Hunger woke the creature before anything else could.
The sensation crawled through its belly like something alive, demanding and insistent. How long had it slept? The dripping water offered no consistent rhythm to measure time by. The sound changed with air currents, with temperature shifts, with mysteries the creature couldn't yet name. Maybe six hours. Maybe twelve. Time felt plastic here, measured only in the urgent demands of metabolism.
The creature stretched, and armor plates shifted with new confidence. Yesterday's growth cracks had sealed overnight. Fresh chitin had hardened into overlapping segments that caught the dim bioluminescence in strange patterns. It was noticeably larger now, thirty percent more mass than when it first tore free from the pod.
MASS SCAN: 4.2 KILOGRAMS (INCREASED)
ENERGY RESERVES: 22% (CRITICAL)
The message crystallized with absolute clarity. It was burning calories faster than it could accumulate them. Growth demanded energy. Sustained activity demanded energy. The metabolism that came with World Cat genetics was hungry in ways that human caloric requirements had never approached.
It needed to hunt. And this time, it needed to be efficient.
The creature moved through the cavern with confidence born from yesterday's lessons. Thermal vision painted everything in gradients of heat: the temperature variations in stone, the slow movement of air currents, the places where geothermal warmth bled through from chambers far below. It could see the world now. Really see it. Not just perceive but understand, turning raw sensation into actionable information.
The salamander had been easy because it was nearby and stupid. But there wouldn't always be easy kills. The creature understood this with bone-deep certainty, understood it because genetic memory was becoming less like intrusive knowledge and more like instinct. Like it had always known this truth.
So it moved quietly, testing each step before committing weight, keeping low to the ground where shadows pooled deepest.
The human consciousness watched from somewhere deep inside, observing with something like fascination. This was the first time the Devin part could truly watch the predator part work, could see the difference between panicked aggression and calculated hunting strategy.
The difference was terrifying. And exhilarating.
Movement flickered in peripheral vision. Fast. To the left.
Every muscle locked simultaneously. Thermal vision caught a blur of heat signature: something rat-sized, moving with erratic urgency. Prey pattern. Fleeing pattern.
The creature pounced.
Claws scraped stone instead of flesh. The impact jolted through its foreleg, sharp enough to send warning signals cascading through its nervous system. It had missed. The prey had moved, had anticipated the strike and shifted at the last possible moment.
The creature skittered upward, claws finding purchase on the vertical stone face, and watched its target scurry up the cavern wall. When it reached the ceiling, it clung there, defying gravity in ways that shouldn't be possible for something its size.
Eight legs. Bulbous abdomen. Fangs visible even from this distance.
A spider. But not like any spider that had ever evolved on Earth. This thing was massive, easily the size of a dinner plate, with a body that gleamed like polished obsidian. And intelligent. The way it hung from the ceiling suggested calculation, not just instinct.
It chittered at the creature, a sound like claws scraping stone, and the meaning was unmistakable: I'm too high to reach. Come and try anyway.
The creature climbed. It moved with the same confidence the spider displayed, finding handholds that shouldn't exist, pulling itself up the vertical surface. But the spider was faster. It scuttled sideways, positioning itself directly above where the creature would be in three more moves.
The message was clear: I can reach you. You cannot reach me.
Deep inside, the Devin-mind felt something unfamiliar: shame. Embarrassment. The creature was being toyed with by prey. By something it should be able to kill easily.
But the World Cat consciousness didn't process shame. It felt interest. It felt the electric thrill of a problem demanding solution.
The creature dropped back to the cavern floor. Looked around with fresh eyes.
Tools. Did it have tools? Claws and teeth were sharp enough to pierce most organic material, yes. But stone was harder than flesh, and this prey was demonstrating that direct approach wouldn't work here.
The creature's gaze landed on scattered stone fragments. Broken stalactites from whatever ancient collapse had created this cavern system. The largest piece was roughly forearm length, jagged at one end, sharp enough to draw ichor.
A spear. Or a knife, given the creature's current size.
It grabbed the stone carefully, testing weight and balance. Heavy, but manageable. The muscles strengthened by predator genetics made the load feel almost negligible. The creature's mind processed the object's properties automatically: weight distribution, center of mass, potential velocity if thrown.
The spider, sensing some shift in the dynamic, began inching toward an exit tunnel. A small opening that the creature would have difficulty squeezing through.
Oh no. That's not happening.
The creature hurled the stone.
It missed. The shard clattered off ceiling stone where the spider had been a heartbeat before. The spider hissed, a sound somewhere between growl and scream, and retreated to a far corner. But it had been close. Close enough that the spider had felt air displacement from the projectile's passage.
The creature realized something profound in that moment: it was accurate. Despite never having thrown anything in this body, despite zero experience with projectile weapons, the geometry had been nearly perfect. Only the target's movement had saved it.
The Devin-mind recognized the phenomenon: genetic memory expressing as physical skill. Millions of years of World Cat evolution, encoded in DNA, teaching the creature how to throw like someone who'd done it thousands of times.
The creature gathered more shards. Three felt optimal. Three pieces that fit comfortably in its claws, each one tested for weight and sharpness.
The spider, sensing the shift from prey to predator, began inching toward the exit tunnel with renewed urgency. It skittered faster now, perhaps hoping to gain the safety of tighter spaces where the larger creature couldn't follow.
The creature threw again.
This time, stone connected. Not a solid hit—the spider was too fast, too practiced at evasion—but close enough. One of the spider's legs took a glancing blow. Yellow-white ichor spattered in droplets that glowed faintly in the darkness.
The spider dropped several feet, thrashing, and the creature pressed its advantage. It was learning now, understanding the geometry of the throw, understanding how to lead a moving target, understanding that patience and precision beat raw speed.
The next shard embedded itself in the spider's abdomen.
The spider shrieked. An ultrasonic sound that made the creature's entire body vibrate in sympathy. It dropped, actually fell, thrashing on the cavern floor as eight legs churned uselessly against smooth stone.
The creature pounced without hesitation.
This time it knew exactly where to bite: the junction between head and thorax, the point where chitin armor was thinnest. The creature's teeth sank in, and the spider's venom sacs leaked futilely into its mouth, useless now.
The taste was bitter and slightly numbing, and for a moment the creature wondered if it had poisoned itself.
Then the sensation faded, replaced by warm softness of the spider's interior and the knowledge that the hunt was complete.
GENETIC MATERIAL CONSUMED
SEQUENCE MEMORY STORED
No forced choice this time. No overwhelming integration. Instead, a trickle of knowledge: webs, traps, patience. The spider had been intelligent in its own way, an ambush predator of considerable cunning. But there was nothing immediately useful to integrate, no dramatic physical adaptation worth the energy cost. The spider's strength lay in its hunting technique and web-building capabilities, neither of which the creature could directly absorb.
Still, the knowledge was there. The creature catalogued the spider's hunting patterns, stored the information, understood that it could apply these tactics to future hunts.
Ambush is more efficient than direct assault.
Patience is a weapon.
Intelligence matters more than simple strength.
It feasted, crunching through hard chitin with satisfaction. More mass. More energy. More growth. By the time it finished, the creature was noticeably larger. The armor plates felt thicker, its limbs slightly longer, its movements more coordinated.
Small pale beetles crept back to nibble at the spider remains, moving alongside the remnants of yesterday's salamander. They moved with absolute fearlessness, probably too simple to understand fear.
The creature sniffed one experimentally. Squishy, full of something that smelled foul. Not appetizing. It let them be, understanding the calculus: these were scavengers, not threats, not worth the energy expenditure. They served a purpose here—consuming waste, cleaning the cavern.
COLONY CREATURE: LOW-LEVEL SCAVENGER
DANGER: NEGLIGIBLE
POTENTIAL UTILITY: WASTE RECYCLING
The interface was becoming more conversational. Or perhaps the creature was becoming better at receiving information. It could categorize life forms now, could understand their place in the cavern's ecology, could assess threat and utility simultaneously.
But the Devin-mind noticed something else. A hierarchy was forming in the creature's consciousness:
Survive. That came first. Always first.
Adapt. Learn from the world. Learn from prey. Use information to improve.
Expand. Take more territory. Find more resources. Grow larger.
Dominate. Not yet. But eventually.
It was becoming something with a plan. Not a plan that Devin had consciously made—he was too deep in the background now to drive complex strategy. But a plan that emerged from predator genetics meeting a human consciousness particularly good at problem-solving.
Something new was being born here. Something that thought in ways neither human nor World Cat could alone.