[You gained 100% energy of Northern Rock Gorilla (Alpha)]

[Congratulations! You have reached Level 31]

-All stats increased by 1

-You gained 1 Stat Point to distribute

Six levels. From 25 to 31 in a few seconds..

The energy hit him like a wave of warm water flooding through every muscle and joint and bone in his body. The exhaustion that had been building for hours dissolved and his headache vanished and the deep structural ache in his skull went quiet for the first time since the chase began. His fingers stopped tingling and his feet stopped throbbing and even the blisters felt less raw.

A system warning appeared after the wave settled.

[WARNING: Caloric deficit critical. Physical restructuring paused. Resume adequate nutrition to continue adaptation process after the Evolution]

[WARNING:

The invincibility feeling drained out of him as fast as it had arrived. Six levels meant nothing if his body ate itself from the inside because he hadn’t put real food in it for almost a full day.

He stood up on legs that felt new and strong and looked at the bloody scene behind him one more time.

Then he walked away.

..

The water source took him fifteen minutes to find. Not the same one from before but a different crack in a different wall that wept cold metallic water into a shallow depression in the stone.

He drank until his stomach was full and then pulled up his system panel while the water settled.

Current Physical Details;

/ -

Usable Evon Stat Points: 6

Strength: 60

Perception: 91

-Endurance: 40

-Intelligence: 42

-Agility: 51

-Mana: 12

-Charisma: 35 (+99) 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

-Luck: 41

/ -

Every stat had jumped by six from the level-ups alone. His Perception was at 91 now, his Agility had broken 51 and his Intelligence had crossed 40 but he didn’t feel any difference with his intellect.

Even his Mana had doubled from 6 to 12 which meant his Mana Pool had gone from 50 to roughly 120.

That means Invisibility went from five seconds to twelve seconds. And my mana regeneration should be faster too.

Six unspent stat points was waiting for him in the panel for his decision.

Strength or Mana?

More physical power or more magical utility. Twelve seconds of Invisibility had almost worked in the feeding hall except the wyverns could see through it anyway so more mana wouldn’t help with that specific problem.

But Strength... six levels had already pushed it from 60. Six more points would put it at 66 and with Physical Durability’s fifteen percent boost that would be an effective Strength of about 76 in real life.

He’d decide later. Right now he needed to get out of this mountain without the wyverns noticing.

The tunnels going downward were darker and colder and smaller than the ones near the wyvern levels. Eren moved through them with the careful silence of something that knew it was trespassing in a predator’s home and that every second it stayed was borrowed time.

His cat-adapted eyes handled the total darkness without any problems and his Primal Senses at Level 9 were painting the tunnel system in such detail that he could feel the texture of the stone walls from two meters away through air pressure alone.

If those wyverns can still sense me I’m going to lose it. Just once I want the paranoid thing I’m worried about to not be true.

"Please don’t be waiting for me outside.." he whispered to nobody.

Something lunged at him from a crevice in the wall about forty minutes into his descent.

It was fast and dark and about the size of a large cat with a long tail and teeth that glinted in the nothing-light of his enhanced vision. His Predatory Reflex caught it before his conscious brain registered the attack and his hand moved on its own. He grabbed the thing by the back of the neck mid-lunge and slammed it against the tunnel wall with a force that surprised even him.

The creature went limp. His new Strength at 59 had turned what should’ve been a defensive shove into a killing blow.

[You gained 100% energy of Dark Rat (Poison Variant) - Level 11]

He looked at the dead animal in his hand. It was some kind of oversized rodent with dark fur and elongated fangs that dripped something greenish. Poison Variant meant the bite would’ve been toxic.

He considered eating it for about three seconds. His stomach was screaming for protein and his metabolism was burning through the water he’d just drunk like it was nothing.

No. I’m not eating a raw poison rat in a dark tunnel. I’m not that desperate yet. The level-ups bought me time and I’ll find something better.

He dropped the rat and kept moving downward.

The next half hour was quiet enough to make him nervous. His Primal Senses detected no large threats in the immediate tunnels and the wyvern signatures were far above and behind him in the upper chambers. The mountain was settling around him with groans and clicks of cooling stone and somewhere very far above a deep vibration rolled through the rock like something massive had landed on the peak.

The dragon was back on its mountain. The vibration was the impact of a forty-meter predator touching down on rock after whatever rampage it had been on in the southern forest.

Whatever that thing was attacking down south is either dead or wishes it was. And now it’s home. Great. I’m inside a mountain that’s a few hundred meters below a dragon’s roost. This is fine.

He kept descending through narrower and narrower passages until his Primal Senses picked up something unexpected.

Fresh air and organic matter. Not animal but plant.

The passage opened into a section of tunnel where a crack in the outer wall let in cold night air from outside. The crack was too narrow for his body but wide enough to see through and through it he could see the mountainside dropping away into darkness under a half moon.

And growing along the crack, threading through the stone and out onto the cliff face and back in again in a tangled zigzag pattern, was a vine with small orange fruit clustered along its length.

Eren pulled one off and sniffed it. His enhanced nose gave him a full breakdown in about two seconds. No toxins, no magical signatures, moderate sugar content and a dense fleshy structure that reminded him of a small plum crossed with an olive. Not magical and not dangerous, just food.

He ate it. Then he ate another one. Then he started pulling them off the vine with both hands and shoving them into his mouth three at a time.

They tasted like a plum that had been left in the sun too long and then soaked in mineral water. Not good exactly but so far from bad that his starving body treated each one like a five-star meal.

He ate fifteen from the inside section and then squeezed his arm through the crack and pulled another fifteen from the vine growing on the outer cliff face. The night air hit his skin through the gap and he could see the forest spread out below, dark and vast under the moonlight.

Thirty fruit. His stomach felt human again for the first time in almost a day. The structural warning in his body, the deep ache that had been telling him something was wrong for hours, dissolved as the calories hit his bloodstream.

Okay. Not dead and not starving and not being chased. For the first time since this morning all three of those things are true at the same time.

He sat down with his back against the wall next to the crack where cold night air came through and mixed with the warmer air inside the tunnel. His Primal Senses scanned the area one more time. Nothing threatening in any direction for at least a hundred meters.

He’d go back to the forest in the morning. Set up a new camp somewhere. Find food and build tools. Figure out where he was relative to his old tree even if it took days.

He’d also need to think about those seven stat points and the fact that his Primal Senses was at Level 9 and one evolution threshold away from becoming a Rare quality skill which still had a question mark about this whole system.

He hoped all of his skills would get upgraded quality options for their evolution choices.

And he needed to think about the Northern Rock Gorillas and why their last two members had died trying to kill a man who’d never heard their name.

When I find the people who sent me here and left me among these dangerous creatures, I’m going to fuck them in the a*s...

He was thinking about random thoughts with sudden fullness but then Eren stopped caring about random bulls*it.

All of that was tomorrow’s problem.

His eyes closed.

His body shut down so fast and so completely that he didn’t feel himself slide sideways against the wall. Through the crack in the stone the moonlight painted a thin silver line across his face and the dark forest below stretched out into the distance.

Somewhere very far above him a dragon was sleeping on a mountain peak.

For the first time in a month his body wasn’t fighting for survival. It was just sleeping. And it was the kind of deep, heavy, dreamless sleep that Eren hadn’t had since he was a kid falling asleep in the backseat of his father’s car on the way home from his grandmother’s village.

It was the best sleep of his life.