Ellis decided to stay and watch over the unborn fox’s birth.

Still, despite coming to such a decision, he didn’t really have a lot of options available. Until the baby was successfully delivered, all he could really do was stay by the corpse’s side and patiently wait.

Thus, he waited. He postponed his plan of climbing the rock wall and waited.

He waited for an excruciatingly long time.

****

Several months passed. No, going by Earth standards, it’s been over a year. Five hundred days to be exact.

Day in and day out, Ellis would frequently enter the cave and check the status of the baby. During the nights, he slept near the mouth of the cavern. He borrowed some of the material from the fox’s nest and made himself a little bed to sleep on. Although the nights were still cold, at the very least, the ground did not hurt as much anymore.

As the days passed, the mother fox’s stomach swelled. At the same time, Ellis noticed a peculiar change. The corpse gradually grew colder. The change happened concurrently with the stomach’s expansion. It was as if someone took the mother’s vitality and directly transferred it over to the womb.

The first time he noticed this change was when the corpse’s hind legs suddenly grew colder. After a few hours, they started to shrivel up. As the days accumulated and the months passed, this same phenomenon happened repeatedly to all of its limbs, its tails, its chest, and even its head. At this point, the corpse looked no different from a mummified dog.

It was a gruesome scene, but the sole exception was its stomach. Round and bloated, a familiar warmth could be felt whenever he placed his hands on the stomach.

He did not know why, but he had a feeling that the baby was almost ready. No, he hoped it was almost ready. After all, five hundred days had already passed! A normal fox’s gestation period back on Earth only took around fifty or so days. Lull’s foxes took nearly ten times that amount. This fantasy world was seriously overstepping its boundaries!

Ellis had spent over a year camped out beside this lagoon.

In that time, the various beasts of the forest grew impatient. A few of them routinely attacked him. What was strange though, was that the beasts he encountered were not the same ones that he had happened across on his first day here. They were noticeably larger, a lot more ferocious. What was stranger was that as the days passed, the beasts only grew even stronger.

At first, he felt worried. Would his cheat-like super strength hold up against these guys? It was like he was playing a tower defense game with only one unit. No matter how well he stopped the oncoming waves, more and more kept coming.

Thankfully, Ellis was somehow able to manage the situation.

Unlike with the rabbit, he could not outright kill a few of the stronger creatures with one hit. Fortunately, his body was sturdy enough to trade blows with them, and through the powers of grit and gumption, he would eventually come out on top. The downside to this style of fighting was that he would always end up with a few injuries, some of them pretty fatal looking too.

Luckily, he discovered that he also possessed a pretty cheat-like ability to self-regenerate. A broken arm took only a few hours to heal, while scratches would sort themselves out within a period of ten seconds to three minutes, depending on the severity.

Even the most fatal of his injuries took a little less than two days to fully heal.

It was by no means a completely broken ability, but it was still helpful nonetheless.

As expected, his abilities were indeed rule-breaking.

****

“No, wouldn’t a real cheat-like ability allow me to one-hit kill all these monsters?” One day, such a thought suddenly popped up in Ellis’s head. “Struggling so fiercely in order to beat up these mook-looking bastards… getting severely injured just because two guys gang up on me… don’t I just have an above average physique?”

When he came to such a realization, his mood immediately plummeted.

Having strength above the norm was good and all, but if it wasn’t completely rule breaking, then didn’t that just make him one of the mid-bosses to someone else’s story? In that case, he would have much rather remained a mob. At the very least, mobs get ignored. Mid-bosses get brutally hunted down.

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The prospect of death wasn’t a very pleasant thought for anyone. Thankfully, Ellis recovered from his depression fairly quickly. After a few days, he was back to normal. The only thing that changed was that he had reaffirmed his resolve to avoid those damnable heroes.

“Like hell I’ll stay satisfied as a damn mid-boss!” On that day, a ridiculous sounding declaration echoed through the forest.

****

A few more weeks passed.

The day started off sunny, much sunnier than usual. Still, despite all that, the temperature beneath the forest remained relatively cool, a result of all the constant shade that blanketed the area.

Ellis breathed out a sigh as he stretched out his back.

“Ahh~ ah~, these guys have been coming in more and more lately.” He grumbled to himself.

His hands were scarlet red. A viscous liquid rolled across the grooves of his knuckle and dripped down onto the forest floor. Beneath his feet, there was a beast about as large as an SUV. It was a pudgy cat-like creature with jagged teeth reminiscent of a shark.

Right now, it was dead.

Fist-sized indentations covered its body. The blow that had killed it was the one located on its head. There, a deep crater could be found right between its eyebrows.

“This is already the second one today. Any more, and I’ll seriously be in trouble.”

He grabbed it by the tail and dragged the corpse over to a hole that he had previously dug up. The hole was nearly thirty meters deep and practically every week, he spent time further expanding it.

With a grunt, he tossed the corpse into the hole. Almost immediately, the somewhat squishy sound of colliding meat reverberated through his ears.

Peering down, he could see that the hole was filled with all sorts of dangerous looking monsters. Two-headed giant lizards, four armed monkeys, even birds with six wings, it was honestly amazing. In fact, he was somewhat surprised by the diversity.

Ellis furrowed his brow. “Isn’t this a little bit too close to the surface?” He muttered to himself as he stared at the newest corpse. Its head was practically sticking out from the hole. “Do I need to expand it again?”

He felt aggrieved. The creatures of this forest, they were way too energetic. At first, it had only been one every month, but then, that changed to one every two weeks, then to one every week and eventually, it accumulated to the present situation. Now, multiple monsters attacked him on the same day.

Was this on purpose? Was this damned forest bullying him?

He did not know the truth, but it seriously felt like it.

If it was any other person in his position, then they would have surely died by now. Luckily, Ellis had survived. What’s more, he had shown growth.

Battle sense. It was a term that he used loosely, but basically, Ellis learned how to fight. In addition, it also felt as if his reaction time had improved. If he were to meet up with that rabbit again, then he would be able to react to his attack, instead of relying purely on his body’s instincts.

There was also the matter about his strength. Lately, it felt as if his strength had also increased, but that sort of thing was a bit difficult to gauge, so he was still unsure.

In either case, he was starting to lose confidence. The rate of his improvement could not keep up with the increase in monster interactions. He felt like an exhausted office worker with two, no, three consecutive projects due all within the next quarter.

The corpses within the hole numbered more than seventy. It was a rather deep hole too, but a few stray limbs were already sticking out from the ground like some sort of macabre garden. He also realized that at the very deepest parts of the hole, a few of the corpses had already begun to rot. That was only natural. After all, the first corpse had been there for over six months now.

Ellis breathed out a sigh. He stared bitterly at the growing pile. If one looked closely, they’d notice that a few chunks of meat were missing from the corpses. Those chunks had been Ellis’s meal.

All this time, he had eaten the meat from the various creatures that he had defeated in battle. That in itself wasn’t a bad thing, but eating it raw was. Ellis did not know how to start a fire.

For those raised in a modern city, how many of them knew how to start a fire from scratch? A few of them might, but Ellis was part of the large majority that didn’t. His experience with the outdoors was purely limited to hiking up the trail in his neighborhood.

This left him with no other choice but to eat the meat raw. So far, he hasn’t gotten sick yet, but the taste was definitely not something he enjoyed. As a result, Ellis somehow adapted to his situation. Now, he only ate once every week. The taste was indeed that bad.

Luckily, his body could handle such a diet. He had to praise that old man once again. Homunculi really were quite adaptable.

In addition, aside from his inability to start a fire, there were other practical skills that Ellis unfortunately lacked.

For example, he did not know how to make leather or hides from the animals that he killed. As a result, despite how much time had passed, he still walked around naked. For now, it wasn’t much of an issue. After all, he was currently living in a state of isolation. The only thing he really had to worry about was the occasional chill that sometimes caused his butt cheeks to quiver.

After he dumped the monster in the hole, Ellis shook his head and inspected his body.

He wasn’t completely unscathed from the fight. Light scratch marks covered his arms and legs. His most prominent wound was a bite mark on his left collar bone. There was also a circular puncture wound on his right shoulder. This injury was the result of yesterday’s battle with a mole-like creature that had a drill-shaped horn on its head.

He had been pierced yesterday. Today, it started to itch. While it was irritating, that was also a sign of it healing.

Ellis quickly washed himself in the lagoon and made his way back to the cave.

Within the cave, he stared intently at the mother fox’s belly. He did not know how much longer it would take, but feeling the rhythmic throb that resembled a heartbeat, he felt that it was close.

Plus, the cavern had begun to smell of rot. The birth had to be soon, or else…

He resolved himself to wait for a few days longer, but on this particular day, something interrupted him.

It started when the earth began trembling.