If the forest was dangerous during the day, it was downright treacherous at night. The felith had learned that the hard way a few days after she had come to awareness. Her eyes were well-adapted for the darkness, and her pink fur was muted and almost unobtrusive under the starlight. She had foolishly assumed that this meant the night would be safe, that she would be able to hunt with ease. That mistake had nearly cost her life, when she had been attacked by a pack of large wolf-like creatures that seemed to blur in and out of the shadows. One of them had pounced on her, catching her unawares, and it was only through sheer luck and and instinct that she had been able to escape, stabbing up at it with a thin shard of crystal and distracting it long enough to escape its grasp. After that there had been a harrowing chase that ended only when she had found a small hollow below a tree that was too small for her pursuers to follow.
She had only been truly aware for a few days, at that point. She did not remember her own birth, neither in this life nor the previous, and she was grateful for that. Awareness had come to her gradually and over the course of several days. By the time that she could remember her past life in another world, she had been completely alone. Whether her mother and any siblings in this life had abandoned her or been caught by a larger predator, she didn't know. Nor did she have a good idea of how old she was, except that she must be young since the specification form had called her juvenile.
By her careful count, it had now been at least twenty seven days since she had become sapient enough to mark such things. At least, because there had been a bad reaction with a mushroom around day ten that had left her unsure of quite a few things, including whether it was day or night. That was before she had figured out how to properly hunt prey, and before she had gotten over her hesitation about eating raw and freshly killed meat. After the mushroom incident, she had gotten over both of those hurdles fairly quickly.
It was dark now, and she was back in the cave that she now called home. It lacked many of the amenities of her previous residence, including a television, a dishwasher, furniture, power, running water, or in fact much of anything other than dirt, stone, and quartz crystals. Still, at least there was a stone ceiling to keep her dry when it rained. When she had found the cave, recessed as it was in a small gully, it had barely been large enough to fit her whole body inside. Over the course of the last few weeks, she had used her mana to carve out more space for herself. She was able to manipulate soil and stone to some degree, although it took far more effort than the quartz crystals, and it was much harder to control as well.
A howl from outside brought her back to the present. The shadewolves—that was what she had taken to calling them—were prowling outside, and now they were presumably celebrating over some poor animal's death. Well, better them than me, she thought to herself, and curled up tighter. The crystal ridges on her spine made a soft scraping sound when she moved, although it was muffled by the loose arrangement of rodent fur and fallen leaves that she had arranged into rough bedding. It was better than nothing, but in practice it didn't do much to fight against the chill touch of nighttime.
Once more, she considered trying to meet a human. She knew that they existed here, in whatever strange realm this was. It was something she had suspected for a while, from occasionally walking across paths in the forest that seemed more significant than ordinary game trails, but it wasn't until ten days ago that she had gotten real confirmation. She had been out searching for prey when she abruptly saw the distant figure of a tall young man with bronze skin and light brown hair, who had seemed to pass through the forest without making a sound. He had been wearing dark green clothes that blended in with the dense foliage, although it lacked the mottled pattern that would have made it actually effective camouflage, and he had a tall longbow strapped to his back. When she had first seen him, she had almost run directly up to him, so starved was she for human company, except that instinct made her hesitate. That was enough time for rational thought to catch up, and she realized that a hunter like him might well consider her easy prey, rather than a companion. Instead, she had followed behind at a careful distance, watching to see what he would do.
That decision almost certainly saved her life. She had been following him for a few minutes when he had stopped and drawn the bow, taking aim at something in the distance. The release was silent, but the yowl of pain when the arrow connected with its target was certainly not. He had shouted then, rushing forward and drawing a knife at the same time. When she followed the man through the underbrush, she found him kneeling down over another felith, although this one was a dark gray color. It had a large arrow sticking out from its stomach and a deep knife wound across its neck, and was now in the last spasms of its life. The man was holding it down, uncaring for its struggle or the blood that had spilled on his stained leather boots, and had the knife stuck deep into the creature's sternum, wiggling it around as if searching for something.
She had let out an involuntary cry at the sight, and he had turned around with a start, one hand whipping around to his bow. He said something in a language she didn't recognize, and as his arm reached back for an arrow, she was already rushing away from the scene as fast as she could. An arrow came whistling through the air and impacted a tree next to her, but he didn't give chase past that. Presumably, he was too concerned with butchering the body that he had to pursue her much further.
As frightening as the experience had been, it had taught her quite a few lessons. First, that humans did exist in this world, and that they at least had the technology for bows, weaving, and cobblery. She was pretty sure that the knife he used was iron or steel, so that was another indication of the technology level. Second, that she didn't understand the language that he spoke, and would almost certainly not understand the language either, which put something of a damper on her plans to show her intelligence. Third, that the man had been hunting a felith, and had tried to kill her with no hesitation. Fourth, that the man had been looking for something in the body of his prey, and she was pretty sure that it was the one of the small beads that she had been consuming on instinct, which restored her reserves of mana.
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The juvenile felith liked lists; they were comforting, and helped to make sense of the disorder of the world. Now, curled up in her cave and illuminated only by the faint moonlight that made its way through the hole that served as an entrance, she considered her next steps. She had spent so much of her time just trying to survive that she had been unable to plan further ahead than the next day. Although that was a lie, she knew; there was plenty of time to cower in her cave at night. No, in truth she had been unwilling to do so, since that would mean admitting that this was all real, that she had been suddenly ripped away from her home and her world to wake up in the body of a jewel-encrusted cat, in a world with magic and strange screens that tried to tell her who she was.
The screens were still confusing. Not the concept of them; although she hadn't been an avid gamer in her past, she was familiar enough with roleplaying games to know a status screen when she saw it. But there presence here, in real life, was bizarre, not least because she could actually read it. She had a sneaking suspicion that its appearance was drawn more from her memories and expectations, and that it was merely a visual representation of information that was somehow being implanted directly into her mind. Still, it seemed more descriptive than anything; she was unable to summon it on command, and she had so far been entirely unable to interact with it either physically or mentally.
Of course, she had considered the possibility that none of this was real, that she had somehow fallen into a coma and was dreaming all this up. In the end, she had realized that it didn't really matter; either this was reality or it was something indistinguishable from reality, and regardless she still wanted to avoid feeling pain or hunger. So she had learned how to survive in this forest; what creatures she should hunt and how to hunt them, what monsters she should avoid and when they liked to roam, what plants would cause a rash if she brushed against them, and what mushrooms should absolutely never be eaten.
One option would be to continue doing as she had done. To hunt in the day, stay in the cave at night, and to keep doing that until she either was killed or gained enough levels to not fear the predators, assuming that levels even worked that way. It was perhaps the easier option, since the danger was familiar. And then I can keep being a coward until the loneliness drives me insane or I get picked off by my own shadow. Lovely.
The second option was to seek out a kind human, who would take her in and who she could hopefully find a way to communicate with. That was assuming that she could find somebody who wouldn't try to kill her for her pelt or her chest stone, which was not at all a guarantee. Maybe it was only hunters who came to this forest, or maybe people just wouldn't feel comfortable around a creature that could conjure crystals that could impale through flesh.
Both paths had a high likelihood of death. She was not the lowest link in the food chain, but neither was she at the apex. She knew that her first escape from the shadow wolf was extremely lucky, and even with her improved Grace she wasn't sure that she could manage it again. On the other hand, if she tried to meet humans, there was no guarantee that she wouldn't be instantly killed on sight.
So I'm damned either way, then, the felith thought to herself. Lose my mind in isolation, or spend my life as a lab rat. She let out a small mew of exasperation, fed up with a game that seemed to only have losing moves. Instead, she shifted around to face a wall of the cave that had been meticulously scraped away, until it formed a completely flat wall. At first she had done this with her claws and later, as she had gained greater control of her ability to control stone and crystals, she had been able to command the stone to flake off. Scratched into the wall by her claws—she lacked the necessary fine control with her magic—was a string of symbols that described the behavior of elliptical curves operating over a finite field. It had been her area of study before, when she had been working as a graduate student, and she would be damned if she let the fact that she had been ripped from her world and placed in a felith's body get in the way of continuing her research.
She reached up and, with meticulous care, scratched a new symbol against the stone, at the end of the latest line of math. Sharp as they were, her claws barely made a mark, and even then it was uneven. She traced it again, pressing harder, and again made only slight progress. The felith continued in this way, etching away at the stone, until with countless repetitions she managed to produce a clean symbol. Then she moved one space over, to begin on the next one. It was meditative and soothing, and it gave her plenty of time to consider the math in her head, to run through different possibilities and proof structures. This was her monument, her temple; it was the thing she had which proved to herself that she was human, that she was more than a beast to be hunted. It stood as a testament to her mind, a distraction from the rest of the strange new world, a reminder of her true calling.
After a while of the slow, laborious work in the dim light, she eventually grew too tired to continue. She turned over and shifted her body, trying to find a way to lie comfortably on the ground without the spines on her back digging into the ground or sharp pain from her injured ribs. Sleep would be hard to find tonight, as dark thoughts circled in her mind. Outside in the night, the wolves were howling their triumph.