Yes, this is definitely familiar.

Adon floated in a wide circle above the palace and saw the now-tiny-looking building from several different angles. It was while he was wheeling around in the air that he looked down from a certain position that changed his perspective. It was as if a gear suddenly clicked into place and gave him access to the specific memory that made the view feel familiar.

I flew above this place as a dragon, he remembered. The image floated in his mind’s eye beside the live image he was seeing now. It hovered there, clear as a photograph, leaving no room for doubt.

Certainly, it looked different. The shape of the city was much more developed than it had been. But the palace was more or less the same, and the contours of the earth around the capital had not changed very much over time.

This is so strange. So, when I was a dragon, that was the same world. Was I one of these mystic beast things back then too? And I wonder how many of my lives might have been lived in this world…

He already suspected that the memories he had experienced where he was some nameless monster were also from this universe. It was only a suspicion, but he could not think of any other reason why he had been pulled into those memories and forced to watch their entire contents if not because they were directly relevant, in some way, to this life.

So, I’ve probably had more lives here than in my last world. I thought that choosing to send me here was sort of random, just because the Goddess thought I wanted to become a butterfly, but now it’s starting to feel very deliberate. Kind of calculated. Why does the Goddess keep sending me back to the same place?

It was unnerving to think that he might be quite directly the subject of a deity’s careful planning. Did he truly have the freedom that he believed he did, or had his every action been according to some design of hers?

Adon wanted to investigate what had happened in his dragon life and piece together how it intersected with his choices in this life. But back then, he knew he had been bound somewhere for a longer journey.

In this life, he had promised Rosslyn he would return to the palace.

He had other reasons for choosing not to follow the trail of his memories. A part of him thought he might be playing into some manipulation by the Goddess. Though for the most part, he still wanted to believe that she had good intentions, he also did not want to feel like a puppet on a set of invisible strings.

It would be a massive distraction from his hunting trip, though that was beginning to feel unimportant compared with the possibility of discovering his intended role in this universe.

Perhaps most consequentially, he doubted that he would be able to make it as far in this life as he had when he was a dragon. It had been a lengthy journey for dragon-Adon, and considering butterfly-Adon’s endurance while flying, he probably did not have the lifespan to complete it. Not without undergoing some additional Evolution to turn him into a more powerful and long-lived creature first.

Butterflies don’t live long, I don’t think. Though Adon did not know much about magic butterflies.

Adon pushed down a wave of frustration at his lack of knowledge before it could build up.

That’s right, he told himself. Butterflies don’t live long. All will be made clear, or it won’t. I’ve already wasted so much damn time with resentment!

He turned to face his body upward, though that meant he immediately began slowly tumbling downward. He wasn’t worried about falling. He was an insect, after all, and he had lost Biomass since becoming a butterfly. Even a fall from several miles up shouldn’t be able to hurt him.

He wanted to try and send a thought upward, to where he imagined the Goddess was. High in the sky.

He reached out with Telepathy, and although he didn’t sense anything up there, he took his shot anyway.

Don’t rely on me to complete whatever your design is, Goddess, he sent. I’m just here trying to live as best I can. I’m probably not the guy whose story goes down in legends. Everything in my history as a reincarnator tells me that. I’m zero for several hundred in terms of successful lives. So just don’t lean on me, all right? He paused, then added a Please at the end.

Adon waited a few seconds, as if he really thought that a message he sent into the sky was going to result in an answer.

It wasn’t until the disappointment hit that he realized he actually had imagined that the Goddess might answer his quasi-prayer.

But that was arrogant—perhaps ridiculous.

The being that had set in motion this universe and also transmogrified his soul to fit into the body of a caterpillar—the being who did everything that needed doing in all of creation that was above the humans’ paygrade.

He really thought that being was going to respond to him personally.

Adon shook his head and righted himself.

Then he began to glide back down toward the earth. It had been a very smooth flight, on the whole. He thought he had the fundamentals of flying down after the last few hours. He could never have mastered them to this extent by staying indoors.

But the sun was setting now. The warmth in the air was dying away, and Adon was much too high up. His body was starting to feel uncomfortably cold. He could burn Mana to keep himself warm, but he would also need to do the same to keep himself flying.

Adon didn’t know the mechanism, but he could feel the sunlight was giving his body more energy to fly with, or some similar effect. He was weakening as the rays of the sun faltered.

He would rest for the night and begin the hunt in the morning.

He did not want to give anyone who might happen to be watching the garden the sense that he was giving up already, so Adon directed his path carefully away from the palace greenery.

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Even if he was not going far tonight, he would at least get a little ways away from the palace. He could see a forest nearby, a little ways beyond the exterior wall that enclosed the palace and just outside the next wall, which protected the city from attack.

He steered into the canopy and managed to land carefully atop a tree with a thick covering of greenery.

As he landed, the sun finally dipped completely out of sight.

Safe!

Adon felt the sense of emptiness that told him he was ravenously hungry. This would be the fifth time his stomach had approached empty today. His appetite was less each time, but food was no less a concern for him as a butterfly than it had been for Adon as a caterpillar.

No one ever told me that, he thought.

Still, he did not want to try hunting for nectar in the dark. He was too weak to fly with the same speed and grace that he had learned he was capable of over the last several hours, with the sun now down and his Biomass nearing empty.

He allowed himself to rest. That sleep-like state that his body entered at night would keep him from burning too much of his fuel. He would stay in this tree until sunrise, when his energy levels would naturally recover somewhat. Then he would feed himself and get hunting.

I think there was a Photosynthesis I Adaptation in the Evolution Store, now that I consider how important the sunlight is to my general energy levels. It might be worth considering. He would be able to rack up Evolution Points and Biomass just by sitting out in the sunlight.

Then again, as Adon had experienced when the palace started feeding him, his life was perhaps not meant to be that easy.

For now, the question did not matter. He lacked the Evolution Points to purchase much of anything.

And thinking was beginning to feel energy-intensive.

His body was almost painfully empty.

There was a sort of ascetic pleasure to be had in that, but Adon was not in the head-space to appreciate it at that moment.

Slightly uneasy at being surrounded by the unfamiliar sounds of the woods, the butterfly nevertheless allowed himself to drift into his sleep-like state.

The dark had well and truly settled over the forest when something disturbed Adon’s rest.

It was a sound that he almost did not notice.

Something subtle, carried on the wind.

But the noise brought with it an unmistakable sense of danger.

Adon remained completely motionless as the sound rippled through the air around him. He knew without knowing immediately how that it was the quiet noise of a wing flapping.

Then he realized that it was because these wings sounded remarkably similar to his own. Keeping his body as still as he could while still looking around, he slowly, carefully swiveled left.

He stared to the left for a few seconds. Nothing there moved.

Then he slowly, carefully swiveled right. He found that a giant, four-eyed face confronted him.

Adon threw himself backward, mentally prepared himself for a fight, aimed his spines—and realized that what he had seen was not a face at all.

It was a pair of large wings shaped vaguely similarly to what he imagined his own looked like. There was a pattern on the wings that looked like eyes. Only in the darkness could he mistake that for a face.

You big dummy! Adon thought. Do you know how close I came to killing you?

Identify told him that the creature was a Giant Peacock Moth.

Well, that explains why you’re such a big sucker, he thought. Get out of here before I eat you. I’m pretty hungry, you know. If I didn’t feel like you were a distant cousin, and I wasn’t used to stuff that tastes better than you probably do by now, I would totally chow down.

As he had that thought, the moth fluttered closer, almost touching him.

Adon flapped once more and moved to another branch.

You’d better back off, buster! I’m not playing here.

He activated Telepathy and sent the moth an image of itself flying away.

The moth’s mind conjured up an image in response to Adon’s that could not have been a conscious attempt at a reply—Adon did not give the average insect that much credit—but that definitely communicated something.

I should not have left my coloring the way it was earlier, Adon thought, slightly grossed out.

He had shifted his body to parchment tone at lunchtime, when he was interacting with Rosslyn’s family, so that it would be easier for everyone to see him. Now that he saw the moth’s mental image, and what it wanted to do with him, he realized that his color scheme looked uncomfortably similar to the Giant Peacock Moth’s, but minus the fake eyes.

It would be easy enough for the creature to think that he was one of its own kind and form a misunderstanding as to the possibility of future romantic prospects. It apparently had been easy enough.

Step off, or I will kill you, Adon thought. He sent an image of his spines tearing a dozen holes in the moth’s exoskeleton.

He didn’t want to waste energy killing a creature that he was almost certain would not be a nutritious meal. But the moth was starting to leave him very few other options.

Despite his messages, the moth fluttered close to him again. It settled on a branch next to his and adopted what Adon interpreted as a sort of “come hither” posture.

Adon was preparing to deal with the moth permanently when he heard another sound, even quieter than the moth’s wings. Yet this pair of wings was much larger, he knew instinctively. His senses were on another level since Evolution.

We must have gotten something’s attention, was all he had time to think.

Adon made a desperate leap to the far left, trying to get as far from the Giant Peacock Moth as he could in a single bound.

The moth fluttered its wings, made as if to follow Adon one last time—and then a mottled dark shape crashed up through the branches beneath them. Even the landing, despite breaking multiple twigs, was almost silent.

When the small owl emerged from the tangle of sticks, it held the moth clutched triumphantly in its beak.

Stupid moth, agitating a Goddess-damned owl!

Adon held very still and waited to see what the bird’s next move would be. He thought he should be able to kill an owl now, but he was a little worried about what sort of creatures a fresh commotion would draw. If that moth trying a mating dance on Adon had attracted an owl, he did not want to see what sort of creatures would appear if he got into a scuffle with the owl.

Adon and the owl made eye contact and held each other’s gazes for a long few seconds.

The owl, much smarter than the now crushed moth had been, seemed to Adon to sense that something was off about this butterfly. The potential juice from attacking him was not worth the squeeze.

And so it finally flapped off into the night, its wings still remarkably quiet.

Right, Adon thought. I’m back in nature again. How did I ever let myself hang out at the palace for as long as I did? Practically torture. I almost forgot about how much I missed this stuff…

He crawled underneath a layer of leaves this time, to conceal himself better from hungry eyes. And he changed his coloration to match the leaves.

Adon had no interest in attracting a mate this evening.