Jon was sufficiently impressed with his acid-enabled digestion. He had used his abilities to quickly dispose of the rest of the spider. It seemed that his acid had a limited capacity. After using the ability ten times, he seemed to run out. Fortunately, it refilled at an even pace that appeared to be augmented when actively consuming something. It would make sense that his health would restore more quickly after consuming food. Otherwise, he would have to take substantial breaks between meals, and that would slow down the evolution process significantly. After wholly finishing the spider, Jon was rewarded with a total of 2 biomass and 200 experience. Based on the size of the spider, which probably took up about a fifth of an average-sized man, Jon estimated that eating a fully grown adult would provide him around 10 biomass.

In his excitement earlier, he hadn’t extensively thought about the effects of experience. When he had resummoned the biomass notification, he hadn’t realized he had dismissed the experience notification. It had taken him a quick glance at his status page, and a mental question before an experience bar popped into his vision like a heads up display.

The system showed him that he had 200 out of the 500 experience required for the next level. That didn’t seem bad, but if Jon were a betting man, he would assume that leveling was a progressively more difficult advancement process. Additionally, he wasn’t sure what levels actually meant. It didn’t seem to reward him with anything, but seeing as his whole goal on this world was to evolve, he could safely assume that levels were connected in some way. Regardless, Jon intimated he would need to find more prey for his consumption. If victims meant more experience and biomass and those two things were related to evolution, then he needed more of them so he could stop making his way around the world as a serpentine predator.

Jon decided to stick with his earlier plan to gather more information about the world around him. He slithered his way to the tree in front of where he had initially spawned. He found that his microscopically ridged hide easily let him wind his way up the tree. The roughness of his exterior gripped the softness of the bark and gave him the traction to scale the tree as smoothly as he would slithering along the ground. He wryly noted that looking like a tryst between a flatworm and a snake at least had its positives. Navigating up the tree was actually less exerting than it would’ve been in his original body.

Once he reached the top branches of the tree. He cursed himself for being an idiot. He was still operating as if his new body worked the same way his old one did. Getting a higher vantage point would have been better if he had actual working eyes. However, his mana sensing organs were merely hampered by him being in a tree. Height didn’t increase his range of observation. His senses now had a firm distance cap. At the end of his field of vision, his ability to see simply stopped. This was a more frightening prospect than Jon had realized. Human vision was meant to give them the ability to see predators from a distance, and this was just the opposite. He could study anything happening within his immediate surroundings but was blind to happenings outside of them. Now that he had positioned himself in the tree, he couldn’t even sense what was lying on the ground beneath it. There was a fifteen-foot sphere of vision in all directions, but now he had left himself vulnerable to someone attacking outside of his sensory capabilities. He would have to be more careful in the future not to let himself move in such a way that he left an opening for attack.

This is a tall fucking tree, Jon groused, taking his anger at himself out on the tree.

If he had his human mouth, he would’ve sighed. His ability to see distances, or lack thereof, would be necessary to improve in the future if he could somehow evolve the way the Lord had implied. Until then, he would have to make do with what he had. There was no use crying over spilled milk and missing eyeballs.

Jon wound his way back down the tree and remained alert. He didn’t think there would be a predator waiting at the bottom in the short time he had been up in the boughs of the tree, but a Marine didn’t stay alive without a healthy amount of suspicion and paranoia. Once he reached the bottom, he used his vision to remain as much in the tall grass as he could. He was increasingly worried that something more lethal than a spider would find him before he could see it. The smart thing to do would be to find a place to hide and wait for prey to come in. His whole body had been optimized for ambush hunting. As his thoughts manifested, his vision lit up with a mana signature at his 2 o’clock position. He slowed as he focused his senses, and tried to determine what he was seeing.

In the roots of a massive tree before him, a pulsing blue-white light was resonating with his mana vision, revealing its location. As his vision focused on the area, Jon began to make out the details of the tree. He could see how the gnarled and twisted roots created a space within them. He couldn’t make out what was in the burrow, but he could tell by the strength of the pulsing mana that it was smaller than himself. He couldn’t take size for granted, every time he had received a brief about respecting the wildlife, it had always been emphasized that the smaller creatures often killed you faster than their more substantial counterparts.

Jonathan made his way forward. He had no need to try to be silent. His form made nary a whisper as it slid under, over, or around obstructions without any conscious desire to remain quiet. Part of that was his natural form, snakes tended to be quiet. However, he recognized that the softness of his hide actually worked in his favor in this regard. Instead of remaining rigid and disturbing the natural detritus of the forest, it tended to flex and bend around objects, making him more stealthy. He’ didn’t have any hearing organs to make sure, but as he watched his victim hiding in the sanctuary of the tree roots, he knew his movements hadn’t alerted it at all.

As he reached the burrow, he pulled back slightly to give his senses a chance to penetrate the den. Unfortunately, his sight didn’t provide any more clues. Something about the wood of the tree prevented a more in-depth perusal of his prey. Slate didn’t mind this series of events. It would have been nice to gather more information on his opponent before engaging with them, but it was more important to learn the limits of his new physique. The quickest way for him to die would be to become overconfident of his body than he should be; finding himself the midnight snack of a predator much more developed than him. Luckily, whatever it was, hadn’t moved at all since he had spotted it.

Jonathan made his way above the den and then slunk toward the ground intending to surprise his enemy from the ceiling. From his time in the Marine Corps, he knew that the entrance to a domicile was always the most dangerous position. If he could approach his target from any unsuspected angle, it would rapidly increase his chances of surviving this encounter. Since he didn’t have sight in the traditional sense, and the ridges on his scales allowed him to grip the wooden ceiling of the burrow, he could hopefully ambush the opponent and kill it before it had a chance to do significant damage to him.

Adrenaline, or whatever the snake approximation of adrenaline was pumped through Jon’s body. It had been decades since he had felt so alive. Political debates, campaign rallies, and donor luncheons couldn’t compare with the primal feeling of crushing one’s enemies through sheer determination and physical effort. The last time he had felt this way was when he had been in actual combat.

With one last breath to steady his nerves, and put him in that magical zone between panic and alertness that allowed one to accomplish extraordinary things, Jon explosively shot into the burrow and blasted acid from his mouth at the same time. The acid struck accurately and hit a gigantic beetle lying in a state of torpor below him. The acid immediately started to emit caustic smoke once it landed on its carapace and the startling stimuli were enough to shake the creature from its restful state. The burrow was large enough for the beetle to gather its six legs underneath it. It was round and had a sizeable defensive shell on its back, but it turned toward Jon to present savage-looking mandibles.

He didn’t know much about insects, but he knew that if those mandibles were to surround his form, the beetle would have enough power to slice through his flesh with little resistance. These implements had been designed to eat wood, a much harder substance than his hide. Jon launched another attack at his enemy's face, trying to let some splash onto the beetle’s primary offensive weapons. If he could degrade them in some way, it would dramatically increase his chance for victory.

The first acid attack seemed like it was doing little to actually hurt the beetle, but with the latest attack, it let out a high-pitched squeal and tried to use its front legs to slash at Jon. The size of the burrow didn’t allow the beetle to lean purely on its hind legs and so it couldn’t get the range to let its claw-tipped legs reach Jon. He was able to twist to avoid the swipe and felt the natural impulse to capitalize on his momentum. The predator in his heart cheered him on to attack.

Going entirely inside of the burrow would give the advantage to the beetle because Jon was significantly longer, but there was no guarantee what kind of powers the beetle possessed if Jon gave it operating room. After all, the last enemy he found had been a weird amalgamation of rock and arachnid, and this enemy could have some other elemental augmentation. Jon really did not want to get his ass fried by a bolt of lightning if he could help it.

His mind worked overtime to run through various permutations of the following action. It was a blessing and a curse for him. In situations such as these, his devious mind kept him alive, but when he had still been human, the adrenaline and plotting did little to allow him a restful night’s sleep.

Selecting a strategy from amongst many, he launched himself into the burrow at the awkwardly positioned beetle. As he did so, a wild swipe from the creature’s mandibles connected with his side. Jon thought that initially, the blow wouldn’t be so bad, but he was quickly disabused of that notion. He could feel with exquisite agony as the mandible rebounded slightly from his supple skin and then catch in one of the junctions between two different sized scales.

The claws easily shredded through the keratin armor and into the soft musculature below. Jon hissed and tackled the beetle through the pain by massing the front third of his body into a dense object. The movement brought the claws through his flesh as the insect flailed wildly, still screaming from its melting eyes.

Jon took the opportunity to wrap his body around the enemy. Unlike last time, this enemy was not made of rock. Although the shell on the back of the insect was thick, the soft fleshy belly was ripe for attack. The carapace actually worked against the beetle as Jon flexed his muscles and felt his body stabilize against the shell to rend his razored flesh through the underside of the beetle, like piano wire. Ichor, the color of snot, gushed from the wound and painted the inside of the burrow a sickening hue.

Jon hadn’t seen a system message, and so he continued his rending as the pest struggled weakly. Its piteous screams did not affect Jon’s emotional state at all. This was a battle for survival and one that he was familiar with. After what seemed an eternity, Jon was rewarded with what he had been waiting for.

Congratulations! You have slain a level 2 Giant Wood Beetle. You have earned 50 experience.

The message was a relief to Jon, and he relaxed the coils he had wound around the wood beetle. He laid on his back, panting, with his snake-like tongue hanging from the side of his mouth. He was exhausted. The insect had been thrashing and fighting in his grasp all the way until it finally died. In the process, it had left a score of shallow cuts all over his body with its barbed limbs.

He used his senses to probe the wounds along his body. There wasn’t a real numeric value for hit points in this world. His attacks hadn’t killed the beetle because he had depleted its hitpoints, it had killed it because its intestines were now a steaming pile on the ground. Jon was increasingly happy that he didn’t have a sense of smell. It was also somewhat of a relief that life and death depended on the actions of individuals and not on an arbitrary attack and defense modifier. That had been something his military mind had never understood about games. Winning and losing should’ve been about skill and tactics rather than what level a meteor was.

Jon rolled over onto his belly again and began to feast upon his conquered foe. The process was reasonably quick, and at the end, he had netted himself another 3 biomass bringing his total to 6. While he was eating, he noticed that consuming the enemy had sped up his natural rate of healing. By the end of the meal, the small gashes on his body had healed, and silvery scars had replaced the former wounds. He was also treated to another message.

Congratulations! You have earned your first 5 biomass and may now choose to level an existing mutation.

Confused, Jon studied the message as if it were going to provide more insight. Unfortunately, this world didn’t do much to make its underlying system more navigable. With a thought, he brought up his status screen and studied his mutations. He only had three; acid, paralytic, and mana vision.

As he thought about each one, he got an instinctual sense of how they would evolve with the acquisition of biomass. It would seem that he could level up each mutation with minor improvements up until a point, and then he would have the opportunity to mutate them into something more significant.

He got the sense that each level up would require more biomass, but the exact number eluded him at this moment. He figured that the further he got, the more the system would inform him. It wasn’t exactly the best way to optimize his growth, but this seemed like he was in the grinding phase of the early game that Autumn had always complained about. He was still level one, and all of his mutations remained unchanged. With a thought, he focused his attention on the mana vision to acquire more information. He was rewarded with another system message.

Mana Vision: Mana vision allows an organism to see other creatures in relation to their surrounding within the mana spectrum. The sense is provided by two mana-emitting glands located in the head. These organs, continuously use pulses of neutrally aspected mana to activate a resonance in the life forces of the world around them that is then picked up by mana receptors in the body. Non-living creatures will not resonate with mana, but all things have an ambient mana signature and still remain visible to various degrees. Every living being has a base level of affinity for mana manipulation. Less evolved creatures use mana instinctively for several evolutionary benefits. As creatures increase in sophistication, so does their control and use of mana, creating a stronger mana signature in comparison. Upgrading mana vision will increase the range and clarity of your sight until you reach the minor evolution threshold. It accomplishes by increasing the number of mana receptors along the mouth and increasing the size of the mana-emitting glands located on either side of the snout.

Jon knew that he desperately needed more utility in his build. He assigned his biomass to his mana vision. He figured that right now, he had more than enough firepower to engage low-level creatures. The beetle had out-leveled him by one and the spider by five and it had been relatively easy to defeat both.

As of the moment, Jon needed the ability to detect more prey; so that he could level himself accordingly. Jon mentally confirmed the expenditure of biomass to increase it to the next level. He felt a comforting warmth suffuse his body. The sensation concentrated heat in two pits that he had on either side of his face, and an itching feeling broke out along his mouth.

After the warmth faded, Jon experimented with his new senses. His previous range of fifteen feet had extended to thirty, and he felt like if he focused, he could see through more obstacles that didn’t seem to conduct mana as well as living creatures.

To test the theory, he concentrated his senses on the wood around him and saw that his vision could penetrate some of the thinner roots, but the larger ones still remained too dense for him to see through. He also felt like his sight had gained more clarity and depth. It was like looking at an x-ray and being able to see finer details in the image. Overall, Jon was satisfied with his purchase.

Feeling tired, Jon decided to rest in the relatively safe burrow for a while. The changes to his life had started to take a toll on him. The physical efforts of the day weren’t that strenuous. In fact, the life or death situation had awoken a fire in Jon that he had long thought extinguished. The thrill of battle and the exultation of victory brought him back to his time in the military as an infantry officer.

A large part of him missed the chaos and complicated nature of combat. While the political arena was no less convoluted, it lacked the primal feeling of warfare. He felt as if his life were relentlessly on the edge of success or failure. The only thing that kept him alive was the strength of his will and the cunning of his mind. This was a type of paradise to Jon.

He fell asleep with these thoughts running through his mind. He had vibrant dreams of middle eastern bazaars, endless desert mountains, and bullets cracking by his head. He remembered the screams of the wounded and sound of an assault helicopter thundering overhead. Most of all, he dreamed about the sense of fulfillment he felt when an entire city had been warned of their coming, and then they were released like hounds of hell to bring their whole population to heel. The dreams of blood and violence soothed Jon.

Jon awoke feeling refreshed. It was time to hunt.Jon spent the entire next day on the hunt. In the process, he learned much about this world and how it worked. He learned that enemies higher leveled than him, netted him more experience and enemies that were weaker than him, gave him the same amount of experience no matter how many times he killed them. It seemed to be a flat percentage of his opponent’s accumulated experience.

As he leveled, it grew progressively harder for him to earn enough experience by hunting the same types of opponents. When every enemy, no matter how small, had the potential to kill him, the risk to reward ratio became important. Luckily, the animals in the forest could sense the relative strengths of their opponents. Enemies that he had killed many times before, seemed to avoid him and higher leveled enemies wouldn’t allow him to pass through their territory without attempting to kill him.

Jon was amused to find that it seemed a much more meritocratic system than human societies. The only thing that conferred power and prestige was experience in the most real sense of the word, and no one was impeded in their desires to topple their opponents and claim their territory for themselves. Ultimately, it seemed like a more honest approach to life, and Jon was reveling in his new existence. After murdering his way through the forest for much of the morning, he had killed a score of low leveled insectile enemies and leveled himself to level two.

Sooner than he realized, it was the end of the day; he felt like he could hunt the whole night too. Jon considered the fact that his vision wasn’t dependent upon the time of day, and that he needed to grind out the next level of his mutations. He had gotten his acid and paralytic mutations up to II but the next upgrade required 10 biomass each. He was just shy of his first one with 9 biomass points saved up.

Deciding to continue, Jon continued his hunt late into the night. Jon had thought that the forest was alive during the day, but he had been mistaken. At night, the forest was a bustle of activity. Creatures of all types were hunting, mating, and traveling. The amount of activity confused Jon’s senses as he had to track multiple movements in his field of view. Fortunately, most of the animals he encountered were similar in level to him or just slightly above.

He noticed that the levels seemed to increase in a single direction. Jon surmised that the route would take him deeper into the forest. He had no qualms following the experience. He had no idea where he was in relation to the world at large and had no clue where the closest sign of civilization was.

He hoped that by mutating and growing stronger, he could change his form enough to integrate into some sort of society. He couldn’t be the strangest thing in this world, and the only way he could pursue his holy mission would be to get a group of people behind him. For some reason, he didn’t think people would be willing to follow a snake-worm thing, and the Lord had to have known that.In the meantime, he would hunt and kill wherever his instincts took him.

As he was waiting in the brush for his next prey, a mana signature rapidly entered into his senses. He tried to turn towards the disturbance and found that it was hurtling from above him. He was hiding ensconced within some tall grass, and so he desperately tried to turn towards this new threat. He was too slow.

Two pairs of tibial spines hooked into his flesh, punching through his hide, and digging deeply into his musculature. He hissed in pain. He tried to spin and wrest free of his attacker’s grasp. His fighting slowed the creature down as it flapped its wings to gain altitude. They vibrated violently like the buzzing of a helicopter. Jon was able to twist his body enough to fuse his mana vision to focus on the creature that attacked him.

If he didn’t know any better, it was a praying mantis similar in type to any common garden variation found on earth. He hadn’t sensed this one before he was attacked and he wondered if it had a stealth capability. This mantis was significantly more prodigious than its earth-grown brethren. Jonathan was kind of pissed that even though he had upgraded his senses, he had found himself in such a predicament. He hadn’t seen a flying creature all day, and he had become stupidly complacent, thinking himself the smartest and most ferocious animal in the forest. After all, he had only stumbled upon a variety of different insects. They didn’t seem threatening on their own. As he felt the deadly claws clamp down and draw more blood, he cursed himself for his ignorance.

Finally, the mantis was able to regain some lift and launched itself higher into the air. It weaved about the trees and made its way deeper into the forest while Jon writhed in its forelegs below. He couldn’t quite gain enough momentum to use his flesh to its full effect, but he was able to get a coil around the mantis’ forearms.

After a couple more moments, Jon got a second coil around the forelegs and he noticed the beating wings slow by a fraction. Jon cheered in his head. If he could get the flying insect to slow down, he could wrap himself around it more, and if that happened, the paralytic coating on his skin should get the mantis to fall out of the air. He was risking injury by falling from this height, but he didn’t want to be taken to a mantis’ mate and offered as tribute. To have his head popped off and eaten alive seemed a ghastly way to die.

Soon enough, the results he was looking for occurred and the mantis slowed sufficiently, such that the downward momentum was enough extra force, and Jon was able to twist his body further and further around the insect. Even the strength of the forearms relaxed somewhat, and Jon was able to move his body more freely. Unfortunately, this merely pulled the mantis’ spine from deep inside his body, and more blood began to flow freely from the wounds.

The mantis started losing altitude as the paralytic began to take effect. Jon kept his mouth shut and struggled mightily to wrap his body entirely around the bug. The result was almost immediate, and they hurtled towards the ground. Jon made himself feel better by telling himself that it was a controlled crash and not an absolute fucking disaster.

Mantis and snake hit the ground with a bone-shattering impact. Pain lit a fire in Jon’s nervous system as many things began to feel wrong at once. A quick glance at the mantis showed it to be a twisted wreck on the forest floor. Its limbs were clearly in the wrong position, bodily fluid was painted over the forest floor, and delicate insect wings resembled shattered window panes. The pain was intense in Jon’s mind.

The only thing he could think about was the fire in his body. Jon knew what he had to do. If he could kill and consume his prey, the acquisition of biomass would heal his injuries. The mantis seemed so far away. Jon painstakingly made his way to the head of the body and wrapped his frame in a loop around its head. He took special care to wind his figure over the deadly mandibles in such a way that they would be restrained from being used against him. He twisted his form to apply the pressure of his ridged skin against the mantis’ carapace, and the head separated from the body with a slimy gush.

Congratulations! You have defeated a level 15 Giant Wind Mantis. You have earned 1,550 experience. You have leveled up to level 5.

Jon didn’t have the energy to be excited about his conquest. Instead, he used his acid and tried to quickly consume the creature. He wasn’t sure how far the mantis had taken him into the forest, but he could assume he was in a territory where he would be the hunter; not the hunted.

Luckily, his form of nourishment didn’t leave any pesky bodies for scavengers to find. All in all, he was a highly efficient hunter. Like magic, his wounds faded as he consumed the mantis. Interestingly enough, because the flying bug had been such a higher level than him, it seemed that he earned more biomass for its consumption. Soon he was rewarded with another message that did excite him.

Congratulations! You have met the requirements to acquire a minor mutation. Please select from the following list.

With a thought, a vast list of choices blotted out Jon’s vision. He was overwhelmed by the content.

He could give himself a new circulatory system, he could change his musculature or bone structure, and he could add a variety of new senses or organs. He couldn’t make any drastic changes to his body. But he assumed that he could find something that would make him more lethal.

Everything in the list had a cost and the more complicated the mutation, the more it cost. Thinking quickly, Jon knew he needed a melee weapon. He had no fangs or claws to speak of, and the lack of a melee weapon almost cost him his life. Additionally, he had already run into cases where his acid wasn’t very useful. What he needed was something simple yet effective.

With a flash of inspiration, Jon knew what he needed. Gents! Fix bayonets! Jon gleefully selected an option that would equip his tail with a keratin blade. The description was simple.

Tail Blade: This mutation grows a keratin blade at the end of the tail. It is slightly curved, has a cutting edge, and a point. For an additional cost to biomass, this blade can be attached to existing biological weapons to apply poison, infectious bacteria, acid, or other effects to its surface. Further mutations can increase the strength, sharpness, size of the blade, and more.

It wasn’t very long, perhaps only an eighth of his total body length. It was a curved blade that ended in an extremely sharp point. It could be used to slash, but the most deadly wounds came from stabbing. For a little extra biomass, Jon was able to create a second paralytic gland that attached to the blade. Now his blade would use a paralytic compound just like his flesh.

Familiar warmth spread along his body after a couple of minutes, the changes were made. Jon was ecstatic. With this new weapon, he wouldn’t have to be worried about getting swooped out of the air. Additionally, he now had more options for physical combat.

He knew there was an opportunity cost for upgrading his weapons rather than his senses, but the mantis attacking him from above had frightened him more than he liked to admit. No infantryman wanted to be attacked from the sky without cover of his own. The first rule of combat was to own the heavens, and Jon wasn’t in any position to do that as a ground-dwelling snake-worm. Now it was time to find a hiding place, recover, and collect more information.