Just a minute later and the ball of skin covering the frog burst, sending some goopy fluid all over his cave as a burst of mana rushed from the cave. Yet it was still lower than his own mana, and no part of the frog’s power actually frightened him, although maintaining caution was an obvious response.

“Merge.” Once connected to the spirit, he understood what it meant by being so much more powerful. Every single limb felt strong enough to break the mountain to rubble, so full of energy and power that it was euphoric. And for a few moments, he lost himself in the sensation.

But a warning from deep within his mind grew louder and louder, and time practically slowed as he threw himself to the side, flying far away from the cave as something seemed to hit the ground he once stood. The result was a small flurry of snow where he stood… enough to damage him but nothing serious.

In fact, he’d have healed the damage in seconds. His senses were pushed up to eleven, and everything could be felt around him, from the gentlest breeze to the slight tremor of a beast stepping a hundred metres away.

He chose to believe these ridiculous senses and became wary of whatever that attack was.

Jumping back to the cave, he overshot it a bit, but already began the casting of Mental blast. He walked towards the cave entrance as it finished casting, but his senses flew off again and he failed to see anything which could attack him. His mana sense agreed here as well, the frog broke the bars he’d made and fully regrew its limbs with its evolution… But it just stood in the cave, looking at him through the walls.

A red object flew out of the cave and suddenly curved in midair to strike him, a wet and sticky substance coated his face as the red thing slapped him before rushing back into the cave. He felt his eyes and mouth burning, noticing the substance rapidly corrode his scales and begin seeping into his ice-cream body.

An acidic substance? Perhaps toxic as well… but his ice-cream body gave him a high degree of immunity to such things. Still, being dissolved alive wasn’t preferable.

If the thing wanted to stop his casting, then he’d go meet it…

With two steps, he threw himself into the cave and landed on a wall. By simply gripping his ice-cream claws, he dug into the icy walls and held on tight, pushing off with a single goal of cutting the frog in half. It didn’t stand a chance, his front two legs both swiping with full power to split the troublesome thing in two.

Even after evolution, a frog is just a frog, and his claws swept through the soft, mucus-covered flesh with ease. The blast of aura following knocked the frog backwards against the wall and sliced it open completely. Blood and guts flew all over the cave and he killed the thing instantly.

“Was it holding back? This has to be steel tier by now…” He hadn’t expected so much damage from the spirit, at the very least the frog shouldn’t have died so horribly from this attack. Either way, he killed it and needed to quickly gain the ability it evolved into… if any.

[Killed level 14 Gummy tongue prancer frog! Received 5% EXP]

Gummy? That had to be a mutation then, which meant… It worked?

“Did my bloodline force an evolution?” He didn’t want to mistakenly celebrate over things working so easily.

[Yes]

A clean and simple reply, he knew it really had worked!

Before moving in to eat, he pulled out the soul lantern and saw dozens of small motes of light fly into the glass chamber. When it finished he returned the lantern to his storage.

Having enough of waiting, he hurriedly began cutting up the frog corpse and drinking all its blood. Water control helped pull off the film covering himself and walls so he quickly drank it all, and in the meantime he noticed that this frog’s whole body tasted a bit sweet.

He liked it.

Not even 15 minutes later he completed the assimilation, having scarfed down a huge amount of meat to the point of bursting. Fortunately, the burst of heat was entirely pleasant, showing the low level of this frog’s bloodline.

[Assimilated Prancer frog bloodline! 2 new bloodline directions potentially available]

But as the assimilation finished, he was confused to see that nothing else changed. It took a few minutes to remember how the acquisition of his scales went. The Nexus informed him that the ice ant bloodline had been assimilated, so in truth he didn’t know how much mass was required to acquire an ability.

He could only hope this rather large frog provided enough mass…

Didn’t he only eat the wafer scales last time and acquire the ability? To his memory the body of the ice ant queen hadn’t been touched. Looking over to the frog’s face, its red tongue slightly peeked out of its mouth, and he took a closer look at its head for the first time.

Looking inside, he saw the red tongue was slightly transparent and appeared slick. It was a strange glassy texture, but on touch he knew it was springy. With a long tongue stored in its mouth, he just had to cut it from the base and saw how the gummy appendage somehow blended into flesh and blood to merge with its physical body.

Living like this looked torturous, and perhaps just killing these mutated creatures was more of a mercy than anything.

He quickly cut the tongue into pieces and ate them all, each piece was surprisingly sweet and while compressed easily it quickly reformed. While similar to normal tongue meat, this gummy candy had a bit more resistance than the soft flesh.

Eventually he’d eaten through two-thirds of it, stomach still bloated from all the food, and suddenly he spat out a piece of the gummy tongue, some ice-cream remained attached to it.

But his spitting did not end there. As he continued to throw out ice-cream piece by piece…

He breathed heavily at the expected, but still frightening, situation.

His tongue no longer remained.

A searing pain erupted from the base of his mouth, and his mana sense caught sight of a dense substance forming at the back of his mouth. It grew outwards soon after, the pain now vanishing and he watched as a brand new tongue formed.

In a similar red to the frog’s, it too appeared both transparent yet shiny. And with things finally under wraps, he just waited for things to finish. Once they did, an expected prompt came through.

[Obtained innate ability ‘Toxic tongue’]

“What does it do?”

[Toxic tongue - Coat your tongue in thousands of tiny barbs which break off in flesh to poison enemies. The exact toxins are a mixture of any consumed but not a serious concern]

It turned out to be both a vague but specific situation. For now he wanted to learn how to use his new somewhat tougher tongue. While it felt just as flexible, the new material was heavier and that made movement all weird to him.

A few days of talking should help to overcome it, but for now spellcasting wasn’t a great idea.

Also, while the tongue in the frog’s mouth was rather huge, in no way should it have been capable of extending out of the cave and hooking to the side. Clearly this tongue held some more secrets, but it had yet to answer an important question.

Did he actually earn anything of use with this?

A tougher tongue, perhaps. With no clue on this gummy material’s actual toughness, it might be as strong as ice-cream or perhaps stronger than an iron chain. Alternatively, perhaps this toxin coating could be repeatedly strengthened to kill something stronger than himself near-instantly. To do that he just had to eat the venom sacks of several beasts, and then consume whatever poisonous plants he happened across.

Whatever the toxin, his body was resistant to pretty much everything at his level. Things which instead corroded his body were a far greater problem overall.

Perhaps absorbing the substances would further raise his resistance as well… The idea sounded too convenient though. And simply evolving did this job anyway, he simply didn’t need another source of immunity.

But overall, he felt he actually gained something from all this. The gummy tongue was no less flexible than his ice-cream one, it simply took some getting used to and then he’d be able to cast spells as usual. Not to mention… He now had a method to acquire more advanced traits without sinking evolutions into the ice-cream pathway.

And if he ever really wanted to become a different flavour of ice-cream, he just needed to find a weak creature and evolve it! As for what flavour he obtained, that was up in the air.

Preferably something most creatures didn’t like the taste of, like a spicy ice-cream!

Furthermore, this new tongue should be capable of being enhanced by skills or certain spells. Dragons didn’t have many for their tongues, but one very specific spell is the Beginner true spell, Enhanced taste.

The ‘normal’ use of this spell was to give more pronounced tastes to high quality foods, allowing dragons to enjoy their gluttonous treats… But it also allowed them to track creatures just by hanging his tongue out of his mouth. While effectively looking like a dog, the ability would be another excellent tool for creatures that escaped his mana sense’s range.

Memorising the 16 word spell took half an hour at best, and from there he went about storing the frog’s corpse for later meals.

Although the third or so leftover barely functioned as a single meal.

During all that eating he did his best to supply the Auric spirit enough liquid aura to recover, but it had been twelve sackfuls and almost a whole hour… Its requirements rose so much his body physically failed to keep up.

Only after handing over 16 sackfuls of the transparent liquid, and a whole more half hour of waiting, did the spirit finally return to its vibrant, peak state. So few of these abilities scaled well with each other at his level, he imagined that most Kandir giants only formed a spirit whilst equal to steel tier, and then reached some equivalent of gold tier by the time they reached this level.

However, this morning’s matters had finally been cleared up with the recovery of his spirit, and he decided to pay a visit to the wyvern for today’s batch of blood.

Strangely, while he’d assimilated very few bloodlines, he knew that the quantity of energy absorbed was far from small. The wyvern sounded rather powerful as well, so he hoped to assimilate its bloodline before another evolution.

Even if things didn’t go his way, the boost of his spirit alone was a great boon. But he’d really prefer to get some more useful traits right now, anything to change his ice-cream teeth and claws into actual weapons.

Especially his teeth, living without the ability to chew food was a complete hell.

Once meeting the wyvern, neither spoke as he drank a bowl of blood. Even afterwards he considered bringing up the matter of the anaconda, but chose to stay silent. It didn’t really matter to him anymore, the anaconda couldn’t kill him and he’d stop holding a grudge as long as it didn’t impede him.

Also… If he had the wyvern intervene, would he still have a reason for killing it if the chance arose?