The first skill in the list that he was seeing for the first time was the one he’d already been using all morning without knowing its name.

[Featherfall Reflex (Uncommon - Bloodline) Evolution League 1]

-Passive: Automatically reduces fall damage by distributing kinetic energy across the entire body at the moment of impact. Temporarily decreases effective body weight during the final phase of descent and sideway impacts.

Triggers automatically during high-velocity landings or collisions. Damage reduction scales with skill level and Agility stat

-Level 1: 40% fall and brunt impact damage-reduction

He read it twice while the snake meat started sizzling on the stone next to him. So the fifteen-meter drop from the trees wasn’t some miracle. This skill had been working behind the scenes the entire time making his body lighter right before he hit the ground.

Forty percent at Level 1? So I was still taking sixty percent of the hit and it felt like nothing?

If it scaled the same way his other skills did then by Level 5 or 6 he could probably jump off buildings without thinking about it. And if the Agility scaling was real and his 46 Agility was already doing something in the formula then the effective reduction was probably higher than forty percent right now.

He swiped to the next one and almost choked on his own spit.

[Predatory Reflex (Uncommon - Bloodline) Evolution League 1]

-Passive/Active: Increases neural reaction speed in direct proportion to Perception, Intelligence and Agility stats. At current stat levels the user can process and react to visual and physical stimuli approximately 2.3x faster than baseline human capacity

-Reaction window allows multiple decision-action cycles within a single second

-Scaling: Reaction multiplier increases as contributing stats grow. No upper ceiling

No upper ceiling detected..?

What do you mean no upper....

He stared at those four words longer than anything else on the screen.

Right now he was roughly two times faster than a normal person at reacting to stuff. That explained why the fire snake strike had looked like slow motion this morning and why his hand had snatched that beetle mid-air without his brain being involved.

But "no upper ceiling" meant the multiplier just kept growing as his stats went up. Perception was already at 85. If that hit 150 or 200 someday...

So basically if my Perception keeps climbing I’ll eventually see fast things moving in slow motion? Like that scene in every superhero movie where the bullet is floating in the air?

And it wasn’t just about seeing things faster. The description said "multiple decision-action cycles within a single second." That meant he could decide to do something, start doing it and then decide to do something else and start that too, all before a full second had passed. Right now it was maybe two decisions per second. But if the multiplier hit 5x or 10x...

Ten things in one second. If my body was fast enough to actually follow my brain at that speed I could punch something five times before it finished blinking.

That was the catch though. His brain could process faster but his muscles still moved at regular speed. He needed way more Strength and Endurance to match the reaction speed or the skill would basically turn him into someone who could watch himself get beaten up in high-definition slow motion.

Which honestly sounded exactly like the kind of cruel joke this system would play on him. Give the Magician of Love a reaction speed skill that lets him watch punches coming in perfect detail without being fast enough to dodge them.

He swiped to the third skill and the screen that appeared had a golden border around the text that he hadn’t seen on the other two.

[Primal Senses (Uncommon - Bloodline) Evolution League 1]

-Passive: Permanently enhances all five primary senses and grants an adaptive sixth sensory layer modeled on apex feline predator biology. Visual acuity, olfactory range, auditory sensitivity, tactile precision and gustatory analysis all improved

-Sixth Sense: Ambient threat detection based on micro-environmental changes. Triggers involuntary physical responses to unidentified dangers

-Each level deepens sensory range and precision

Level 4 already huh..

He almost laughed. The skill had been running on overdrive all morning while he chased birds and smacked insects and pressed his face against tree bark sniffing things like a weirdo. Three hours of acting like a complete lunatic had apparently been enough to push it through three level-ups and the system hadn’t even bothered showing him the individual notifications because he’d been swiping everything away.

This was also why the beetle at twelve meters had been visible in shadow. Why the fire bird’s scream sounded different this morning, sharper and more layered like he could hear the individual vocal cords vibrating. Why the snake blood at the pond had been a "dinner bell" not just for the predators around him but for his own nose which had picked up the iron and the copper and something else in the blood he couldn’t name.

And the sixth sense part. That was the thing that had been making his shoulders tingle whenever something watched him from the treeline. He’d been feeling it all day but assumed it was paranoia from the cat instincts. It wasn’t paranoia. It was a passive skill literally detecting threats he couldn’t see.

Level 4. This thing went up three times in one morning just from me running around like an idiot. Five more levels and it hits Rare quality.

He didn’t finish the thought because his stomach growled so loud it sounded like one of the smaller predators in the brush around him.

The smell of the cooking snake meat had been building for minutes and his new nose made it ten times worse. The fat was rendering on the hot stone and the slow-roasting piece was turning golden brown near the edges and his entire body was screaming at him to eat something immediately. He hadn’t had real meat in almost a month. Grubs and mushrooms and boiled roots weren’t meat. They were survival food that kept him alive while making him miserable. This was actual animal protein sizzling on a hot surface and his evolved metabolism wanted it so badly his hands were shaking.

He forced himself to read the last skill before touching the food.

[Absolute Equilibrium (Uncommon) - Bloodline Evolution Skill]

-Passive: Improves balance, body weight distribution and fine motor control during all forms of movement. Each level grants incremental percentage improvements to stability and precision

-Secondary Effect (Permanent): Complete elimination of acrophobia and vertigo. The user cannot experience fear or disorientation from heights regardless of elevation

-Active Component: During falls, jumps or impacts, automatically optimizes body positioning for minimum damage and maximum recovery speed

-Level 1: 8% improvement to balance and body control precision

He tested the height thing immediately by looking straight down from the branch to the forest floor twenty meters below. Nothing. No tightness in his chest, no instinctive pull backward, no "what if I fall" whisper in the back of his brain. Just a gap between him and the ground that looked like a number instead of a threat. Twenty meters could’ve been two meters and his body would’ve reacted the same way.

I haven’t been scared of heights all morning. I thought it was adrenaline but this skill literally deleted the fear from my brain.

And this one worked together with Featherfall Reflex. One skill reduced fall damage and made him lighter on impact. The other one optimized his body position during falls and made his balance perfect. Together they basically turned him into something that could jump off anything and land ready to fight or run.

He closed the skill screens and leaned back against the trunk.

Four new Uncommon skills from one evolution and all of them scaled with his stats. Primal Senses was already Level 4 from this morning alone. Predatory Reflex had no upper ceiling. The other two worked together like they were designed as a combo.

And here was the thing that kept bouncing around in his head. Every skill he’d gotten so far had evolved to the next quality tier when it hit Level 9. Throw became Calculated Arc. Running became Kinetic Flux Runner. If that same rule applied to these bloodline skills then hitting Level 9 on Primal Senses would push it to Rare.

Primal Senses is already Level 4 and it got there in three hours of me acting like a lunatic. If I keep using it like that... a week? Maybe less?

He’d have three Rare skills. Three. A month ago he had zero skills period.

He pulled up his full stat panel to see the bigger picture but his Perception screamed at him before the screen finished loading.

Something was moving in the brush about eighty meters south. His Tracking skill picked up the weight of the footsteps, heavy, bipedal, definitely bigger than the fire snakes. His Primal Senses layered information on top of that. The scent was musky and mineral-heavy like crushed rock mixed with old sweat.

A blue screen appeared at the edge of his vision.

[Existing Skill Modified: Tracking (Basic) > Tracking (Basic - Feline Enhanced)]

-Sensory integration upgrade: Tracking now incorporates olfactory and auditory data in addition to visual cues

Oh great. Even my old skills got cat upgrades. That’s one of the two modified skills from the evolution.

He dismissed it and focused on the approaching threat. His nose told him it was close to seventy meters now and his ears could pick up the faint crack of branches under heavy feet. Whatever it was it wasn’t sneaking. It was walking directly toward his fire like it knew exactly where he was.

The meat. The smell of the cooking snake had been spreading through the forest for the last twenty minutes. If his enhanced nose could track it from here then every predator in a wide radius could too.

He looked at the two pieces of meat. The one on the stick over the fire was almost done and easy to grab. The piece on the hot stone was harder because he’d need something to lift it with and the stone surface was too hot to touch bare-handed. He’d prepared a small clean piece of wood earlier for exactly this purpose and stabbed it into the meat on the stone, angling the wood so he could yank it off quick if he needed to run.

Stick piece is grab-and-go. Stone piece needs the wood handle. Both are ready in maybe two more minutes.

His Tracking skill and Primal Senses were building a rough picture of the area around him. The approaching thing to the south was the biggest signature but there were smaller presences everywhere.

Birds shifting nervously in branches above. Something low and fast circling about a hundred meters east. Two or three mid-sized shapes lurking at the tree line to the west that had been watching him cook for the last ten minutes.

Would be nice to have a skill that maps everything around me. Like a radar or a minimap from a game. Tracking is close but I have to focus on things one by one. Something passive that just shows me everything alive within a radius...

He closed his eyes for two seconds and focused all his senses outward. Primal Senses gave him a wash of overlapping input.

Sounds layered on smells layered on the faintest vibrations through the ground under his bare feet. He could feel at least twelve living things within a hundred meters. Most of them were small and harmless but three of them had the heavy slow-breathing pattern of predators waiting for an opportunity.

And the big one from the south was now at sixty meters and still coming.

He opened his eyes and started reading his last unread notification while keeping his senses aimed north..