The fire pit at the base of the tree still had ash and rocks from his snake cooking setup but the leftover raw python meat was gone. Something had taken it while he was away which was expected.

He dropped the long stick he’d been carrying and unwrapped the vine from his arm. The roots at the end of the cutting looked dry but still alive so he dug a shallow hole about two meters from the trunk and buried the root end in loose soil. The rest of the vine he guided upward along the bark and tied it to the trunk with strips of his old rope.

If those fire apes can maintain an entire fruit grove and the wolves keep beetle farms then I can grow one vine. A permanent food source right next to where I sleep.

He was tying the last strip of rope when something struck at his ankle from the base of a rock near the fire pit.

His Predatory Reflex caught the movement before his conscious brain registered it and his leg pulled back just enough that the fangs scraped across his skin instead of sinking in. A small snake, maybe forty centimeters long with dark green scales and a triangular head that screamed "venomous" in every language including snake.

It coiled for a second strike and Eren looked at the stick he’d dropped on the ground a meter away. The stick wasn’t sharpened. It wasn’t even particularly sturdy. Just a long piece of wood he’d picked up on his walk home.

Okay. Let’s try something.

He grabbed the stick and pointed the blunt end at the snake while pulling up every point of mana his body had. The Mana-Infused Stabbing skill activated and he could feel the energy flowing from his core down his arm and into the wood. Not a lot of it because his mana pool was only 120 and the skill drained it fast but the tip of the stick started glowing with a faint blue-white light that he’d never seen before because he’d never pumped this much mana into a single stab.

The snake lunged and Eren drove the stick forward.

The blunt wooden tip went through the snake’s head like it was made of wet paper. No resistance at all. The mana coating had turned a useless piece of wood into something that could punch through scales and bone without even needing an edge.

The snake went limp on the end of the stick and Eren stared at it while his mana pool drained to zero.

The stick isn’t sharp. It’s not even pointed properly. But with enough mana behind it the skill doesn’t care about the weapon’s quality. It just goes through.

[You gained 100% energy of Green Fang Viper (Poison Variant) - Level 8]

[Congratulations! Your skill Mana-Infused Stabbing (Uncommon) levelled up]

-Level 2 > Level 3

He pulled the stick out of the dead snake and looked at it. The tip was clean. Not even stained with blood because the mana had cauterized the entry wound on contact.

If I had more mana... if I had 500 or 1000 points of it... I could punch through anything with a stick. A rock or even my bare finger. The weapon doesn’t matter. The mana does all the work.

That was the first time since getting this skill that its mana component felt useful instead of wasteful. At Level 2 with 50 mana it had been a joke. At Level 3 with 120 mana it was a proof of concept. At whatever level and mana pool he’d have in six months or a year it could be his primary weapon.

He flicked the dead snake off the stick and left it for the scavengers.

The sun was getting low and he needed to clean up before dark. His cat nose could still smell traces of goblin waste in the creases of his skin and behind his ears and the thought of sleeping in his own bed smelling like that made his chest tight with the grooming anxiety that had been plaguing him since the evolution.

His water source was a small lake about three hundred meters from his tree. He’d been drinking from it for weeks but had never gone in because the water was dark enough that he couldn’t see the bottom. But today he was Level 31 with Primal Senses at Level 9 and his Perception was telling him in very clear terms that nothing larger than a small fish lived in the shallows.

He grabbed one of his stone cups and scooped ash from the dead fire pit. Somewhere in the back of his brain, maybe a history class or one of those survival shows he used to watch at three in the morning, he’d heard that people used to wash with ash. Wood ash and water made something like soap.

He waded into the shallows and the cold water hit his skin and his cat instincts screamed at him for about three seconds before the grooming relief kicked in. He scrubbed ash into his skin in handfuls and it did foam up a little, not like real soap but enough that he could feel the remaining grime lifting off.

He spent extra time on the areas that needed it most. The chafing between his legs was healing but still raw. The back of his neck where sweat and dirt had crusted. And everything else that had been through more physical abuse in the last forty-eight hours than most people experienced in a lifetime.

"If Rosa could see me right now.." he said to the empty lake while scrubbing his chest. "Naked in a magic lake washing myself with fireplace ash. She’d either laugh until she cried or call my mother to come get me."

He climbed out feeling lighter than he had in days. Not clean by Earth standards but clean enough that his cat brain stopped sending distress signals. He refilled all three stone cups and carried them back to the tree. The climb up to his sleeping platform took about four seconds with his new Extreme Climbing skill and he placed the cups in their spots one-handed while his feet gripped the bark.

The old rope ties were hanging from the branch above his platform. The ones he’d used to strap himself in every night so he wouldn’t roll off and fall twenty meters. He looked at them and grinned. With Absolute Equilibrium deleting his height fear and Featherfall Reflex turning any fall into a soft landing and Extreme Climbing letting him grip surfaces in any direction he could probably sleep upside down and not fall.

He jumped off the platform. Not climbed down but just stepped off the edge and dropped twenty meters to the forest floor. Featherfall Reflex engaged automatically, his body weight decreased at the last moment of descent and Absolute Equilibrium rotated him into a perfect landing position. His feet hit the ground with barely any impact.

[Congratulations! Your skill Featherfall Reflex (Uncommon) levelled up]

-Level 2 > Level 3

It leveled up from that? I’ve been jumping off things all day but that one felt smoother and more automatic. Like I wasn’t even thinking about it.

The skill hadn’t leveled from quantity of use but from quality. The jump just now had been completely unconscious with zero thought and zero preparation, just stepping off an edge and letting his body handle everything.

So skills don’t just grow from being used a lot. They grow from being used better. More naturally.

A few ideas from Earth floated through his head. Martial artists who trained the same punch ten thousand times until their body threw it without conscious input. Musicians who practiced scales until their fingers moved on their own. Athletes who talked about being "in the zone" where thinking stopped and instinct took over.

That’s the trick. Make every skill feel like breathing. And then it levels up because it graduated from "ability I use" to "thing I am." 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

He climbed back up to his platform. The sun was setting behind the canopy and the fire birds were settling into their evening positions on the outer branches.

He sat on the edge of his platform with his legs dangling over the drop and activated his Observe skill on everything within range. His Hunter’s Tracking layered on top of it and together they painted a picture of every living thing he could reach. The fire birds in his tree. The beetle colonies in the roots below. A pack of wolves two hundred meters east that he could smell but not see. The faint thermal signature of something large sleeping in a cave half a kilometer north.

He cycled through them one by one practicing the focus and release of Observe on each target. Some gave him levels and species data. Others gave him nothing but a feeling of relative strength. Nothing leveled up but that was fine because he’d just started.

He sat there until the last light faded from the canopy and the forest sounds shifted from daytime to nighttime. His eyes adjusted automatically with pupils widening as the darkness deepened until the moonlit forest below him was as clear as a cloudy afternoon.

Wyverns looked at me like I was a bug. Two days ago I couldn’t do anything about that. Couldn’t fight them, couldn’t outrun them, couldn’t even make them consider me a threat. They just watched me like I was nothing.

His jaw tightened and something in his eyes changed. His pupils contracted to thin vertical slits for about two seconds, sharper and more predatory than the soft ovals they usually settled into at night. The expression on his face had nothing to do with the confused curiosity or the self-deprecating humor that had defined most of his time in this forest.

It was something colder and hungrier and it lasted only a moment before his face relaxed and his pupils softened back to their normal nighttime shape. But it had been there. And somewhere underneath the exhaustion and the relief of being home a part of Eren that hadn’t existed a month ago was already making plans of its own.

He lay back on the bark platform and closed his eyes. His Primal Senses kept scanning even as sleep pulled him under and twenty meters below his tree the forest went about its nightly business.

Tomorrow he’d start grinding. Twenty-nine days in and he was just getting started to conquer this damn forest..!