The fire birds woke him up at sunrise like they did every morning and for the first time in thirty-one days Eren didn’t hate them for it.

He lay on his back on the thick branch platform and listened to the screeching with something that wasn’t quite gratitude but wasn’t annoyance either. More like the feeling you got when a neighbor’s dog barked every morning at six AM for years and you finally learned that the dog had been scaring away burglars the whole time.

Still annoying but now I understand things better now..

He sat up and stretched and his spine popped in three places and his shoulders cracked and his jaw opened in a yawn so wide his new canines showed. The bark under him was hard and rough and his old body would’ve woken up sore from sleeping on it but his cat-adapted muscles didn’t seem to care about surface hardness anymore. He’d slept without the rope ties for the third night in a row and hadn’t moved an inch. His Absolute Equilibrium kept his body perfectly balanced even unconscious.

I’m getting comfortable with this. Too comfortable maybe. Yesterday I caught myself thinking about how nice it would be to sleep in a smaller tighter space like a cabinet or a crawl space. Like Portakal used to squeeze into the kitchen cupboard and sleep behind the pots even though she had a perfectly good cat bed.

Portakal. His parents’ orange tabby who’d been ancient even when Eren was a kid. That cat had refused to drink from her water bowl for the last three years of her life and would only drink from the bathroom faucet if someone turned it on for her. She’d also licked the same spot on the living room wall every evening for reasons nobody ever figured out.

If I start licking walls, I’m going to have a serious conversation with whatever part of my DNA is responsible for this..

He stood up on the branch and looked down at the forest floor twenty meters below. The birds were screaming from the outer branches in their usual morning positions and the first rays of sunlight were cutting through the canopy in golden shafts.

"Good morning you ugly beautiful bastards!" he yelled at the birds.

A few of them turned their heads to look at him. Most kept screaming.

He stepped off the branch.

No hesitation, no preparation, no conscious activation of any skill. Just a yawn and a step forward into empty air while his mind was busy thinking about whether he should check the fire ape fruit trees first or the deer territory. His body dropped twenty meters and Featherfall Reflex caught him so smoothly that his bare feet touched the ground with about as much impact as stepping off a stair.

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

-Level 3 > Level 4

He grinned while brushing a leaf off his shoulder. Starting the day with a skill level-up by doing nothing more than stepping off a branch while yawning. The system kept rewarding seamless unconscious use over deliberate practice and he was starting to understand why. A skill that felt like breathing was worth more to the system than a skill that felt like work.

Breakfast was a chunk of yesterday’s cooked python that he ate while walking through the perimeter of his territory. The meat was cold and a little tough from sitting overnight but his Enhanced teeth handled it fine and his stomach was grateful for protein after a month of mostly fruit and stolen scraps.

His first stop was the turtle.

The magical turtle lived about a hundred and fifty meters southeast of his tree in a wet depression between two fallen logs where groundwater seeped up through the soil and formed a shallow pool. It was about the size of a large dinner plate with a dark green shell that had faint blue veins running through it like circuitry. Not a blood-magic turtle like the terrifying ones he’d seen near the northern border but something quieter and more defensive.

During his first week Eren had watched a venomous snake strike at this turtle and bounce off an invisible barrier that materialized about ten centimeters from the shell’s surface. The turtle had watched the snake recoil and then gone back to eating moss without changing expression.

It was sitting in its pool this morning looking exactly like it had looked every other morning for a month.

"Good morning turtle neighbor.." Eren muttered as he walked past. "Still doing nothing I see. Respect."

After yesterday’s realization about the birds and their intelligence network he’d decided to treat every creature in his territory with a baseline level of politeness. Most of them couldn’t understand him but the ones that could were apparently taking notes and sharing information across species lines. Being rude to the wrong animal in this forest could get you killed by something you never saw coming.

The panther territory was a rocky stretch about three hundred meters east where the tree cover thinned and boulders jutted up through the soil.

At least three cat-like predators lived there, dark-furred and lean with muscles built for ambush rather than pursuit. They’d chased Eren twice during his first two weeks but both times had given up after about a minute when it became clear he was faster.

His Apex Predator Awareness painted them in vivid detail as he jogged past. Three heat signatures in the rocks, two resting and one grooming itself on a flat boulder in a patch of sunlight. His new skill gave him individual profiles for each one now, heartbeat patterns and approximate sizes and even a vague emotional read that his old Primal Senses had never managed.

And the Mate Detection passive confirmed something he’d been quietly worrying about. No reaction to the female panther. Zero. His skill registered her as "living creature, feline, predator" and nothing else. No warmth, no pull, no biological interest.

Oh thank god. I was about fifteen percent worried that the cat evolution might have... adjusted my preferences. Good to know I’m still attracted to humans and only humans. The cat DNA gave me reflexes and night vision and climbing ability but it drew the line at interspecies romance.

Thank you cat DNA...

He checked the fire ape grove next. The purple fruit on the big tree was slightly larger than yesterday and the color was deepening from pink toward a richer purple. A few more days maybe a week and they’d be ripe. He memorized the size and shade for comparison tomorrow and moved on.

The deer territory was further south in a meadow-like clearing where a herd of creatures that looked like deer crossed with something alien grazed on luminescent grass. The tree he cared about, the one whose fruit had given him his Invisibility skill months ago, was standing in the middle of their territory with bare branches and not even the beginning of a bud. No flowers and no sign of fruiting any time soon.

Maybe it fruits once a year. Or maybe it needs something specific to trigger it. Blood or dead creatures nearby or some kind of magical fertilizer? The fire ape trees fruit constantly but the Invisibility tree is rare-grade. Rare things probably have rare conditions.

He made a mental note to observe the tree more carefully over the next few weeks and headed west toward territory he hadn’t explored as thoroughly.

..

The blurry animalistic enemy found him before he found it.

Eren had been moving through a section of forest west of his usual range where the trees were spaced wider apart and the undergrowth was replaced by a carpet of low bushes bearing small bright-red berries.

His Hunter’s Tracking had picked up heavy hoofprints in the soil about ten minutes ago and his Apex Predator Awareness was painting a cluster of large heat signatures about half a kilometer ahead but he’d been more focused on the bushes than the signatures because some of the berries looked edible and his Observe skill was telling him interesting things about them.

That’s when he noticed the trees which didn’t look like regular magical trees.

These were shorter and thicker with dark bark and branches that held clusters of fruit he’d never seen before. Small and round and about the size of plums but with a surface that shifted colors depending on the angle, mostly red but with flashes of rainbow iridescence that caught the sunlight and threw it back in prismatic bursts.

The fruits looked rare and just hanging there which was the point that made him steal to just try it’s effects. They looked like jewelry growing on a tree and he wasn’t at fault..!

Eren was reaching for a low-hanging branch when his Apex Predator Awareness screamed.

The spear came from behind and to the left and it was on fire. Not carrying fire but made of fire, a solid shaft of compressed flame that cut through the air with a sound like tearing cloth. His Predatory Reflex kicked his perception into slow motion and he saw the spear’s trajectory as a burning line aimed at the center of his back. 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

His body moved before his brain finished processing. He threw himself sideways and upward, twisting in the air in a motion that felt less like dodging and more like his entire skeleton had decided independently to not be where the spear was going.

His feet left the ground and his body rotated through what could only be described as an inverted aerial twist and the spear passed under his ribs close enough to singe the hair on his stomach.

[Congratulations! You have learned a new skill]

[Evade (Basic - Feline Enhanced) First Evolution League]

-Active/Passive: Enhances reflexive evasion of incoming attacks. Integrates with Agility and Perception stats to improve dodge success rate. Movement-type skills amplify evasion trajectories.

He landed in a crouch ten meters from where he’d been standing and turned to face whatever had thrown that spear.