These ants were about the size of wasp from earth and were crunchy with a slight spicy flavor that alex actually enjoyed a little. the five ants the woman had brought barely lasted him thirty seconds and he felt very un satisfied with the amount and subconsciously whiped his tail into the table in his irritation. the woman seemed to notice his dissatisfaction at the amount of food and quickly left to get more eager to see if she could ingratiate herself to this oddly intelligent lizard. alex went back to his scarf to wait on the woman while quin seemed to just stare at him.
While he waited alex checked the system screen to see what he could do with those five points he got from eating the ants. as it turned out the special tab actually let him manipulate the parameters to his size as well as his elemental affinity. the parameter alex wanted to modify was his size but to increase his max size to that of even an iguana cost one hundred points. the dynamic tab actually allowed alex to fine tune his body with things like wings and extra dense muscles or special rapid digestive speed or even poison teeth or tail.
The item tab however was entirely focused on the creation of external items with the more detailed the drawing and description the more expensive the thing he wanted to create was. alex had a vast knowledge of pop culture items and things that he could see becoming useful for him such as the devil fruits from one piece or the perfect A virus from resident evil or even stupidly useful things like senzu beans. unfortunately all of those things were very expensive for the current alex who wanted all the benefits without any downsides.
The woman reentered the room again fifteen minute later with a whole jar of dead ants the size of quin. she didn't seem to mind the weight though as she set it down and popped open the top and reached in to grab a handful of the ants before creating a line of ants leading to a small mass of them in her hand. 'i'm not a skittish dog lady , but sure i'll play along.' alex thought while giving the woman a funny look. he ate all of the lined up ants cuz no wasting points before casually grabbing the small mass off of her hand before eating it , apparently leaving the woman speechless at his shamelessness.
Once he was done with all those ants he felt full so he climbed the woman's arm to her shoulder and curled up in the crook of her neck before going to sleep. The woman stared at alex who had decided that her shoulder was his nest with an odd expression. it was very unusual how clever the little lizard was as besides certain elder dragons only four species were documented with sentience. those were humans , lynians , troverians and wyverians.
The intelligence that alex had shown made him an exception in every regard and the woman was thrilled to be the first person to document an unknown sentient creature. the next two weeks made the woman named eliza wonder if she hadn't accidentally adopted an elder dragon as each feeding gave alex more and more points that he put into his size. at the end of those two weeks alex was as large a jagras and got between fifty to a hundred points each meal. he had decided to start saving his points after reaching this size so he could get the wings that were priced at a whopping twenty thousand points.
The people in astera were used to seeing alex at this point as he strolled through the outpost town casually. the most eye catching part of him was the red scales between his eyes and the long deadly tail that trailed behind him. "oy , whatcha up to today sid?" the port master asked alex with a grin. all of astera had decided to adopt alex as a mascot and named him obsidian which he didn't mind since it was a fitting name. most people just called him sid though since obsidian was a mouthful to say.
Alex pointed his tail towards the sea and the port master seemed to figure it out. "going for a bit of a swim aye?" the man asked with a smile and alex just nodded. "well have fun with that and if ya find anything interested just bring it over and i'll trade ya your usual." the man said with a laugh. alex had found that larger things gave him more points if he ate them so he had started to trade pearls and other valuable things from the sea with the port master for whole fish that they caught. at first the man and his worker couldn't figure out what alex was getting at but he eventually figured it out.