“Well, well, well, are you the lucky quintuplets?” Adamu in humor because every single one of the creatures looked remarkably similar. As if this variant was so successful that there was no need to create different kinds.
Waiting a few more seconds for the creatures to enter deeper, Adamu smiled and hunched his body somewhat.
“Let us see if your maker gave you more than just a cat’s hunting instinct?” That said, Adamu gave the creature no more time to enter his little cave.
Instead, he inhaled and prepared to rush forth as abruptly as possible.
“AAAAHHHHH!!!”
Then Adamu rushed two steps forward, and seeing them flinch and jump back, just like cats in their over-the-board manner thanks to their overly powerful reflexes, Adamu instantly veered off course. His target became the closest of the creatures to his left side. This one had flung itself right into the cave wall.
Thus, seeing the opportunity, Adamu went for it.
This time, he did not care if the creatures lynched him from the back. And neither did he care if the one in front of him injured him in defense because it had nowhere to run. No, all Adamu had in mind was to grab any part he could with his left hand.
Because the raven/cat creature was only up to his hips high, Adamu succeeded on the left wing and shoulder, or what counted as such for birds. Once the grip was there, Adamu hastily turned around and swung the raven/cat at the others. It hit none of them, and neither had Adamu desired it to happen. Instead, Adamu released his grip mid-turn, and the creature flew right into one of its brothers or sisters depending on their gender, if they had a gender to begin with.
When two of the creatures collided with each other and possibly injured themselves, Adamu instantly shifted his focus to another one in the hope of repeating the process. Interestingly, he managed to repeat the move one more time, thus leaving the creatures scattered around his little cave.
What followed was Adamu rushing for the last of the quintuplets. Having managed to buy himself some time, Admau succeeded in grabbing the fifth raven/cat by the throat at the cost of a few bites on his left forearm. Once it was in his grasp, Adamu began smashing the creature on the cave wall with full brutality in mind because when facing multiple opponents, brutality was the tumbling stone that would push things in your favor, at least when facing humans or similarly sentient beings.
Adamu was unsure just where these creatures stood, but they had intelligence. He only hoped they carried its downfalls as well.
Still, in case, things did not go according to the initial plan, Adamu changed the way he did the smashing on the wall. Instead of constantly facing the cave wall and smashing the creature, Adamu would smash once, do a 180-degree spin to check on the others, and if things looked fine, the spin would continue before achieving a full rotation for another smash.
The rotation added more centrifugal force to the smashing, so it took much fewer hits for the creature to begin to dissolve, on top of denying the others to gang up on him.
Adam stared at the creatures hissing at him, all while ignoring the slightly warm feeling merging with him. Or better said, he disregarded the feeling of Pure Essence using his Spirit Body as a springboard to reach his actual body, thus making him experience the warm feeling of merging with Pure Essence, even though it should not be happening to the current him because his Spirit was not attuned to such profound powers.
Either way, a very, very brief point of silence ensued between them if one ignored Adamu’s rough breathing. But it did not last long because Adamu did not dare give the creature's hyperactive nervous system to settle down.
If it did, he would be in trouble. As such, Adamu broke the very, very brief pause by rushing for another one of the creatures.
What followed was strange, in Adamu’s opinion.
The raven/cat creatures kept flinching back and sometimes to the sides. Hence, even after he repeated the same smashing maneuver after successfully grabbing his second victim, the creatures constantly kept their distance from him instead of ganging up on him.
Neither did they run away through the cave opening and into the ordinary darkness of the cave. Either Adamu’s brutal showmanship had broken their minds, or something prevented them from running away, or both happened to be the case.
Adamu desperately hoped it was the first and not the second.
Regardless, a frown manifested on Adamu’s face because creatures like this, which preyed on others, usually only knew one thing. Hunt the weak and obey the strong. When the last of the quintuplets died by his left hand and the cave walls, he knew luck was not on his side today.
Therefore, Adamu tried his best to recover his breathing pattern as fast as possible even though this was his Spirit Body. However, it was because it was his Spirit Body that he chose to do so, as rough breathing could be equated to extended focus consumption for processing everything going on.
As such, Adamu mentally disciplined himself and manually attempted to control his breathing rhythm. It worked because a few moments later, his Spirit Body behaved as if no fight had occurred, yet there was no doubt that Adamu felt mighty tired right now.
Then, all that was left was for Adamu to await the true threat. And as such, Adamu waited. And waited, and waited, only for no doom to come.
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That threw Adamu off a bit. It made him question if his earlier thoughts held a problem, which would not be a surprise as he knew far too little of the raven/cat creatures or the Illusion he found himself in.
Then, after reexamining a few things from a different angle, it came to him.
“Haha…” It was so obvious that Adamu started laughing. “It's too big to enter the cave. Haha. Its fat ass can't enter the cave. It's the only logical explanation. Lower sentience usually only considers things bigger than itself to be stronger. Therefore, if something had indeed forced five of the creatures to seek my juicy flesh despite their ilk of not liking each other, then it has to be either a bigger version of the raven/cat or some other bigger creature.”
“Haha…” Then, all of a sudden, Adamu ceased laughing when another thought reached his mind. “Wait… Would that not mean that I was fighting babies or younglings? Then again, if they are taking from others what they don't already possess, it could mean that they need external stimuli or conditions to become bigger.”
“Ha… Another theory left on the shelf to be proven later.” That said, Adamu relaxed somewhat.
With the breather, he took the time to check on his injuries received during the group, yet not group battle. Overall, after examining everything in detail, he came out of the fight rather intact.
There were a few bites and scrapes but no major bleeding wounds.
As such, Adamu considered summoning the leaves to stem the bleeding that did occur, but after trying to summon one, he gave up. Adamu simply could not focus hard enough to summon something not already energized or attuned to his Spirit wavelength. With that being the case, he left it as it was and just hoped that the headache would not be what he expected it to be.
Though, since very little time passed since he appeared in the Illusion, there was a lot of time till it broke.
And since he was too tired to focus on crunching his Essence Awakening problem, Adamu instead meditated. With that tool, time passed surprisingly fast, although not as fast as it could have been if all of his attention had gone to that mental state.
Still, when the cracking occurred, Adamu’s meditation broke as well. And when the shattering happened, and Adamu woke in the real world, all Adamu had time for was to brace his mind when a giant spike seemed to manifest in his head.
It pierced deeply and momentarily stunned him far more than he imagined it would, which had not been a true surprise, since his new body had very low pain threshold tolerances. Not that there was such a thing as a pain tolerance when one’s Spirit was damaged. It was either you endured it or you did not.
However, it was hard to determine which was the better option.
The first forced you to endure the migraines of hell only to be relatively fine once endured. The other, while giving you the sweet embrace of unconsciousness, also carried massive risks toward Spirit Dispersal, thus turning one into a living zombie.
Adamu, of course, knew better than to take such a chance. Therefore, he endured a few hours before the migraines seemed to settle down. When they did, Adamu stood up and slowly made his way through the darkness of the cave passageway, leading outside and right into the illuminated world.
Once under the mighty Source of True Light, Adamu remembered an excellent place to sit down, and that was what he did.
Sit down and enjoy the warmth flooding his almost naked body because there was nothing he could do that would be better for him than pure rest. Even meditating would be a problem because there was no Mana through which to offset the pain, and meditating deeply in his current state was similar to being unconscious.
As such, pure rest was what Adamu did.
Although, periodically, his thoughts wondered about his situation.
One such wonder was if the raven/cat mommy or daddy would await him in the Illusion once again.
If it did, would it send some of its followers at him? Or would it simply ignore him altogether? Adamu hoped it was the latter because he had trouble imagining how he would flare with a five-year-old body against multiple raven/cat creatures.
Had he full mental acuity, Adamu could repeat what he had done last night, but he did not.
In the end, without being able to affect anything about it, Adamu sidelined it and instead focused on something much less ethereal, like getting himself something to eat, as he was already on the fourth day in this world with nothing filling his stomach bar water, which was fine under normal circumstances because the human body got designed to go without food for multiple days without any aftereffects.
In fact, it was the opposite because the body healed tremendously after the second day of fasting till the fifth or sixth and even the seventh day, depending on the constitution of the individual. During those three days, the body automatically consumes the bad cells in one's body to either heal or generate new ones, hence facilitating healing. The problem was that there was only so much readily available fuel for the process. And if the prolonged state of fasting continued, even the good cells would be consumed to prolong the body's existence over the natural limit of five to seven days.
As such, Adamu knew he should either find something soon or possibly the next day, or he would continue being weaker as the days passed. And that was not a good thing if you wanted to energize your Life Energy through physical exercise in order to awaken the active state of Life Energy, called Essence.
Nodding with clarity, despite the hurting head, Adamu opened his golden eyes and gave the sky a very brief glance before lowering this gaze to observe the path to the forest before him.
Taking into consideration the possibilities and the remaining time of True Light protecting him, Adamu reluctantly broke his rest and ventured toward the forest. However, it was not food that he sought out. Instead, he took the closest route he remembered towards the river. If Adamu got lucky, he would find and try catching some fish.
If not, a big mouthful of the GOOD WATER would do wonders to alleviate his headache.
Thankfully, the footwear he made, despite being terrible, still made it easier to reach the river the first time he came. Unfortunately, as he observed, there was no fish again. “Have to be sensing the dormant Bloodline. Makes no sense otherwise.”
With fish being out of the question because they all fled from him, and making traps was time-consuming for the current him, all that was left was to dunk one’s head into the stream and enjoy the fresh and cold experience.
Done filling his belly with water, Adamu trekked to a mighty walnut tree since it was one of the locations he was most familiar with.
Once there, Adamu paid attention to the green bulbs growing on the tree.
“Hmm… If the Realm Template is even remotely close to what I am familiar with, then it should be currently midsummer. That leaves me a month or two before the nuts are mature enough to eat.” Adam voiced out his thoughts. “That leaves me with the prime time to find barriers of all kinds.”
“Usually, that is.”
After identifying a direction, Adamu waved the gold-patterned squirrel family goodbye and began searching for anything edible.