Eren’s eyes opened to blue screens.

Not one or two like a level-up or a skill notification. Dozens of them, layered on top of each other in his vision like someone had dumped an entire system update while he was unconscious. The text was blurry and his brain was still somewhere between sleep and whatever the hell that dream had been.

He blinked and the screens reorganized themselves. Most of them collapsed into a queue at the edge of his vision but three stayed in focus, bright and clear and clearly important.

[Congratulations! Evolution Process Succesfully Completed!]

-Catalyst of repeated consumption of Electromagnetic Feline Organism and Selected Evolution Path: Lightning + Speed

-Genetic Adaptation Result: Feline Predator Integration - Partial

[Racial Detail Updated: Humanoid > Humanoid (Feline-Adapted)]

[Physical Restructuring: Active in the Post Evolution Phase]

-Metabolic acceleration is expected in this progress

[WARNING: Caloric demands will increase significantly during adaptation period]

-New skills acquired: 4

-Existing skills modified: 2

-Full details available in System Panel

He read the words three times while lying on his back on the sleeping branch but had a hard time to understand what it said or meant.

The rope around his waist was still tied to the branch and the inner trunk of his giant oak-pine hybrid was as quiet as it always was. No insects, no birds, nothing. Just the distant screaming of the fire birds on the outer canopy that he’d been using as an alarm clock for four weeks.

Feline Predator Integration. So the cat meat actually changed what I am. I wonder what was the other choice.

The screens faded when he stopped focusing on them. He could still feel the full queue of unread notifications sitting at the edge of his awareness but reading skill descriptions while half-asleep on a tree branch felt like a bad use of his time.

He sat up and untied the rope.

His fingers moved faster than he expected. The knot he’d been fumbling with every morning for twenty-seven days came apart in one smooth pull and the rope dropped into his lap before he registered what his hands had done.

He looked down at his hands. The fingers were the same shape but the tendons stood out sharper under the skin and his nails looked thicker at the base. Not claws or anything that dramatic but definitely harder than yesterday.

Then he noticed his eyes new clarity.

The bark of the tree wasn’t just brown anymore. He could see individual fibers in the wood grain like yesterday’s Perception boost but now there was something else layered on top of it.

The shadows between branches had depth and gradients. The dark spaces under leaves that used to be just "dark" now contained shapes and textures he’d never been able to resolve before.

A beetle crawling on the underside of a branch twelve meters away near the outer canopy was perfectly visible even though it was completely in shadow.

I can see in the dark. Like a cat?

That word kept coming back. Cat. Cat-Man. Like Spider-Man...

The electric cat he’d been eating messed up things in the best way possible and he wasn’t complaining.

The "Lightning and Speed" choice was proven to be great already. He wondered if his irises or eye shape changed but apart from that it was cool.

His body was tingling with the same buzzing electrical warmth from the first bite of that meat ,except now it wasn’t fading and flowing inside but he wasn’t too sure about the details.

It was like there was a elemental buff inside his body permanently and it baked into everything; his muscles, his skin, even the way his fingers gripped the bark felt different.

He didn’t have electric shooting powers but somehow his body was more attuned to speed and currents..which was awesome in his book!!

He carved the twenty-seventh scratch mark into the trunk with his sharpest stone which was also tied to a rope he made days ago.

The stone went deeper than usual. He wasn’t pressing harder but his hand was steadier and the angle was more precise than any of the previous twenty-six marks and maybe his physical power was also higher.

Then he climbed down and the moment he reached the outer branches, everything changed.

His safe zone ended where the inner trunk’s influence stopped. The outer canopy was fire bird territory and they were already awake and screaming like broken car alarms the way they did every single morning.

A fat one sitting on a branch about four meters away turned its head and looked at him.

Eren’s entire body locked onto the bird like a lazer targeting system. His eyes tracked its head movement, his fingers twitched against the bark and something in the back of his brain lit up with a single overwhelming impulse to chase it. Not to kill it or eat it, just chase. The movement had triggered something primal that he couldn’t override.

No. No no no. I’m not doing this.

He did it.

His legs pushed off the branch and he launched toward the bird with a speed and angle that shouldn’t have been possible for someone his size.

The fire bird shrieked and took off from its perch. Eren grabbed a thin branch and swung himself through a gap between two thick limbs, his body twisting sideways to fit through a space he would’ve gotten stuck in yesterday.

The bird shot a fireball over its shoulder. Eren ducked under it by bending backward on the branch until his spine was almost parallel to the wood and he didn’t wobble even a millimeter. The fireball sailed over his chest and exploded against a trunk somewhere behind him.

He didn’t care about the fireball. His eyes were locked on the bird and his legs were already coiling for another jump.

His human brain caught up about three seconds later and he forced himself to stop on a branch and grip it with both hands until the urge faded. It took about thirty seconds. During those thirty seconds his eyes tracked every single moving thing within visual range, a beetle crawling up a trunk, leaves spinning in the wind, a small lizard darting between rocks on the forest floor twenty meters below.

His brain wanted to chase all of them.

He sat there waiting for the instinct to pass and a blue screen of system appeared somewhere in the notification queue. He ignored all of them for now.

The remaining morning time was a disaster in the most entertaining way possible.

Eren spent the first two hours after sunrise doing things he had absolutely no rational explanation for.

He chased fire birds through the outer canopy and got almost hit by two fireballs that his Pain Resistance worked but they didn’t really connect with his body.

They still made him feel some mild to mid level warmth on his skin and it was kind of dangerous but Feline Eren didn’t give a damn.

He caught a fat beetle out of the air with one hand while hanging upside down. And he did it on a tiny branch by his knees alone, his core locked perfectly still without any effort like his body had forgotten what losing balance was.

He stared at the beetle for ten seconds before letting it go because his human brain caught up and asked what exactly he was planning to do with an insect.

He jumped from a high branch down to the forest floor about fifteen meters below and landed in a hard rocky floor but the fall felt completely natural. No pain in his knees and no shock through his ankles, bare feet... just a smooth compression and release like his legs had springs and shock absorbers inside them.

Another notification showed up as he landed but he was already sprinting into the underbrush chasing for something that moved in the leaves.

I’ve been dropping from five meters and worrying about my ankles for the last weeks. I just did fifteen and it felt like stepping off a curb.

His father had a cat when Eren was eight years old. A fat orange tabby named Portakal that means Orange in his language. And it used to spent sixteen hours a day sleeping and the remaining eight terrorizing everything in the house that moved. Bugs, mice, his mother’s yarn, the curtain tassels. Portakal didn’t care what it was. If it moved he slapped it.

His mother screamed at that cat three times a day minimum for it’s weird antics and then hugged it and forgave that little lazy terror.

Portakal would sit on the kitchen counter with his fat bored face and knock things off the edge one by one while making direct eye contact with her. She threw a slipper at him once and missed by two meters. The cat didn’t even flinch. Just sat there licking his paw like he owned the entire house.

Which he did. Everyone in the family knew it.

Eren was now Portakal in a way...

He realized this around the almost two hours of time spent when he found himself sitting on a boulder smacking at dragonflies as they buzzed past his head.

His right hand was swiping with an open palm at anything that entered his peripheral vision and he’d already killed two by accident without feeling bad about it which was the disturbing part.

Rosa used to throw couch pillows at him during arguments and he’d get hit in the face every single time. Now his hand was intercepting flying insects at full speed without his brain even being part of the process.

[Congratulations! Your skill Climbing (Basic) levelled up]

-Level 7 > Level 8

The climbing had been so effortless all morning that he forgot he was doing it half the time. His body found grips and angles on the bark that his old hands would’ve slipped off of. And the Climbing skill was level 5 yesterday so he levelled it up like 3 times this morning?

Just wow..

..

The cat instincts started calming down after about three hours. Not disappearing but settling into a background hum instead of screaming at him to lunge at everything that twitched.

Eren climbed back into his tree’s inner trunk zone and sat on his sleeping platform breathing through his nose. Not from exhaustion but from the slow realization of how much energy he’d just wasted doing absolutely nothing productive for three straight hours.

He pressed his face against the trunk of the giant oak-pine hybrid and inhaled deeply with his new nose. Then few more times acting like a cat with fast and short paced sniffs.

It was weird.

But with his old senses, this tree had always smelled like bark and resin and nothing else.

Now he could pick apart layers inside the wood. Some kind of mineral content deep in the heartwood, a faintly sweet sap running through channels under the surface, the dried smell of fire bird droppings crusted on the distant outer branches. But nothing dangerous. Nothing that his new instincts flagged as a threat.

So what the hell keeps everything away from this main trunk?

He’d been sleeping here for almost four weeks and the inner area had always been completely untouched. No insects, no predators, no territorial lizards, not even the ants that organized supply chains everywhere else in this forest.

He’d always assumed the tree was doing something, some kind of magical repelling property in the wood. But his cat nose was telling him the tree was just a tree. A big weird tree with glowing leaves but still just wood and bark and sap.

Something else was protecting this space. And whatever it was he couldn’t smell it or see it but every single creature in this forest respected it.

He thought about the other safe zones he’d found in twenty-seven days. The turtles with their pressurized water defense and traveled to who know where like untouchables. The ghost-deer grazed in their white tree clearing without a single predator bothering them.

And the dragon’s mountain, that massive rock to the north where he’d seen something enormous circling on day ten, he’d bet everything he owned that nothing in this forest went anywhere near that peak.

Everything he owned being three stone cups and a pair of ruined shorts but the point was some apex beings- not just creatures but also trees or some other things were taboos in the forest.

Apex creatures created safe zones just by existing. Their territories became dead zones for everything below them on the food chain.

And somehow this tree’s main body was considered as a apex creature or something was really weird here..

If I ever get strong enough to create that kind of pressure around myself, then I could sleep anywhere. Travel north to ask that Dragon about my situation. Or go other ways and find out why I’m here or if there are smart civilizations on this place..?

It was the first time in weeks that the thought didn’t feel completely delusional. But he shook it off.

Daydreaming or not, this plans wasn’t going to fill his stomach and his stomach was already growling again even though he’d eaten his entire morning food stash before the cat-man chaos started.

Like a fast arrow, he jumped down from his sleeping area to floor and landed like a feather.

I love the new me!.

HAHAHA

Eren continued to jump around and mess with everything weak in every chance he got even after his head cooled down..