After the spirit left, Aki was treated much better. He didn't really care either way, but at least he didn't have to watch his back for no reason now. He did need new clothes though. When commenting that with the village chief, she looked directly at his groin, than nodded, signaling him to follow her.
For a moment he asked himself if he was going to get his first time taken, the woman was old, but certainly still had everything up there, nevermind being a beauty. He'd also not seen anyone by her side in any occasion. He shoved the thought away and followed her.
Not long after he was shown to her late husband's clothing. The man was massive for a rabbit kin, and Aki commented so, but apparently the chief had been married to a dog-kin who wandered the land and decide to settle down after meeting her.
Aki was starting to think his previous thought process had some credit, but then he shoved it asside again. That would make no sense, they'd met three days ago and could barely communicate.
After thanking her, he told her he knew where a family of bears lived, a cave relatively near his, which he found after stalking the mother and cub who had gone to drink water. After that they'd scheduled a hunt for said bears, he excused himself, talked to Alara for a bit, and went away. He needed to hunt.
*****
Another week later, Aki, wearing a long leather skirt and jacket, was tracking a deer.
It was the first he'd seen in the less dense areas of the forest, and if he was right, it was magical.
He'd recently started to learn the beast-kin universal language, which they apparently share because they were all from one empire a couple of centuries ago, and deer were apparently either more dangerous than bears, or of religious significance around here.
He'd only been told he should not hunt them, so he tried to look for a lonely one. Maybe eating it would grant stats or it could just be worth lots of XP.
It was quite the let down when the one he'd been hunting was able to reunited with it's herd. He imediatly formed a mind magic spike and striked right behind his head though.
"Impressive. You are turning out to be quite the natural hunter. You would still be prey to even one of those though." Said the spirit.
"Oh, it's you. I assumed you had a way to understand me since you would be ancient from my point of view, but it's good to know you think highly of me. Also, everything is prey to something, but sapients do not need to stick to such denominations as long as they have enough preparation." Aki refuted while turning back to look at the spirit before studying the deer again.
The spirit shook it's head.
"Before you say anything, everyone is conceited, so what if I'm a bit more?" Aki practically read her thoughts, which made her close and open her mouth for a bit. She sighed and decided to warn him already.
"Tonight, if you cannot defeat your inner beast, I will kill you." She said.
"Thank you. Be sure to break my cranium completely and wait five minutes besides the corpse just to make sure. If possible, ask someone to torch it though." Aki instructed.
The spirit shook her head again and vanished as silently as she appeared.
In the end, Aki couldn't find the opportunity to kill a lonely deer before sundown. So he had to go back to his cave.
Sitting down against the deep cave wall, Aki cleaned the air with magic, tried to induce calm on himself and started to meditate. Since he was at it, he decided to try and practice Qiqong breathing.
In his mindscape, a growling sound started to reverberate. As Aki ignored it, it started to get weaker.
As a wolf started to flank his core, each step made by it revealed more of its characteristics were revealed.
"Weak, you are too weak." Growled the wolf with a deep and difficult to understand voice.
"Yet you need me to form a pack. Aren't you weak too?" Rebuked Aki with calm, which made the wolf roar and bite.
"You are no wolf! You are not worthy of deciding that!" The black and red eyed beast growled as it's figure grew.
"Yet, I am whole. Can you say the same for yourself? Do you not even want to be more? Are you even a wolf?" His eyes showed nothing but pity.
"YOU KNOW NOTHING!" The two meters tall wolf lunged at him, maw wide open.
Aki didn't even move, but somehow he was now standing at a height similar to the wolf. With impecable timing, and partial control over space and perception, Aki punched the big creature on the base of the chin, a force similar to a legendary boxer, which actually had it break some teeth and hurt it's gums.
Not like it would matter for long though.
"And yet that allows me to learn so much. Just like it teached me how to fight myself. The moment you wanted to attack me, you had to become part of me. I cheked, i'm a master of mental battles already." Aki didn't actually speak that, the sound just registered to the wolf, Aki was too busy eating it alive.
*****
The spirit stood there at the entrance of the cave. Inpatience was an unknow consept to a being like it.
"That was even easier than expected. Even got a skill out of it. Do I look any diferent?" Aki's voice registered even before the spirit opened it's eyes.
"Your eyes are red. You became an alpha." It said with a tone of surprise.
"Well, there goes my originality. Hope that actually gets me more benefits than problems, because the next full moon is definetly going to be very much harder, no questions asked. Do tell me if any other werewolf or lycan comes around then, the skill should problably help. Anyway, i will be hunting that deer from before and seeing if i can get some rabbit to cook it for me. See ya sirup."
"What?"
"You didn't give me your name even now, where i come from that means you don't care how people call you." He said and sprinted.
*****
Turns out, they were right, Aki was not strong enough to kill one of those dear. Good think it was a magical beast barely smarter than a normal beast, so Aki just trapped it while it tried to charge at him and soon enough the thing was getting mind rapped. Ten seconds of roughing it up from a safe distance, Aki imediatly drained it's blood with magic and took it to the beast-kin village on a stone pole.
The guards looked at him strange while approached, but they rapidly understood what the lycan with glowing eyes wanted. He was even drolling after all. One of the guards had a similar reaction though.
The deer that Aki wanted to hunt was a breeze runner. A magical beast with mild wind magic and great speed. Though the description was simple, they were most certainly deadly for this simple tribe of hunter gatherers. As proof, please note that Aki leveled up four times in both his class and race.
*****
"Free, stats?!" Asked Aki in the an almost irreconizable accent of the tribe's language while holding Alara and looking at her with an expression of ultmost urgency.
She tried to say something, but while was actually good at linguistics, no way he'd decode something fully in the time he had. Again though, he got the word status out of the sentence. It was similar as to when someone on the other side of the room spoke your name and sudenly you are already there asking what they are talking about.
'Stats?' He asked again, but through a mind connection.
'Magical beasts. Eat. Stats. With. Limit.' Hearing that, Aki could only think of one thing.
'Thank goodness i didn't spawn near a human city! Any jackass with enough money would have enslaved me and i would have no power to stop it even if the otherworlder skill had some bullshit life saving function! If someone appraised me and knew about mental allacrity, nevermind the sadistic fucks that would want my body, I'd be turned into something worse than a mana battery! I need to hunt down every stat point, probably learn how to cook as well. Worse yet, if people can get stats out of eating magic beasts, then it would be very hard for beasts not to have something like that as well. Unless...'
'What limit?' Aki was getting better at telephaty, more complex meanings were finally able to come across.
'Beast. Stats. Number. Many.' That didn't mean other people had the same talent and proficiency as him though. Even if he had spent his whole life with problems in comunications, which he did, and gained some intrinsic ability to translate broken language for meaning, that didn't mean he could understand everything either.
Instead, he frowned, made a stick out of rock and started to make drawings in the dirt. Luckly, the common language had numbers similar to the latin ones, so the beast kin who knew it could somewhat understand his drawings. Alara and the village chief were in said group.
After a lot of pointing, grunting, confusion and mimicry, Aki understood that apparently the strength of said creature defined how many points you would get from it, the race determined which stat would be boosted, and if the creature's strength didn't surpass a certain botleneck, than you would only receive stats as long as you had that stat that could be granted bellow said bottleneck, like 25, 50, 100, so on so forth.
'Nope, even with these limitations this still means that humans would be very fucked in the evolutionary process, so the chance that the whole world is civilized is quite close to zero from my point of view. Even if the races here didn't pass through the same as the humans in earth and the gods just spawned people and beasts together, which is quite unlikely, anything with minimun talent or more would be able to start to hoard power very fast. This certainly explains why the deer had teeth. Human society will problably be shit, nevermind others, who would potentialy straigth out kill me because i'm not one of them or some other bullshit. By rule of thumb i should not try to plan like i'm already dead and screwed, but my best way for survival would definetly be to create a new power with me in it's centre, so i need to think of everything that might even try and stop me.
'Skill, better eating?' He asked, as the sinapses ended in his brain, sweat driping from his back, his resolution and fear were redoubled. 'I need to grind ingredients. Maybe find out how to cook sapient's meat would be good too.' He decided, imediatly throwing away his fickle morality and the speck of humanity he'd kept on the side so his mother would not cry herself to death.
Alara looked confused, but the chief nodded, pointing at the drawings still in the ground, informing him he'd need to eat much of one creature to even start and eating even more of diferent species if he wanted to actually level the skill.
'There problably is a similar skill for training your stats, otherwise everyone would get stuck and would need to spend money or hunt. Crafting and researching would never spread if this kind of skill doesn't exist. Maybe "student" already does that, but i'm better thinking it doesn't and trying to surpass more hardships. I've leveled up as a werewolf after passing the monthly test, so combat isn't the only thing that makes you level up, but the free status points would still be too little, unless you're some protagonist in a novel and find a way to focus all your points in one stat while compensating for the rest with skills that give bonuses of... No, skills like enhanced agility should actually be doable if someone got enough points through training or something like that.'
Aki hurried the bunny kin to cook the thing so he could eat it and go hunt more. The two women he constantly interacted with in the village immediatly noticed what his intentions were, but after tasting the first food that actually had a good taste after weeks and seeing the point in agility being added to his status, Aki couldn't care the less as to what they said.