A new day dawned, and Adon felt a surge of energy through his whole body.

Part of it was the light hitting him more directly. The outside wall of his chrysalis had grown more transparent, so that he could see the outside world as if through a slightly fogged window.

The quality of the liquid inside had clearly changed. Adon could sense it through his legs somehow. The best way he could describe it to himself was that he could somehow taste through his legs now. Something he would have to get used to.

The taste difference he noted was that the liquid all around him had shifted from highly acidic, to much less acidic over time, and now it did not feel as if it could damage his body at all.

And the sunlight seemed to give him back some of the strength that he had enjoyed throughout the latter part of his life as a caterpillar. Adon thought he was almost at a hundred percent again. As the sensation of power spread through his body, he knew that today was the day.

Finally, I’ll see Goldie again. I’ll meet the people who moved me into the palace. I’ll spread my wings and fly.

Excitement rose in Adon’s chest, and he started stretching his limbs, testing his range of motion and physical strength. He touched his forelimbs against the wall of the chrysalis, and giving in to impatience, he tried immediately to push through it. And the glass-like surface began to give way under his pressure!

Adon pushed harder and further, attempting to break through once and for all. After he managed to plunge forward by a couple of millimeters, however, it began to push back slightly. Another millimeter or so, and the force trying to propel him backward became stronger and harder to ignore

Pushing with just the two forelimbs he was already using, he could hold his position. But Adon also felt that the surface was more resistant than he had initially thought, and that it would sap his strength if he kept this up. He did not have as much energy as he had imagined, and the material of the surface was surprisingly strong—though it was made from his own, pre-Evolution body.

He allowed the chrysalis to push him back. It did not shove his limbs entirely back to their starting positions. The material was not elastic or robust enough for that. As he focused his eyes on where the tips of his forelimbs had left their impression, he saw a satisfying dent in the wall. That told him he would not need to wait another couple of days to build up to full strength, or even infuse his limbs with Mana to make them more powerful.

I might not want to try using Mana actually, he thought. I remember I heard during one of my lives that you shouldn’t help a butterfly out of its chrysalis. Something about how they need to use their body’s own strength to do it. Mana is sort of part of my strength, but if there is any broad truth to the idea about using the body’s strength, I might be weakening my physical body permanently if I relied on Mana here.

So instead of supercharging his limbs with Mana, he just waited a few seconds to allow his forelimbs to rest. Then he reached out with all six of his limbs—longer and more supple now than they had been when he was a caterpillar, although they also felt very flimsy to him, possibly from disuse. He used all of them to push against the spot where he had made the indentation in the chrysalis, applying as much force as he thought he could risk without possibly tearing a ligament.

The chrysalis fought him again, trying to maintain its shape. It held his limbs in place for a moment—but he could feel it giving way. Six limbs shoving against the same spot was far more powerful than two. Then Adon’s limbs were touching empty space. At the same moment that he felt that emptiness, there was a tiny popping sound.

Adon detected a little rush of air flow in through the tiny hole he had made, and a feeling of satisfaction flooded through his body.

Yes! I can do this.

For the next ten minutes, Adon used his forelimbs to widen the hole. It was harder than he might have expected, mainly because it was difficult at first to fit the tips of two limbs into the opening he had made.

Then there was the resistance the material provided against the level of force he was capable of exerting at that moment. His limbs were still drastically weaker than they had been when he was a caterpillar. At times, it felt like he was trying to tear a hole in thick plastic using nothing but wadded up wet paper towels.

They would need time and practice, he could tell, to build up the same physical power he had enjoyed in his last days in the pre-Evolution stage.

On the bright side, he could feel fluids pumping through his body as he struggled with the chrysalis. He did not know what to call those fluids. Blood? Whatever stuff gave a butterfly’s wings their color? Something else? Whatever the stuff was that was now pumping through his body, he was dimly aware that it was waking up the cramped, as yet unused lumps of flesh on his back—his wings. Fluid flowing through his body as he fought against the tough material of his old skins was also driving circulation through his promising new appendages.

This struggle might be a part of what I need to do to make my wings work properly once I’m out of the chrysalis, he told himself.

Just then, however, the struggle was quite frustrating. He had only perhaps doubled the hole’s size.

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He tried, at that point, to lean in and chomp the hole wider with his mandibles, only to suddenly realize that those mouthparts—the bladed, piercing, acid-injecting mandibles that he had invested so many Evolution Points in—no longer existed.

Instead, he had some sort of tube-like structure on the end of his face. It flopped uselessly against the tiny opening to the chrysalis, smacking softly like a wet french fry rather than cutting or piercing as he had expected.

What the—? He wrestled with his desire to solve the problem—continue widening the hole via the means actually available to him—and his feeling of frustrated confusion at the sudden and unwanted change to this critical part of his anatomy.

The frustration won out.

Adon spent the next few minutes feeling up the long tube with all his limbs, just trying to get a handle on what in the world it was. He began to feel a bit like an elephant, except that his trunk was a bit longer than average. Quite a bit.

He finally settled on an idea of what it was. He had seen pictures of butterflies before. He had an idea of how they typically fed. It was not the same as what caterpillars did.

A straw, he thought indignantly. I have a straw attached to my head. A straw that’s about as long as my body, from how it feels. That will be just great for self-defense. Gosh!

Adon had to remind himself that the butterfly lifestyle was typically nonviolent—or at least it was nonviolent until and unless the butterfly was eaten by a predator. He would probably have to get used to avoiding fights, unless he wanted to invite that fate.

Though he was open to vegetarianism, he could already tell it would be a big shift. He had chosen eating other insects over leaves as a caterpillar, after all, even when leaves had been highly available.

For the first time, he wondered if he was going to regret undergoing Evolution. He could not avoid maturing into a butterfly if he wanted to live out his life properly, he imagined, but he was not prepared for the idea of going from predator to prey. That did not feel like Evolution. It felt like a step back.

Eventually, he figured out how to coil his new proboscis up to keep it out of the way of anything he might want his head for. It was another new muscle he would have to train, but that described basically his whole body at this point.

And he resumed working at the opening of the chrysalis, though it continued to be slow going without the bladed mandibles he had expected to find.

I wish I had invested in bladed limbs instead.

Just after he had formulated that thought, one of Adon’s limbs pushed down onto the chrysalis, and instead of coaxing it a little further apart, the limb went right through, tearing a long rip in the previously stubborn material. Adon’s body was suddenly half-exposed to the open air.

Huh? What happened? At first, he tried to peer through the hole to see who was slicing into his chrysalis. But Adon could not spot any curious cats or naughty children who might have decided to cut into his self-made prison.

Slowly, he came to the conclusion that he had somehow ripped through the chrysalis himself.

So, how exactly did I do that?

Adon looked down at the limb in question, and he saw a thin blade’s edge had somehow appeared on the tip. The sight was jarring. It looked as if a scalpel had suddenly been grafted onto the end of one limb.

What is this?

He turned his head to look at the other forelimb, and he saw no such modification there. Then he looked back at the first limb. And the blade’s edge was gone.

Adon felt a strange sense of alienation from his body, a cold creeping through his guts.

I don’t understand. What just happened? What happened to my limb? Am I hallucinating?

He managed to keep a grip over his mood by reminding himself that even if the blade on his limb was gone, he could still see a big hole in the side of the chrysalis.

So I’m probably not crazy, unless I’m hallucinating more than just the ends of my limbs changing.

He went over the events in his head, and he realized the likely connection between his wish and the actual physical change to his body.

I thought, “I wish I had invested in bladed limbs instead,” and presto change-o, I suddenly had a bladed limb right where I was trying to make a tear in the chrysalis. It can’t be that easy, can it?

He tried willing the change again. Need a bladed limb to finish cutting open this chrysalis. Adon did not even look down at the limb as he swung it toward the gaping chasm in the chrysalis’s side. He wanted to have all the faith he could in this apparent new ability.

And his strange new body did not disappoint.

The tip of his forelimb slit the remaining length of the chrysalis like a hot knife sliding through butter. It was easy.

Adon looked down at his limb again. The whole world was suddenly open to him through the massive hole in the side of the chrysalis, but he was now more fascinated with his new body than with anything else.

What does this mean? Did my Evolution extrapolate some investment I made while I was in the larva stage? What would give me an ability like this? Does it use Mana? And what else could I change? What are the limits…?

As he was thinking about this question, a shadow fell over Adon. He froze for a moment and just stared out through the open wall of his chrysalis.

There stood a middle-aged man of imposing physical stature, with thick, unkempt hair and a beard that grew wild all over his face as if he had not shaved in weeks. His clothes appeared to be of fine quality, but they were slightly dirty, as if he had been wearing them for a few days in a row without bathing. He stared down at Adon with intense eyes that made the newly reborn butterfly want to shrink back and close the chrysalis up again.

Adon activated Telepathy reflexively, though he did not yet know what to say. Even with his newly enhanced body, his confidence had not grown much from his caterpillar days. He did not feel quite ready to meet someone new yet. And the man’s piercing gaze made it hard for him to think clearly.

Fortunately, as Adon was struggling to formulate a sentence, the man spoke.

“Hello there,” he said, his voice hushed. “Mystic Crystal Butterfly.”