The next section was the Slime related skills, skills that he would not have gained if he did not have a pre-disposition to them as a Slime…that is getting easier and easier to say without wincing. I need to be careful, might get used to living as a Slime…well I don’t need air so survivability is way up already…stop it! Stop it Aarav, you are NOT staying as a Slime…Ahem, anyway… These were quite definitely the skills that had given him the most and kept him alive throughout his endeavours in the forest.

Species, Slime

X Exp per Use

Level

Exp

Next

Description

Slime

Intrinsic Assimilation

10

22

532

20x EXP Used instead in tandem with Consume X% chance to gain an ability or characteristic

Slime

Strong Consolidate

20

746

1872

Converts 3g/min and increases density by 0.2g/cm3, all actives and some passives not usable during this time. 1Exp per g

Slime

Consume

23

382

2430

Absorb & Digest Xg of a material per hour. 1.5 Exp per g Consumed

Slime

Strong Odour Alteration

18

1329

1540

Store up to 10 Odours - Manure, Loamy Soil, Fresh Grass, Red Meat, Cat's Fur, River Water, Polished Wood, Roof Tiles. Additional Effects for Odours and Range for Odour to work. Range is Xcm from body.

Slime

Strong Camouflage

18

1388

1540

Store up to 10 Textures that you can use - Grass, Tree Bark, Loamy Soil, Tree Leaf, Panther Fur, Water, River Bed, Brick, Thatch. Camouflage range of effect grows Xcm per level

From the high levels of the skills here it was clear that these were the bread and butter skills. This was the source of his power and would continue to be so. It was the thing that made him unique compared to all the other creatures he had encountered. It did not make him more powerful than them but it gave him the means to be able to surpass them in time. Everything took a long time in this world; he wasn’t sure if was just him or if it was this world as a whole. All of his skills were very weak to start and grew stronger the more he used and trained with them. But it was a grinder’s world. Aarav had never been much of a grinder, work hard and for long periods to get results. Here working hard actually paid off. Not just working smart or sly.

Consume was surprisingly close to the level twenty-five mark and that was exciting. Just a little more and it would be where he needed it; and then maybe something profound would happen to Consume to make it even more powerful. Aarav gave it a bit of thought but other than being able to get this tedious job done faster he could not think of any way that he wanted to improve it. It was shockingly slow right now and if that could be improved Aarav would be jumping for joy, one day he would get back to his 45kg of weight. Right now he still had about another kilogram of pigeon to absorb…hang on a second, Consume now isn’t it? The shear amount of information was just ridiculous.

Hiding in plain sight and masking his odour made him nearly invisible, unless someone could detect the change in air currents around his body or he made a sound or touched something. That was the only way he could be detected, all within his control and things he had a lot of experience controlling in his last life. Living on the run taught you a few things.

Aarav couldn’t help but think of ways that he could make his abilities stronger, how would things change at the next stage? Could he influence them as he had some of his Talents? Did he have the power to make these changes happen? Everything was up for speculation because he had no one in this world to talk to or ask questions of. If he could have he would. He hardly even understood the language! What he needed more than anything else right now was a mentor of some sort, someone that could explain things instead of this slow and ardous process of trying to figure everything out for himself. It was incredibly slow and inefficient, not to mention boring and annoying and tedious. Oh and did I mention it is soooo irritating?!!!!

As he looked away from the numbers he saw that the sun was halfway down from its peak, mid-afternoon then. The days seemed to be about as long as they were on the old world, twenty-four hours. In the five or six months since being born here there had only been one season change about a month before very hot with almost no rain that he had seen and then about a month or so ago winds and gales had started getting stronger by the day. Even now the winds buffeting him were just strong enough to make him feel unstable on the roof, anchoring himself had been a simple task, sliding a little of his slime underneath the roof tiles had secured him there, like a harness. His body had the consistency of sludge tar. Thick and oozy and heavy, that was what high density got you and to become a dense slime it needed even more than that? It was crazy, what was he supposed to be a neutron star?

Anyway, setting all that aside, Aarav had finished inspecting the core Slime skills, time to move on. Next came the Healing Skills, again life savers, literally. Without these skills he would have died for sure, Natural Plant Healing had been with him from the beginning as Photosynthesis. Thought it had been about gaining weight then, it was what he had needed and the subconsciously when he needed healing it had changed at level ten. It was great how that worked though. There was a limit to how much he could change but some of these abilities were predisposed to work in certain way and others weren’t.

Healing

X Exp per Use

Level

Exp

Next

Description

Healing

Zen Meditation

14

61

972

Enter a meditative state can be used at anytime if not moving increase all recovery by 2X%.

Healing

Natural Plant Healing

18

442

1540

Regenerate XHP, SP or MP per hour

Both worked in subtly different ways, but both acted on his natural healing so as long as he boosted that he would be able to strengthen these as well. Everything seemed to be tied together when it came to energy, brain and brawn. Everything fed off of everything else. It was hard to keep track of all the moving parts. Just keeping in mind that getting stronger was important was enough for now. Nothing more could be expected.

Next was senses, he had started with none of these and then they had burgeoned quickly becoming indispensible. Thankfully that he had got all his senses weak as they were before fully integrating with this body. If he didn’t have eyes or a mouth or ears before fully gaining consciousness he might have gone totally mad and been unable to assimilate into this body properly. As it was it had been enough of a shock but that could have broken him.

Senses

X Exp per Hour

Level

Exp

Next

Description

Sense

Bird's Prime Eyes

25

3

3060

See 4Xm with perfect clarity, after that is a little more than blurs and Vision is 270deg from straight forward. See in Reds, Greens and Blues as well as Black and White.

Sense

Sharp Mouth of Consumption

20

51

1872

You can Consume things 3X% faster if you use your mouth. You can also speak!

Sense

Ears of Echo Location

16

1083

1240

Hear up to 2Xm away a sound 100-XDB volume. Sound falls off at 1DB per Xcm.

Sense

Smell of Watery Soil

15

858

1102

Smell any scents up to Xm away. Only strong smells at first then clearer as you level.

Touch was not counted amount them. I guess it must be because I had it from the beginning? Again, it was only speculation with no one to confirm the hypothesis. He was happy to go with it though, these senses, apart from his eyes were not as strong as a regular human’s though, at least not from Earth, he would bet that the people here had stronger senses than that so compared to most he would be subpar at best.

With senses specifically, there were two way to improve them, either he could continue to level them up and that would increase their power, as with any other skill. That took a lot of time and utilization. The second way was what he was doing now, which was to assimilate other animals and plants and things into his DNA like the sea slug from the old world and add their traits and capabilities to his own, this worked faster but also involve more danger. Like getting bitten or half swallowed or chunks ripped out of him, claws tearing through his flesh like a hot knife through butter…Aarav shuddered at that last.