The dreams were getting weird.
Kai knew he was dreaming because the world kept shifting between impossible things. One moment he was small, sitting at a kitchen table under fluorescent lights that buzzed like angry insects. A lottery ticket sat in front of him, creased from being folded and unfolded too many times. His hands were human hands, soft and useless.
The next moment he was something else entirely. Running through forests that had never existed on Earth, hunting prey that moved in ways physics shouldn't allow. His body was wrong, alien, but it felt right in a way that terrified him.
A woman's voice called out. "Baby, you need to eat something."
Who was she? Kai knew he should know. The knowledge was there, buried somewhere deep, but reaching for it was like trying to grab smoke. She was important. She mattered. But why she mattered kept slipping away from him.
The dream shifted again. Now he was tearing into something warm and struggling. Blood in his mouth, hot and copper-sweet. The satisfaction of a successful hunt singing through his veins.
He woke up gasping, not sure which dream had been the nightmare.
The den was dark except for the faint glow of bioluminescent fungi creeping along one wall. Kai's new pressure-sense picked up the tiny vibrations of beetles moving through cracks in the stone. Water dripped somewhere far below. The world hummed with life he could feel through his bones.
"I'm still here," he whispered to himself—testing, checking if the voice that came out was still his.
It was and it wasn't.
The human part, what the system kept calling Devin, was definitely still present. But it felt like listening to someone talk from another room. Still there. Still audible. Just… distant.
How long before that voice went silent completely?
Kai wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer.
Something was happening to his body.
Kai woke up feeling like someone had inflated him overnight. Not painfully, but definitely noticeably. His armor plates had thickened again, the overlapping segments fitting together so smoothly they almost looked mechanical. When he flexed his claws experimentally, they gleamed in the dim light like polished knives.
He'd grown. Again. Significantly.
The system notification popped up in his vision, crisp and clear:
FIRST ADAPTIVE CYCLE: COMPLETEGENETIC MEMORY SYNC: 12%NEW PROTOCOLS AVAILABLE
"Protocols," Kai muttered, testing the word. "Because that's a totally normal thing to think about my own body."
But it was normal now. That was the weird part. Thinking about his genetics like software that could be updated felt as natural as breathing. The human part of him knew this should be disturbing. The World Cat part accepted it as obvious truth.
He stretched, working out the kinks from sleeping curled on stone. His muscle control had improved dramatically overnight. Movements that had required concentration yesterday now came automatically. His body was learning, adapting, becoming more efficient with every hour.
The spider he'd killed three days ago had taught him about tool use. The salamander from his first real hunt had shown him how thermal vision could track prey. Every fight, every meal, every close call was building something new inside him.
Not just muscle memory. Understanding.
He didn't just know how to climb now. He understood why his claws found purchase at certain angles, how weight distribution affected grip strength, the precise muscle engagement needed to scale vertical surfaces. His mind processed information like a biological computer, taking raw experience and converting it into actionable knowledge.
"Is this what genius feels like?" Kai wondered aloud. "Or am I just getting really good at being a monster?"
The Devin-voice in the back of his head didn't answer. Maybe it didn't know either.
Kai moved through his den, checking the boundaries he'd marked with scent. Still strong. Still claiming this space as his own. Any creature wandering through here would know: something dangerous lives here now.
His stomach growled. Transformation wasn't free. Growth and improvements demanded fuel—lots of it.
Time to hunt.
Kai had been tracking the water source for two days, getting closer each time, learning the territory. The tunnels here were different from his den. Wetter. Colder. The air carried mineral-rich dampness that made his enhanced senses tingle with information.
Something big lived down here. He could feel it through vibrations in the stone.
He'd been using thermal vision almost exclusively since the spider hunt, and it had become second nature. The world painted itself in gradients of heat: cold stone in deep blues and purples, warm-blooded prey in yellows and oranges, his own body temperature a bright red at the edge of sight.
It was beautiful in a way the human part of him could still appreciate. Like seeing the world through an artist's eyes, everything reduced to essential information and glowing color.
The tunnel opened into a larger chamber where water trickled down one wall. Not a stream, but enough moisture to support different life. Kai's pressure-sense picked up movement near the water source. Something large. Something that had learned to stay very, very still.
His thermal vision showed… nothing.
No heat signature where something should be.
Every instinct he had screamed danger.
The shape moved.
One second the shadows were empty. The next, something massive lunged out of them like darkness made flesh. Serpentine body, thick as Kai's torso, with multiple limbs that shouldn't exist on anything snake-like. Gills flared along its sides, and its jaws opened wide enough to swallow him whole.
An eel. A massive eel that hunted on land.
Kai threw himself sideways on pure instinct, claws scrabbling for purchase on slick stone. The eel's jaws snapped shut where he'd been standing, teeth like daggers clicking together with bone-jarring force.
"Oh, you've got to be kidding me!"
The eel didn't give him time to process. It thrashed, using its bulk as a weapon, and one of those weird land-limbs caught Kai across the forearm. Pain exploded up his arm, followed by spreading numbness.
Venom.
"Okay, that's just rude!"
Fear spiked—sharp and clarifying. Loss of motor control meant death. If the venom spread, if his legs went numb, he'd be helpless. The eel would wrap around him and squeeze until something important broke.
So Kai did the only thing that made sense.
He attacked.
Not away from the eel, but into it—inside its striking range where those massive jaws couldn't get proper leverage. His claws found soft tissue between armored plates and he ripped, putting every ounce of strength into the strike.
The eel shrieked, an ultrasonic needle that made his bones hum, and tried to coil. Its body was terrifyingly strong, muscles like steel cables.
Kai bit down on the nearest section of flesh.
And didn't stop biting.
Jaw pressure spiked; his teeth sheared through the eel's body. He bit it in half.
A spray of yellowish ichor. The rear section twitched. The front spasmed. Then stillness.
Kai collapsed next to the corpse, breathing hard, venomed arm numb.
VENOM SACS DETECTEDPARTIAL NEUROTOXIN (PARALYSIS)ADAPTATION AVAILABLE: VENOM RESISTANCE (MINOR)INTEGRATE? Y/N
"Are you seriously asking me that right now?" he gasped. "Yes! Obviously yes!"
ADAPTATION INTEGRATEDVENOM RESISTANCE (MINOR): ACTIVEFUTURE ENCOUNTERS WITH NEUROTOXINS: 40% RESISTANCE
Warmth flooded him. The numbness receded—not instantly, but fast. His body was learning to neutralize the toxin in real time.
"Okay," he told the dead eel. "I'll admit that's pretty cool."
The Devin-voice stirred. We almost died.
"But we didn't," Kai said. "We won. And now we're going to get stronger."
He looked at the eel and felt satisfaction the human part recognized. The predator part just felt hungry.
Time to eat.