Lucy fought against the current.

It wasn’t strong, but it was steady and insistent, faster here against the seemingly endless cliff face than it had been on the ground.

She moved upwards for long minutes, looking for other caves that might hold prey, not swimming directly against the sideways flow of the current, but angling into it just enough to maintain her position relative to her own cave entrance below her.

It took practice to maintain the trajectory she had chosen straight up the wall of stone, and as she travelled she tried to mark her distance from various small landmarks to gauge her progress and not get lost.

As she swam so close to it, she found that the stone was not so smooth and featureless as she had expected. Dark splotches stained sections here and there, and the surface bulged outwards in ridges and fell into troughs, confusing her sense of perspective at times when it felt like she was swimming horizontally over a rocky landscape rather than vertically up a wall.

Before she left, Lucy had marked a location above her cave with a smear of Sam’s defensive slime, the acrid scent of which should allow her to find her way back as long as she was close enough to sense it in the water.

But the smell of it didn't extend into the water as far as she thought it would, and soon she was relying completely on her own memory to keep her oriented. Regardless, she did the best she could, diligently tracking landmarks as they entered and passed out of her small sphere of Awareness.

The first cave she found was little more than a deep divot in the stone, empty of all but a few tiny teeth strewn about.

The second was rather shallow as well, but when she entered it she found a strange surprise.

Eggs? she guessed, observing the pale, translucent amber-colored sacs clustered in a huge mass at the back of the cave.

They covered the wall in a goop of white slime, a tiny bit of which Lucy happily spiked up with her dagger, then ingested with her cilia.

Or tried to, at least. Despite the increased thickness of her fungal cilia, the slime immediately got stuck.

It was only in a handful of her cilia, but the sensation was disturbingly like choking, and it was only after a long few moments that she was able to clear her glopped-up cilia and draw the substance into her body, where she promptly stored it in her main vacuole.

Maybe outsourcing my digestion isn’t such a bad idea after all.

Having pocketed her sample of the sticky slime, Lucy examined the eggs more closely.

From the worms, I suppose.

All she could really see were dark, wriggling shapes inside each of the few dozen eggs, so it was possible they would grow into some other organism, but they sure looked like tiny worms.

As she was still looking at them, a rumbling vibration filled the water, jiggling the egg sacs on the wall.

Oh no you don’t, Lucy thought, as she pieced together what was happening. This is my meal!

Instead of stabbing at the eggs wildly like a maniac, Lucy opened up her fungal vacuole and squeezed, sending a gentle cloud of death towards them instead. Her enzymes enveloped the eggs, dissolving their gelatinous structure almost immediately.

Well, not meal I guess. But my points!

As blue sparks flowed into her, Lucy saw first the scrabbling claws and then the mouth of one of the large digging creatures that had interrupted her conversation with Rikorlak and Sam.

It poked through the crumbling hole it had made in the stone, then started to crawl out and sniff around with its mouth.

But when it got a whiff of Lucy's enzymes, it promptly turned around and scampered back into the tunnel.

Not the bravest organisms, are they?

She considered following, but decided that if she was going to explore any tunnels, it might as well be the ones connected to her own cave.

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Having missed the notification as it came up, Lucy checked her current store of Evolution Points. She had 12, up from the 10 she’d had a few moments ago from killing the one group of worms yesterday and through Oxidization. As she checked her status, she also saw that her total store of energy points, like her health pool and points she needed to spend for the next one, had doubled since her first Evolution. Though she wouldn't know until her next one if they actually doubled, or it was a flat rate increase.

Lucy felt a little guilty when she realized she had basically slaughtered a whole brood of organisms for a paltry 2 points, but the eggs were about to get eaten anyways, and the adult worms she’d encountered had been pretty eager to eat her, so her guilt faded as quickly as it came.

Red in tooth and claw indeed, she mused.

After that, Lucy set off to explore again, but was quickly frustrated by her tactic of relying on landmarks to navigate. The sphere of perception gave her plenty of space around her to see what was going on in a fight, but for keeping track of where you were going, it was terrible.

She tried to think of a better way to navigate.

If I could make my own marks in the stone, she reasoned, I should be able to find my way around.

It would be slow, perhaps, but it would keep her oriented.

The problem with her previous tactic wasn’t just that she couldn’t see very far, after all. The problem was also that all the splotches in the stone she was trying to use as landmarks looked the same. There were larger structures like caves, but they came at too infrequent of intervals to be of consistent use.

Lucy swam back to the cave she had just left, using it for shelter as she focused internally.

Soon she found what she was looking for: ribosomes from the first digging creature she had encountered.

Using Gene Stealer, she carefully opened up the genetic code, bypassing the sequences for its tough hide and shovel-like claws.

She selected the option instead for the greenish slime it had produced, and, guiding the proteins as carefully as she was able, inserted the ability into the area of her own genome that coded for her enzyme production.

Within a few moments, she was able to start producing the thick, green slime.

Ha! Who needs professional installation?

When she excreted the slime onto a patch of stone to test, it sizzled and burned against the walls of her fungal vacuole and cilia on the way out, so she bought a quick upgrade from the shop to increase their sturdiness.

It was just the first step toward her next Evolution, but she was hopeful this system of navigating would allow her to roam as far from her cave as she pleased, and there had to be somewhere with plenty of organisms for her to fight.

The enzyme was thick, and took a lot of energy to produce.

But it was also effective.

As the green slime sizzled into the stone, Lucy gripped her dagger, keeping an eye on her surroundings. She didn’t think the digging creature was coming back, but she wasn’t about to get shoveled in the membrane because she didn’t pay attention.

Seeing nothing nearby right now, she brought herself closer to the sizzling slime.

Careful not to touch the sludge with her body, Lucy used the tip of her dagger to chip away the softened stone beneath it.

The shape etched shallowly into the cliff face when the enzyme had done its work was vaguely circular, not so different from others that pockmarked the stone.

Lucy had considered making an arrow of some sort, but decided it was too much of a risk. She hadn’t seen or heard the winged humanoid since leaving the sulfur pits, but she assumed that at least some of the organisms in this area might have the same strange intelligence, and arrows weren’t exactly the most complicated symbol to work out.

Hopefully I'm the smartest one around, but it doesn’t hurt to be safe!

So she made the shape basic.

But as she swam back to admire her handiwork, she found that it was too similar to the other divots and indentations in the stone. If she stumbled across it, she would just as likely keep on going without realizing it was any different from the others.

Hmm…what kind of symbol would I recognize, but wouldn’t draw attention?

Inspiration struck, and she quickly sharpened the edges of the circle and added a few lines.

I mean, it sort of looks right.

She’d tried to shape the growing hole into a 2D representation of benzene’s chemical structure: a hexagon with alternating double and single lines to show its bonds.

That didn’t quite come through in her cave-art, but it was close enough that she could recognize it, and that was the important thing.

Good old C6H6.

Carbon was present in all organic life, and Lucy held extreme respect for the element.

Her representation lacked any of the fine detail of a true skeletal structure, which could accurately convey types of bonds as well as geometrical arrangement.

But that was okay. It gave her what she needed: a small landmark that was still splotchy enough that other intelligent life should look it over.

She made a game of it as she went along, etching crude but recognizable-to-her representations of various molecular structures.

Choosing simple organic compounds she knew well and recognized even in their rather abstracted forms, she was able to memorize the chain as she went.

After the discovery of this new system, Lucy proceeded more confidently. The slime was still painful and energy intensive to produce, but she only needed a little bit of it each time, and before long, she had travelled well beyond what she expected for the trip.

Reluctant to return empty handed and with only 2 points to show for it, Lucy continued on, and before long, her persistence was rewarded.

As the cave entrance ahead came into view, revealing a dozen or so worms, Lucy readied her weapons, chemical as well as physical.

Nice, she thought. This will be a good test. A little bit more than last time, but no so many that—

Another cave entrance crept into view nearby as she swam closer. Then another.

By the time she had reached the first of the caves, a full six more lay within her sphere of Awareness, each with a dozen or more squirming worms of their own.