Adon’s exoskeleton expanded and contracted, broke down and re-formed, as his body sought to obey his command and reshape itself to a degree it had never attempted before.

The process of trying to use Transformation to shift to a different species was the closest that Adon had come to dismantling his own body since Evolution—in which he had actually dissolved into a semi-liquid state before forming a new body.

Rather than melting down, this transition was more of a twisting, crushing, and rearranging of the solid matter that was already there.

The physical sensations accompanying this semi-destructive process were naturally far more uncomfortable than anything Adon had felt in his prior attempts at using Transformation.

No—as the feelings lingered, Adon had to admit that it was not mere discomfort. He was in a lot of pain!

What had he gotten himself into?

It seemed that expanding his wings or lengthening a limb or two was miles away from trying to shapeshift into a completely different species.

Maybe he had bitten off more than he could chew right now.

Be patient, the butterfly told himself. This will pass. You know how to endure pain. That’s how you achieved a lot of the progress you’ve already made.

His mind flashed through incidents like his poisoning at the hands of the dead Ladybug Larva, his near death experience when he and Goldie fought off the “thief spiders” mooching off of her web, and the time when he had been forced to run to the limits of his endurance to survive the Vendetta Ants chasing him.

The capacity to endure unpleasant things might be what distinguishes this incarnation from every other one. It’s at least one important factor. Maybe that’s what life is. You endure what you have to, and just on the other side of the thing you think you can’t endure, you find the treasure. If you don’t push yourself beyond what’s comfortable, how will you ever know what you’re actually capable of? How will you ever push past your limits?

For several minutes, he bore the pain in silence, attempting to be philosophical about his suffering. It was made more difficult by the fact that he could see no signs of any actual progress. Whatever changes were happening, the butterfly was not capable of examining his own body visually without the aid of a reflective surface.

Adon had never seen his wings directly except when he expanded them to a massive size. And his size had not increased enough with his Transformation attempt thus far for him to see any part of himself.

He only heard and felt the cracking and crunching of his exoskeleton being smashed apart repeatedly as he attempted this strange metamorphosis.

The butterfly simply endured—and willed the process to continue.

Finally, his pain resistance began to crack under the constant pressure. It felt like a dam about to burst.

If he’d had vocal cords, he would have screamed or been forced to bite into his lips to contain the urge.

Instead, his body actually tried to scream—defaulting to a human, instinctual reaction to try to relieve pain.

What actually happened was that he forced all the air out from inside him, pushing it in what felt like the proper body movements for a scream. Fortunately, with no biological ability to vocalize loud or human sounds, all his attempted screaming amounted to a tiny, piercing whistling noise as air was expelled from his body.

Good, he recognized. An actual scream would have been embarrassing.

He had chosen to be outside and away from witnesses for a reason. More than pain, he was afraid of embarrassing himself. He did not want anyone to think he was weak, and if he failed to change his shape, as he was beginning to suspect he might, he didn’t want anyone else to know about it.

It would be a way in which he was falling short of the previous mystic butterflies—just as he had fallen short as a dragon.

Even as Adon’s pain threshold broke, and he tried to scream, he could tell that a part of his will had remained untouched by the physical suffering and firmly in possession of his faculties. That part of him was in the driver’s seat. It was still actively willing Transformation forward.

At least it’s not as painful as Evolution was, that detached part of him told the suffering whole.

And the willful inner observer also knew that his endurance was having some results.

Even if he could not see them as yet, he felt it as his wings and spines twisted and deformed into new shapes. The sensation presented itself as an almost tortuous pain, but he could recognize that his form seemed to be changing in the right direction, expanding in size and shifting toward a more humanoid body structure.

After another minute of this, he finally began to be able to see some results before his eyes.

First, he saw the ends of some unidentified appendages beginning to stretch out before him.

The obscure chunks of flesh elongated further in front of his eyes as he maintained his focus, and he felt the beginnings of a reward for all his patience.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

As these unfamiliar pieces of his changed body grew longer, he was gradually able to identify which pieces of himself he was looking at.

Adon saw a pair of extraordinarily pale—partially translucent—hands extend in his field of view. They were strange and disproportionate little hands with long, thin fingers. But they did not look like human hands. The digit ratios were completely off, there were no knuckles or other bones beneath the transparent skin, and the fingers felt completely weightless and lacking in substance.

If hands like these had belonged to a human, Adon would’ve had pity for them.

They reminded him of a pair of white latex gloves that had been filled with air like balloons until they reached the point of bursting.

Did I fail at understanding the complex structure of a human body or something? It feels like this is a copy of a copy of a copy of a pair of hands, and the copier machine ran out of color ink in the middle—or like I asked for a pair of hands to be made, but the sculptor had never seen human hands before and had to go off my description.

He could sense that there were wrist-like structures that attached the hands to his body as well. Perhaps the arms would grow out normally. Arms were structurally simpler than hands.

Based on the hands, though, he wasn’t optimistic.

The wrists were probably limp, boneless spaghetti things just like the fingers on the hands. Still, he had to remind himself that he was making progress. Even the shape of hands and wrists was a great leap forward.

As he was trying to look on the bright side, Adon suddenly felt the most intense pain of the experience up to that point. The fingers of the fake hands felt like there were burning hot pins sticking into them, stabbing up and down the fingers. The pinpricks were spaced one centimeter apart, from the fingertips to the base where they met the hand. All he could think was that perhaps the elastic of his balloon hands was finally approaching its limit.

Maybe Adon was about to pop.

Despite the pain, the willful part of him that remained in control of the process was still pleased that the wrists were extending in front of him. Every second he continued, he told himself, he drew closer to actually having a full human body under his control.

If he managed to get this right—or even close to right—he knew it would be easier every subsequent time he tried to do it.

He focused on the coloration, and the skin of the hands and wrist quickly shifted. It became less translucent for a moment, and less inhumanly pale—more like a human’s epidermis and less like a length of stretched out white rubber.

Then, suddenly, everything reversed.

Adon heard a series of cracking sounds, and his new hands jerked toward him so fast the fingers blurred before his eyes. Then they were gone. He couldn’t feel them anymore, only his normal butterfly body.

He knew, without being able to see, what had happened. The same thing that had happened to him before, whenever he released Transformation. Once again, his body had flicked back to its standard settings.

Replacing the pain of the Transformation attempt was the pain of a pounding headache from the complete exhaustion of all his Mana.

Damn it, he thought.

The first attempt was a failure.

But he couldn’t deny feeling a bit of relief that it was all over, at least for tonight.

Even the intense headache that gripped him was a mild sensation by comparison with the pain of trying to use Transformation to become human.

He wasn’t too down about this, though. In the back of his mind, he had known there was a high chance of failure with this first attempt. If he had thought he was very likely to succeed, he probably would have done it in front of witnesses.

As he considered how things had gone, he even told himself that previous mystic butterflies had probably also needed to practice and train this ability—or perhaps needed to hone the Adaptation to a higher tier of power.

Adon was able to take the failure as a learning moment—and even take a bit of inspiration from it. If he had been unable to reach a human form, when previous mystic beasts had acquired it, that meant that he had not hit a plateau yet. There was more potential to be explored, more power to be unlocked, more training that he could do.

The previous mystic butterflies had probably attained a higher level of power than me before they even revealed themselves to humans, he thought. The only reason why that didn’t apply to me is that I wanted to make this the lifetime in which I made friends—and that Rosslyn and her father brought me out of the garden.

He flapped his wings and rose from the ground level, fluttering up toward the treetop again. Adon was grateful that his body did not continue suffering the pain of the Transformation attempt as he moved through the air now. His cells seemed to have forgotten how their owner had twisted and reshaped them, or perhaps he was just hardier than he had imagined.

For that matter, I’m lucky nothing tried to attack me while I was using Transformation. But he supposed that he probably would have looked horrifying to any creature that saw him while he was in the middle of reshaping his body. To the extent that he appeared human-adjacent in his distorted shapeshifting attempt, he would have been especially terrifying to any of the garden creatures that had encountered the humans from the palace before.

Adon landed among the leaves and saw his bundle of silk-encased bat corpses, untouched, where he had left them.

He bounced over to the bundle and grabbed hold of it with his legs.

Then he began flapping his wings again, trying to fly the bundle back to the palace—back to his friends.

He found that his body was barely capable of lifting the bats from the treetop. Trying harder seemed to make his head pound more forcefully, so he made himself stop, having only moved a few inches forward from where he had started.

Right, I guess I’m usually using Mana to strengthen my body. It’s probably pretty amazing that I can lift the bats at all, using a flimsy butterfly body, with my Mana totally depleted. I’ll have to try really hard if I want to get these things home before my Mana regenerates.

He considered simply sitting and waiting. Patience was one of Adon’s virtues.

But he finally decided to treat it as an exercise.

He had not been this constantly reliant on Mana as a caterpillar, had he? Shouldn’t he be stronger after Evolution? Even if he wasn’t, he should exercise to become stronger. He certainly could not allow himself to grow weaker over time. He would not necessarily be able to rely on Mana to perform every task that he needed to perform.

With internal questions and arguments like those, he persuaded himself.

In the end, the butterfly did not wait for his Mana to regenerate. He took firm hold of the bats, flapped his wings with a more concentrated effort, and he flew them from the treetop into the palace.

Adon was proud when he set the silk-wrapped gift down in front of Goldie and Samson. He had only dropped the bats and had to pick them up again twice along the way.