Royal Road
SomethingOtherThanRain
Re: Dragonize (LitRPG) by Kuiper
Chapter 14: Carrion
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[From sleeping outside, your health has been restored up to 70% of its maximum.]
[From sleeping outside, your stamina has been restored up to 90% of its maximum.]
[HP:15/22] [SP: 10/11]
[You are hungry!] [Satiety: 22%]
I blinked myself awake, dimly aware of the notifications' presence before fully processing my situation. For the first time since I had begun my life as a baby dragon, I was waking up with less than full stamina. Furthermore, I was fairly certain that my health bar was lower than it had started yesterday. According to the notification, it was now at 70% of its maximum, but the first time I had woken up and done the mental math to see whether that was getting rounded up to the nearest integer, it had been 80%.
While the notification message suggested that [sleeping outside] impacted the quality of my sleep, the fact that my SP and HP recovery varied from day to day seemed to suggest that there were other factors at play. Was it the intensity of my injuries from yesterday? I flexed my tail, seeing if there was any pain from yesterday that lingered, but nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary. Considering how hard the hyena's bite had been, I was lucky to have escaped without so much as a contusion -- back in my previous life as a human, I'd had bruises that had a more lasting impact.
Likely, the reason I had woken up with less HP than the day before had less to do with quality of sleep than quantity of sleep. Yesterday, I had stayed out after dark. More time spent hunting under the moonlight meant less time for sleeping, and evidently that also meant less time for recovery. I groaned. Considering that stamina (and not time) seemed to be the main bottleneck to my progression, I would have gladly spent another hour or two sleeping in to recover an extra 10% SP (and HP). But evidently I didn't have that choice: I had awoken with the rising of the sun, and the sun wasn't the kind of wake-up alarm that I could delay by pressing a snooze button.
Perhaps I could sleep in if I found some way to escape the sun: the fact that my wake-up notification specifically noted that I was [sleeping outside] suggested that it might be possible for me to sleep "inside," and while there were weren't any buildings as far as the eye could see, the rabbits I had encountered yesterday seemed to be perfectly capable of hiding from the sun, avoiding detection from predators (like me) during the day by presumably sleeping during the day before venturing out at night. Some of the hyenas were probably doing the same. Perhaps it was time for me to find a nest of my own. Or maybe a "den" or "lair." Those might be forms of shelter more befitting a dragon, though shelter by any name would be welcome.
I went to the edge of plateau to begin my descent, and yelped in excitement: the persistent hyena that had died to my [noxious breath] last night was still there. Or, at least, it seemed like part of it was: I saw a trail of ants leading to (and from) the hyena's remains. I had climbed halfway down the edge of the plateau before considering whether I should make my entrance more ceremonious. The ants were still carrying on as though everything were normal, and the hyena, due to the circumstances of its death, was directly below my climbing path. I hadn't yet tested whether "fall damage" was a thing, but I had a decent enough health buffer that I was willing to experiment, and besides, according to Newton's third law, any impact force that I experienced on my body would also be experienced by whatever I landed on: if falling from this height was enough to injure my body, it might be enough to crush an ant to death, and that seemed like a price I was willing to pay. I was already in the business of spending SP to kill ants; why not take the chance to spend HP as well?
I debated climbing back up to the top of the plateau and trying to crush the ants with falling rocks, but this was a part of the plateau that had a grade that didn't allow a sheer drop downward: while I had confidence that the grade was steep enough that it wouldn't stop my body from hitting what was below, there was a good chance that a rock dropped from that height would just bounce off the side of the plateau, and besides that, I wasn't confident in my ability to hit a target as small as an ant with a projectile as small as those rocks. I couldn't increase the size of the target, but I could drop a larger object on the ant: my own body. Add to the fact that the rocks seemed like the kind of limited resource worth conserving for a rainy day, and the decision to turn my body into a weapon was a simple one. Besides, it would save me the tedium of climbing all the way back up, and every second that passed meant more and more of the hyena's remains being carried away by the ants. If nothing else, falling would hasten my journey downward and allow me to claim my kill more rapidly.
I climbed down until I was maybe fifteen feet above the hyena's remains, and waited until an ant was mandibles-deep in its carcass before letting go. The sensation of falling struck me with a brief moment of terror, but it lasted only a second -- in fact, probably almost exactly a second, if I was falling from a height of 5 meters (or, technically, one second would be my fall time for a distance of half of 9.81 meters, assuming this place had the same gravity as earth).
That thought was quickly replaced by the sensation of pain, and I saw my health bar flash before registering the sensation of something moving under me. As I shifted my weight, I heard the sound of something cracking -- a new sound, and yet also somewhat familiar. It took me a second to register where I recognized that sound from: it was the same barely-crackling hiss that the ants let out when dying to my [noxious breath].
I lifted myself off the ant, and was surprised to see that its legs were still moving, though it wasn't walking anywhere -- it seemed to be in the throes of death. Most notably, its armor was cracked open, the first time I had ever seen the exposed flesh through the cracked armor of an ant that was still alive. I forced a claw through the crack in its chiton covering, stabbing it, tearing and rending it, before pulling out my claw, and stabbing it again.
[Armored ant defeated! Earned 7% experience toward next level.]
By now, the rest of the ants had fled, and I devoured the remains of the ant and the hyena carcass that it had been extracting meat from.
As I dined on the hyena carcass, I found myself a bit taken aback by how easily my jaws crunched through the beast's cartilage and bones. It wasn't that the texture bothered me -- in fact, I found it to be quite delicious. And that, on some level, was what I found slightly disturbing. While I still felt very much like the version of "myself" that I had been for over 20 years, the reality was that I was now in a new body, which was wired with different set of impulses and desires than the one I'd had as a human. On a certain level, that was a good and probably even necessary thing: it would be pretty bad if my reaction to my own [noxious breath] were to find it unpleasant, and considering that I was a carnivore destined to spend much of my life subsisting on raw meat, it was good that I found the flavor and texture of raw meat to be enjoyable. Still, it left open questions about what other desires and impulses might have been changed in the transition from my previous life. Did it go beyond mere gut reactions to smell and taste? Did I now have completely different moral intuitions? As I crunched through what I believed to be a carpal bone, I considered the morbid question of whether I'd find this meal as delicious if it were the remains of a person -- of some humanoid creature, be they human, elf, dwarf, or otherwise. Technically speaking, a dragon eating a human wouldn't be an act of cannibalism. Dragon eating dragon, that was cannibalism. Or hyena eating hyena. Did hyenas eat their own?
I had sort of vaguely assumed that hyenas weren't above some light cannibalism, which would explain why the hyenas I killed on day one weren't there when I woke up the following morning, but this hyena had been left to the ants. Maybe the fact that this hyena had died from [noxious breath] deterred the hyenas from cannibalizing it? Or, maybe I was completely wrong about hyenas being cannibals: maybe the hyenas I had defeated on my first day had become ant food, just like this one, and the only reason that this hyena hadn't been fully devoured by the time I got to it was that the ants had less time to work on it: after all, this hyena had been killed at night, while the hyenas from the first day had been killed during the day time.
I polished off the remainder of the hyena, savoring the last few remaining bits as my satiety rose to 60%.
I had to say, the red meat was really starting to grow on me: not only was it a good deal more delicious, but it also seemed to be more filling. Granted, that was based off a pretty small sample size: two instances of red meat (the rabbit and hyena), and two instances of...non-red meat, the ant and the turtle. Ants surely didn't count as white meat, but I wasn't sure what they counted as. Insect protein? Whatever they were, it was definitely less fulfilling -- both from a hedonic and from a raw satiation perspective -- than the flesh of mammals.
Bearing that in mind, I decided to head to the craggy area. If mammals slept there, I might be able to catch them unawares. The possibility that I'd actually be able to find and kill any rabbits or similar creatures seemed unlikely -- after all, they burrowed there specifically for safety, and my body was probably too big to fit into an entrance picked by a rabbit, but maybe there were larger mammals about. After all, those hyenas had to sleep somewhere. Heck, I might even find shelter large enough for a dragon: maybe then I could stop sleeping outdoors and start waking up with full health. Or, well, maybe not. Maybe sleeping in a den down here would result in me not waking up at all, with zero health, because any cave or crack big enough to fit a dragon would also be big enough for a hyena or three to slip into. I recalled how the hyena had sunk its teeth into my tail yesterday, and considered how much more attractive my neck might be as a target if they managed to creep up on me while I was sleeping. They were already good enough at ambushing me while I was awake, and they didn't need one more advantage.
The plateau was probably the safest place for me to sleep, so I probably shouldn't be in the market for a new home, but I was still curious to see if the craggy and apparently porous ground held any secrets that might benefit me. As if answering my unspoken question, I detected an odor: that of rotting meat.
I wasn't sure exactly how I knew it was rotting meat. On a certain level, I was familiar with the smell: I had, on more than one occasion, accidentally left food in the fridge of my campus apartment while leaving several weeks for a break, only to come back and be confronted with some truly rank odors when I returned. But my reaction to the smell was completely unfamiliar: while most of my human encounters with rotten meat had had me recoiling in disgust, this odor was positively tantalizing. Well, I was a carnivore, after all. I fed on "the remains of fallen creatures," and carrion evidently fell into that category. Maybe this, too, was a part of adapting to life as a dragon.
Still, there was a certain part of my brain that nagged at me -- specifically, I couldn't get past the thought that things that would have disgusted me as a human were now downright enticing. That word "disgust" especially stood out in my mind. I had remembered watching a TED talk about how humans' sense of disgust was tied to a lot of our moral intuitions: apparently, measuring people's disgust sensitivity allowed researchers to predict their stances on various issues of morality, and a study found that people's moral intuitions actually changed based on whether you exposed them to an unpleasant smell. Maybe the absence of a disgust reaction when confronted with things that I previously found "gross" was a good thing, since it meant I was becoming less close-minded. Or maybe it was a bad thing, if it meant that I had fewer moral guardrails. Or, maybe I was overthinking this, and my newfound appetite for rotting meat had nothing to do with my moral intuitions. I should probably be more than a little hesitant to base too much of my thinking on what I had heard from TED talks, especially considering that it was frighteningly common for those pop-science pep talks to be based on research that later failed to replicate. Besides, if I just considered the basic facts of the situation, if I was going to spend an inordinate amount of time analyzing my own reaction to rotting meat through a moral lens, wasn't feeding on meat from creatures that were already dead more ethical than hunting down fresh meat?
I followed the scent. How long had the creature been rotting? Honestly, I had no idea. Based on the smell, I assumed that the meat was well past its expiration date, but it might not have been too long: I was pretty sure that meat rotted faster at higher temperatures, and I was in a desert, after all.
Come to think of it, hyenas were carrion feeders, too. Given that I wasn't too far from where I had seen some of them yesterday, I wondered why I was smelling the carrion at all: if I could smell it, then why hadn't they also smelled it and beaten me to the meal? Was my sense of smell better than theirs? Somehow, I doubted that: mammals had a much more acute sense of smell than reptiles. In fact, I recalled overhearing a conversation about how mammals' keen sense of smell was the reason that primitive mammals had been so quick to evolve bigger brains relative to reptilian and avian species: all that olfactory input required a bigger cerebral cortex, or something like that. Admittedly, I was no biology expert, but it certainly struck me as plausible. Hmm...thinking about it that way, maybe I did have more in common with a mammal than a reptile: my brain was big enough to ponder questions of evolutionary biology, something that a mere lizard brain probably wasn't capable of. In fact, maybe my brain came equipped with an olfactory cortex that was even better equipped than hyenas to pick up on the smell of rotting meat. Or...maybe dragons just had an exceptional sense of smell. It was hard to know what biological benchmark I should measure myself against. It was at moments like this that I really wished I had an older dragon to help educate me.
I didn't have to travel far before the odor led me to an opening in the craggy ground that, upon close inspection, looked like a very short and very wide cave entrance. If I hadn't specifically been following the meat's odor, I would have missed it entirely: until I got up close, the opening just looked like the shadow of an overhanging rock, but as I flattened myself, I could see that it was an opening. Was it large enough for me to crawl through? It seemed like I could fit in there, and that question was probably best answered by experience. The worst that could happen was that I'd find out the answer was "no." Or...well, maybe the worst thing that could happen was that I would get stuck, with my backside completely exposed for the hyenas to get revenge for what I had done to their friend last night. That was definitely a possibility. Bearing that in mind, I vowed to be cautious. I would pull back if it seemed like it was getting to be an uncomfortably tight squeeze. But until then...I was going to be as adventurous as my size allowed.
Class: Baby Dragon
Level: 3
Progress toward next level: 96%
HP: 15/23
SP: 10/11
Satiety: 58%
Claws: level 1
Scales: level 1
Mouth: level 4
Wings: level 0
Traits: Carnivore, Kin sensitive
Abilities: Sprinting, Noxious Breath
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Royal Road
SomethingOtherThanRain
Re: Dragonize (LitRPG) by Kuiper
Chapter 15: Cave
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Crawling with my belly flatted against the ground, I poked in first with my head, following the scent of rotting meat. Once my head was in, the rest of my body fit through without much effort, and the ceiling past the entrance was much higher. Wait, no, that wasn't quite right: it wasn't that the ceiling was getting higher; it was actually that the floor getting deeper. Every inch I moved forward, I was descending deeper underground. Well, whatever the case, it gave me more room to sit up and swivel my head around rather than continuing to crawl with my belly flat against the ground. It seemed like I was in an actual cave. It was hard to tell how deep it went: the entrance, while wide, was also short, and didn't let in much sunlight, but the longer I spent the darkness, the more my eyes adjusted, allowing me to make out the shape of the cave walls. Whatever the case, the scent of carrion seemed to be coming from deeper within the cave, so I prowled forward. I wondered where the odor might be coming from: probably, some critter had decided to make this cave their home, and had died here, maybe simply passing due to old age, leaving their body to stink up the place. Well, "stink" might be the wrong word: I certainly wasn't minding the smell. In fact, it was downright enticing, and that alone was enough to draw me deeper into the cave.
Besides the intoxicating aroma of the meat, the cave itself felt...enticing. Rich with possibility. Ever since reincarnating, I had only found myself in large, open spaces, which were hardly the ideal circumstance for my breath attack. A tight enclosed space like this, however, could be completely enveloped by my [noxious breath], and while it was possible to escape this cave, the tight entrance meant that anyone trying to crawl their way out would suffer more damage-over-time in the attempt. Maybe this was the ideal place for an ambush predator like myself to call home. The entrance wasn't big enough for more than one hyena to enter at once, and if they did, it felt much more like they would be the ones trapped inside the cave with me.
As stepped forward, I planted my foreclaw on a bit of ground that felt...softer, somehow. Or rather, it felt like there was something soft on top of the ground that my claw crushed before hitting the hard ground beneath. I lifted my claw, wondering if I had just crushed something, and was startled to find that something was sticking to my claw. I wondered if it was some kind of sticky residue, but something came up with my claw. I inspected it as best I could in the dim light: it was a glob of material that was lighter-colored than the rest of the cave, so it presumably wasn't moss, but maybe it was some other form of vegetation? Whatever it was, it wasn't enough to halt my progress, and it seemed harmless enough, so I placed another claw forward, and it too encountered a sticky substance -- again, not enough to trap it or impede my movement for more than a second, so I tentatively decided to take a step forward.
Admittedly, the scent of rotting meat was a big part of what kept me moving forward: it was so close now that I could practically taste it. I reached out again with my front claw, and hit a lump. I poked at the lump, and realized that it was the source of the smell -- it was the same size as the rabbits I had encountered yesterday. I reached down and bit into it -- I realized after my jaws shut that I had acted totally on impulse, but I didn't regret it -- up until the moment that I tried to open my jaws to chew, and found that they didn't open nearly as easily as they had closed.
The rabbit, I quickly realized, was covered with the same sticky material that the floor of the cave was covered in. It had no discernable flavor, but it certainly didn't feel pleasant in my mouth. It was almost like having hair in my mouth -- I could feel a bunch of small strands on on my tongue. I spat out the rabbit -- again, it was an act of impulse, and after I spat it out I considered my best move. Was this situation dangerous? Was the sticky substance poisonous or otherwise something that I would regret putting into my mouth? It was really hard for me to make any judgments from inside the cave: I had no idea what I was dealing with here. I was curious about what this was, but I was increasingly aware that if a retreat became necessary, I wouldn't be able to vacate this area rapidly. My sense of unease grew, and I considered turning back: if I needed to explore deeper into the cave, that could wait until later, when I'd had more time to give this situation a more sober evaluation. Okay, no need to panic.
Still, if I was going to leave the cave, it seemed like there was no reason for me not to leave with the rabbit carcass. It was what I had come for, after all. And I had already bit into it once: if there was some kind of booby trap or fast-acting poison, I would have encountered it the first time I bit into it. Maybe I didn't want to swallow the rabbit (or more specifically, maybe I didn't want to swallow whatever was covering it), but I might as well take it with me. Once again, I grabbed the rabbit with my jaws, and turned around to exit the cave.
Big mistake -- I turned around, rather than simply backpedaling. And in the process of turning around, I swing my tail behind me. I felt it catch on something. It was the same sticky covering that I had felt with my foreclaws, and which had covered the rabbit, except my tail was pointing deeper into the cave, where the stickiness, whatever it was, seemed to be thicker and more dense. As I walked forward, I felt it pull on my tail, and I actually struggled to work my way forward. I tried swinging my tail free, but moving my tail from side-to-side just got it more trapped and tangled in the sticky substance, and I quickly found myself unable to move my tail or turn at all. Okay, now I was starting to panic.
The walls that moments earlier had seemed ripe with possibility now felt strangely menacing. No longer was I an ambush predator fantasizing about making my home here; I was now keenly aware that I might have just walked into some trap laid by some other ambush predator who had already made their home here.
No longer able to walk forward, I grabbed the floor of the cave with my claws and pulled my way forward, using the same motion that I had every time I'd pulled myself vertically to scale the side of the plateau. The same movement that had proved strong enough to overcome the force of gravity was apparently forceful enough to overcome the pull of whatever it was that ensnared me, and I was able to make slow, gradual progress as I clawed my way toward the cave's exit. It was slow, and I was still a sitting duck for any predator behind me that might be laying in wait, but it was progress nonetheless. All I could do was hope that I was alone and continue clawing my way forward.
I kept my eyes on the cave entrance, moving my body toward the sunlight, and my salvation. The motion of clawing my way forward was oddly comforting, working the same muscles in the same motion that I'd become familiar with from climbing. Every inch I gained was reassurance that I wasn't trapped, just impeded. Keeping that thought in mind helped quell my panic. I just had to keep moving myself forward using the same motion that I had used to escape danger countless times before.
The real test came when I reached the entrance and had to flatten myself to fit through: the widened stance made it harder for my claws to grip the ground. But, I realized that whatever it was that had stuck to my tail wasn't pulling as hard against me as it had before. As I wormed free of the entrance, I felt the sticky substance releasing my tail with a sensation that was simultaneously pain and relief, like the sensation of pulling off a band-aid. With my tail now mostly free, I was able to wiggle my way out of the cave.
As I emerged, the sweet anticipated sunlight hit my face, and a wave of relief washed over me. I took several steps forward, putting several steps between me and the cave entrance. I was pretty sure I hadn't been actively pursued by anything, but I was still fully unaware of what it was that I had become stuck in. I turned around, and as I felt myself start to breathe normally again, I spat out the rabbit carcass -- in my intense focus of crawling forward, I had completely forgotten that my jaws had been clenched around it the whole time. As I looked down at the rabbit in the light of day, I realized it was wrapped in what looked like white strands of some kind of...string. No, thinner than string, but woven together. Like silk.
I brushed my tail, dragging it along the rough surface of the craggy ground, and it left behind the same substance that had the texture of silk, woven into a web. A spider's web.
I looked back at the cave. Evidently, I had invaded someone's home, but I was pretty sure that it wasn't the rabbit I was trespassing on: this rabbit had met its demise trespassing on the territory of some spider that had woven webs strong and dense enough to ensnare a baby dragon who was too careless to think about where he was putting his tail.
Just to be cautious, I decided to get much, much further away from the cave entrance -- I brought the rabbit with me, since, as far as I could tell, it was still good for a meal, if I was willing to pick those webs off of it. It seemed unlikely that the spider's webs were toxic, considering how long I'd had my mouth wrapped around them without feeling any ill effects, so eating the rabbit seemed safe, but just to be safe, I didn't eat the fur that had the spider silk stuck to it. The parts I didn't eat, I assumed, could become more food for the ants. I dug my claws into the rabbit and splayed it open before gobbling up its soft entrails.
[Monster trait: Carrion feeder. Reduces penalties from consuming rotten meat. Scales with mouth level.]
I blinked. It had been awhile since I'd discovered a new passive ability like this. I guess it made sense that ingesting new things would inform me more explicitly about what kinds of things I was capable of ingesting: my discovery that I was a [carnivore] had come about from trying to ingest rocks. What made this new ability unique was the fact that it was a contingent ability: much like my [noxious breath] attack, this ability's effectiveness apparently scaled with my mouth level. I supposed that made sense. In fact, I mused, the same aspects of dragon biology that allowed me to spew [noxious breath] might also be responsible for my ability to eat rotten meat. Rotten meat wasn't inherently toxic: the thing that made rotten meat unhealthy to eat is that it was covered with microorganisms that specialized in breaking down meat -- and, well, animals are also made of meat, meaning that any human that ate a lump of rotten meat was at serious risk of having those same microorganisms then go to work on the inside of their digestive tract. I, apparently, had a heartier digestive system, and the same things that made my breath (conditionally) lethal to other creatures could probably also do serious work on whatever microorganisms were causing the decay or rot in meat. I was hardly unique in that respect: nature was full of carrion feeders like vultures possessing digestive systems adapted to deal with the bacteria that cause decay in meat.
Earlier, I had questioned why I had gotten to the rotten meat before the hyenas. Now, I had a better inkling of why: perhaps the hyenas had learned not to mess with giant spiders. Admittedly, I hadn't actually seen the spider, but based on the size of its web, it certainly didn't seem like a little spider.
I eyed the entrance to the spider's cave, an entrance that had been so short that I had first nearly mistaken it for nothing more than a shadow under an overhanging rock. This area was full of craggy ground that looked just like that cave entrance. How many other caves might be here? How many of them were full of giant spiders? I shuddered at the thought.
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