Adon inhaled and exhaled.

And his body reverted back to its usual colors almost instantly without him trying to change back. All he had to do was stop thinking about being a different color, it seemed. As he was looking down at himself, he noticed how his appearance had changed with Spine Thicket purchased. The spines had always been a light brown, translucent on close inspection. Now, when there were so many of them close together, it looked like they were a deeper shade of brown.

Kind of pretty, he thought of their new appearance. Like I’m wearing a cozy sweater. I guess I need to make sure I keep my focus if I want to keep my color shifted. The idea didn’t bother him. A camouflage power that was fully under his conscious control gave him much more of a sense of agency than a passive power that would not be effective in all environments. He was still happy he’d chosen Color Change I over Camouflage I.

He stepped backward along the twig he stood on. Then he began crawling back down the stem he’d climbed up when he first arrived. Once he reached the base of the plant, he headed out of the thornbush, walking toward the opposite side from the one he had entered through.

He moved a little nervously—he couldn’t help wondering if somehow the bird would be waiting for him on the other side of the bush—but he didn't stop. Who knew how long he had been semiconscious? He had to deal with the problem of his location now.

Now that Adon had done all the fun parts—reviewing his Status and selecting his new Adaptations and Skills—and the not so fun parts—when his Adaptations actually took effect—it was time to face something he was genuinely afraid of: the darkness.

Specifically, it was time that he walked through the darkness and escaped from the thornbush he’d fled into to avoid becoming bird food.

Time to face the unknown world of nocturnal animals. A setting he had been worried about since he hatched.

As he stepped out of the cover of leaves, Adon faced what felt like a strange new environment. Fortunately, he could still see quite well. The first thing he noticed was something about the ground.

What happened to this patch of dirt? he thought. No… As he looked around, Adon realized that what he was looking at was not precisely a patch of dirt. No. The scale had him confused for a few seconds. But this wasn’t a field of untilled earth or something.

It was a path.

Adon looked down the path as far as he could, but it split and turned, and he thought he was far from being able to see the end of either route. One of the turns, he realized, must go directly by the birdhouse.

I guess I would have walked right into it if I’d walked a bit further, he estimated. But he’d been too absorbed in the task of doing a stakeout to worry about taking in the scenery.

I shouldn’t be too surprised, he thought. I started to get the feeling that I was in a garden after I remembered hearing a king and a lord walking around and chatting. Still, it was one thing to vaguely assume he was in a garden, and another thing to see flattened earth for the first time. Visual proof of the assumption. I wonder if there’s a path that goes by the plant where I was born. He wouldn’t have been able to see it if there had been. Back then, he only had simple eyes.

He recalled the girl who had promised to bring him something to eat if he defeated the Ladybug Larva. Is she a princess or something? She must be someone important’s daughter if she’s hanging out in a king’s garden in the early hours of the morning.

It made him feel a bit smaller, seeing the path. The landscape feature just confirmed for him that he was in a cultivated space, not a truly wild location. He had barely survived this place thus far. How would he have fared if he’d been born in some forest? Eaten before he even hatched?

He shook his head, irritated with himself. Shut up and navigate, he ordered.

And so he did.

Adon used his best guesses as to what direction he should move to reach his destination: Goldie’s web. He continued to take the most indirect route as he could imagine without getting completely lost, because his most direct route would have taken him closer to the birdhouse. Anything else he met out here, he hoped he would be able to fend off. But not angry birds.

He felt a sense of wonder as he walked. The world showed itself to him differently, now that he had his compound eyes, plus more points in Perception than he’d ever had before, along with Infrared Vision and lots of moonlight to show him the way. That night, there was a nearly full moon in the sky, so even if Adon’s vision had not been much enhanced, he still would have been able to spy shapes.

But seen through the lenses of his compound eyes, the world at night was different and beautiful. Flowers that Adon had never noticed before began opening up and showing off beautiful shapes and bright white and yellow colors.

There are some flowers that only bloom at night, aren’t there? he recalled. And some of those flowers happened to be among the most magnificent. Though Adon didn’t know their names, he witnessed evening primroses and moonflowers in their full glory, among others. They seemed almost to glow in the moonlight.

Giving more credence to the idea that he was in a garden, the flowers seemed to grow almost everywhere.

For a time, the beauty of the landscape banished his trepidation about navigating the world at night.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

One day, I’ll help perpetuate their cycle of life, he realized. Knowing where he fit in with these splendid plants only made him more appreciative of their natural beauty. It was humbling, in the best way. I might be a vicious predator right now, but someday I’ll help flowers pollinate. Along with being however pretty I’ll be as a butterfly, I’ll be a compounding source of beauty.

Looked at that way, the Goddess had given him a wonderful opportunity with this life. He hadn’t been quite sure what she had intended when she turned him into a butterfly larva. Adon’s goal for this life was to make friends and ideally find love.

But even if butterflies were hated and feared in this world, as that king and lord had seemed to imply in the conversation he overheard, he would still have a purpose. A beautiful purpose.

Life can be beautiful, even alone. It was a wishful thought as much as it was a sincere revelation of personal truth. He wasn’t completely confident whether he believed it. But why shouldn’t it be true? Humans were made to be social animals, but Adon clearly wasn’t human anymore, even if he often felt like one.

Then he saw the first giants of his night walk, and all his existential concerns fled immediately.

What the heck are those?

Walking the garden path, he saw a tall tree—or what looked to him like a tall tree. There were a handful of dark-furred mouse-like creatures munching on various parts of the exterior of the tree.

Like little beavers, he thought. They were quite small, compared with beavers or even the bluebird who had hunted him earlier. But they were still large when compared with him, roughly four or five times his size. One of them seemed to notice Adon, and he immediately started looking for another direction to walk in.

The interested rodent seemed to sense weakness. It began walking away from the tree and toward Adon. He activated his color changing skin while continuing to move away from the vole and look for a good new route that would keep him away from these creatures’ tree.

As he walked, he kept an eye on the monster that had begun pursuing him, but fortunately, it seemed to lose interest once its eyes could no longer track him. After walking a few feet away from the tree, it tilted its head, still looking at where Adon had been, and then turned back to the bark it had been eating. The color change seemed to have been very effective.

Adon used Identify on the monster out of sheer curiosity.

Midnight Garden Vole (Male)

In another life, I probably would have thought that thing was cute, he thought ruefully. It was a shame that in this life, almost everything was a potential predator relative to him. To him, the creature’s beady black eyes looked like those of the bluebird before he enraged it. The snout was almost wolf-like. Greedy and predatory jaws, ready to rip him to pieces or swallow him whole.

He continued walking, but now a large part of his focus stayed on maintaining his coloration and occasionally changing it when he moved from one surface to another. He didn’t lift the changed coloration at any point.

I’m in a really bad neighborhood. Just focus on staying invisible…

Adon crossed between dirt paths and grass several times, and he congratulated himself each time on having chosen Color Change I over Camouflage I, which would have certainly been useless in one or the other environment.

Heck, I might have been eaten by that vole if I’d just chosen Camouflage I.

When he encountered the next monster, it was less of a shock, despite the fact that the creature was even bigger than the voles had been.

A triangular, pointed snout. Beady black eyes. A big, bulky body covered in sharp quills.

He used Identify, though he was fairly certain he knew generally what the creature was.

Common Claustrian Hedgehog (Female)

Yep. Confirmed that it was a hedgehog, although she reminds me a lot of an elephant at our current size relationship... Actually, she probably looks a lot like me. They were both covered in spines, though Adon also had the benefit of being able to disguise his entire body to match the surrounding space. And the creature had the benefit of being humongous.

Despite his color advantage, Adon tried to give the creature a wide berth. There was something in her eyes that he didn’t like very much. She kept sniffing the air as if she could tell that something unusual had entered her typical habitat, and Adon didn’t want to risk her taking a bite out of him, unlikely though it might be.

There were a few other close calls like this, when he had near encounters with shrews, another few voles, and a bunch of foraging mice. Each time, Adon carefully maintained his focus on maintaining his disguised coloration and tried to get away from the monsters as quickly as possible.

Who knew the garden was so active at night?

Actually, he knew that nocturnal animals existed and that many of these creatures were among them. But it was one thing to know, and another to have to avoid and evade their predations.

Once he actually saw a hedgehog encounter some of his fellow insects. A small colony of crickets. Not the same species as the creature Adon had killed, and slightly smaller, but it was still distressing how one-sided the conflict was. The hedgehog was sniffing at the ground, which almost made Adon hasten to run away.

But then it moved away from him and approached what seemed to Adon an unexceptional patch of earth. The hedgehog knew better. It used its claws—well adapted for digging, he could now recognize—and dug several inches deep very quickly.

Rather than fleeing, Adon stopped for a few seconds and watched. And he saw the hedgehog uncover them. Around a dozen crickets in a burrow. They tried to run and leap to evade the monster, but it captured big chunks of them in its maw and claws. Those lucky few that escaped were able to scatter, but most of the others were captured easily and swallowed whole. The only exceptions were those crickets the hedgehog accidentally stepped on in the process of capturing and eating their fellow colony members.

There was no defense, nor even any discernible effort at it. The creatures knew they were so outmatched that their only strategy when attacked by this behemoth was to flee.

Adon found it slightly horrifying to watch. Not that he wouldn’t have devoured those crickets himself, but it was all too easy this time to imagine himself in their place. The hedgehog would swallow him whole without even realizing it was eating something venomous. An upset stomach later would be the only proof that Adon had ever lived in this world. He wasn’t so much bigger than the crickets that this scenario was implausible at all.

Witnessing the hedgehog messily capture and crush and swallow its prey was like watching a real-life horror movie.

Before Adon knew it, he was running. Moving without thinking, without direction.

Operating on instinct. The only thing his brain was doing was keeping his change of coloration active.

Finally, after he had gotten some distance from the hedgehog, he stopped.

And realized that he was lost.