Adon rolled the leaf with the aphids on it into a little burrito. Then he entered his feeding trance. He didn’t come out of it until the dozens of little green bugs and the leaf they rested on were no more.
Munch munch. Chomp chomp. Gobble gobble. Gulp.
And the aphids he’d swallowed down were sweet. This life’s closest equivalent to a sugary soda. If sodas were healthy. Crunchy, with a noticeable fruity flavor. Melon?
If I can keep finding them, I might make those a regular part of my diet, he thought.
Then he refocused. His eyes looked to make sure the box on a post that he’d seen the bluebird fly into was still where it had been. There was no reason to think a fixed object like that would move, but he found himself profoundly distrustful of everything he had seen with his old eyes.
And he did see things much more clearly now. The bird was living in a box on a post, but now he could see the shape of it. Someone had made the box lovingly with hours spent shaping its outward appearance. It looked like a cozy little cottage, complete with a red painted roof. Welcoming and homey.
Adon’s mind automatically went to the girl he’d seen before. Maybe when she was smaller, she would have wanted to make something like that. Perhaps she had a carpenter for her father, and he’d indulged her whim.
He shook his head. Stop thinking about human things right now, he told himself. You’re an animal in a natural setting. You need to think like an animal—except with human smarts. That’s how you survive here. Get mean! Remember, that bluebird would have eaten you if you weren’t covered in venomous spines. And she tried to steal your lunch!
He resolved to do what he’d been considering.
No more second thoughts. It’s on.
Adon began looking around for the materials he would use to carry out his plan. Not far from him, he found them: a handful of the first fallen leaves of Autumn.
He walked over and excreted some of his sticky silk liberally on the handful of leaves, and he pulled them over his body like a coat with the hood up. To the outside world, he now looked like a small pile of dead leaves. He shouldn’t draw the eye of any predator now, only those tiny creatures, like snails and earthworms, that actually liked to eat dead leaves.
There. I didn’t need to buy a camouflage Adaptation anyway. I just needed my human ingenuity.
He began making his slow way to the post that supported the bluebird’s house. Even as he approached, he still had his doubts about this crazy plan. With his sluggish speed, his mind had plenty of time to go over the potential problems. And despite his own expressed resolve, it did just that.
If the bird sees you, she can kill you in a second, Adon’s fears reminded him. Even if she recognizes your venomous spines and doesn’t think it’s safe to eat you, she could just crush you. And two key parts of the plan were speculative.
Yet he kept walking. He had already had all these thoughts. His motivations were too strong for him to be dissuaded. And the instinct that pulled him forward was powerful.
If I succeed, it could propel me to the next stage early, he thought. Or allow me to lay a much stronger foundation. Maybe both. He held these ideas almost as convictions, despite not knowing for certain where they were coming from.
He felt certain he’d get a bounty of Evolution Points if he succeeded. Maybe enough to evolve. And he really liked the idea that even creatures far above him on the food chain couldn’t mess with him in his new life without suffering consequences.
Thanks for the reminders about how dangerous this is, brain. But I killed the Ladybug Larva, even though it should have killed me. And even after it poisoned me, that ended up working out fine. I admit, it’s true that I can’t kill this bird, but I can make it regret coming after me, if it’s capable of that kind of thought.
Plus, he’d already taken precautions against being killed. The possibility of being recognized as an insect and killed was why he had disguised himself as a clump of dead leaves.
And why should I be more afraid of this dumb bird than I am of everything else in this garden? he thought a little irritably. Everything here’s been trying to kill me ever since I was born. I’ve always been at the bottom of the food chain. I can’t let fear paralyze me! I have to keep growing and taking on stronger enemies to ascend the evolutionary ladder and become something—somebody—to be feared and respected in my own right. Birds are a natural predator for lizards, too, but they still eat birds’ eggs. I’m not trying anything outrageous. Quit trying to scare me, brain!
Adon managed to reach the wooden post before his argument with himself could escalate to name-calling—I need social activity, or I’m going to go crazy was one of his more cogent thoughts at this time—and he began to climb.
Scaling the sheer post was easier than he ever could have imagined back when he was a human. What probably looked to a human like just a smooth length of wood had so many tiny imperfections that there was always a next foothold for him.
He made it midway up the post and staked the birdhouse out, watching and listening carefully. He had no pressing obligations to attend to, unlike the bird, who he was guessing—hoping—had a brood of eggs in her nest. The caterpillar stood motionless for a long time, cleverly concealed beneath his cloak of stuck-on leaves. It was extremely simple to stay stuck onto the post. He just didn’t move forward.
He stood in place for so long that his mind began to contemplate things that he would never have thought about otherwise.
I hadn’t thought of it, but this is what insects do all the time, isn’t it? Stay standing still on surfaces in a vertical position. Whenever I’ve been a human, I’m pretty sure I always wondered how they could do that. And here I am now. Turns out, it’s super easy, barely an inconvenience. He literally didn’t even have to think about it.
His mind wandered further. He thought about the girl with the intense golden aura. What was her deal? He remembered Goldie the spider and wondered what she was up to in her web. What had she thought of him when she met him before? That was assuming she could think. Somehow he imagined the spider as being smart, like himself. And Goldie had her own aura, too. He didn’t fully grasp the meaning of that yet. Maybe he would if he and the spider had spoken. Speaking of which, he hadn’t been capable of talking to her at their last encounter, but would she remember him if they met again? Adon hadn’t thought of himself as a memorable person in his last life. Was he different enough now? Was he becoming a person—er, caterpillar—who others would want to be around?
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He wondered about what kind of creature his mother in this world had been—a butterfly, of course, but what specific type? He had no special traits of hers that had been passed down as far as he’d noticed. All of his Adaptations were his own purchases from the Evolution Store—or at least all the ones he was consciously aware of. Most species names he’d seen with Identify reflected what the species’ traits were.
In his case, though, his Status screen had referred to him simply as “Unnamed Butterfly Larva.” Did that mean that he needed to get new Adaptations that would define what kind of Butterfly he was going to be? Then again, maybe he already had. The few times he’d revisited his System interface, it was never to verify that he was still “Unnamed Butterfly Larva.” His eyes would have skipped over that line of text entirely.
But it was something worth checking out. Maybe he’d learn something about himself, or about the underlying logic of this world and its System.
Not now, of course. He couldn’t afford to look away from the birdhouse for something silly like checking his Status screen. Even as his mind wandered, Adon hadn’t taken his eyes off the entrance to the birdhouse. Nothing had moved in all that time. He hadn’t seen or heard anything.
It must have been at least an hour, he thought.
Adon began to wonder if the bluebird had left at some point while he was getting used to his new eyes. Since he started walking toward the birdhouse, he hadn’t taken his eyes off the opening on the birdhouse. He certainly hadn’t looked away while he was standing on the side of the post, still as a statue. But the bird hadn’t left while he was watching.
He took a moment to look at the position of the sun—quite bright now that he wasn’t basically blind!—and he judged that it was a bit past midday. In human terms, maybe three o’clock in the afternoon. That was just eyeballing it. But it made him question what he was doing.
She’s not calling it a day in there, is she? he wondered. She’s going to come out eventually? The plan couldn’t work if the bird didn’t leave the nest. Maybe he needed to leave and go look for something less complicated to eat. There was a part of his mind that bristled at that idea.
The underlying motivation wasn’t so much doubt that the bluebird was there, but sheer cowardice, he knew.
Still, I will want something else to eat before I bed down for the night, he thought. I can’t afford to waste too much time here, can I? He pictured himself waiting until morning to make his move when the bird left for the day’s first bits of food. Then I guess I’d be the early worm that gets the bird, huh?
Yes, he thought he might be willing to wait that long for sweet victory. But it still might not work out even if he waited…
He started to move higher up on the post. He would at least satisfy his curiosity about whether there were any hatched chicks in there. If he heard baby bird peeps, that would be enough to tell him to give up. If not, then he would continue to wait.
But as he reached the two-thirds mark on the post, there was a sudden vibration of movement above him. Adon froze, with the single exception that he allowed his head to snap to focus again on the opening to the birdhouse.
The bluebird came flying out, apparently eager to go and hunt for more insects and earthworms—or whatever it was that she’d been about to eat the last time he saw her.
Adon waited for a long few seconds and watched the bird, in accordance with his plan. He wanted her to be out of sight if possible, or at least have her back turned, before he crawled the rest of his way up to the birdhouse.
When she did begin to get further away, he began inching himself up the remaining one third of the post’s height. Crucially, he didn’t hear a single peep coming from the birdhouse as he walked. And the bluebird didn’t appear to be coming back anytime soon. She flew about, scouring the surrounding landscape, undoubtedly looking for unsuspecting insects to feed on, while he snuck up to her home.
There was some sort of twisted irony there, probably, but he didn’t dwell on it.
Let’s see if I can find what I came here for, he thought. He finally made it all the way to the birdhouse entrance—looked behind his back, just to make sure the bird wasn’t about to dive down onto him—and found that she was still some distance away, back turned.
There’s not going to be a better moment, he told himself. And he scurried up into the birdhouse as quickly as he could.
The interior of the birdhouse was a darkened space. Adon thought that if he hadn’t upgraded his vision, he would only be able to make out the vaguest of shapes, if anything.
But he could see clearly now. He saw what he’d been hoping for. A thick tangle of soft nest materials: plant stems, grasses, feathers, a few bits of what looked like mouse fur. And in the midst of this nest sat four beautiful eggs.
They’re massive! he thought. Adon had been expecting them to be big, of course, relative to how he’d experienced eggs as a human. Still, this was more than he’d imagined. Each egg was larger than him—even larger than the Ladybug Larva or Goldie! Not by an insane amount, but considering they weren’t even moving beings yet, it really reminded him of where he, and those he’d encountered so far, were in the food chain.
How does she even fit them inside of her? Each egg was, he estimated, about one sixth or one eighth the length of the bluebird’s body. The width was harder to compare, since the eggs were round. But if she laid four of them…
His mind jumped to human women being pregnant with ten pound babies and then pushing them out of a space that was supposed to be extremely small and tight—he wouldn’t know, but that was what he’d heard—and he decided not to think about this anymore.
Maybe just best to be grateful the Goddess didn’t make me a female in this life. Thanks, Goddess! I’ll just chalk this mystery up to, ‘She moves in mysterious ways’…
Adon shook his head to clear the distracting thoughts, and he approached the eggs. As he got closer, his greed intensified.
I want to eat all of them, he thought. They’re so big… I bet they’ll be even better than that cricket. And he wondered how many Evolution Points he’d get for this.
As he stepped further into the shadows of the birdhouse, the details of the eggs became clearer in his vision. Their shells were blue, just like the bird, and they were speckled with brown spots.
Without further ado, Adon sidled up to the nearest egg and swung his newly reforged mandibles at its unprotected shell, like a bird pecking at a nut.
Ting!
The tip bounced right off. That was fine. I wasn’t using my full force, he thought. I know I can get through this. Baby birds can, and they’re definitely weaker than me at this point. I think?
He reared back and launched himself at the egg like a cobra striking.
A sound struck his ears. A beautiful, crunchy sound. He pulled back. The faintest of cracks had opened where he made contact.
Oh yeah. Now we’re cooking!
He struck again, at less than full force this time, and he widened the crack a bit. Exactly according to plan. He didn’t want to destroy this thing and make a mess everywhere. He wanted a hole big enough that he could eat it.
I am going to be a caterpillar legend, he thought. Has any caterpillar ever done something as crazy as this and succeeded? It feels like I’m stealing fire from the gods or something!
Quickly tapping at the side of the egg—he needed to accomplish his objective before the bluebird returned—Adon expanded the cracks into a hole. He saw yolk and knew he’d won, but he still patiently spent several more precious seconds expanding the hole so that he could fit his head into the shell.
When it was finally big enough, Adon stuck his head into the hole he’d made, and he began to drink.
Sweet nectar of the gods, he thought. This is better than I could have imagined.