Evolution into the bird that almost ate me cost over three thousand EXP. I stared at the number on my evolution screen for several seconds, sour taste filling my mouth, and looked at the other, more affordable option.

The bird had ‘Peck’ ability (besides ‘Flight’, of course, which I already had), and I imagined it would give me a beak to make said pecks with. But since I was just a beetle yet, stinger was much more reliable. Hell, it already gave me one huge kill!

So, without too much thinking, I spent one hundred and twenty EXP on both ‘Flight’ and ‘Stinger’, bringing them both from level two to level six. Better to spend this EXP now than to die with it unspent. Especially since I knew that at every tenth level I will be able to evolve my abilities further, giving them special improvements.

I remembered how confused with all these options I was the first time I went over this road from the bottom to the top of the food chain. Cost me a few deaths, then. But in Hell, that only meant that I had to start from the beginning. Now, failure wasn’t an option.

By the end of my EXP spending spree, my character screen looked like this:

[Voren]

[General Info]

Species: Erimia Beetle

Sex: Male

Age: 15d

Height: 0.8cm

Weight: 0.026kg

Emotional state: Satisfaction

Titles: Devourer, Alpha Predator, The Lord of Nine Hells

[Stats]

HP: 1/3

EXP: 29

STR: 2

DEX: 1.4

CON: 2.4

INT: 8.3

[Abilities]

Devourer (lv MAX) (Evolution options available!)

Flight (lv 6)

Stinger (lv 6)

Chitinous Carapace (lv 1) (species boon)

Yes, I even acquired a third point of HP! Probably during the battle with the bird. Basic stats only improved with growth and training, and being trashed increased CON like nothing else. It was very slow now, but I knew that as soon as I change forms into something human-sized, my stats will skyrocket.

Besides, increasing my HP by one didn’t sound very impressive, but increasing it by fifty percent…

It didn’t change the fact that I only had one left, so I took a good rest after this. And on the next day I went and killed that damn spider with a single precise stab of my stinger. Or maybe it was another one that looked just like it—I didn’t care. The only thing I cared for were the scraps of EXP I got from him, and the latest addition to my evolution option list.

[Web Spinning (3 EXP)]

It was even more expensive than ‘Stinger’ and ‘Flight’. Good thing I had EXP left to spare after eating that bird, and with an ability to spin traps it will be much easier for me to stack enough EXP to evolve into something a size bigger.

Once again I hid in some hole and prepared for evolving. This time I wondered how the ability will present itself on my body. All the abilities I ate had some visual representation. Some are more obvious, some are less… Which is why a bad ability was a huge hindrance. The more limbs you had, for a start, the more INT and DEX you needed to not tangle in them.

The pain of evolution stabbed me in my throat this time and then spread to my back. When it passed, I felt for it with my forelegs, trying to find out what’s changed. Nothing, which was weird, unless I changed in colour. In this case, I was left to guess.

But besides that, I felt a new muscle in my throat, something that grew there when I evolved. I never had it before, in Hell, and in my dark, warm and wet hole I eagerly set to experimenting with what I could do now.

I clenched my new muscle this and that, until suddenly a spurt of thick, bitter-tasting liquid filled my mouth. I spit it out in a hurry, but as soon as it left my mouth, it began to solidify. Without a tongue I couldn’t even push it out, and had to use my tiny claws to pull it out of my mouth before it would glue it shut.

The sticky mass refused to break, instead stretching and stretching into infinity, until my forelegs were completely tangled from the attempts.

I got caught in my own web. My four free legs couldn’t hold me up any longer as I dropped to the ground in shame. Then I lifted my head and proceeded to solve this problem the same way I solved most of them: by eating all my troubles away.

The spider silk (or was it beetle silk since I was a beetle for now?) tasted foul, but it was better to have it in my stomach than all over myself.

After that I spent a while training how to do web traps without getting caught in them. The solidified silk stuck to anything. It took me several days to find how to manipulate its properties in order to make it less sticky or less elastic. I also found that spinning silk made me hungry.

The chunk of EXP from the bird, though, made me unwilling to risk my skin hunting insects that were worth five EXP each at best. Instead, I finessed my skill with webs, filled my belly with grass, and prepared for my next great hunt.

I had found a perfect prey already. I found what it ate, how it behaved, where it lived… and with whom.