[From sleeping outside, your health has been restored up to 70% of its maximum.]

[From sleeping outside, your stamina has been restored up to 90% of its maximum.]

[HP:15/22] [SP: 10/11]

[You are hungry!] [Satiety: 22%]

I blinked myself awake, dimly aware of the notifications’ presence before fully processing my situation. For the first time since I had begun my life as a baby dragon, I was waking up with less than full stamina. Furthermore, I was fairly certain that my health bar was lower than it had started yesterday. According to the notification, it was now at 70% of its maximum, but the first time I had woken up and done the mental math to see whether that was getting rounded up to the nearest integer, it had been 80%.

While the notification message suggested that [sleeping outside] impacted the quality of my sleep, the fact that my SP and HP recovery varied from day to day seemed to suggest that there were other factors at play. Was it the intensity of my injuries from yesterday? I flexed my tail, seeing if there was any pain from yesterday that lingered, but nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary. Considering how hard the hyena’s bite had been, I was lucky to have escaped without so much as a contusion -- back in my previous life as a human, I’d had bruises that had a more lasting impact.

Likely, the reason I had woken up with less HP than the day before had less to do with quality of sleep than quantity of sleep. Yesterday, I had stayed out after dark. More time spent hunting under the moonlight meant less time for sleeping, and evidently that also meant less time for recovery. I groaned. Considering that stamina (and not time) seemed to be the main bottleneck to my progression, I would have gladly spent another hour or two sleeping in to recover an extra 10% SP (and HP). But evidently I didn’t have that choice: I had awoken with the rising of the sun, and the sun wasn’t the kind of wake-up alarm that I could delay by pressing a snooze button.

Perhaps I could sleep in if I found some way to escape the sun: the fact that my wake-up notification specifically noted that I was [sleeping outside] suggested that it might be possible for me to sleep “inside,” and while there were weren’t any buildings as far as the eye could see, the rabbits I had encountered yesterday seemed to be perfectly capable of hiding from the sun, avoiding detection from predators (like me) during the day by presumably sleeping during the day before venturing out at night. Some of the hyenas were probably doing the same. Perhaps it was time for me to find a nest of my own. Or maybe a “den” or “lair.” Those might be forms of shelter more befitting a dragon, though shelter by any name would be welcome.

I went to the edge of plateau to begin my descent, and yelped in excitement: the persistent hyena that had died to my [noxious breath] last night was still there. Or, at least, it seemed like part of it was: the was a trail of ants leading to (and from) the hyena’s remains. I had climbed halfway down the edge of the plateau before considering whether I should make my entrance more ceremonious. The ants were still carrying on as though everything were normal, and the hyena, due to the circumstances of its death, was directly below my climbing path. I hadn’t yet tested whether “fall damage” was a thing, but I had a decent enough health buffer that I was willing to experiment, and besides, according to Newton’s third law, any impact force that I experienced on my body would also be experienced by whatever I landed on: if falling from this height was enough to injure my body, it might be enough to crush an ant to death, and that seemed like a price I was willing to pay. I was already in the business of spending SP to kill ants; why not take the chance to spend HP as well?

I debated climbing back up to the top of the plateau and trying to crush the ants with falling rocks, but this was a part of the plateau that had a grade that didn’t allow a sheer drop downward: while I had confidence that the grade was steep enough that it wouldn’t stop my body from hitting what was below, there was a good chance that a rock dropped from that height would just bounce off the side of the plateau, and besides that, I wasn’t confident in my ability to hit a target as small as an ant with a projectile as small as those rocks. I couldn’t increase the size of the target, but I could drop a larger object on the ant: my own body. Add to the fact that the rocks seemed like the kind of limited resource worth conserving for a rainy day, and the decision to turn my body into a weapon was a simple one. Besides, it would save me the tedium of climbing all the way back up, and every second that passed meant more and more of the hyena’s remains being carried away by the ants. If nothing else, falling would hasten my journey downward and allow me to claim my kill more rapidly.

I climbed down until I was maybe fifteen feet above the hyena’s remains, and waited until an ant was mandibles-deep in its carcass before letting go. The sensation of falling struck me with a brief moment of terror, but it lasted only a second -- in fact, probably almost exactly a second, if I was falling from a height of 5 meters (or, technically, one second would be my fall time for a distance of half of 9.81 meters, assuming this place had the same gravity as earth).

That thought was quickly replaced by the sensation of pain, and I saw my health bar flash before registering the sensation of something moving under me. As I shifted my weight, I heard the sound of something cracking -- a new sound, and yet also somewhat familiar. It took me a second to register where I recognized that sound from: it was the same barely-crackling hiss that the ants let out when dying to my [noxious breath].

I lifted myself off the ant, and was surprised to see that its legs were still moving, though it wasn’t walking anywhere -- it seemed to be in the throes of death. Most notably, its armor was cracked open, the first time I had ever seen the exposed flesh through the cracked armor of an ant that was still alive. I forced a claw through the crack in its chiton covering, stabbing it, tearing and rending it, before pulling out my claw, and stabbing it again.

[Armored ant defeated! Earned 7% experience toward next level.]

By now, the rest of the ants had fled, and I devoured the remains of the ant and the hyena carcass that it had been extracting meat from.

As I dined on the hyena carcass, I found myself a bit taken aback by how easily my jaws crunched through the beast’s cartilage and bones. It wasn’t that the texture bothered me -- in fact, I found it to be quite delicious. And that, on some level, was what I found slightly disturbing. While I still felt very much like the version of “myself” that I had been for over 20 years, the reality was that I was now in a new body, which was wired with different set of impulses and desires than the one I’d had as a human. On a certain level, that was a good and probably even necessary thing: it would be pretty bad if my reaction to my own [noxious breath] were to find it unpleasant, and considering that I was a carnivore destined to spend much of my life subsisting on raw meat, it was good that I found the flavor and texture of raw meat to be enjoyable. Still, it left open questions about what other desires and impulses might have been changed in the transition from my previous life. Did it go beyond mere gut reactions to smell and taste? Did I now have completely different moral intuitions? As I crunched through what I believed to be a carpal bone, I considered the morbid question of whether I’d find this meal as delicious if it were the remains of a person -- of some humanoid creature, be they human, elf, dwarf, or otherwise. Technically speaking, a dragon eating a human wouldn’t be an act of cannibalism. Dragon eating dragon, that was cannibalism. Or hyena eating hyena. Did hyenas eat their own?

I had sort of vaguely assumed that hyenas weren’t above some light cannibalism, which would explain why the hyenas I killed on day one weren’t there when I woke up the following morning, but this hyena had been left to the ants. Maybe the fact that this hyena had died from [noxious breath] deterred the hyenas from cannibalizing it? Or, maybe I was completely wrong about hyenas being cannibals: maybe the hyenas I had defeated on my first day had become ant food, just like this one, and the only reason that this hyena hadn’t been fully devoured by the time I got to it was that the ants had less time to work on it: after all, this hyena had been killed at night, while the hyenas from the first day had been killed during the day time.

I polished off the remainder of the hyena, savoring the last few remaining bits as my satiety rose to 60%.

I had to say, the red meat was really starting to grow on me: not only was it a good deal more delicious, but it also seemed to be more filling. Granted, that was based off a pretty small sample size: two instances of red meat (the rabbit and hyena), and two instances of...non-red meat, the ant and the turtle. Ants surely didn’t count as white meat, but I wasn’t sure what they counted as. Insect protein? Whatever they were, it was definitely less fulfilling -- both from a hedonic and from a raw satiation perspective -- than the flesh of mammals.

Bearing that in mind, I decided to head to the craggy area. If mammals slept there, I might be able to catch them unawares. The possibility that I’d actually be able to find and kill any rabbits or similar creatures seemed unlikely -- after all, they burrowed there specifically for safety, and my body was probably too big to fit into an entrance picked by a rabbit, but maybe there were larger mammals about. After all, those hyenas had to sleep somewhere. Heck, I might even find shelter large enough for a dragon: maybe then I could stop sleeping outdoors and start waking up with full health. Or, well, maybe not. Maybe sleeping in a den down here would result in me not waking up at all, with zero health, because any cave or crack big enough to fit a dragon would also be big enough for a hyena or three to slip into. I recalled how the hyena had sunk its teeth into my tail yesterday, and considered how much more attractive my neck might be as a target if they managed to creep up on me while I was sleeping. They were already good enough at ambushing me while I was awake, and they didn’t need one more advantage.

The plateau was probably the safest place for me to sleep, so I probably shouldn’t be in the market for a new home, but I was still curious to see if the craggy and apparently porous ground held any secrets that might benefit me. As if answering my unspoken question, I detected an odor: that of rotting meat.

I wasn’t sure exactly how I knew it was rotting meat. On a certain level, I was familiar with the smell: I had, on more than one occasion, accidentally left food in the fridge of my campus apartment while leaving several weeks for a break, only to come back and be confronted with some truly rank odors when I returned. But my reaction to the smell was completely unfamiliar: while most of my human encounters with rotten meat had had me recoiling in disgust, this odor was positively tantalizing. Well, I was a carnivore, after all. I fed on “the remains of fallen creatures,” and carrion evidently fell into that category. Maybe this, too, was a part of adapting to life as a dragon.

Still, there was a certain part of my brain that nagged at me -- specifically, I couldn’t get past the thought that things that would have disgusted me as a human were now downright enticing. That word “disgust” especially stood out in my mind. I had remembered watching a TED talk about how humans’ sense of disgust was tied to a lot of our moral intuitions: apparently, measuring people’s disgust sensitivity allowed researchers to predict their stances on various issues of morality, and a study found that people’s moral intuitions actually changed based on whether you exposed them to an unpleasant smell. Maybe the absence of a disgust reaction when confronted with things that I previously found “gross” was a good thing, since it meant I was becoming less close-minded. Or maybe it was a bad thing, if it meant that I had fewer moral guardrails. Or, maybe I was overthinking this, and my newfound appetite for rotting meat had nothing to do with my moral intuitions. I should probably be more than a little hesitant to base too much of my thinking on what I had heard from TED talks, especially considering that it was frighteningly common for those pop-science pep talks to be based on research that later failed to replicate. Besides, if I just considered the basic facts of the situation, if I was going to spend an inordinate amount of time analyzing my own reaction to rotting meat through a moral lens, wasn’t feeding on meat from creatures that were already dead more ethical than hunting down fresh meat?

I followed the scent. How long had the creature been rotting? Honestly, I had no idea. Based on the smell, I assumed that the meat was well past its expiration date, but it might not have been too long: I was pretty sure that meat rotted faster at higher temperatures, and I was in a desert, after all.

Come to think of it, hyenas were carrion feeders, too. Given that I wasn’t too far from where I had seen some of them yesterday, I wondered why I was smelling the carrion at all: if I could smell it, then why hadn’t they also smelled it and beaten me to the meal? Was my sense of smell better than theirs? Somehow, I doubted that: mammals had a much more acute sense of smell than reptiles. In fact, I recalled overhearing a conversation about how mammals’ keen sense of smell was the reason that primitive mammals had been so quick to evolve bigger brains relative to reptilian and avian species: all that olfactory input required a bigger cerebral cortex, or something like that. Admittedly, I was no biology expert, but it certainly struck me as plausible. Hmm...thinking about it that way, maybe I did have more in common with a mammal than a reptile: my brain was big enough to ponder questions of evolutionary biology, something that a mere lizard brain probably wasn’t capable of. In fact, maybe my brain came equipped with an olfactory cortex that was even better equipped than hyenas to pick up on the smell of rotting meat. Or...maybe dragons just had an exceptional sense of smell. It was hard to know what biological benchmark I should measure myself against. It was at moments like this that I really wished I had an older dragon to help educate me.

I didn’t have to travel far before the odor led me to an opening in the craggy ground that, upon close inspection, looked like a very short and very wide cave entrance. If I hadn’t specifically been following the meat’s odor, I would have missed it entirely: until I got up close, the opening just looked like the shadow of an overhanging rock, but as I flattened myself, I could see that it was an opening. Was it large enough for me to crawl through? It seemed like I could fit in there, and that question was probably best answered by experience. The worst that could happen was that I’d find out the answer was “no.” Or...well, maybe the worst thing that could happen was that I would get stuck, with my backside completely exposed for the hyenas to get revenge for what I had done to their friend last night. That was definitely a possibility. Bearing that in mind, I vowed to be cautious. I would pull back if it seemed like it was getting to be an uncomfortably tight squeeze. But until then...I was going to be as adventurous as my size allowed.

Class: Baby Dragon Level: 3 Progress toward next level: 96% HP: 15/23 SP: 10/11 Satiety: 58% Claws: level 1 Scales: level 1 Mouth: level 4 Wings: level 0 Traits: Carnivore, Kin sensitive Abilities: Sprinting, Noxious Breath