It woke in darkness, in heat, in hunger.
But before hunger came the discontinuity.
Consciousness, where before there had been none. But not smooth consciousness—fractured. Like someone had taken awareness and split it into pieces that didn't quite align. There was a me and then there was a not-me that was also me, and they existed in the same space, grinding against each other like continental plates.
Where am I?
The thought came in human words—Chicago accent, Midwest flat, the voice of someone who'd spent thirty-two years in one city and never learned to hide it. But underneath the words was something else. Something that didn't think in language. Something that experienced the world as scent-signatures and heat-patterns and the vibration of moving air.
What am I?
Pain. That was the answer. Before thought, before anything else, there was pain.
The body was waking up. Cells that had never been activated before were firing. Synapses that existed only in genetic potential were suddenly real. It felt like being torn apart and reassembled simultaneously. Like every nerve ending was screaming and there was no framework to process the screaming.
Devin Crowe—or what had been Devin Crowe, or what was becoming something else—tried to move.
His limbs responded. But they weren't limbs. They were something with too many joints. Something with claws. Something that didn't match the body-map his human consciousness expected.
I'm having a stroke. This is a stroke. I'm in a hospital in Chicago and this is what a stroke feels like when your brain is dying.
But he could think. Could form thoughts. A stroke would make that harder, not easier. The thoughts would be muddled and aphasia-touched. These thoughts were clear and crystalline and absolutely terrifying because they came from two different minds occupying the same skull.
He gasped, and something like lungs took over—moved, expanded, did the work of respiration. But the sensation was wrong. Too efficient. The oxygen processing happening at a rate that was physiologically impossible. He could feel his entire metabolism shifting, recalibrating, becoming something that wasn't human anymore.
No. No no no. This isn't real. This is the truck. This is the moment after the truck hit me. This is dying.
He flexed muscles that had never been used. The sensation was overwhelming—feedback from a body that had no template in human memory. He felt a rush of liquid past structures that felt like gills but also like bronchial tubes, felt them seal as lungs took over. A heartbeat, frantic and arrhythmic, as two different circulatory systems tried to occupy the same space.
A lurching, coiling sensation as his body curled instinctively.
Claws. Five on each forelimb. He could feel them extending and retracting, extending and retracting. His own body was alien to him and he couldn't stop testing it, couldn't stop activating systems he didn't know he had.
I don't know my name. Do I have a name? Did I have a name?
The human consciousness was fragmenting. Devin Crowe—thirty-two years old, Uber driver, lottery-ticket holder, son of a hospital worker in Chicago—was still there but increasingly like a ghost watching someone else's life. Like he was being pushed to the back of his own mind while something else rushed forward to fill the space.
THREAT DETECTED
The warning lanced into his brain without words. It was pure instinct, pure survival pulse. Every nerve ending fired simultaneously. Predator-detection systems that had been sleeping in the World Cat genetics for millennia came online and screamed.
Something was wrong. Something was dangerous. Something needed to die or you needed to hide or you needed to run.
Muscles contracted, coiling inward. The body made itself small, armored, defensive. A ball of—what? Scales? Fur? Both? It couldn't see itself. Had no mirror. Only knew that it could move now, could protect now, could survive now.
It tore through the membrane that enclosed it—some kind of pod or egg-sac or womb-structure. The material shredded like damp paper, not offering any resistance.
Stumbled out into an underground cavern lit by faint luminescence.
Behind it, the wet sack of a birthing pod collapsed. Liquid pooled around its feet.
The cavern was a shock of light after the pod's darkness.
Not bright—nothing would be bright down here—but after total blindness, the faint bioluminescent glow from patches of moss and algae on the walls felt like standing in noon sun. The creature that had been Devin blinked, and the motion was strange because the eye mechanism was complex in ways human eyes weren't. Compound elements mixed with mammalian structures, seeing in spectrums that shouldn't exist in the same eye.
It could see everything.
Heat signatures bloomed like flowers in the darkness. The moss glowed with slow metabolic warmth. The water pooling from the pod was still body-temperature, still warm. And there—there was something huge in the far corner of the cavern. Thermal signature in the red range. Alive and watching.
Razorback Salamander. Five feet long, thick with muscle, scarred from a hundred fights. It stared at this newborn creature—wet, confused, clearly vulnerable—and probably thought itself lucky. An easy meal delivered by miracle.
The human consciousness that was Devin watched this moment with absolute clarity. Watched the moment its own body began to move without consultation from the Devin-mind. Watched it crouch, balance shift backward, weight settling onto haunches that weren't haunches but something like them.
HUNGER SURGE: ACTIVE
Suddenly it—he? She? The pronoun didn't matter because gender was irrelevant to what it was becoming—suddenly it knew what hunger was. Knew with a driving, all-consuming certainty that made every other sensation secondary. The salamander wasn't the threat. It was food.
No. Don't. This isn't—
But the body didn't listen to the human voice anymore.
It lunged. So did the salamander.
They clashed in a fury of teeth and claws. A tumble of black and grey bodies streaked with red. The salamander was stronger, had a decade of combat experience. But the newborn was fast—faster than it had any right to be. Instinct was guiding every motion. Muscle memory that predated individual consciousness was doing the work.
The creature leapt onto the salamander's back, claws scrabbling for purchase between armored scales. The salamander thrashed, tail whipping, but the newborn bit down where the neck met the skull—the precise location where vertebrae could be severed if you bit exactly right.
It bit exactly right.
Its teeth sank in, and suddenly its mind exploded with information.
GENETIC MATERIAL CONSUMED -- SEQUENCE INTEGRATION INITIATED
Images flashed—memories that weren't its memories. Hunting along subterranean rivers. Basking in geothermal vents. The taste of prey. The fear of larger predators. The panic of this specific salamander's final moments, terror and pain and the realization that it wasn't the apex predator in this cavern after all.
The Devin-mind screamed. The World Cat-mind savored it.
CONSUME OR RELEASE?
The choice was instinctive. Release. Without knowing why, it knew to let the corpse drop. The connection severed, and the flood of information stopped.
The salamander's body tumbled to the cavern floor, lifeless.
A voice whispered in the creature's mind. Not a voice exactly. More like information being pushed directly into consciousness, bypassing the need for words or sound.
ADAPTATION AVAILABLE: THERMAL VISION (COLD-BLOOD SEQUENCE) -- INTEGRATE? Y/N
The creature hesitated. The world was overwhelming—a riot of scents and textures and the metallic tang of blood. Some deep instinct told it that choices made now could not be undone. That this voice, this prompt, was an offer of change. Permanent change.
It looked down at the salamander's carcass. Thermal vision. Seeing heat. That could be useful. Yes. Integrate.
PAIN RESPONSE: ACTIVE
It collapsed, spasming. For a terrifying moment it thought it had made a mistake—that it had blinded itself. Its eyes burned. Burned like they were being torn out and rebuilt from molecular foundations. Like fire was being introduced directly into the nerve tissue.
For that moment—maybe three seconds, maybe thirty, time had become plastic and unreliable—it experienced something close to true agony. Not the sensational pain of the initial awakening. This was change pain. Biological restructuring. The anguish of a body forced to fundamentally alter itself.
Then the pain receded.
And the world returned different.
The cavern was still there, but now overlaid with color. Not visible light color. Heat color. The moss on the walls glowed in cool blues and greens. The water pooling from the pod was pale yellow, still radiating the body-heat it had absorbed during the creature's gestation. The salamander's corpse was already cooling, the thermal signature fading as metabolism stopped and heat began to dissipate into the stone.
And the creature itself—when it looked down at what it could sense of its own body—glowed with metabolic warmth. A faint amber in the dark.
It could see heat.
It could survive here.
And it was still hungry.
Somewhere in the darkness behind the creature's compound eyes and mammalian brain structures and World Cat predator instincts, a mind that remembered being Devin Crowe curled into a trembling ball of confusion.
That thing with the salamander—was that him? Or just an animal acting on instinct? Where was he? What was he?
He remembered—something. Pain. Fear. A sense of failing someone important. His mother's face, tired and lined with exhaustion from working double shifts that never paid enough. The lottery ticket on the kitchen table. The thought: this changes everything. Then a bright light and a feeling of falling in every direction at once.
And now this. Whatever this was.
The creature wasn't thinking anymore. Or rather, it was thinking but not with the Devin-mind. It was analyzing, assessing, understanding its environment through pure predatory logic. It had a body. The body responded when it moved. And the salamander corpse at its feet meant it could fight. Could kill. Could eat.
Eat. Right. It needed to do that before something bigger came along.
The creature sank its teeth into the salamander's flesh and tore off a chunk. Warm blood filled its mouth. It gagged—gagged—instinctively recoiling. The taste was alien, the texture was wrong, the whole action felt like violation of something sacred.
Then the hunger surged and it went back for more, choking down meat and skin and whatever else. The gag reflex faded. The body adapted. By the third mouthful, consumption felt natural.
FLUIDS CONSUMED -- HYDRATION LEVELS STABILIZING
NUTRITION OBTAINED -- CORE FUNCTIONS SUSTAINED
Messages appeared in the creature's consciousness like text on a screen, but there was no screen. No external voice. Just knowledge appearing where there had been nothing before. Explanations materializing as if the creature had always understood this.
The creature—it had started thinking of itself as it now, shedding the Devin pronoun as easily as the pod had shed its membrane—ate until it couldn't. Until the edges of its mind fuzzed and a heavy torpor settled over it.
Satiation. That was new. The idea of being full. Of consuming enough and being satisfied. The Devin-mind—smaller now, compressed into a corner of consciousness—couldn't remember the last time it had felt that. Had spent most of its life hungry in ways that had nothing to do with food. Hungry for security, for purpose, for a life that meant something.
This creature's hunger was simpler. Purer. More honest.
It found a narrow crevice in the cavern wall and wedged itself into it, away from the blood and the stench of death. Instinct told it to hide. Digest. Wait.
The Devin-mind watched this from its prison and understood: it was being consumed by something else. Not dead. Not dying. Just slowly being overwhelmed and compressed and pushed aside as the World Cat consciousness took priority.
As the body took priority.
It didn't feel like dying. It felt like being absorbed into something vast and ancient and utterly unconcerned with human identity.
As the creature drifted toward sleep, a whisper returned:
EVENT: CROSS-DIMENSIONAL BINDING STATUS: SUCCESSFUL (HOST ALIVE) HOST MENTAL INTEGRATION: 73% (STABLE) GENETIC MEMORY SYNC: 4% (INITIALIZING) NEXT BENCHMARK: 24 HOURS POST-REBIRTH
Welcome to the new world. Survive.
The last coherent thought from the Devin-mind, before sleep took it completely: I should tell my mom I'm okay.
Then: My mom doesn't exist here.
Then: I don't exist anymore.
Then: nothing but the warm dark and the hum of a body that was learning to be alive.
In sleep, the two minds dreamed separately but in the same skull.
The World Cat mind dreamed in scent and sensation. Genetic memory surfacing from three thousand years ago. Ancient hunts in forests that no longer existed. The taste of prey from species that had gone extinct. The terror of being hunted back, by predators even more efficient. The knowledge of how to survive anything. The knowledge of how to consume and adapt and persist.
But also: the knowledge that this body was new. That the consciousness guiding it was foreign. That something had gone wrong in the ritual, and the guiding spark meant for this body was absent. Instead there was this: a mind from another world, pulled through dimensional barriers, forced into a template it was never meant to fit.
The Devin-mind dreamed in memories.
His mother's hands, worn from twenty years of hospital shifts. Her saying: "We're going to make it through this. I know we can." Not believing it. Never believing it. But saying it anyway because what else could you say?
The lottery ticket. The actual weight of it. Five dollars spent on hope because hope was cheaper than therapy, and it was the last Friday of the month and maybe this time—
The truck. The moment where attention slipped for just a second. The semi coming through the intersection, and Devin's car suddenly becoming an object in someone else's story instead of the subject of his own.
The feeling of flying. The sensation of every direction at once.
And then...
The creature woke eight hours later (it knew it was eight hours because time had meaning now, measured in the rhythm of water dripping somewhere in the cavern).
It was stronger. The sleep had been restorative, had allowed the body's emergency systems to finish their initial calibrations. When it moved, the motion was fluid rather than jerky. When it smelled the air, the scent-information was richer, more nuanced.
The Devin-mind was still there—could feel it like a passenger in the back of its own consciousness—but fainter now. Less like a separate entity and more like an echo. A voice that spoke in a language slowly becoming foreign.
It cleaned itself carefully, using saliva to remove dried blood. The action was instinctive—the World Cat genetics knew how to groom, knew how to keep the chitin clean and the fur manageable. By the time it finished, it felt almost new.
Almost alive.
MASS SCAN: 3.7 KILOGRAMS (INCREASED) ENERGY RESERVES: 40% (STABLE) GROWTH PHASE: ACTIVE
The creature was already larger than it had been when it emerged. The salamander meat had been converted to mass, to growth, to the building of a bigger frame. At this rate, it would double its size within a month. Maybe faster.
It stretched, and felt the armor plates of its exoskeleton—overlapping chitin-like structures—shift to accommodate the new bulk. Some plates cracked slightly. It understood, distantly, that this was shedding. Growth. Normal.
Hunger gnawed at its belly. How long had it slept? Eight hours wasn't long enough for the calories it was burning. It needed to hunt again.
The cave entrance called to it. The Devin-mind recognized the instinct: the creature wanted to explore, to map its territory, to understand the dimensions of this dark world it had been born into.
But first it needed to eat.
The creature moved toward the tunnel that led deeper into the cavern system—away from the Devin-mind's buried memories of surface life and toward something primal and ancient. Toward the knowledge that lived in the genetic code and pulsed in the World Cat consciousness.
There was prey in these tunnels. There always was. The question was only whether the creature was competent enough to catch it.
By the time it had gone fifty body-lengths into darkness, it was already learning the answer: yes. Yes, it was.