Two minutes..

It took Eren exactly two minutes to come back to himself which was strange because his body was running at more than ten times the biological processing speed of a normal human being. Two minutes of lost control at those specs was like someone else taking the wheel for twenty minutes at regular human speed.

The feline thing inside him was still humming somewhere behind his ribs. Not literally purring but that was the closest word he could find for the low vibration sitting in his chest like a second heartbeat.

He was holding Kalina on his lap on a café terrace in Üsküdar with the Bosphorus behind them and roughly fifteen strangers watching.

So I just made out with my ex-boss in front of a bunch of strangers like a horny teenager. Fantastic.

He checked the damage immediately. Shirts still on, pants still on, no buttons ripped off. The only visible casualties were Kalina’s makeup which had run in streaks down her cheeks from sweat and the collar of her cream sweater which was visibly damp from what he could only describe as aggressive neck exploration.

"Could’ve been worse," he whispered to himself.

Around them the café terrace had turned into a live show. Two university-age girls at the next table had their phones pointed at them with the intensity of nature documentary filmmakers tracking a rare mating ritual. A middle-aged couple three tables down kept pretending to admire the view while sneaking glances every few seconds. The waiter was frozen near the counter holding a glass of water he’d clearly forgotten about.

Eren shifted Kalina properly in his arms and stood up. She weighed nothing to him which was impressive because the woman was a hundred and eighty-six centimeters tall with legs that could probably snap a man in half.

She buried her face in his chest the second he lifted her. Her heart was hammering so hard he could count the beats through her sweater. The cold and terrifying boss who used to make entire boardrooms go silent with one look had completely disappeared and what was left was a thirty-year-old woman with ruined mascara trying to become invisible.

Someone in the crowd whistled and Kalina’s fingers dug into his shirt like she was trying to crawl inside his ribcage.

"Let’s go," she whispered against his collarbone. "Please."

Eren looked down at the top of her head and felt the exact grin forming on his face that used to make her throw office supplies at him.

"Hey boss."

One brown eye emerged from his chest. It looked murderous and terrified at the same time.

"Don’t you dare-"

He tightened his grip around her waist and leaned his face toward hers like he was going in for round two. She smacked the top of his head but her lips were already parted and her eyelids had dropped to half-mast.

She’s literally hitting me while waiting for the kiss. Women are a different species entirely.

"Relax. I can get us out of here right now," he said, keeping his voice low enough for only her. "I’ll even show you where the fruit comes from. The real place. But I need one thing from you first."

He turned her face gently toward the right where the girl with the phone was still recording from two meters away with zero shame.

Kalina went stiff in his arms.

"If that gets online my mother will have a groom candidate at my door by Thursday." Her voice came out in a tight hiss that would’ve been scary if it wasn’t shaking.

Eren knew she wasn’t joking. Kalina’s family was the kind of Italian-Turkish hybrid that treated romance and marriage with the combined obsession of both cultures cranked to maximum. Her grandfather had come from Italy to Turkey in the early 1900s as a bureaucrat who kept traveling between İstanbul and Rome until he eventually moved his whole family over. Her mother’s side was half-Italian half-Turkish which made Kalina roughly seventy-five percent Italian by blood. It showed in everything from her sharp nose and wavy black hair to her height and the way she argued about food like it was a matter of national security.

She’d escaped at least five near-engagements in the last five years. Each one orchestrated by relatives who genuinely believed a single woman past twenty-eight was a family emergency.

Those cameras weren’t a small problem for her. They were a direct countdown to her mother’s next matchmaking attack.

"If we don’t leave right now I will kill you." Her voice cracked on the last word which destroyed whatever threat was left in the sentence.

Eren still didn’t move.

She pressed her forehead into his neck and gave up. "Whatever you want. I’ll agree to it. Just go."

"I’m not asking anything crazy." He shifted her chin up so she was looking at him directly. "I’m going to show you some things and they’re going to be strange. All I need is for you to not freak out and not decide what they mean before I get a chance to explain. Just trust me for the next ten minutes."

He pushed a thin layer of Charming Voice into the last two sentences. Not enough to override her thinking but enough to make the words land softer than they should have.

She stared at him. The cat inside Eren stirred again and he shoved it back down.

"Fine." It was barely audible.

Eren raised his right hand and focused on a place he’d been to a hundred times. The clearing near the edge of the elf village. Emily’s old house that was empty now because the entire village was living at his family’s place in Zekeriyaköy.

"Door Master," he muttered.

His mana pool emptied and the air two meters in front of their table bent like heat haze over asphalt. A door-shaped shimmer materialized with a faint blue glow around the edges and through the opening Eren could see stone houses, dirt paths and afternoon sunlight hitting the rooftops of a village that didn’t exist anywhere on planet Earth.

Kalina’s one visible eye went wide.

What..?

He walked through before she could process it. The portal sealed behind them with a soft pop and the noise of İstanbul traffic cut off like someone yanked a plug from a speaker. The air was instantly different, cleaner and thinner with the smell of damp earth and wood smoke that he’d gotten used to months ago.

Kalina’s head came up slowly from his chest.

They were standing in the middle of a village she’d never seen before. The houses were made of rough stone with wooden roofs and vines crawling up the walls. There were no cars, no asphalt, no power lines. The trees between the buildings were a species she couldn’t name and the dirt path under Eren’s feet looked like it had been walked on for centuries but never paved.

She was a woman who’d visited thirty countries with her family and stayed in five-star hotels across three continents. She’d eaten dinner in a palazzo in Tuscany with a view of vineyards that cost more than most people’s apartments. But whatever this place was, it didn’t look like anywhere on Earth that she knew about.

The sky was wrong. The blue was too deep, too clean, like someone had removed a filter she didn’t know existed.

Somewhere in the distance she could hear people yelling and the clash of metal on metal. Men with long curved swords were doing some kind of drill in a field behind the houses.

She looked back at Eren’s face.

"Where are we?"

Eren opened his mouth to answer but the system beat him to it.

A blue screen materialized in his vision without warning.

[Clone Entity (ID: Eren Teya - Copy 1) Status Update: Deceased]

[Cause: Predator attack during aquatic escape - Day 38] 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

[Feline Predator Bloodline (Partial) successfully transferred to Origin Body]

[Clone Memory Archive: Processing]

-Compressed inheritance from the connected life form "Clone" will begin immediately

-Duration: Approximately 3-4 seconds at current Intelligence stat

Three seconds was nothing in a normal conversation. But at Eren’s processing speed it was long enough to live through thirty-eight days of someone else’s life.

The memories hit him like a shaky video being fast-forwarded. Not clean and organized like a system tutorial. More like someone dumped a drawer full of photos on a table and his brain was picking them up one by one at superhuman speed.

The Clone waking up in the forest completely alone with the same face and the same memories and the genuine belief that he WAS Eren. The first night shivering in a tree and trying not to fall asleep because falling meant dying.

Running.

It was all day running in full desperation for the Clone.

So much running that Eren couldn’t believe what he was seeing and feeling from all of it. It was almost liberating now that he learned how a basic skill like running could evolve so much and change everything.

The Clone had run from everything at first and then started running toward things because he figured out that running away only delayed the inevitable. He’d evolved his Running skill to Kinetic Flux Runner by Day 7 and Eren was jealous because his own Running was still at Basic Level 8 before this inheritance came to his body.

He could

He grinded harder in five weeks than I did in three months. What the hell.

Then the evolution came as the Clone ate a big ass cat...

What the hell?

An actual giant electric cat creature. Multiple times. And the system had turned him into something half-feline because of it. The memory of waking up with slit pupils and sharper senses felt so real that Eren blinked and checked his own eyes with his free hand.

The Magician of Love class sat untouched in the Clone’s skill panel for thirty-eight straight days. He never used Lovely Eyes or Charming Voice or Love Shot. He’d looked at the class once on Day 16 and his exact thought had been "Useless garbage for a solo survival situation" before closing the panel and going back to stabbing things with a stick.

Eren almost laughed out loud. The Clone had been a better fighter but a worse thinker in some ways. He’d ignored the one class that could’ve charmed half the forest creatures into leaving him alone.

But the survival instincts were real. The Clone had developed skills through pure combat pressure that Eren hadn’t even known existed like Evade and Punch and Wrestle and Enhanced Healing. Thirty-one skills total. The system hadn’t been generous about it either. Every single level-up had cost blood or broken bones or both.

The gorilla chase, the jaguar fight, a centaur fruit that gave fifty Luck in one bite, Pain Resistance reaching Level 9 right as the lake creature dragged him under.

All this new skills and most of the levels came from the clone to his original body but some of them was altered on the road.

For example he could feel how the feline enchanted skills lose their enchants with the pressure of Monarch Elven Bloodline. Also all of the skills came as a Evolution League 2 but as the least level possible. So they were all Level 1 even if half of them Ev2.

So many new skills, paths, experience and unbelievable amounts of insights..And it all worked in his body like he did or earned all of it.

Clone skill was truly busted!

But at the end of inheritance, Eren felt the Clone’s last moments and it wasn’t comfortable.

Cold water filling his lungs and teeth sinking into his side and the realization that this was it and there was no skill to save him. The last thing the Clone had felt before dying wasn’t fear or regret.

It was frustration.

It was weird that this frustration wasn’t about dying.

No, it was all linked to dying without ever touching another person. Thirty-eight days of running and fighting and eating raw meat in trees and the Mate Detection passive pinging empty every single night for ten kilometers in every direction.

The cat bloodline had wanted a mate so badly that the desire had become physical pain by the end and the Clone had ignored it because what else could he do about it alone in a forest full of things trying to kill him.

You went through all of that and the thing that pissed you off the most was dying a virgin? Actually I wasn’t a virgin so he wouldn’t think like that in a normal situation. Maybe it was the inner cat bloodline’s virginity..

Weird.

Eren shook his head and a small grin grew at his mouth. The Clone was him after all. Same brain and same priorities when you stripped away the survival pressure with easy misdirection from a bloodline.

Maybe the inner cat bloodline was all about being a cat and mating was an important part of it unlike his monarch level elf bloodline.

Maybe bloodlines’ were alive but he was the only person unlocking bloodlines as a smart humanic person. Elves couldn’t do it and he didn’t see any other human on the Planet Aradne in this Evon Universe.

But there was something else underneath the memories that he almost missed.

A layer of confidence that hadn’t been there before. The Clone had developed a pride over those thirty-eight days that was bigger than anything Eren had ever felt. Not the fake confidence of a Charisma stat boost he had right now.

This was a real pride earned through killing things that should’ve killed him first and surviving in a place where everything was stronger and faster and alien.

Clone was a better man at surviving and he would do so much more if he came to this village at some point.

Eren made that clone far away as a test and didn’t even believe it-actually he could survive this long. There were other reasons for him to make the clone so far away but this wasn’t the time.

The important thing was that pride clone developed in a short bloody life was now sitting inside Eren’s chest right next to the feline vibration and it felt like it had always been there.

He didn’t notice it as something new. It just felt like him as the clone and him was the same person at their core.

"You taught me a lot," he whispered so quietly that Kalina couldn’t hear it over the distant sound of sword drills.

"And I think I can do this much for you as a last wish.."

He had planned to walk Kalina through the village and show her the well in the center and explain the totem tree. Maybe even introduce her to Thadric’s militia from a distance and let the reality sink in before dropping the full explanation.

But the Clone’s memories were still warm inside his head and the mating drive that had tormented the copy for at least two weeks after he got the bloodline was now pushing against his own bloodline urges with a combined force.

His plans could wait.

He kicked the front door of Emily’s house open with his foot and walked through the small hallway and dropped Kalina from her princess carry onto the couch in the living room.

The door behind them bounced off the stone wall but stayed open.

Eren didn’t bother closing it. He was the one who fed this village and kept it alive. Every elf who lived here knew his face and his name and what he’d done for them. If someone walked past and heard something from inside then they’d keep walking.

He leaned down and kissed Kalina before the next question could form.

The new cat bloodline woke up at the contact and this time Eren gave it more room. Kalina’s hands grabbed the back of his neck and pulled him down harder. Her eyes were still trying to figure out what was happening but the rest of her had stopped caring about answers.

He pulled his shirt over his head. The woman who used to scream at him about quarterly reports until two in the morning was now staring at his body with her mouth slightly open. Her fingers traced the lines across his chest and stomach like she was trying to understand how the same person could look this different.

Five years she made me feel like I wasn’t good enough to breathe the same air as her. Now she can’t stop touching me naked..

The thought should’ve made him feel a bit guilty but it didn’t. On the opposite it made him feel like he had finally won something that had been his from the start.

When she pulled her own sweater off her hands were shaking. The fabric caught on her hair and she struggled with it for a second which made her look so different from the polished businesswoman he was used to that Eren almost laughed.

But then the sweater came off and he stopped laughing.

Kalina’s body was long and athletic, the kind of frame that came from years of swimming or running or whatever rich Italian-Turkish girls did at private gyms. Her waist was narrow and her skin was a shade of olive that looked darker against the white of her bra. The wavy black hair that she always kept a little bit straightened was in it’s true curly form. Her hair fell across her shoulders and collarbones in a mess that she would’ve fixed immediately in any other situation.

She didn’t seem to notice her look or how natural and alluring her everything looked.

Eren kissed her hand and she reached for his body in return just after she was half naked.

Something in the feline mating instinct was radiating outward from Eren’s body and she could feel it.

It was so obvious now that it was affecting her as Kalina’s pupils had blown wide until the brown was nearly gone and her breathing had turned fast and shallow. She kept biting her lower lip without realizing she was doing it.

They never made it to the bedroom.

Somewhere between the couch and the stone floor the rest of their clothes disappeared and Kalina stopped trying to understand what was happening to her.

Hells, the stone floor and backing from the couch on the ground, and this angle as this handsome man was onto her body...

It was a bliss.

She ran her tongue up his neck from collarbone to ear and bit down on his earlobe hard enough that a regular man would’ve yelped. Eren barely felt it through the enhanced durability but the gesture sent the cat inside him somewhere past the point of return.

She was nothing like Emily. Emily treated intimacy like a fight she intended to win.

Kalina first challenged him then immediately surrendered completely when he started. Like she was molding and forcing him to be in her way and when she realized Eren was ready, Kalina let him do whatever he liked.

This was too different from all the Elves he fu*ked before.

Like something she’d been holding back for years had finally broken loose and she had no intention of putting it back but "doing it in her way" which was the fresh part.

She was quieter than Emily but her body moved with a desperate honesty that was almost overwhelming, sometimes biting his nipples or teasing his legs or even his toes.

"No, stop..."

She made him laugh even in the middle of his cat mating frenzy!

Kalina pushed some of his buttons and made him crazier than necessary. Fantasies she’d never considered before were flooding her head and she didn’t have the strength left to question any of them and just tried all of them.

At some point their lips fell apart and Eren looked down at the woman under him then felt something that wasn’t just the cat bloodline or the mating instinct.

Five years ago this woman had made him redo a budget presentation eleven times in one day because it was a big customer and it had to be perfect for the sale. He didn’t even remember what the hell they were selling to them today. Maybe a security system..? He wasn’t sure.

But he remembered just how much she started abusing him after two years period. It was the summer he met and started a relation with Rosa.

After she learned he had a girlfriend Kalina started calling him even at midnights for some crappy reasons.

She’d made him feel small and desperate and replaceable. Made him spent his time all in the work, away from his family or private life.

There were so many signs that Kalina was abusing him in a more personal level but he ignored all of them.

"So, you tried to make me break up with Rosa?" He whispered into her ears with a lot of breath and Kalina just looked back with a pissed face.

"You were stupid..!"

He also had to agree about that. And now she was looking up at him with those blown-out pupils and her back arched against the cold stone floor of an elven house in a different dimension and her nails were digging into his shoulders hard enough to leave marks.

I went from fetching her coffee to carrying her across universes for business and s*x.

Life is a joke sometimes.

He kissed her collarbone with much more force this time then licked that place slowly. And she made a sound that she would absolutely deny later.

Neither of them noticed that Eren’s eyes had been pulsing with a faint golden light time to time. A soft glow that synced with his heartbeat and got brighter every time his skin pressed against hers.

The Magician of Love class had been sitting idle in his system for months doing nothing beyond pushing his Charisma to stupid levels or giving some unique but useless skills for the immediate situation.

But the class had never been combined with a Feline Bloodline before and the fusion of charm-based energy with a primal senses of a cat and it’s mating drive was about to bear consequences that neither of them could have predicted.

But that was a problem for the next day.

Right now they were just two people tangled together on the floor of an empty house.

Or at least that’s what they both believed for now.