune anyway?" Vin asked, feeling at his chest. Despite the unexpected level up, he was a bit shaken. He had to say, he wasn't a huge fan of his ribcage being forcibly vibrated without warning.

"Tremorsense," Neurol said, grinning at his curiosity. "A slightly more advanced version of Sense Vibrations, and one of our more useful runes. Let's us know when monsters are approaching or when people have wandered off the prepared paths."

"You don't say," Vin muttered, stepping around to look at the rune from multiple angles and copying the formation with Iron Mind. The meriders' runes were particularly interesting because despite being formed out here in the physical world, Vin was pretty certain the rune hadn't been altered in the slightest from how it would look woven together within a mage's mana. The elder from Sakis had explained to him how their Stone Mages were required to learn almost an entirely new dialect of runes in order to translate the three-dimensional structures onto a two-dimensional plane for their walls and buildings, but the benefit of weaving the rune into a hanging web was that Neurol was able to weave it in all three dimensions.

"Wait, if it's Tremorsense, how did Kark talk through it?"

"Excellent question!" Neurol said, walking around and taking down the web covering half his nest with incredible efficiency. "That was actually a different rune entirely. Once Kark detected your presence, he no doubt found one of our prepared runes of Vibrating Voice. It's a formation that would probably be rather useless for both of you, but it allows us meriders to listen and speak through our webs, so long as they aren't too far from us."

"I guess that makes sense…" Vin said, scratching his head. "Speaking of communicating long distance, I don't suppose there's any chance your people have access to any type of scrying magic, would you? Some way to track things down from far away?"

"Sorry, I can't help you there! Not unless whatever you're looking for accidentally stepped onto one of my webs!" Neurol laughed, finishing up his cleaning. "Now then, anything else I can help you with? While I don't mind giving a demonstration, I'm technically not supposed to teach you any of my runes unless you become a merider, so no more handouts like that one. Hopefully you got a good look at it while it was up."

Vin blinked as Neurol gave him a knowing grin. The merider's pure black eyes didn't actually have any eyelids, but Vin was pretty certain Neurol would be winking right now if he was physically capable of it.

"Well, we could always use more information," Shia said, seeming to have finally given up on her dreams of becoming a runeweaver. "Can you tell us anything about the fragment you came from? Or your people who live there?"

"Ah…" Neurol chuckled, shaking his head. "The strangest part of this whole 'forced happiness' thing is it doesn't quite stop the stabs of sadness I get when I think about the past. Though it sure makes them fade quickly!"

"If it's too painful-"

"I don't mind!" Neurol said, cutting Vin off. "As you probably guessed, my fragment is directly next to this one. It's a beautiful land of crystalline pillars, where monsters roam freely and survival belongs solely to the strong. My father is actually the head of our clan, which caused some seriously crushing expectations to fall on my shoulders. I was stronger, faster, better than all the other members of my clan. And as such, I was burdened with responsibility since the day I was born.

"Over the years the monsters grew more and more plentiful, and eventually, the strain of being responsible for so many lives became too much for me. Then, when our world fractured and our levels were lost, it all came crashing down. I'm ashamed to say I fled, abandoning everyone who relied on me and all but stumbled into the meriders' forest. They welcomed me like family, and after observing their society for a bit, I decided to become one of them."

Throughout his entire story, the large grin never left Neurol's face. "That is to say, if you journeyed into that fragment a few months ago, you would have discovered the blue fur clan in disarray, their next clan-head gone and their people panicking at having their levels stripped of them. Though I have no idea what you'll find now!"

Vin waited for the merider to stop chuckling, and he frowned at Neurol's strange reactions. Vin could tell from the slight waver in his voice he had strong feelings regarding his clan and old fragment. However, the odd merider biology was essentially fighting him every step of the way, practically forcing him to remain cheerful despite the heavy memories weighing down on him. It was a terrifying thing to witness.

"We're in the middle of mapping out the nearby fragments, so there's a good chance we'll be stopping by yours soon enough," Vin admitted, noticing how Neurol perked up at the thought. "If you don't mind filling us in on the types of monsters we'll run into and dangers to expect, we'd be happy to deliver a message to your clan for you."

"You'd do that?" Neurol asked, his attention bouncing between the two of them.

"Of course," Shia gently smiled. "I'm sure your clan is worried about what happened to you."

"Okay," Neurol shuddered, slowly nodding. "Okay… Give me a minute to write them a note, and I'll give it to you to deliver! In exchange, I'll tell you as much as I can about my world!"

"Deal," Vin grinned, excitedly getting out his journal and turning to a new page. While Neurol scurried over to a cabinet and started looking for materials, Vin began jotting down his notes on Pendet and the meriders.

Spur was going to love this fragment.