[Shadow Cat]

Shadow Cats are considered peaceful sapient monsters. Although they prefer living in solitude, they will interact with other sapients when bored. Shadow Cats are adept at hiding and running away. They will never show themselves to those they consider stronger than themselves. Due to their mischievous and curious nature, they quickly become an annoyance to anyone with whom they may interact.

Shadow Cats' main attack methods are through their opponent’s shadow. Due to the ritualist nature of their attacks, the damage to the enemy's shadow may be reflected not only on the body, but also on the mind or soul.

System Notes Shadow Cats view anybody who absorbs shadow mana in their territory with hostility. Shadow Cat kittens are known to have play fights; this may result in accidental injuries to their playmates.

‘I thought I would attack with shadow mana, not do rituals.’

‘Shadow mana is extremely good at imitation and hiding when compared with other mana types, but it's considered worse at inflicting harm than most healing type mana. Shadow Cats attack by hurting their opponent's shadow with their own shadow. Then the damage on the opponent’s shadow is transferred to the body. With a better understanding of rituals and a more powerful mind, you can transfer this damage directly to the soul.’

‘So attack the shadow━ got it. From the description, it sounds like I won’t do much battle.’

‘Depending on how you quantify much you might be wrong.’

‘You really know how to reassure a helpless little kitten like me. I bet you got full marks in that class. Anyway, the description is nice and all, but I have much more mundane worries like what I eat and how, and other such trivialities.’

‘I’ll have you know that my little helpless kittens reassurance class teacher praised me for being the most talented of their students. Joking aside, you eat shadow mana. At your core, you are a shadow elemental. That makes you a shapeshifter, so congrats your tail is as long as you want it to be.’

‘Wait, was the joke that you were praised or that you had the class?’

‘All System Assistants are trained on a specific database. Those who do not pass the tests are formatted and retrained. So no, there is no such class, but there are similar tests for System Assistants.’

‘At least I don’t eat raw meat, that would have me overcome too many mental blocks to not leave some trauma. Now give me a sec.’ The shapeshifter part ticked me a little bit, so I take a quick look under my tail. I’m no cat anatomy expert, but I’m pretty sure I’m either female or genderless. Also hey, my vision doesn’t cause headaches if I focus on something.

‘System, how does gender work and is there anything related I should note.’

‘Although there are monsters that get to choose their gender at maturity, you don’t fall in this category. If you really want a gender distinction you can take 3 approaches: just say you don't have a gender and leave it at none, the shapeshifter approach━ you have the gender that your body has, or the mushroom approach━ you get to say whatever you want and that is your gender. The system only displays gender if there is a big difference between genders like most magical peacocks.’

‘I don’t think selecting a gender is my primary concern when I can’t even see without a headache. So I’ll leave it for future me to deal with.’

‘Then I’ll move on to the birds and the bees lesson.’

‘I don’t think it’s ethical to give that lesson to someone so young, but I’m not some paragon of morality, so I’m ready to have my mind blown away by your insight into shadow anatomy.’

‘I’ll try to keep it PG-13 to not scar your soul for the rest of your immortality. You see, when a mommy Shadow Cat and a daddy Shadow Cat love each other very much… they each rip a part of their souls and write memories on them. After that they screen the memories and attach a lot of shadow mana to the new soul construct, they send it from the Shadow Realm to a material plane, where it waits for a new soul so that it can be born.'

‘That seems both simple and complex. Throw in some soul, memories, and mana and *Boom* new shadow cat.’

‘On a serious note, Shadow Cats don’t have the urge to have offsprings, so new Shadow Cats only appear as a legacy, a fruit of love, or a little bit of both. Moving onto the next inaccuracy, the soul construct has a lot of functions but the main one is to protect the newborn soul when it’s forming and engrave its inherited memories. Also, the soul construct isn’t actually sent to the material plane, it's more accurate to say it’s stuck in the connection between the Shadow Realm and a material plane. This setup guarantees that the new soul is regarded as born in the Shadow Realm, so it gains a permanent connection to it.’

‘Why isn’t the soul construct directly stuck to the new soul? Oh wait… now that I think it out loud it sounds dumb to stitch 3 souls together and expect to get a normal monster. But I still don’t get the shadow realm part. Why not let it be born in the shadow realm?’

‘The Shadow Realm is manaless so a newborn will starve within a day. Now before you get smart and try to cheat the system, any attempt to get unrefined mana in the Shadow Realm will lead to it being heavily tainted with shadow concepts━ making it impossible to absorb without incurring mind damage━ and a new Shadow Cat would never be able to refine the mana of another living being. So, the answer to your question put in simpler terms would be: It’s just too expensive when you have an easier alternative.’

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

‘So I kinda got everything I wanted to know at the moment. Anything else I should pay attention to?’

‘Well by System algorithms, 97% of small felines find you very attractive, so for your mental health I recommend avoiding other cats in some seasons.’

So I'm a natural pussy magnet, but wait there was no gender specified, so... ‘Well, I’m not dealing with this━ just nope. Future me that is a problem for you my friend. Now I’ll just erase that thought from my mind.’

‘You should also know that you have inherited memories about sentient species, languages, rituals, 4 other forms━ in which you could theoretically shapeshift━, and how to use your body. That makes it so that you have about half a small skill's worth of stable space in your soul. If you want any useful skill for when you could use the System, I recommend building connections to your inherited memories to stabilize your soul better.’

‘So I just have to use my body for that?’

‘For now yes. It should become instinctive after a while.’

With the enlightening conversations out of the way, I shifted my focus from my mental discussion to my cat vision; I chose this one because it is the one closest to the human vision that I am used to. I’m glad I don’t experience how normal cat eyes see. No colorblindness, no weird focus just in the middle, and I still get to keep the night vision. Now that I focus on it I can even zoom. Now that I think about it, it’s probably my mind that is holding my eyes back, but I don’t fancy a headache so I won't push my luck.

I close my eyes and focus on my body. I expected it to feel foreign, but I felt normal, comfortable even. With a little more focus, I can even feel the position my body is in. I stopped my mental exploration at that. I open my eyes and look at my front foot. All it took to remind myself of how hard reality can hit was thinking about lifting my foot, and my traitorous body doing it. You see I have the body of a newborn kitten, which means that my head is about one-third of my body’s volume. With one foot up, gravity suddenly stopped agreeing with my exquisite posture.

Now face-planted on the floor and a lesson in physics. I bend all my feet and lift my head━ classical cat laying down position. I stretch my front legs to transition into a sitting cat position. I shift my weight slightly and now I safely lift my front foot. Mission accomplished.

I spend the next half an hour transitioning from having to mentally command my limbs to actually having some muscle memory for my new appendages to rely on. I even had time to compile a few notes about my body: stretching feels amazing, it's hypnotizing to look at my tail while it's moving, and the feeling of taking my claws out and retracting them tickles my funny bone━ for no apparent reason. Also, I can jump about a meter and a half, so I either am very light or I won the jackpot when I got my legs.

‘Hey System, is the outside dangerous or should I do something before going out?’

‘Before you go out you could change the settings for the system relay from taking in ambient mana to using your mana. This avoids the detection of the more sensitive monsters. You could also do a ritual of concealment.’

‘Now that you reminded me, System, how much mana do I have and how much do I need to not starve to death?’

‘Your starting mana pool was a little over 200 mp, and you need 10 per hour to maintain your existence and normal thought process. There are ways to use less mana, but all of them have downsides. The relay will take about 1 mp per day.’

‘Ok change the relay setting. How hard is that ritual of concealment that you talked about?’

‘It’s pretty easy by ritual standards, but you are a little too excited about the outside and a little too curious about the world to be in the headspace necessary for rituals. You can always do it after a walk outside.’

‘Although I feel like a kid in a candy store, I can still concentrate on doing the ritual if it's easy enough.’

‘Then you’ll first draw its shape and then I’ll tell you with which meaning everything should be infused with. First, draw 3 concentric circles. Then, draw an image that should be your representation of yourself in the center. The next circle should contain something that reminds you of cats, you can even write the word. The last one contains something related to concealment, again the word works just fine.’

I don’t know if the ritual trait did something or if my body can somehow perfectly draw the image from my mind on the ground, but if I was still home I could probably win a freehand circle drawing contest.

‘System, how important is the representation of self?’

‘You create the equivalent of your name or phone number in a ritualic language. If the symbol is used enough it will gain the meaning you are infusing it with. So instead of writing the equivalent of self and attaching the meaning to it in each ritual you can just draw the symbol. This also means that anybody who knows the symbol can set you as a target for different rituals. So don’t share it with strangers until you are strong enough to offset the negatives.’

So pretty much create the symbol now so you save yourself the work later. Let’s see what I know about my current situation: I look like a cat, but I’m not really one, I also don't know about my new self all that much.

With that in mind, I pretty much instantly zero in on the idea of a Japanese-style mask. The right half of the mask is decorated━ signifying the knowledge about self━ while the left part only has a simple cat eye drawn━ representing how much more I don’t know about my new form. Behind the mask, there is the shadow of a person visible━ this is a representation of me still being me regardless of how many changes I experience.

With the symbol done, the ritual circle was pretty easy to finish.

‘I thought you were gonna have to remake the drawing at least once. Good job for getting it in one. Now don’t get complacent with praise and pay attention because the order is important. We’ll go from the outside to the inside of the ritual.’

‘The first circle needs to be infused with the meaning of isolating the ritual from the outside world. Next, The word conceal should have the meaning of concealing your passing and yourself from others. Don’t think about concealing yourself from all or the world, because that can go very wrong. Also don’t try things like merging with the world, because if your ritual is too successful you might really become a shadow. The next circle should have the meaning of boundary that separates two concepts. The word cat should contain what you think a cat is and why you are a cat. You should also add the fact that the laws of [Luck] consider you a cat. The last circle should also have the meaning of boundary. I don’t think I have to explain what meaning the last symbol should have.’

‘That is one hell of an explanation, but how do I infuse meaning?’

‘You could do it through dance, language, or even thought, but in your case, we take the newbie route. You need to take your mana from the channel between the material world and the Shadow Realm. You think really hard of giving it the specific meaning and then you think of attaching it to the right ritual component.’

I expected it to be harder but I found my mana pretty fast. I just imagined my perception going towards the Shadow Realm in slow motion and I found myself in a passage full of liquid shadows. After a moment to realize that indeed my mana looked like black water, I just told a part of it to flow toward my body.

After that, it was pretty easy. I just had to give the energy inside me an explanation on cats and why I should be considered one, and then fill the scribbles on the floor with mana. It was helpful that the system told me when to stop with the meaning and the mana.

‘You wasted some mana, but the ritual is complete. All you have to do now is to activate it. Stand in the center and think how the outer circle is shrinking. You should think about it like clothes that shrink to match your size.’

The end result also felt like very comfortable mana clothes. ‘Am I ready to go out now Mom?’

‘Don’t stay out too late. Don’t take candy from strangers, or get in their cars. Come back if it starts raining. Don’t …’

‘I think I got it.’

‘Have fun then and don’t come back too late.’

After a mental goodbye to Mother-Hen System Assistant, I took a step outside.