The humans’ biological components flit away, and it was left in the void, not focused enough for the Skill to bring forth its own body, lost in thought.

The [Devourer] Skill had changed somehow. The mental space was not unlike a series of floating knowledge and matter as it was before, but with the vague idea that it could do much more all of a sudden.

It just didn’t know what that ‘more’ entailed.

It prodded around, trying to figure out what had changed, until eventually, something clicked, the symbols that strengthened it suddenly giving it information.

One of the things that had changed was speed. The energy of the Skill could change it faster now, as if a pinprick sized hole had expanded to allow more of the energy to flow between itself and its Skill. The other thing that had changed was control and understanding. It could control much more finely what it wanted its resources to be allocated to.

And its newfound understanding of how the Skill worked was quite enlightening. When it had first gained access to the symbols, or letters, it had thought that it was taking flesh from that odd storage and just placing it on itself, that it was using the bones of the rats to strengthen its own, but that didn’t seem to be how the Skill actually worked.

It simply transported the flesh to a void, somehow, then turned it into an unseen, unfelt energy according to whatever the wolf told the Skill to do with it, before using that energy to change its body. It couldn’t peer into said energy, its structure and what its conversion rates of flesh to energy were, neither did it get the feeling that it could be able to in the future, but it knew that it wasn’t ‘mana’. It was something entirely unique.

Its curiosity of how the Skill worked being sated for the moment, it thought of its body, and with but a thought, its structure appeared, hazy and sharp, invisible and glowing, a shapeless shape.

That… was new. And it was giving it a headache the more it focused on the visual aspects of it.

It used to see itself as it was in its sleeping position with the ability to float around like some detached, airborne eye that could see through layers of solid flesh.

Its ability to perceive itself was… not visual anymore. It could just feel and become every tiny bit of itself. It was frankly, extremely annoying and disorienting, at least for now, but it was somehow easier and smoother to use the Skill, so it tried not to feel disgruntled at the change, focusing on its body instead.

By the time it woke up, its antennae would be complete, all its whiskers fallen out to be replaced by long, chitinous organs it could move, covered in microscopic hairs. Just sticking its snout to the ground would allow it to feel every walking human for multiple dozens of feet through the vibrations on the stone, and even just flaring the antennae out would allow it to feel the vibrations on the air, and it could use that along with its ears to precisely pinpoint the source of most, if not all, sounds.

The cerci hairs would be complete as well, just a few extra long hairs among its coat, and it would be able to tell any and all changes in wind direction, allowing it to sneak up on prey better without the wind carrying its scent to said prey. Or allowing it to dodge noxious fumes before the breeze blew them into its face.

It would also be much less starved in appearance, and the thin layer of fat under its skin would probably double by the time it woke up. Its flesh was slowly but surely growing, and although it was tempted to add more, it could tell that it was already going to be a little oversized to pass as a dog when it grew into an adult, and didn’t wish to accentuate that problem. Wolves were naturally bigger than dogs, it seemed.

Then it remembered that all the extra tendons would give it a lot of extra muscle mass anyway, and decided to pump a bit more growth hormone into its body. Hopefully by the time it grew into an adult, it would already be too strong to be bothered about humans wondering why it was so much larger than the other dogs.

If it decided to even stick around where humans were, for whatever reason.

That done, it looked into its storage…

And mentally gawked at just how much flesh it had to mess around with. It was a mound of flesh so large it could be used as a small dwelling by a human.

It looked to its extra tendons, and prodded around to see how quickly it could have them grow, adding and removing the Skill’s essence as its mind seamlessly swapped its form for a copy it could experiment with.

It could have all the tendon work finished within just five days, and although it was skeptical about such fast paced changes, it had a small mountain’s worth of essence, and leaving it sitting there felt like a waste. Up until now it always lived day to day, hour to hour, and now that it had leeway to save up and think of what would happen later, it had to control itself to not just throw all of the Skill’s essence on its body and hope it worked out.

A quick but careful check of its previous work made it notice a few of its new tendons that would snag on its spine and various other bones when doing specific movements, and thus it discarded them.

In just five days it would be almost twice as physically strong, assuming its rather amateurish attempts at adding more tendons would work as it had envisioned.

The mere thought made it giddy, its tail wagging against ground sticky with half-dried blood in the real world.

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It peered into its body more closely, noting things that were beneficial and those that weren’t, and noted that it had a rather puny amount of those things called ‘vitamins’, and thus dedicated about twenty rats’ worth of essence to generate more and pump it into its bloodstream slowly over time.

Its bones were hardening quickly, and the process would be finished in a couple days, and while hardening them further was tempting, it also wanted to keep itself sort of light, just because of the unsafe, rickety grounds it sometimes had to cross, and to conserve more energy as it moved around.

Its changes sped up significantly when it slept, for some reason, so it realized that if it wanted to change faster, it could just sleep constantly, something that it mentally noted to do more from now on.

It could get rid of some of the fat it decided to put on itself to shed more weight, but the fat was added for the purposes of insulation from both the ‘electricity’ thing, and to keep its body warm, so it let it be for now.

It looked for any other improvements it could make, and after a moment, realized that it had a problem.

There was a lot of flesh in storage and little to spend its essence on.

Its intestines were also currently in the process of being dissolved by the Skill, and after a bit of nudging, it realised that it could have that part finished by the time it woke up, leaving it with a lot of empty space in its body, the jointed miniature ribcage of bone it had placed under its abdominal muscles to be ready in perhaps seven to eight days, or light cycles. So its abdomen would hopefully not be so grimly thin it would draw attention.

The lack of intestines would actually make it much lighter, but still, it felt like a waste for its abdomen to just be a film of muscle over a few shoddy bones.

But what could it put in there? Maybe an additional lung? But it had no idea how that would be in a fight. If it had to clench its abdomen, its lung would get squeezed, so that wasn’t quite viable. A… liver?

Oh. Wait. It didn’t need a liver, did it? It helped with production of bile, which it did not need, production of certain proteins for blood plasma, which some essence could easily take care of instead, and it helped with producing something called cholesterol and some specific proteins that would help it carry fats through its body. Which was another thing the [Devourer] Skill could take care of, and at about the same energy efficiency.

After much deliberation, it decided to keep its liver, as it assisted in its internal structural integrity, and it had nothing to fill that space with for the moment.

In general, it let its insides remain much the same, and then focused on its muscles. It considered making them harder or more resilient, but that would also probably make its movements stiffer and its muscles less stretchy, so after dedicating some essence to fully repair every single small injury on its body as it slept, including the regeneration of the tiny hairs on the inside of its cochlea that gave it the ability to hear, and fully restoring its sense of smell and taste, it turned to feel its body a bit more for anything more it could fix or improve.

After some deliberation and mental fumbling, it managed to make its body cut most of its hairs on its upper body in half, just to get rid of all that extra weight from the crusted filth it couldn’t reach before with its teeth. Filth that had densened significantly from its feast, at least on the underside of its neck and chest. It was mildly embarrassed it hadn’t thought of doing that before.

Still, it was incredible how much fine control the Skill allowed the wolf to have over its body, to the point it could pinpoint specific hairs and cut them to specific lengths by just dissolving the unwanted or overly long bits into the Skill’s storage.

It then checked its eyes for progress, and tried to see how much it could rush the process along. It wanted better sight, was absolutely intrigued at the idea of more colors, and pushed that process as much as it reasonably could. It was ready to dump half the mountain of rats into the process, but after a certain point, it just refused to be further sped up, some sort of bottleneck in place preventing it. So it carefully tuned the maximum amount of flesh it could turn to and in about ten days, it would be able to see new colors, for the cost of about only ten rats.

It tried to imagine how that would even look, but much in the same way it could not imagine the sky when all it had known were pipes and darkness, despite knowing what it conceptually was, it could not imagine the colors the humans saw.

And finally, its tongue. The reason that human tongues were so dexterous was that they were purely muscle and taste buds, while its own tongue had substantially less of both in exchange for much higher blood flow to the organ, which was used to regulate its heat.

So, after much, much fiddling, it figured out a way to put more muscle fibers into the organ without restricting the blood flow too much, thus making its tongue a bit more dexterous in exchange for slightly less efficiency in its body cooling abilities, forcing the change to happen in mere hours, thanks to the low volume of flesh produced. It didn’t even have to rush the process along.

Then it looked at its storage of roughly one and a half human bodies, and assigned them as nutrients. They had no real difference from the rat meat besides their higher quality flesh being equivalent to more essence, but it preferred eating humans over the furry rats, so for the sake of mental organization, it would put humans as food.

As soon as it thought that it had nothing more to see or change, its consciousness faded entirely, and it peacefully slept, hours passing by in moments.

Until a shrill scream startled it awake.