As the days passed, Ellie fell into a routine of waking up in a cage, eating various crystals, and being watched. The man also seemed to have become happier than before, every time Ellie would successfully digest a new color of crystal, he would smile and happily write his notes. Each new crystal she ate gave her a new type of elemental resistance, and she ended up gathering 6 new types. Shock, Water, Wind, Earth, Dark, and Light. A menu appeared in front of her as she ate the last crystal.
{Compatible Talents Detected}
{Would you like to combine your talents?}
{Y/N}
Ellie pressed Y, and the crystals on her back started to glow brightly, shimmering and changing colors through the rainbow, casting light through the cage bars, and catching the man's attention. The man hurried over and frantically wrote his notes. The lights dimmed after a few minutes, her crystals going back to their original blue color, and a notification popped up again.
{Universal Elemental Resistance Created}
The man shouted in happiness and hopped around with his little notebook, then picked up a huge crystal to bring to her cage. Setting the crystal down, he immediately hurried over to his desk and started to tinker with a little crystalline device. Ellie looked at him for a bit, but then decided the crystal was more important. She grabbed it with her two front claws and tried to put it in her mouth, but it was too heavy, so she just climbed up onto it and started chewing.
'Maybe I should put a few points into strength'
Before she had even finished the crystal, Ellie had grown to level 5, raising her agility up to 28 in the process. As she digested the last crystal completely, she saw the menu appear again.
'Did I level up twice?' she wondered, and started to read the wall of text that had appeared in front of her.
{Level 5 Reached}
{Evolution Available}
{System Feature Available}
{Pick A System Feature to Unlock}
She just sat there and stared blankly at the menus that had appeared.
'This is too much.' she sat for a while, and eventually decided where to start. ' I'll look at that system feature first, and then make my decisions after that, since I don't know what features are available.'
{Unlock One Of The Following}
{Inventory} {Treasury} {Combiner}
'I pick Inventory!' she thought, and slammed her finger on the inventory button.
{Inventory Unlocked}
A glowing blue box floated in front of her, with a few hundred slots, but only 3 slots were glowing. Pressing on one of the dim slots, another menu popped up, saying that it required various types of resources, like iron, or lumber, and some later boxes even had rarer types of gems listed as requirements, like diamonds, or alexandrite.
'Well, I don't have any of that stuff,' she then turned her attention to the evolution option that had appeared.
{4 Evolution Paths Available}
{Infant Kobold}
{Adult Crystal Lizard}
{Wyrmkin Progenitor}
{Helios Snake}
She looked through the descriptions and dismissed two of the options immediately.
'I'm not picking a snake, because I like having limbs, and the adult lizard is just too boring.'
She then re-read the options she had left
{Lesser Kobold}
{A 2-foot tall humanoid lizard folk similar in status to a goblin, with low intelligence, and basic tool use.}
{Wyrmkin Progenitor}
{A never seen before race, the first of its kind. Bipedal dragon kin with high Durability and decent potential. Very limited dragon bloodline concentration.}
'Well, this is kind of obvious, isn't it?' She immediately slammed her finger through the Wyrmkin Progenitor option.
What followed can only be described as having every bone in her body breaking and shifting around, tearing and rearranging muscle ligaments, and stretching skin. It was so painful, Ellie immediately passed out, as her brain apparently decided that she didn't need to be awake for this experience. The last thing she heard as she passed out was the frantic screaming of the man, fading away.