Finding an empty nook it could stuff its body into was surprisingly easy.

These underground nest tunnels were full of them.

It took a bit longer to find a good one, but it managed.

It had to kill a few stray rodents to get to it, but even in its half-dead state, that wasn’t very difficult, and so it had found itself a clogged little tunnel with a metal grate in the middle, which it shuffled into, pointed its snout at the entrance, and finally fell into [Devourer], with both the time and peace available to see what it could improve on.

And the list was long.

After healing itself to functionality again, just in case, the first thing it did was add more strips of the wood-like underskin armor. It had saved its life when the human stabbed it in the neck, stopping his blade before it could go any deeper and pierce something like an artery, so it simply considered where these strips would be needed, where its weak points were, and wrapped the thin mesh around them.

Four wide strips across its abdomen, with a bit of overlap, one very long strip running across the back of its neck down its spine, almost to its tailbone, and two vaguely cylindrical tubes around its legs, to protect tendons and arteries once more.

It would take a couple days for those to grow in, and the cost was enormous, but that was alright. It had more essence than it could even try to use in one session.

Next were the things it had gained from that ‘Spearhead Shark’.

They were all incredible. But almost none of them fit well with its biology.

The shark’s skin was almost like the wolf’s in its layered and protective form. Its topmost layer was like a sponge which sucked nutrients and food from its environment, a very efficient process, then underneath that was leather-like skin, stretchy and bouncy but tough to cut or pierce.

Under those layers was a tightly packed thicket of tiny bones within a thick pocket of fat. So even if one got through the skin, they’d then have to cut through what must feel like flexible bone, so tightly packed within the fat as it was.

It was fascinating, but the skin and its layers were far too heavy and thick for the wolf’s biology. And making them thinner would very negatively impact how protective they were, how mobile. It was just not something designed for the wolf’s size. The sponge-like layer that passively fed the shark was useless, as its fur was incompatible with that and the wolf wasn’t swimming through its food most of the time, so that was another great thing that simply didn’t fit with its body.

The next thing it gained was the thing’s cell structure.

In short terms, it had just gained agelessness and natural, infinite growth. Which would be great if it didn’t have those already.

In longer terms, the thing just didn’t age. Its cells did not age, it never stopped growing, a ‘spearhead shark’ that was five years old would be just as spry as one that was five hundred years old, even if significantly smaller.

On any other animal, it would have been a great power-up. For the wolf… it was already functionally immune to aging, and it could force its body to grow to whatever lengths it wished, so long as it was careful about strain on its heart and such details that might harm it.

The next few things were most definitely usable, however.

First, braided muscles.

They were functionally twice as powerful as its current muscles, without adding any bulk to its form, nor weight.

Which explained how that colossal thing could whip and twist around in the water like it was a snake floating on empty air.

The problem was its bones, and energy consumption.

Bending bones was one of the best upgrades it had done so far, and they were the anchor to which muscles were connected to.

So if it used muscles that were too powerful, every pull would force its bones to bend and fray in strange, uncomfortable ways that would contort its body in the middle of a fight.

It also reasoned and saw that twice the power didn’t mean it used the same energy. To fully contract a braided muscle took twice as much energy as a normal muscle. Which meant it would tire out twice as quickly if it began using its muscles to their full potential.

Which meant that it would have to be very careful with how much force it used. Unnecessary force was energy being wasted.

So, it had options now.

It could either strengthen its bones and give up on a lot of their flexibility, but not all, to replace all its muscles with braided ones.

Or, it could only use braided muscles in places where it really needed them, like its ‘fingers’, or its jaw muscles. Bones with surface areas too small to bend, in places where it could definitely use more power.

It opted for the first option, at least for now. Making sure not to work its muscles too hard would take some practice, but would be worth it.

It slowly replaced all of its musculature with braided muscles, and tightly packed its bones with hardened connective tissue, without adding any micro-tendons through it to balance out the hardness.

The result was a slight increase in weight, a big increase in durability, and the added option of having its bones actually crack and snap with enough force. They still bent more than any bone should, but they could snap in two now.

Hopefully, it wouldn’t come to that, but it knew better than to get its hopes up.

With that change finalized, it focused on the shark’s tail.

It was an almost vertically flat piece of biology, with flesh and bone and tendons in the middle but a specialized, rubber-like mass of… scar tissue, it felt like, covering the top and bottom of it.

Its purpose was simple. Absurd shock absorption on the upper and lower portions of the tail. The shark could make three foot wide pillars of stone crack with a single blow, and it wasn’t merely its toughness that let it do that without its tail snapping in two. It was in fact that the scar tissue shielding its tail was seemingly designed to minimize or neutralize impact for the shark to the point where it was ridiculous.

It was even disconnected from the flesh itself, just enough to not slide around when it moved its tail, but just disconnected enough to where the impact physically couldn’t really travel through its tail.

The wolf was sure this had some great applications.

It just couldn’t figure them out.

It could cover itself in this and be invulnerable to blunt force. But it was the same issue as the shark’s skin. Too heavy, too thick, too awkward.

It could put this scar tissue on its own tail, easily, but it would only hinder the prehensile nature of it. Rubbery scar tissue or not, it was thick, and it wasn’t liquid. It would get in the way.

With a mental sigh, it discarded that idea, and instead got to work on figuring out how to add a second tail to its body. Its tail had saved its life many, many times, so more of something good couldn’t hurt.

At the start it considered just making its bottom spine branch off into two separate tailbones, but it would have to mess with its walking that way, its hipbones would have to be redesigned, and it would feel and work very awkwardly. Instead, it picked the vertebrae where its tail connected to its spine, and significantly thickened them, gradually, before taking the first base vertebrae of its tail and making it even wider, having to redesign a bit of its muscles and tendons to do so.

The end result was that where its tail began, the first vertebrae was enormous enough to fit a whole other tail, which the wolf quickly added.

It had the feeling it could add a hundred limbs and control them all without much issue.

Which gave it… ideas. A lot of them. And while some of them might stretch its own self-definition of its body, many of them didn’t. They weren’t big or drastic enough to where it would feel like a brain connected to a mass of flesh that wasn’t really its own, no longer a wolf.

Putting them in the backburner for a second, it copied its original tail, a comfortable length twice as long as its body was, and simply told [Devourer] to make another one on the free space its tailbone had to offer.

That change, surprisingly, [Devourer] said would only take a couple hours.

It tried to find out why, but at this point, it had learned not to question everything about its Skill or how it worked. It wouldn’t get answers, and any answers it would get wouldn’t really help it, as far as it knew.

That done, it went back to what it had gained from the spearhead shark. The most important and the most troubling aspects it had saved for last.

That thing had multiple brains and hearts.

It had one… big-ish brain, in the middle of its triangular head, and then, like the branches of a wire system being undone, stems of tissue extended to the edges of its massive skull, peppered with tiny versions of its own brain, the bare, most basic parts. Then, through its gargantuan neck, two tube-like tunnels full of nerves and brain tissue extended down into its body.

Unfortunately, it hadn’t eaten the thing’s torso, so it had no real idea what those were doing. It could assume that they would add more tiny brains into its body, presumably connected to other sensory organs, which would transfer the information back to the main brain, already processed and translated.

These brains were all… thoughtless. Nothing but a mass of neurons and fats and proteins and cells that were all completely and utterly dedicated to processing information, offloading the strain its main brain would be under from having to use slightly higher thought as well as parse through its regular senses.

It had eaten… a lot of human heads. It knew what parts of the brain did what, what glands did, which neurons did what. The structure, the stem, the base, the odd division most brains had.

So it could say with relative confidence that it could add these brains to its own biology. They had no memory, no thoughts. No emotions, no ingrained reflexes to stimuli. There were no chemicals in there to do that, no glands, no neural connections. Just mindless brainpower.

Which sounded odd, but was true.

And on top of that, they worked amazingly with its own Skills and biology.

One of the only limitations it had run into with its vibration antennae for example, was informational overload. But if it could add these tiny little auxiliary brains along the inside of its torso, it could probably add hundreds of antennae to its body, make every footstep give it a detailed feeling of everything within hundreds of feet, without even really trying or focusing.

It could make its nose as sensitive as it wanted. It could add more ears, more-

More eyes.

It wouldn’t have to fight annoying flying things by having to turn its whole body and head toward them. It wouldn’t force itself to face its attackers due to that tiny insecurity that between one footstep and the next, in that tiny instance a dashing human might be off the ground entirely, they’d do something strange and manage to hurt it. It wouldn’t have to guess where projectiles were going.

And nothing would really be different for its main brain. It would think at the same speed, do everything the same. Maybe it would even be better.

But, those were still… brains. Parts of one, at least.

So it hesitated.

It thought long and hard, ran through possible problems. Did it again. Dismissed them one by one.

And at the end, it didn’t really have any reasons left not to add them, and a mountain of reasons to do it.

With its heart beating fast enough to make its sleep uncomfortable, it made a little pocket in its abdomen, which was a mass of bunched muscle and a few glands, and put one auxiliary brain in. Ran nerves up its spine, to connect it to its main brain, and then extended two thin tubes to the side of its waist, like the shark had done, and at their ends, it modeled crude sockets, eyelids and eyes, jutting just a little bit out of its waist. It took the normal protective film around its main eyes, made it several times thicker, several times denser, strong enough to where one could reasonably bounce a pebble off its ‘testing eyes’ without even making them flinch. Then it ran thin networks of nerves back to the auxiliary brain.

It confirmed its changes with a mental affirmation, and dove out of [Devourer], pushed away the updates of the symbols, and anxiously slept for a few hours, before noting the eyes and auxiliary brain had finalized, and shocking itself awake with adrenaline.

It didn’t really feel very different. Oh sure, it could feel its own flesh cannibalizing itself only to be replaced by braided superior one, it could feel plant-like strings wriggle under its skin as they grew from its own flesh, it could feel how its body was a little heavier, a little more stable and firm onto the ground, but mentally?

Nothing had really changed. Its memories were still there, there were no… strange, murky visions of places it had never seen before, no strange instincts to go dive into a puddle of water somewhere. None of the things it was worrying about.

First thing it noticed was its new tail.

It felt like it had been there all its life. Swirling it around the confined insides between its hind legs and the grate of the tunnel wasn’t even weird or difficult. And it certainly felt as strong as its first one.

Then, it turned to the new eyes, positioned on either side of its waist.

Getting its body to realize those were there was a bit more difficult and time consuming, but after ten or so minutes of fiddling around, it managed to force the eyelids open.

And resisted the urge to howl and yip with joy, its body vibrating in excitement. It scraped its claws at the stone as its tails slammed into the stone, wagging, keeping a messy bunch of happy sounds contained in its chest.

After so much pain and misery and constant fighting, this little bit of joy felt a thousand times sweeter.

The sight wasn’t the same as its normal eyes. The protective film over its auxiliary eyes was so thick and dense that everything was fuzzier, less colorful, and shorter-sighted. Even while staring at stone that was a mere six inches away, it could tell.

But it had eyes in its waist. It had gone from one point of view to three.

And it wasn’t… terribly disorienting, somehow. It felt like… as if someone had taken the area at the side of its main sockets that prevented its eyes from turning, and replaced that empty void with sight. Like its world had expanded.

Moving them around wasn’t quite as easy, as they were rather weak, but it had put the muscles in there in the sockets, so it could make the eyes swivel and look around independently. It was wonderful.

It really wanted to go back into [Devourer] and add more of them, and after an hour or so of vibrating with excitement it had no outlet for, it managed to knock itself out with a healthy dose of melatonin and do exactly that.

The brains themselves weren’t big. They were thin and long, merely the root of a brain, really, just enough for reflex and momentary, relatively weak processing, and thus no more than half an inch wide and three or four inches long. So it could put in a lot of them. Especially with how much bigger it was now. It was entering the “huge canine” territory, or so it felt. It had only seen something as big itself maybe once when it was a pup.

So it put in a lot of these brains.

Two at the bottom of its gut, where its intestines used to be, for the pair of eyes it had built, which it moved down to its hips. Putting them there was a pain, as so many moving parts meant that it had to be careful of the nerves extending too much or pinching and breaking from its wild chaotic movements in fights, but it thought it managed it.

Six more brains in the middle of its gut around the glands, which it connected to the antennae in its legs, before adding even more antennae, making a loose network that peppered its forearms.

Two at the top of its guts, which it connected to another pair of eyes it placed at its waist, just under its ribcage.

Then it connected all its auxiliary brains to each other, and then to its spine, leading them up to its real brain, finalizing the connection. A network of information.

The auxiliary brains would take in stimuli, take the burden of processing that stimuli into things that made sense, translating reflected retina light into vision, translating vibrations to position and feeling, and then move the processed information into its main brain. It was a little slower than the tiny amount of time it took for its main brain to process vision from its main eyes, mainly due to the smaller distance the information had to travel through its nerves, but it would work.

It would work perfectly.

It woke itself up again, as soon as its eyes had been finished, which it assumed were more than a few hours, just to see if having six eyes instead of four would be any more disorienting.

It wasn’t. Anything around itself in a circle, it could see now. Sure, not as clearly, not as quickly as its frontal eyes, but no more guessing, no more spinning for a flying enemy it couldn’t track. It was satisfied.

It even noticed how much lighter and faster its thoughts were without a thousand stimuli distractions demanding its mind to process them simultaneously. The auxiliary brains were so incredibly useful it wanted to howl in joy.

But that incident next to the burning rivers had taught it its lesson. It was being hunted, for reasons it didn’t know anything about. Best to keep quiet.

It pushed that out of its mind for the moment, then it tried to go back to sleep, with the vague desire to open its Skill and change itself further.

Then [Devourer] opened the moment that thought and desire finalized and processed in its mind.

While it was awake.

It stood there for a moment, all of its eyes glazed over, confused and bewildered.

It tried to check its body, to dive into its biology, and the rush of information was a sensation of panicked confusion rapidly building as images and sensations and understandings flooded its eyes and ears and mouth and it could taste blood for some reason-

Then something snapped and made its brains all shut down.

It came back to the real world almost ten confused, dizzy seconds later, fully aware it had just spent a dozen seconds staring thoughtlessly into empty space, wondering what the hell was happening.

At first, it experimented.

It tried to delve into its own body on a surface level, as detached as possible, and found it nigh impossible. Then it closed its eyes and ears to focus, tried harder, and it… sort of worked. It could feel itself on a surface level. Tendons, flesh, skeleton, the easy parts.

Trying to delve into something too much, too deep, like individual cells and such, it just made the wolf black out again, finding itself completely thoughtless for another few seconds until its brains all… restarted, for a lack of a better word.

It was fairly certain that if brains didn’t have that self-defense mechanism, it would have just given itself either some kind of aneurysm and killed itself, or at least massive brain damage. Just from using its Skill.

Now it could understand why [Devourer] had so far insisted it should be sleeping to use it.

Maybe the paradoxical inactivity of its own mind sleeping had allowed [Devourer] to sneak into the picture and deal with the massive amounts of information without burdening the wolf. Maybe there was something more mystical going on, but it didn’t know what, and it doubted it would ever really know.

But it still wanted to try, so it experimented again.

It could still “see” its body, as long as it focused and reduced outside stimuli. Anything up to seeing individual muscle fibers was… doable. Organs were generally fine. Anything more in-depth made its head swim and stumble, but if it pushed for things too overwhelmingly complex, like trying to read into the nerves of its eyes or something even more complicated, everything shut down.

After half an hour or so of finding out its limits, it delved into a different part of [Devourer].

Saved patterns.

What felt like a lifetime ago, it could idly remember making… experimental templates of sorts. A version of itself with a pair of ears on its neck, for example, just as a test. One it had never applied, of course.

If it wanted, instead of thinking and directing [Devourer] into doing something, which took time and effort in the moment, it could just spend some time a couple days ago for example to make a template of the changes it wanted, and tell the Skill to apply it to its body whenever it decided it wished to add it.

It still had to make the changes itself, the only difference was that they just didn’t apply, until it told the Skill to make them apply. Saved but unused.

It was an interesting part of its Skill, but it had just never found a use for it. It had always been rather redundant. It felt more tedious and worrisome than just putting in a bit more mental effort into making sure things in its body were topped up with more direct attention.

But maybe… it had finally found a use for it. Because templates were easy, even on its exhausted mind.

It barely had to think of that old neck-ear design, and mentally prod [Devourer] into applying it, before it felt the tingles begin, felt a small fistful of its fur start getting sucked back into its skin.

Hurriedly, it pounded its main brain with melatonin, forcing itself to sleep, and took manual charge of [Devourer], canceling that change and pushing its fur back into place.

And that’s when it noticed something it hadn’t been paying too much attention to.

Two of its auxiliary brains were inactive in its abdomen. They had only just finished forming, and the nerves were still creeping through its flesh to connect with each other, and so, without any stimuli, these brains were effectively inactive for… now…

Inactive.

As in…

Asleep.

It paused for a moment, thoughts racing, threatening to pull itself out of sleep again with its frenzied, racing speculations.

[Devourer] was a Skill. It came from the symbols.

And as far as it knew, the symbols were just… something made from the world, weren’t they? Another unthinking phenomenon of the world, like gravity. They were just there. Strange and difficult to predict, but they didn’t seem to be alive.

They were like a universal law or maybe a fixture, or so it thought of them by now.

So, if the symbols, or whatever rules guided them weren’t intelligent…

How would they differentiate between ‘main brain’ and ‘auxiliary brain’? Would they even care or bother to make a distinction?

[Devourer] might have activated simply because one of its brains was asleep, and the wolf had thought of how it wanted to use the Skill then, making it open automatically.

Maybe the Skill and the symbols which made it, thought that one completely mindless brain being asleep was enough to keep the wolf from harming itself. An artificial safety block or something, which it had just bypassed by complete accident.

It thought back to the other thing it couldn’t use without being asleep. The symbols themselves.

Not wanting to interrupt the process of the two brains making a connection, it made another even smaller one, designed to be inactive and forever without stimuli, and placed it right outside the loose, small cluster it had safely packed within its abdomen with shock-absorbing fluid. Isolated from the network.

Then, it waited for a bit, enough for the melatonin to flush out of its system, and forced itself awake for what felt like the hundredth time, the moment all of its brains and eyes were finished.

It called the symbols, and they answered. They didn’t rush in, white squiggly shapes across a black, swimming background with aftershocks of light in the background, not like before. They just sort of… filled its sight. All of its sight, all of its eyes. It was strange.

-Species: Wolf

-Race: None

-Name: None

-Path: [Hound of The Keeper] Level 29

Base Attributes:

Strength ( +1 )

Speed ( +1 )

Dexterity ( +0 )

Endurance ( +10 )

Perception ( +1 )

Resolve ( +1 )

Intelligence ( +6 )

Soul ( +1 )

Available: 8

-Racial Skills: [Pack Hunter], [Quick Learner], [Devourer]

-Acquired Skills:

[Pain Resistance - Level 28]

[Infection Resistance - Level 9]

[Poison Resistance - Level 23]

[Corrosion Resistance - Level 8]

[Disease Resistance - Level 4]

[Magic Resistance - Level 6]

[Mental Resistance - Level 29]

[Electricity Resistance - Level 4]

[Restful Awareness - Level 26]

[Tough Skin - Level 18]

[Iron Stomach - Level 7]

[Mana Perception - Level 15]

[Mana Manipulation - Level 17]

[Soul Perception - Level 4]

[Echoes of Oblivion - Level 8]

[Bloodrush - Level 8]

[Logotexnia - Level 6]

[Sonic Blast - Level 8]

[Tremor Sense - Level 7]

[Maddened Frenzy - Level 6]

[Mana Conversion - Level 4]

[Danger Sense - Level 4]

-Acquired Titles:

Witness of Divinity: You have seen a being of divine nature in their own realm. Your illuminated gaze shatters all illusions, and pierces through any and all falsehoods.

Glutton Beyond Compare: You have eaten multiple times your body weight over a single uninterrupted period of consumption. You gain +1 to Strength and Speed while your stomach is adequately filled.

-Acquired Traits:

Survivor (3 / 5): You have felt the chill of death many times, and survived. You have fought against impossible odds and won. You are significantly tougher than your frame might suggest.

Hunter (1 / 2): You hunt living creatures, whether it is for survival, sport or personal gain of one manner or another. You are slightly harder to notice when intending to hunt.

There was no headache, nor stab of pain or confusion.

The only difference was that no matter how much it focused on the symbols, that flash of knowledge and understanding of what it was looking at was immensely muted. It could still remember the rough numbers and understand that it had gained an absurd amount of levels in almost every Skill, and that its ‘Struggler’ trait had progressed to… something better, it assumed, but beyond the barest hint of a concept, the symbols gave it nothing.

Experimentally, it tried to put an attribute point into Speed.

Speed ( +2 )

It didn’t feel any huge difference, beyond feeling like a few pounds of weight were just removed from its body. Not from its mass, but from the force that gravity exerted on its body, without drawing back on the force its body exerted on the ground beneath its feet.

Simply put, it didn’t make any sense.

It felt similar to putting a point in Strength, but less… present. It was like its body was just a little bit more detached from the laws of the world than before, and it couldn’t quite understand how no matter how much it waved its arm around in a circle and wriggled in the tunnel to figure out what was different.

Still, it could use the symbols while awake now.

So it could… theoretically, give itself attribute points in the middle of a fight? It didn’t know if that was a good idea, to throw points into whatever might save its hide in that present moment rather than something that would save its hide in a future fight, but it was something to consider.

Considering that it gained Levels from using its Skills and killing things, it could gain a level in the middle of a fight and then put that attribute point into something immediately.

That was incredibly, immensely helpful.

It had to take a small break, just to let its mind process everything. It felt… oddly dazed, in a good way.

It still had a couple of changes to shift through. The flying lizard it had eaten and the furry orange thing, it hadn’t even checked on yet. It still had to figure out the possibilities of how it could put this accidental boon to use.

It certainly would not be able to delve into its body and patch itself up in the middle of a fight. It had difficulty doing so while completely safe, in nigh-perfect darkness and relative silence. It would be completely impossible while dodging and getting battered around or running.

And then it remembered the templates, the… copies, it wasn’t sure what to call them in its head. It just knew that they were easy to use.

So if it simply made a copy of its body every time it rested, and told its Skill to revert to that state… the Skill should theoretically heal it. It wouldn’t be fast, not when thinking in the terms of a chaotic fight, where a minute was a lifetime and a half, but it would be fast enough for where the wolf would never have to worry about its condition getting worse in the middle of a fight. Bleeding, open wounds, as long as it stalled, it would inevitably end up better and better until it was healthy again. It would only lose a few hours worth of progress to its ongoing upgrades.

In fact…

Energy was… technically, for the most part, just how much oxygen was in the blood, and how much oxygen that blood was delivering to its muscles and organs. Lactic acid was a byproduct of the process that cells underwent to produce energy without oxygen around. It was what caused that muscle weakness after exertion.

It was a fledgling idea, but it just realized it might have just found a way to make itself completely inexhaustible.

If it made a template that simply told [Devourer] to pump its bloodstream’s cells full of oxygen… and briefly jumped into [Devourer] in the middle of a fight to activate it, it should, theoretically, just… not get tired. Or at least make getting tired to be a very, very, very long process.

Of course, it was more complex than that. Nutrients and proteins and enzymes played a big part in the whole mechanism too. Its muscles would still fray and get worn down over time, needing rest to repair, and its mind would still need rest as well, so it wasn’t like it could just devote such a process to stay on permanently and never bother with sleeping. It would just be a waste of essence.

Plus, sleeping and napping was fun and nice.

But if turned on that template in a fight, coupled with its points in Endurance, it might as well be a biological machine. Utterly inexhaustible, slowly healing. Every missed swing of its enemies would be energy they’d expended, energy the wolf didn’t have to worry about, and after the fight, it would just eat them to replenish any lost essence.

Then it could just turn the process off the next time it went to sleep.

It was… honestly a bit in disbelief of how quickly it was getting stronger. It wasn’t strong. It still had to run all the time, and it grated on its newfound pride like a knife scraping at its vocal cords, urging it to growl and snarl. It made its fur bristle and its teeth gnash, but it was true. It wasn’t strong yet. But it was getting stronger so fast it felt a little overwhelming.

Its sense of time was shot and useless, but it couldn’t have been that long ago that it was a tiny bag of failing organs and melting skin draped atop a brittle skeleton. It felt like years, but could just as well have been a month alone. It just didn’t know.

Its mind was getting a bit lost, in both emotion and memory, as well as speculation, so it took a brief moment to parse through information and sort of… recap. Calm down and re-access things that were actually important.

After all, it wasn’t completely free and safe yet. It could feel the humans. The suspicious ones, and the scared ones too. Prowling about the winding, maze-like tunnels, in and out, all around for hundreds of feet, looking for it.

They hadn’t gotten close yet, but it didn’t have the delusion necessary to think that it was completely free and completely safe. So it had to be productive, and not linger on feelings and memories.

Despite how difficult it was not to, when this tunnel reminded it oh so much of a rusty pipe and affectionate fingers playing with its ears.

It shook its head and body a bit, both to get rid of the flies that were slowly gathering to lap at the drying blood in its fur, and to shake its thoughts away, physically.

It sort of worked.

Re-assessment. Now.

It had…

Eyelids slid open on every side of its body.

Six eyes. Two at hips, two right below ribs, two in its head. Full view of its surroundings from all sides except above. Well, the fur got in the way a little bit, but it couldn’t do anything about that without making far too obvious weak points in its defenses.

And then it realized something.

There was a little too much light in the tunnel, the moment it opened all its eyes. Very yellow light.

It turned around, bent its waist a little, and looked into the glowing eye sitting at its left hip, half-obscured by crusty, blood-matted fur. Then it moved that eye to the side to look at its own head.

Looking at itself in the eye from two directions. It was… unsettling.

This would take some getting used to.

The problem was that all of its extra eyes were glowing like its normal ones. So much for stealthy sensory organs. It would have to come up with a solution to that sooner or later-

Then it remembered it had [Echoes of Oblivion] and exhaled in annoyance. It could just cover itself in darkness and hide such weak points without even noticing the mana drain. Its mind was going too fast, racing too fast. It was like… emotionlessly panicking. It was annoying.

It tried to focus.

So, full view of its surroundings, except above. It had to add one more eye, at around… The crux where neck met torso should be fine. Wouldn't compromise any weak points either, like its spine, since there was a lot of material in the way, more than the middle or top of its neck had.

What else?

It had a faint smattering of antennae going up almost to its biceps, connected to its new auxiliary brains.

It had a new tail.

It was fun twisting the tails around each other like a braid of sorts. Made it look and feel like it only had one massive, extremely fluffy tail. Also helped conceal the second one. Would be good for surprise attacks.

Its bones were more solid now. Its muscles were slowly being replaced for braided ones.

And for now, those were all the changes.

It quickly dove back into [Devourer], squeezing its abused melatonin sac dry, and immediately began working. It adjusted the slime sheath a little, moving the seam down along its back, and quickly put an eye where its neck met its torso between its shoulders, connected it to the brain network.

Then it got to making a template for [Devourer] that would oxygenate its blood when applied, regardless of its body composition, and immediately after, it started looking at what it had gained from the small, furry thing it had eaten.

The biology was blessedly simple. After everything it had gotten from the shark, it was a relief, almost.

It noted the way the cat’s claws could be extended from within their sheaths using little tendons, and wondered if it could do something with that.

For a mild experiment, it focused on its claws, trying to see if it could add something like that to its own hands, and once again, paused, confused and overjoyed.

It could change its claws now.

It had only noticed because it was focusing on them, but that stone-solid knowledge that told it ‘you cannot change this’ was no longer there.

With trepidation and excitement both, it focused on the flawless pieces of what… should have been bone or keratin but was something else entirely, something it couldn’t even try to identify.

Experimentally, it grabbed one with its mind, and told [Devourer] to change it, make it thinner and longer.

And the Skill didn’t protest.

It tested the limit of how much it could change one, and found none besides time and… whatever accounted for mass with such a strange material. Asking the Skill to make them bigger simply didn’t work. Asking the Skill to warp them, shift them, did.

A single claw could be thinned and extended down to the cellular level almost, a thousand times thinner than a piece of paper, into a flat circle almost three hundred feet wide, a size that was mind-boggling to the wolf.

The only problem was that such a change would take literal decades. Asking the Skill only brought forth a sense of flashing sunsets and dawns, of trees being stripped and filled in the blinks of an eye, in the very mountains and landscapes shifting, slowly, a time it couldn’t comprehend.

Decades. Tens of years.

It dialed back, and wondered how much time it would take to move some of the mass from inside the claws, hollow it, and move it to the outside. Making them both longer and wider.

The answer was still far too long for its liking, but a bit more reasonable. Stretching the length of its teeth and claws by about an inch would take about two weeks.

Possibilities came to mind, each crazier and more appealing than the last.

It took one of its crusher teeth, a rather redundant inhabitant of its mouth, and tried to move it up around the inside of its skull, stretching it to form an impossible to penetrate bubble around its brain.

And it worked. It would take something like three months, but it could do it.

It tried to add another tooth to the new protective mass to speed things up, but the Skill refused to do it, acting like each tooth was individual and impossible to merge or combine.

Still, three months, for making sure its brain couldn’t be scooped out of its skull, no matter what hit it? It was a cheap price.

Of course, there were weak points. Where its eye sockets were, the hole at the back of its skull, its ears, if one were dexterous enough. It had to have access to those senses, and a fully impenetrable brain wouldn’t be able to do that.

So in truth, it wasn’t an impenetrable defense against a skilled enemy. But against anything else? It wouldn’t have to worry.

It had precisely forty two teeth. Twenty of them were crushers.

First, it moved all of the crushers out of its mouth into a padded pouch of nerveless flesh on the top of its gut, and told [Devourer] to fill the gap that would form in its mouth with regular, albeit significantly hardened teeth. A process which would only take a dozen hours or so.

From there, it could hold these [Devourer] teeth inside its body, and mold their shape to something more protective over the course of a few months. Four of them would be stretched into rectangular jagged hollow bars that would replace the normal crusher teeth later on, and the other sixteen would be turned into armor plates.

It would have to make sure they weren’t dug out, or somehow removed from its body, because then it would have to restart the process all over again for each one it lost, as [Devourer] only seemed to wish to regenerate them as teeth. Or claws.

But in a month or two, with semi-regular thought and molding, it would have sixteen little armor plates it could use to protect its most important and most vulnerable parts. It wasn’t sure yet of how or where it would put them, but that was a problem for its future self.

It had thought of making them into bones, but flesh refused to attach to them for some reason. The muscles just sort of… slid off.

Then, it turned to its sharper teeth. Canines and cutters.

It didn’t mess with them too much. It took the small tendons that the cat used to pull its claws in and out, and weaved a small system like that through its snout bone, then told Devourer to lengthen its cutting teeth and canines by a solid inch.

Two weeks for those to lengthen too. It told [Devourer] to roughly sync those systems together, so it wouldn’t have semi-retractable teeth without needing to, and turned to the last useful thing that cat had given it.

A ridiculously flexible spine.

Seriously, the thing could twist itself into a spiral if it wanted, and not get injured. It was absurd.

A cat's spine could rotate more due to simple structure, and their vertebrae had a special, flexible, elastic cushioning on the disks, which gave them even more flexibility.

The wolf, of course, had no real reason not to put this into its own spine, and even its tails. It could curl them into tight spirals with this, which meant it could exert more grabbing force since it wasn’t fighting its own tail structure to curl.

Besides, the flexible spine allowed it to absorb impact better than its own super rigid one, though it was a little weaker in how much added force it could give to its movements.

The cat also had a sort of… inbuilt reflex system in its mind, something to do with balance, but the wolf didn’t know enough about how it worked to add it. It wasn’t sure it even needed it, really.

Then, it moved to the flying, annoying thing.

[Devourer] said it was a thrakling. Something like a small drake, whatever that was. Its biology, generally speaking, wasn’t anything all that incredible. It was incredibly average. The wolf couldn’t even use its wings, because it was far, far, far too heavy to fly. Not without wings the size of a small human nest.

But the liquid fire the thing spewed was thankfully, a biological process, not a mana-related thing, as it had assumed.

The explanations it got from [Devourer] about it were frankly, extremely complicated and almost as difficult to follow as going through the structure of a human brain.

But it did roughly understand how it worked.

It was essentially an incredibly thin, unnamed chemical mix that was kept in a gland sac like any other.

This sac however connected to a muscle and tissue system that was expressly designed to launch it with high pressure.

It was essentially a gland that would make the chemical, the chemical would be moved into a holding sac, then there was a launching sac, a valve which kept the launching sac from leaking back or forward, and a bunch of muscles that would utterly crush the launching sac when the wolf clenched.

Then the valve would unlock with a small muscular contraction, and the lauching sac would spew this chemical out into the open air.

The chemical, upon coming to contact with oxygen and carbon, or at least sufficient amounts of it, would ignite. The heat would make the chemical and cell connections change, making the liquid that was less thin than water somehow thicken into a thin, clinging slime.

It was beautiful, and its purpose was entirely savage.

The wolf wanted this so bad it felt like it was salivating with its mind.

It was so wonderfully designed. The liquid was safe within the inside of its body, and when exposed to air, would ignite, before thickening into something its prey would be entirely unable to just brush off or gather. Sure, it hurt the spread of the fire a little in exchange for making sure the fire stuck, but this whole system was designed around precision.

The little thrakling was designed to be a sniper, firing liquid flame onto its enemies and watching them scream and writhe in agony from afar until they collapsed and died. After which, it would swoop in for its free, wonderfully charred meal.

The wolf didn’t even have to think about it. It added the fire-spewing organs as high up in its gut as it could fit it into, and weaved the pressure system through the organs in its chest, using its esophagus as a guide, and formed the exit points, two tube endings that ended at the entrance of its mouth to either side of its tongue.

It was entirely aware of the fact that if any flaming liquid dripped onto its tongue or mouth, it would immediately burn its mouth, at least until the wolf shut it and ruined the chemical solution with its own spit.

It just didn’t care.

A bit of pain in exchange for something this powerful, something this versatile and brutal and scary? It was nothing.

What more? It felt like it was forgetting something, but then again, it had learned so much that that feeling was almost permanent by now.

…

…

…

The shark hearts! It had been planning to give itself a second heart now that it was growing large enough to justify it, and the shark had a great valve system in place. It wasn’t even all that different from the wolf’s, besides shape.

So it began working on changing that shape into something it could fit into its own chest. It was rather easy. Giving itself a second heart was only tedious due to having to shift all its other organs around a little, shrinking or enlarging some others. Within an hour, it was done, and confirmed its change, feeling [Devourer] start to work on it.

With two hearts, its blood flow would go even faster, smoother, and it added the safety blanket of knowing that even if one heart got ruined or somehow failed, it would have another to keep it alive until it could fix the problem.

And then…

It stood there for a bit, feeling oddly lost.

It… didn’t really have anything else to change. It knew how human brains worked decently enough, and their intelligence didn’t seem to be borne of anything more than size and the frequency of the wrinkles in the tissue. The wolf couldn’t make its brain larger without making its whole head awkwardly larger, and “decently enough” was not a level of skill it was comfortable with to start adding wrinkles to its brain or making such drastic changes to the absolute most important part of itself.

Besides, the more wrinkles it added, the slower its brain would process. Smarter did not mean faster. It was slowly beginning to wonder if it even wanted to make its intellect match a human’s. It didn’t feel too motivated to do it at the moment.

The symbols were a bit more of an immediate interest.

The points might be… No, it knew what it wanted. It knew exactly what it needed.

It flicked the symbols open, finished with [Devourer] for the moment.

Speed ( +5 )

Perception ( +5 )

It felt hasty, to dump all its points into two attributes like this, even if Perception was necessary for Speed to even be useful.

But suddenly feeling like weight, momentum, torque and strength were no longer a significant factor into how fast it could go, into how its body felt even while asleep, it couldn’t much care. It knew it had made the right choice.

So now… now it would just… wait for all its changes to finish, make a template copy of its body once they were done, and go on its way.

Half of the changes were already done in the day and a half or so it had been blinking in and out of sleep.

It could wait for another day or two without much issue. Naps were nice.

It would have to keep an eye out for patrolling and searching humans, but it wasn’t terribly concerned. It hadn’t picked the first little nook it could find. It had felt as much as it could with its vibrations, and picked the most remote, convoluted, nonsensical path it could find that led to one. It was also pretty far from the entrance to the tunnel networks it had taken.

It went to sleep peacefully with a deep exhale of both immense joy and sadness, and idly wished it had the luxury to turn off [Restful Awareness] and dream of the last time it was in such a pipe, with its human packmate by its side.

-

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