The real test came when he found the fire snakes about a kilometer south. The thick coiled ones that had nearly killed him during his first week. Each one was two meters long and they spat concentrated fireballs that could burn through wood.

Two weeks ago he would’ve run. Today he dropped from a tree branch right into the middle of three of them.

The first snake struck at his leg. He saw it coming in a way that felt slowed down and his leg moved sideways without him telling it to. His hand shot down and grabbed the snake behind the head before the fireball even left its throat.

The other two launched fireballs at the same time. Eren jumped sideways and the height he got surprised even himself, clearing almost four meters of lateral distance in one push. He threw the dead snake at one and snatched a rock mid-sprint. Calculated Arc guided it into the third snake’s skull from fifteen meters.

Three fire snakes in under ten seconds. A month ago a single one would’ve been a death sentence.

But his hands were shaking after the fight and his heart was slamming against his ribs hard enough to make his vision pulse. The cat reflexes had carried him through but one wrong timing on that first strike and the fireball would’ve hit him in the chest from point blank.

Don’t get cocky. I told myself that last week and it’s still the only rule that matters in this place.

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

-Level 8 > Level 9

He stood there breathing through his nose while his Perception fed him information from every direction. He could hear something heavy dragging through the brush about two hundred meters east. His nose picked up at least six different animal scents in the area and one of them was different.

It wasn’t an animal smell. Warm and alive and slightly sweet like clean skin after a bath. His body reacted before his brain identified it. A heat spread through his lower stomach and his feet took two steps toward the scent before he caught himself.

What the hell? That smells like a person. There’s nobody here. The closest humanoid things are goblins and orcs and there’s no way my body is reacting to a goblin.

The scent faded as the wind shifted and the heat in his stomach died down.

Cat instincts. Some feline mating thing mixed up with my human wiring probably.

He walked in the opposite direction and kept his nose pointed at the ground and searched for a big hunt.

And found it as a big snake hiding in a patch of little dirty grass about a half kilometer further south.

A fire elemental python. At least four meters long with scales that shimmered between orange and deep red like heated metal. Its entire body radiated warmth like a furnace left running overnight. He’d seen one from a distance two weeks ago and immediately ran.

But it was also slow and should be hiding underground or in the cool of trees not on the ground like this..?

He didn’t know if this was injured or just old.

But apart from it’s fast strike range it didn’t have any danger for him today. It wasn’t dangerous for Eren because it’s range of strike was maybe two meters at most and outside of that it relied on its heat aura to keep things away.

His new reflexes made two meters strike jumps feel like slow motion baby moves.

Eren knew his eyes was going to be effective but this was already too much. Giant snake looked like slow moving kid using it’s cute fangs and body to catch him. But it was too clumsy in his eyes. Having Cat reflexes and eyes was great!

He still didn’t rush it though.

Eren grabbed two heavy rocks and his sharpened stick before approaching and kept Kinetic Flux Runner active in case he needed to sprint away. Being confident was fine but being stupid in this forest meant being dead in a moment.

He threw the first rock from a safe distance. Calculated Arc upgrade of his throwing skill guided it into the snake’s midsection and the impact made the python coil defensively.

It really felt like it was a auto aim feature because it was suppose to graze it’s body, not this perfect strike!

The second rock hit its head from a different angle before the python finished turning. He closed the gap fast and drove the sharpened stick through the softer scales behind the jaw to it’s brain.

The python thrashed and a wave of heat exploded outward but the temperature that would’ve blistered him a week ago only made his skin prickle now. He kept pushing until the thrashing stopped.

That would’ve cooked me if I didn’t dodge the most dangerous parts..

He grabbed the python behind the head and started dragging it back toward his tree. Four meters of dead snake weighed more than he expected but the old Eren from Istanbul couldn’t have dragged this thing ten meters without his arms giving out. This version of him jogged the full kilometer and only switched hands twice.

The moment he crouched by the pond with his stone blade the snake blood became a dinner bell.

His Perception started screaming at him from three directions at once. Movement in the brush to his left and right and something heavy shifting behind the tree line to the north. At least four predator scents closing in from downwind.

The smell of blood in this forest was a death sentence normally. And he could feel it better than yesterday how animals tracked the blood smell.

He was a partly animal.

But Eren worked fast. Swift Snatcher and all the other stat or skill effects, even the ones he didn’t read yet helped his hands identify the juiciest and highest quality meat by touch alone.

He cut two thick parts from the midsection where the scales were thinnest and wrapped them in broad leaves. The rest of the four-meter carcass he left at the water’s edge. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

Take it. Fair trade for letting me work and not eating me, I guess..

He was back in his tree’s safe zone in under three minutes and the rustling behind him confirmed that whatever had been watching didn’t wait long to claim the leftovers.

He found a boulder about twenty meters from his tree trunk with a natural crack running through the top. He punched the edge and a chunk broke off with a clean-ish flat surface. The punch barely hurt. A month ago that would’ve shattered his knuckles.

If Portakal could see me now. Punching rocks and cooking snake meat in a magical forest. My dad always said cats land on their feet. Guess that’s me now.

He hauled the flat stone to his fire pit and balanced it over the coals from his morning fire. Built the fire bigger than usual and surrounded it with rocks to contain the heat. One slab of snake meat went directly on the hot stone. The other one he wedged between two upright rocks closer to the edge for indirect slow heat.

Two cooking methods at the same time. One stone-grilling and one slow-roasting.

Yesterday he would’ve done one method and called it enough. Today his hands wouldn’t stop working.

Something in his metabolism had shifted and the lazy part of his brain that used to say "good enough" after every minimum-effort task was just gone. Not reduced or managed but actually missing.

He started thinking about drying fruits near fire and smoking meat on green branch racks and wrapping things in mud and burying them under hot rocks like he’d seen in a survival show once.

Whether the mushrooms would taste less like wet cardboard if he toasted them with the river herbs he’d been ignoring for weeks. Whether he could find some kind of clay deposit near the pond and shape it into an actual cooking pot so he wouldn’t have to balance meat on flat rocks like a caveman.

[Congratulations! You have learned a new skill]

[Cooking (Basic) - First Evolution League]

-Improves the quality and nutritional value of prepared food. Reduces chance of accidental poisoning from improperly cooked ingredients

He stared at the notification and laughed. Almost a month of eating raw grubs and stolen fruit and the system picks now to acknowledge that he could officially cook now.

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

-Level 1 > Level 2

It leveled up already? From using two different methods at the same time?

The snake meat on the stone was starting to sizzle and the piece near the indirect heat was changing color slower. His enhanced nose was picking up layers in the cooking he’d never noticed before, the fat rendering out of the meat, something mineral from the elemental scales that hadn’t fully burned off, a faint sweetness from the fruit wood in the fire mixing into the smoke.

He sat back and watched the meat cook. The afternoon sun filtered through the canopy and the strongest predators in the forest were in their dens sleeping off their morning hunts. His Perception scanned the surroundings in a constant low hum and nothing dangerous was moving nearby.

But he also knew that feeling of safety was the most dangerous thing in this forest.

Three hours ago he was chasing dragonflies like a lunatic and the world around him hadn’t gotten any less lethal just because his reflexes improved.

The turtles he’d watched two days ago could still drain every drop of liquid from their enemies’ body without breaking their walk. The centipede could still crush him flat.

The dragon on the mountain could probably end everything in a square kilometer just by landing too hard or scream for five seconds.

Better than yesterday. But not enough to act like it’s all good now. Not even close.

He sprinted to the pond but this time used another part which didn’t have blood. Eren could see his old bloody location and there was too many creatures still making a scene there. Escaping there in the shortest time possible was the right call.

Here, the water was calm and crouched at the edge to look at his reflection.

His face was mostly the same but his eyes had changed. The irises were still brownish with some gray with mixes of some blue and green touches. It wasn’t permanent and the following days Eren would see how his eyes would end up. He would like to have blue eyes but probably it wasn’t going to happen.

Also his new pupils were narrower, compressed into tall ovals in the bright afternoon light instead of the round human circles he’d had his whole life. In dimmer light they’d probably expand to near-normal but right now they looked distinctly inhuman.

His body was leaner too.

The muscle definition in his chest and shoulders was sharper than yesterday and his waist had narrowed. Not a dramatic overnight transformation though. More like someone had turned up the resolution on muscles that were already there.

Peter Parker gets bitten by one spider and wakes up with a six-pack and twenty-twenty vision overnight. I eat an entire magical electric cat over two days and I get slightly weird pupils and maybe lost two kilos. Come on system. Where’s my montage?

But something was happening under the surface that he could feel even if he couldn’t see it yet. His body was burning through energy at a rate that scared him. He’d eaten his entire morning food stash plus whatever he grabbed while running around like a maniac and his stomach was already growling again.

The system had warned him about increased caloric demands during the adaptation period and that warning was making more sense by the hour.

If this keeps up I need to eat double or triple what I’ve been eating. The snake meat isn’t a luxury anymore. It’s survival.

He jogged back to the fire and sat down cross-legged. The stone-grilled piece was almost done and the slow-roasted one needed more time. His body wanted food right now but his brain told him to use the waiting time for something he’d been putting off all morning.

He pulled up the skill notifications he’d been swiping away since dawn.

There were a lot of them.

The evolution had dumped new skills into his system and he hadn’t read a single description. He’d caught names flashing by during the chaos of waking up and through the morning of chasing birds and smacking insects and jumping between trees like a lunatic. Every time a blue screen appeared he’d swiped it away because sitting still long enough to read felt physically impossible with the cat instincts pushing him to move.

But the instincts had settled and the meat was cooking and the afternoon was quiet enough to sit still for more than ten seconds.

Alright. Let’s see what "Feline Predator or Cat-Man" in my words actually gave me besides weird eyes.

He opened his system panel and started scrolling through the new entries.