[From sleeping outside, your health has been restored up to 80% of its maximum.]

[From sleeping outside, your stamina has been fully restored.]

[You are hungry!] [Satiety: 4%]

[HP: 18/22] [SP: 11/11]

I was used to waking up hungry, but this time, I considered my hunger with a great deal more urgency than usual. I had to find something to eat, quickly. I had gone to bed with my hunger meter at 7%, a “lucky” number that felt decidedly unlucky. Now, I had a mere 4% left, a bad omen if there ever was one. I wasn't the sort of superstitious person to consider 4 an unfortunate number, but right now, it certainly felt close to death!

The plan, I had decided, was to find the easiest prey I could. More ants like the one from the previous day, if I had to. Once I had a bit of food in my stomach and a bit more of a buffer to work with, I could think a bit more speculatively.

I hurried to the edge of the plateau. Before descending, I made use of my vantage point to survey the barren valley, just in case there was anything that caught my eye. I immediately spotted the tortoise shell from yesterday -- still standing. And...it seemed like there was movement in its vicinity. I squinted, but my eyesight wasn’t good enough to make out the finer details, until I realized what I was seeing. There was a trail -- a trail -- of ants leading away from turtle. So, that was how this desert biome dealt with carcasses left out. These ants were larger than the ones I was used to, but they served to fill the same ecological niche: cleaning up the leftovers.

I hurried down from the plateau, considering how to best take advantage of this situation. The ant from yesterday had been able to outrun me (except when I was sprinting), and ran fast enough to escape my [noxious breath] when I wasn’t actively pinning it. Was there any hope of me pinning multiple ants? By the time I had finished with the first ant, would the others have fled? It would be pretty unfortunate if I stumbled upon an entire group of ants and only managed to make a meal out of one of them.

The ants were clearly moving in a line, all headed toward a single destination, but they were all about ten feet apart, nowhere near close enough for me to attempt an ambush body slam pinning multiple ants at once. I would have to do this one by one.

I wished that circumstances permitted me to spend the time to consider a way to make better use of this opportunity, to lay some kind of trap, or devise some kind of method to efficiently kill these ants, but my hunger meter was critically low. My priority had to be getting food in my stomach -- I could plan my next move from there.

The ants paraded on, seemingly oblivious to my presence, and as soon as I was close enough to one of them, I pounced, pinning it under my body. I wish I could say I “flattened” it, but unfortunately its hard exoskeleton didn’t break under my weight. I wasted no time in emitting my [noxious breath] which enveloped both me and the ant I had trapped. As I waited for the ant under me to die from [damage over time] and stop struggling, I observed the “line” of ants that I had now disrupted. I could see that the ants had been marching in two lines, one leading from (I presumed) their nest to the remains of the tortoise, and one leading from the tortoise to their nest. The ants that were coming to get a bite had turned and started to march back, while the ants that had been in the process of making the return trip from the tortoise to their nest were still marching in line, but now giving me a substantially larger berth, and seemingly moving with a greater sense of urgency.

I waited until the ant beneath me stopped struggling. [Armored ant defeated! Earned 8% experience toward next level.]I took stock of the situation: my hunger meter was at 3%, and A few straggler ants were still reasonably close, so I sprinted after the nearest one in hopes of securing a second ant kill before the lot of them had gotten too far. Luckily, I only had to spend a single point of stamina sprinting before I was within pounce range, and this ant I too pinned to the ground before unleashing my [noxious breath]. As I waited for this ant to succumb to its fate, I watched as the other ants made their escape, trying to track their movement to wherever they had come from. If I could find their nest, it could be an incredible bounty of ant protein, but unfortunately wherever they were going was further than my eyes could follow. The ant below me struggled, and at one point bit me, but I could barely register the pain -- the pangs of hunger were much more pressing.

[Armored ant defeated! Leveled up!]

[SP: 8/11] [2 unspent skill points remaining.]

Under other circumstances, I might have taken a moment to bask in the glow of having just reached level 3, but right now my mind was only on one thing. I turned my attention to the remains of the defeated ant below me, and I suddenly realized that I had two bounties: the ant’s mandibles had held what looked distinctly like a piece of white meat. I immediately gobbled up the tortoise meat that was rightfully mine, before digging in and devouring the ant itself. I was still hungry, but I felt a growing sense of relief as I saw that my satiety meter had increased to 10%.

I made my way back to the previous ant -- luckily nothing had disturbed it in the time since I had gone to hunt for the other ant -- and found that it too had been carrying a small piece of tortoise meat. With my hunger meter sitting at low but still more comfortable 10%, I took the time to savor the tortoise meat this time. It tasted...well, like any white meat. Like chicken, as they say. The ant was slightly less delicious, but still a welcome morsel -- any food tasted good when you were hungry.

I finished chewing through the crunchy remnants of the ant’s exoskeleton, which bumped my hunger up to a more comfortable 17%, and briefly wondered why it was that the ants’ hard outer layer seemed to crumble so easily after I poisoned them to death while the turtle didn’t.

I headed back to the tortoise’s shell to investigate further. Unfortunately, the ants hadn’t dropped any bits of meat as far as I could tell, even though it seemed clear that they had been making out like bandits. I looked at the holes in the shell. Had the ants succeeded in physically entering the shell? The ants seemed a bit too large for that, but then again, a lot of their perceived size did come from the length of their legs. Maybe they could squeeze in to get at the turtle’s inner meat and tear of edible bits to...take back home with them? That seemed to be what they had been doing.

I considered my current situation. Yesterday, I had awoken with my hunger meter slightly above 50%, and today I had started nearly drained -- that suggested that my metabolism was working through 50% of that hunger meter per day, which meant that I could go around two days — 48 “hours” — without food. With my hunger meter currently at 17%, I had approximately one third of a day’s worth of food. That being said, a “third of a day” didn’t mean 8 hours -- my metabolism seemed to be much more active when awake than asleep, considering that I had started yesterday at above 50% satiety, ended in the single digits, and only dropped from 7% to 4% in my sleep. So “a third of a day” really was closer to “a third of my waking hours” closer to 4 or 5 hours than 8 hours. Still, plenty of time to take a breather, get my bearings, and plan my next move.

With the task of breakfast out of the way, I could now turn my attention to the other benefit I had gotten from defeating the two ants: I had gained a level, and with that level had come 2 new skill points.

As I settled into my “thinking pose,” I briefly debated retreating back to the safety of the plateau, but with my SP sitting at a comfortable [8/11], I felt pretty confident in my ability to repel any potential attackers. Besides, if the hyenas planned on attacking me today, this might be chance for me to actually flex my [noxious gas] to see if I could get any tools. It didn’t have to be a purely defensive measure. That said, I should probably budget a certain amount of SP for ant-hunting. Let’s see. If I used the remainder of today’s stamina (8 SP) to secure 8 ant kills, and each and was good for replenishing around 4% of my hunger meter, that would bring my hunger meter up from its current level of 17% to 49%, or roughly one day’s worth of food...

I frowned. That left me with basically no margin, no surplus stamina for things like experimenting or, if it came to it, defending myself against other predators. That was...unfortunate. There had to be a better way.

All the more reason for me to make use of the new tools available to me, like those two skill points. I focused on my character sheet.

Claws: level 1 Scales: level 1 Mouth: level 2 Wings: level 0 Learned skills: Noxious breath Unlearned skills: Hot breath, cold breath 2 unspent skill points remaining.

Just to confirm, I tried to deposit a point into the greyed-out “wings” stat before getting the same message from yesterday that I was [Unable to increase level for “Wings.” Maximum level for your class reached.]

It seemed that these “skill points” could be used to increase one of my attributes, and increasing my attributes gained me the privilege of spending points on more abilities, in addition to improving the strength of related abilities. Another point into “mouth” would improve my [noxious breath] (which reportedly “scaled with mouth level”) in addition to, hopefully, giving me access to new breath attacks. Or...maybe those three breath attacks were all that there was.

On one hand, the idea of raising the level of my claws seemed attractive -- right now my claws seemed pretty useless when it came to things like trying to crack open a tortoise shell or even an ant’s chitin shell. On the other hand, there was the possibility that any new claw skill I mastered would, like [noxious breath], require the use of stamina, and right now I was not in the market for new things to spend stamina on. If I had the ability to put stat points toward increasing my daily stamina limit, that was the sort of thing that would get my interest, but it seemed that my stats simply increased automatically each time I had leveled up, without any direct input from me on how to guide them. It was, I supposed, one less thing to worry about, but something that peeved me nonetheless.

As best I could tell, I had two main options: I could be a generalist and experiment with as many different types of skills as possible, or be a specialist and focus all of my improvement toward one specific area. I suspected that at some point it would behoove me to become a specialist: most species tended to survive by finding an “ecological niche” of sorts, and becoming really, really good at one specific thing that allowed them to survive. For example, panda bears survived by having the somewhat unique ability to eat and digest bamboo, an abundant food source that most other animals had difficulty using as a food source, but bamboo was so nutrient-poor that the process of eating (and digesting) bamboo was a full time job.

That being said, I was well aware of the risks of “premature optimization.” As a baby dragon who was but two days old, I was probably not very well-equipped to pick out the ideal life path, so it was probably worth being a generalist for awhile until I had a chance to see what worked well. Best to be a jack of all trades until I could figure out which would be the best to master.

And yet, on a meta level, wasn’t putting my two unspent skill points into claws or scales to a form of “premature optimization” by deciding on a course of a action (“be a generalist”) before considering all of the alternatives?

Tunnel vision could be a dangerous trap -- I didn’t want to grow trapped in a “local maximum” when some other better option might be available if I were willing to take a big picture perspective, but the thing that made local maxima “traps” was that they often provided the fastest immediate short-term payoff -- and I was in a situation where fast, immediate, short-term payoff seemed pretty appealing! Long-term planning was all well and good when you knew there was a long-term to plan for, but there was no sense in making a 10-year-plan for myself when I had no guarantee of surviving the next ten days, or even the next ten hours.

I considered my current predicament. Right now, I needed food, and it seemed like all of my best methods for obtaining food were reliant on spending a limited quantity of SP. Was there a way for me to get a meal without spending SP? Earlier, I had mentally calculated the potential gains of ant-hunting based on the assumption that each ant kill would require expending 1 SP, but it was probably worth testing that assumption. I was now stronger. Maybe increasing my [mouth] level would make it easier for me to crack an ant’s armor covering with a bite. Or maybe putting points into [claws] could allow me to cut it open. Of those options, the former seemed the more plausible.

Or maybe there were other possible food sources that I had yet to come across. Maybe I could find something that wasn’t covered in armor, and also wasn’t liable to travel in packs and attack me. Could this desert valley be home to creatures like rabbits and other small mammals? Or what about snakes and lizards? After all, those hyenas had to live on something. They hadn’t starved to death in the time between their birth and reaching maturation, and somehow I doubted that they were subsisting on a diet consisting entirely of ants. Maybe they had attacked me because I resembled a larger type of the prey that they were used to hunting. After all, without wings, there was little separating me from an oversized lizard.

At any rate, it seemed prudent to spend more time exploring before committing my 2 unspent skill points, since there seemed to be no limit on when I could spend them.

Reluctantly, I left the site of the tortoise shell and began walking, though I made a mental note to check back on it later, just in case the ants decided to resume dismantling the tortoise’s innards. If they did, that would mean ants for me to eat and some of yesterday’s turtle meat as a pleasant bonus. Come to think of it, did that meat have a shelf life before it “expired?” Did I have to take care not to eat “spoiled” meat? Given everything I had experienced so far, this did seem like the type of world that would give me some kind of explicit pop-up notification that I was experiencing indigestion if that turned out to be the case. That said, my [carnivore] trait didn’t specify anything about me eating to eat fresh remains of fallen creatures. Maybe carrion would make just as good a meal as fresh meat. If that turned out to be the case, it could save me a lot of effort: the cheetahs on the plains who hunted down gazelles always seemed to exert more effort than the buzzards that came along afterward to pick their bones clean.

Come to think of it, I recalled reading something about how early humans’ ecological niche had been going one level beyond “picking the bones clean,” using their tool-making ability to create tools to crack open bones and get at the nutrient-rich marrow within. That was also probably why dogs buried bones: it was a way to store nutrients for later. I wondered if I would ever find myself with such a surplus of food that I’d start searching for ways to bank it for a later date. In my current state, the very idea seemed like an impossible luxury, but hey, maybe if I was lucky, I might happen upon the remains of some large fallen beast. Probably not a mammoth or a mastodon or anything like that, given that this seemed to be a desert biome, but if this place could be home to a dragon, anything was possible.

As I daydreamed about what kind of megafauna I might chance upon, I ended up walking a path in the direction that I had seen the ants retreating in. Those ants seemed to know what was up, based on how quickly they had assembled a team to begin harvesting the remains of the tortoise I had defeated yesterday -- if there was a giant rotting animal somewhere in this valley, they would probably already be on the case.

It didn’t take long for me to spot an ant, and I began following it. Worst case scenario, I could wait for an opportunity to pounce and devour it, but right now, it seemed more appropriate to assume the curious stance of an infant, ready to learn from a creature that clearly knew more about this world than I did. The ant began scuttling along in a way that seemed very deliberate, and I pursued it, doing my best to keep up.

Class: Baby Dragon Level: 3 Progress toward next level: 0% HP: 18/23 SP: 8/11 Satiety: 17% Strength: 7 Dexterity: 6 Constitution: 5 Perception: 6 Will: 4 Charisma: 2 Claws: level 1 Scales: level 1 Mouth: level 2 Wings: level 0 Traits: Carnivore, Kin sensitive Abilities: Sprinting, Noxious Breath 2 unspent skill points remaining