Adon spent several hours after his failure with Red on another journey into the darkness of the void.

He still wanted to acquire the elusive power of illusion magic, and then to proceed to more potentially offensive forms of mystical power.

In his state of frustration, he moved far more aggressively than usual, approaching each statue in the vicinity of the incredibly frightening one. Adon examined them closely and tried to deduce the nature of each figure as best he could with his limited knowledge and lack of any actual magical training.

It was hard. He imagined that there were magic academies out there somewhere that studied what these shadowy forms looked like—had perhaps reduced the matter to a hard science in this world where the Princess used magic casually for insect extermination.

Perhaps I should have asked her to show me some of her knowledge, he thought, not for the first time. But then he would have owed her something, and he would have in effect told her something about himself. It was also not necessarily true that she would have shared the knowledge she possessed. Asking if the bugs needed anything was not the same as offering a blank check.

Better to try to enjoy his current situation than to relitigate what had happened anyway.

Adon focused on his primitive efforts to advance his own understanding.

He approached a statue that resembled a pyramid, tried to get a sense of what its shape and the feeling around it portended, and, that approach having failed, he walked away.

The pattern repeated with a statue that resembled a human figure with a wolf’s head in place of the human one, a statue that looked like a skull—Adon thought he might know what that meant, but he did not want to test it and find out—and a statue that seemed to depict a fragment of a rainbow.

That is an illusion, he thought. Right? Like a mirage?

But he was not willing to touch it and find out.

The apparent visual reference to a rainbow could mean too many things, and Adon could also simply be completely wrong about what he thought the statue looked like.

At that point, he left the void. He had to admit, his heart hadn’t really been in the search this time.

On every other expedition into the darkness, he had been willing to experiment. Open to trying something out.

But just now, he didn’t quite trust his own judgment, and it wasn’t hard to figure out why.

How did I let myself fail Goldie so badly? he questioned. Where did I go wrong? What was it about my assumptions?

There was clearly the fact that his mental magic was limited in its effectiveness. Maybe the problem was Red’s innate Intelligence score. Somehow Status points in Intelligence were correlated with the innate capacity to think and remember. Perhaps the starting point set an upper limit for how much Intelligence could be enhanced by magic, and Red’s starting Intelligence was too low.

But he’s been eating crow just like us. It wasn’t much, and the spiders have a weird way of eating it, but…

There was no answer readily available no matter how he racked his brain, so he asked Goldie.

How much crow increased my Status? she thought back at him. It was twenty points to each Stat!

Goldie sounded pleased and exuberant providing that information, and Adon could only look back at her in dismay. The crow had increased his Stats by thirty points each, and he blamed diminishing returns from having repeatedly killed superior predators for that relatively lower than expected result.

He thanked Goldie for the insight and returned to his ruminations.

They’ve never killed anything like a crow before, but they had pretty weak returns on the investment too. It might be because they’ve been through Evolution. Their weaker results are either because they are considered higher on the natural hierarchy than me, or maybe the problem is that they’re eating something I killed rather than an enemy they dealt with themselves.

Either way, this wasn’t a problem he was going to solve in his head. But maybe one more large-sized piece of meat was the solution.

Even assuming that Red started his life with single-digit Intelligence, in exchange for higher Stats than I had in other areas, I can at least assume his Intelligence increased with Evolution, right? And Goldie’s Stats jumped with the crow, so Red’s should have done the same. So, with another big hunk of superior species meat, it should jump enough that I can boost it up the rest of the way I need to with mental magic. Right? I hope? Maybe?

There were a lot of unknowns and assumptions.

In the worst case scenario, Adon realized that even if he couldn’t make Red intelligent enough to learn language, he could probably try to guide Red through the System interface toward buying an Evolution by sending him mental images. After that Evolution, maybe Red would become Intelligent enough to have dialogue with him and Goldie.

But for now, Adon would go for the big game that should at least secure him and Goldie the best Evolutions they could possibly achieve.

He returned to the void with a renewed sense of purpose for a little while, and this time, he actually touched something—a figure that looked like a sort of impossible shape, which he interpreted as an optical illusion.

And something frightening happened.

That statue immediately began draining Adon’s Mana—not channeling it into some area of his body, or converting it into some specific kind of energy, just draining it away. It reminded him of a time he had plugged one of his personal electronic devices into an outlet in a public place, and the outlet somehow began stealing electricity from his device instead of charging it.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Fortunately, he managed to yank his body away from the figure before his Mana could drop too low. He wasn’t left paralyzed with a crippling headache—or drained into a hollowed out husk!

But he decided to rest and recover for the evening before he went out looking for more food. He needed to be at his best to hunt the sort of prey he was after effectively anyway.

The sun soon set, the night set in, and Adon rested.

And at first light the next morning, fully charged and ready, he said goodbye to Goldie and asked Red to protect her with the piecemeal communication the two of them had developed.

Then Adon walked out from beneath the web and set out to see what he could find.

Moving through the garden again after days of quiet and near solitude was refreshing. The quality of the light outdoors was different from the quality of light that fell into the web. It almost felt like he was coming out from having been inside a building, which reminded him uncomfortably of his last life as an overweight shut-in.

But now I’m different in every way, he reminded himself. I was only staying in one place this time so that I could protect my friend. This version of me is strong and brave. And I even have friends!

Even as he reassured himself, he was using all his senses to look out for prey. Something large that would allow him and his friends to climb to the next stage without question. He was no longer afraid of the larger animals. He had not encountered any that seemed to understand Mana in the way that he did, and the more time he spent in the black void, the more unlikely it seemed to him that other animals would have even rudimentary Mana-related attacks.

There was the bluebird, and the bat’s echolocation attack, but both were simply enhancing their natural capabilities—the bluebird’s lung capacity and the bat’s echolocation. If that was the limit of what they could do, then even Adon’s unsophisticated approach should be enough to bring down the greatest of them.

But with his eyes leveled and scanning the environment, his antennae standing up and searching, and his hearing also functioning at its highest level ever, fueled by crow flesh, Adon wasn’t finding anything.

Not only the powerful garden predators seemed to be absent, but even the smaller animals. Wherever he walked, no other insects seemed to be moving in his path.

If Adon looked carefully, he could see spiders working away at their webs deep in bushes or otherwise up out of his immediate reach. None of them looked in his direction—as if he was either beneath their notice, or they were shy.

Everything else was either camouflaged or hidden away somewhere out of his sight.

It felt extremely peculiar, yet also familiar. Not familiar to how Adon had experienced this life, but similar to something he only vaguely recalled from some of his lives as higher life forms.

This is like what would happen when I walked into the forest as a dragon. The whole landscape would grow silent, because… Oh.

Everything that lived and moved around in the garden seemed to be afraid of Adon.

Like he was a dragon—or even a human in most settings.

Nothing was moving within sight of him, because nothing around here thought it could fight him. Other bugs were actively staying away from his stomping grounds.

Avoiding the area they consider my territory, he thought. Especially while I’m out and about. Am I the garden’s scariest predator?

The thought was naturally a big ego boost. It filled Adon’s body with what he was aware was probably a half-imagined feeling of warmth even as he wandered the garden unsuccessfully searching for worthy prey.

At least he was having trouble finding his next victim for a satisfying reason. He had succeeded beyond anything he had realistically believed possible; the creatures that he had once feared now avoided him out of fear in turn.

This idea kept him content to continue walking, without bothering to use Color Change, until he found what he was looking for: something so large and dangerous, so far above him in the food chain, that it didn’t think it needed to hide from him.

It wasn’t mantids or little lizards that Adon was hunting for this time. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he would recognize it when he saw it.

He walked around near the ruined patch of earth that had once been the Vendetta Ants’ nest. Nothing there.

He moved closer to the palace but saw nothing lurking in the open there either—and then he remembered that he had an asset close by. Hidden on the rooftop, there was still a silk-wrapped baby bluebird corpse. Though the thought of consuming it now, days later, seemed disgusting to his still human mind, he imagined it might still have nutritional value for him or Goldie.

But more importantly, he thought he could use the bluebird chick as bait.

Adon drew up to the palace, activated Color Change, and began scaling the wall. The one type of enemy he wasn’t certain he was fully prepared to meet was a flying predator. At least not one that could see him. His mind went to the kite that had killed the bluebird.

Surely it would not be interested in a caterpillar—but if he could get the element of surprise, wouldn’t a bird of prey die just the same as a crow if one of his Mana balls hit it in a vital area?

It made Adon’s heart pulse with a little more excitement to think of it.

He reached the top of the roof and moved to retrieve the bluebird chick, his Simple Eyes constantly monitoring for movement over the horizon that might indicate a large bird.

But as he approached the raised roof tile, there were no indications of movement. Only a distant buzzing sound. Adon listened to that closely enough to verify it was not the same buzzing that he remembered as the dragonfly’s chainsaw-like noise, and then he dismissed it.

I’m not here to catch bees.

He reached the bluebird, and he found a gross, grisly scene. Adon’s silk package had not gone entirely undisturbed after all.

Flies and a thick, bloated centipede were busily chowing down on what was left of the chick. Where there had been blood, there was now thick, almost black goo. The entire small bird had been stripped of its upper layers of flesh.

Adon considered whether to shoot a few spines into the centipede and shoo away the flies so he could take what was left of the corpse and use it as bait, but rejected the idea. The bluebird body smelled rancid now, and even though that might actually make it a better bait, he didn’t want to carry a smelly dead body around with him.

So he left the scavengers alone.

There was no point in more killing here, even if they had ruined his plan to hunt larger prey.

Once again, Adon reflected that he was ready to move past this violent stage of his life. Not that he wanted to renounce violence, exactly, but he wanted to have more choices in what he did going forward. Right now, he was living from one kill to the next. It felt like a strange, slightly counterintuitive choice to not kill something that was in his way.

That couldn’t be right. That couldn’t be what the Goddess wanted for him. Right?

He began making his way down from the roof. That distant buzzing sound was still there, slightly louder now as if there was more than one of whatever made it. The origin point was not within his line of sight, though, and he did not look for it. I guess there’s a wasp’s nest or something somewhere up here. But they were too small and not high enough on the natural hierarchy for Adon to interest himself.

Killing off a bunch of insects would be a lot of effort for low reward.

Adon walked down the side of the palace wall and continued to keep all his senses focused on finding his next prey.

From the high vantage point of the palace wall, he thought he saw some movement near a tree that was some distance into the garden. In the same general area as the birdhouse Adon had attacked, there was a large creature moving.

Dark-colored and moving in shadow. A snake.