I drink from my flask and then infuse my mana in the small water crystal in to refill it. The instructors in the special forces were adamant on it, always refill your flask, quiver, food and other reserves when you can, you won’t know when you’ll need them and be dead if they’re empty.

I crawl in the bushes and look beneath them, the enemy troops are just in front, sleeping in their tent. I wait for my men to send me the signal that they have discarded the enemy’s sentinels.

There is an owl’s scream in the night, the pattern corresponds, it’s the signal, the sentinels are dead. I give a quick prayer to Morhick, the God of War. Then I gave the signal for the full attack, another kind of owl scream, on a different pattern.

My men and I rush in the camp from all around it, silently and quickly we’re closing in on the untroubled sleepers. Some of my men reach the first tent, they enter it and I know they are silently cutting their throat. I’m heading for the commandant tent.

I find it and quickly cut the knot maintaining it closed, I slid inside and rush to the bed. I cut the commandant's throat, he opened his eyes and I see in it that he understand the situation. He tries to reach for a knife on the nightstand, but I push his hand away and stab him in the heart. He dies with a small gurgling sound. It is done, my mission is accomplished.

I stand back up and notice a bunch of blanket at the bed’s foot. I saw it before, but it just moved and that not normal. I pass my dagger from my right to the left and drow my word. Slowly I approach the sword’s tip to the blanket and move it aside. Under it is a small girl shivering in fear.

The intel did state that the enemy commandant was used to keep young slaves for his own pleasure, but he was supposed to have already killed the last one. The girl is naked under the blanket and I can see a lot of marks from punches, kicks, and others mean of inflicting pain without killing. She’s also chained to the bedside.

She looks at the dead man in the bed, then at me and my bloody dagger. She throws herself to my feet and doesn’t make a noise. It seems she made the link and want me to spare her, she’s kind of smart.

“Stand up.” She immediately obeys and stands perfectly straight. “Don’t move.” I searched in the desk of the dead commandant looking for documents that could interest my superiors and for the key of the girl’s chain. I found some paper that looks interesting but no key. I found it a bit later, on a small chain around the dead man neck.

I open the girl’s chain, her ankle is injured by the constant rubbing of the hard and cold iron, but she’s still standing straight and hasn’t moved at all since I ordered her to. I put a blanket on her shoulders and notice a strange scar on her lower back. It’s perfectly circular and looks like scars left after an amputation, there is something strange about this girl. I look at her head, yes, there is the same kind of scars beneath her hair. She’s a beastgirl, but her tail and her ears had been cut. There is nothing more humiliating and degrading for a beastman.

“You’re free now. Do as you want.” On those words, I turn away to leave the tent, but I feel a pull on my shirt. I turn back and see the girl looking at me with wet eyes.

“What?”

She holds my shirt tighter in her little hand.

“Tell me what you want.”

She kneels in front of me, putting her forehead on the ground letting go of my shirt but quickly grabbing my trousers’ foot.

“You- you want to come with me?”

She frantically nods her head.

“How would you be of use to me?”

She jumps to her feet and runs to the desk, then she goes beneath it making some sounds as she’s touching some things there. When she comes back she has some papers in her hand and gives them to me. I look at the paper, they are confidential documents of bigger value than those I already took.

“Fine. If you manage to follow, me you can stay with me.”

She nods, I turn back and leave.

A memory! I have regained another of my previous life memories! And it was clearer than the previous one, with more details.

Ok, I need to analyze it a bit.

First I now know that I was some kind of soldier, with elite training. And I was leading an elite force for an army, I was fighting in a war. That’s good, but it would be better if I had get the knowledge of the training back too. I know that I was an elite soldier, but I don’t have the skills associated with it, not that I could use them anyway…

I also had a glimpse of my arms and the skin was clear. Like the girl skin, was I a ‘beastman’ too? Or something else with the same type of skin. Anyway I know that I wasn’t like the hikers, they have fur all over their bodies, and not me.

The third thing is the girl. What happened to her after that, did she manage to follow me? I'd like to know. Not that I care, I’m just curious.

I think I didn’t have a thing against this ‘slavery’ concept, whatever it is. Just that I didn’t do it like the man I kill. He too was fur-less, completely fur-less, not a trace of hairs on his head or his arms, while I had some on hairs on my arms.

The last thing is that the memory started with me using some tiny-weaky form of water crystal. The thing I used in the memory was just a pebble when I have a big crystal, like hundred times bigger. For my first memory, it was just after seeing the stars and creating mine, and it was about a walk in the night sky. It means that if I continue to experience new things I may get back memories linked to those things.

Oh yeah! There is something else I didn’t think directly. The crystal in the flask was a simple one, but it was ‘enchanted’, is my actual one enchanted too? I’ll need to figure that out. Actually, I can do it right now. I focus my attention on my water crystal looking for something I didn’t notice back then. And I find it, there is something in the way the mana is flowing through the crystal. It’s flowing in a 3-dimensional design, I seem to recall that’s called a ‘rune’.

Did the other crystals have runes too? The ones that produced the barriers have some. Does the reason they can’t do it now is because the runes got erased when the crystals broke? I’ll have to look at this rune stuff if I can make other runes I could make some neat things with the crystals.

Ok, enough analyzing. I have stuff to do.

I dig the second cliff cavity. The one on the seaside. I want it to be able to welcome seabirds. I will let it without plants, for now, I want to see what kind will grow there by themselves, then I will help them grow.

In the other cavity, I claim the fruits that my bats keep bringing me, making them bloom a lot of flowers. I have made a new discovery there. The flowers seem to attract a lot of bugs, and especially ‘butterflies’ and ‘bees’, and each time one of those bugs visit the flowers from the same kind of tree the flower changes a bit. The change is intriguing me so I pour mana in some of the changed flowers. And soon after that, they turn into fruits! I’ve found out how to grow fruits! I need bugs to go from flower to flower. They are transporting something along the way, a yellow stuff called ‘pollen’.

I quickly claim all the butterflies and bees I can, but it’s kind of disappointing at first. The butterflies are dying quickly, just after reproducing and laying some eggs, at least my mana is accelerating the rate at which the eggs will hatch and the larvae change into adults and continue the cycle.

The bees are something different, they have a ‘queen’ that is the center of the ‘hive’, and the queen almost never leaves the hive. By luck, the bees are able to communicate between them, so I order my bees to lure as much bee as they can in my dungeon, so I can claim them. When I’ll have enough bees under my control I’ll order them to bee-nap the queen and as many larvae as they can and to bring them back to me.

Since I claimed the mountain’s foot I learned the name of a lot of different kind of bugs living in the dirt there. Especially the ‘ants’ they are functioning a bit like the bees, so I have a similar plan for them.

I want at least one beehive and one anthill under my control. The rest of the bugs can simply fall under it with time by naturally consuming my mana as I expand my influence.

Speaking of expanding my influence, it seems that the bigger I want my domain to be, the harder it is to claim new areas. The price is growing more than exponentially. And the refine mana emanating from my core is hardly reaching the end of my domain now. Maybe I need to find a way to improve my refining abilities. But how?

When I poured mana into already claimed creatures, they evolved. Can I evolve? I don’t know, but I will try to do the same. However, I’m certain it will need a whole lot of mana to do it, so I start stocking mana into my crystals, storing as much as I can before trying to evolve.

And first I want to do a thing I postponed too long. I forcefully evolve three of my crabs into more flexible version and manage to make them of three different colors. One green, one blue and the last a more vivid red than the average crab. You’ll see what is their use soon.