Growing up 3 years in an instant didn’t seem to tire Magna out. Instead, he felt only more hunger.
It was a satisfying feeling, since he also wanted to fill Gaia again as soon as possible.
He crouched down and reached for the red metal but stopped before touching it.
The thing was sharp, so before carelessly picking it up, he wanted to get more familiar with his fingers and his strength first.
In the end, he had lived as a baby for months, so suddenly evolving into the body of a 4-year-old meant he had to master control over it all over again.
He started by picking up leaves, practicing how to hold them.
His longer fingers felt like alien hands to him. It took a full two minutes of practice before his mind was convinced these hands really belonged to him.
But he still couldn’t convince himself to hold it. He spent another ten minutes opening and closing his fingers, practicing on other objects, until he finally found the courage to pick it up.
Even then, his hands started to tremble, and cold sweat began forming on his forehead.
’Come on, I can’t be this much of a coward, can I?’
Knowing this wasn’t a game, but reality was stressing him out. But what could he do?
He had always been like this, always too much of a coward to even find the courage to speak with others.
It was better when he was still a baby. At least then there was no responsibility to take; he could leave it all to the mother goblin.
But now that he’d grown up enough to shoulder some responsibility, his cowardly nature came right back.
With those thoughts passing through his mind, he threw another glance at the corpse lying behind him.
He wished he had even just a fraction of the courage she’d had inside her.
’I don’t need to be myself. Just pretend this is a game. Yeah, I’m just inside a game, and I’m someone else entirely.’ After talking himself into it for a while, he finally picked up the piece of metal and started to cut the meat.
He cut a big piece from the goblin’s foreleg, then dropped the sharp metal to the ground and finally let out the breath he’d been holding in.
The piece was very big. There was no way he could eat it all in one bite, but he didn’t want to use the sharp metal again, so he picked it up and decided to test how effective his new teeth were.
Opening his mouth wide, he sank his pristine white teeth into the meat, still lightly steaming, and easily tore off a piece large enough to fill his mouth.
His teeth were unexpectedly sharp, and his jaw was strong. He chewed it like a grinder, tearing it apart quickly before swallowing.
[Energy particles detected...]
[Converting nutrients into energy...]
Gaia’s mechanical voice and text appeared once again, notifying him that the meat still had enough nutrients to keep charging it.
As a baby, it had taken around ten pieces of meat to charge it fully. This single piece he’d just swallowed was already bigger than all ten combined, and yet it still wasn’t enough to trigger another energy accumulation threshold message.
This confirmed something else he’d realized.
Every time the charge filled and he chose an option, the next threshold needed far more nutrients and energy to fill again.
"If I hadn’t picked the grow-up option, this would’ve taken days, maybe even weeks, to fill up again," he mumbled with relief, more certain than ever that he’d made the right call.
Then he took another bite of the meat in his hand and another.
Only when he’d finished it all, forcing himself to swallow the last bite, did the message he’d been waiting for finally show up.
[Energy accumulation threshold reached.]
[Please select a method to utilize the gathered energy.]
"Finally. I was about to start puking." He was so full that his stomach bulged out.
Then he silently prayed the options would be good, hoping at least one of them had something to do with mana manipulation and affinity.
[Option 1: Expend 100% of accumulated energy to enhance eyesight by 5x.]
[Option 2: Expend 100% of accumulated energy to enhance the five senses by 2x.]
[Option 3: Expend 100% of accumulated energy to strengthen bone density by 3x.]
The options this time didn’t show anything about mana or spellcasting, a wave of disappointment washing over him.
That didn’t mean the options were bad, though. All three were things that would increase his chances of survival.
The first one, boosting his eyesight by 5 times, could especially come in handy once he left the cave, since he already knew the outside was a forest.
Seeing farther meant he could spot food and danger from a distance, all while staying hidden and keeping himself unseen.
The second option would give a similar effect, maybe even better results, since sharpening his hearing and smell along with the rest of his senses would raise his odds of survival even more in a place like a forest.
As for the third option, it would give him solid defensive traits.
He’d be able to avoid broken bones in situations that called for it, though it still wouldn’t rule out the chance of bleeding or getting seriously injured.
"Why does it always give three random options?" While he thought over which one to pick, he also started wondering how the system actually worked.
Sure, it was the AI he’d named Gaia, one he’d built himself, but he never programmed it to behave like this, at least not that he could remember.
It felt like someone was messing with him, hijacking his own AI and turning his own game against him.
’Are those gods manipulating it?’ A sudden shiver ran through him as he looked up, trying to catch a glimpse of the sky through the cracks in the stone ceiling above him.
He could almost see them up there, watching him, laughing at his misery.
That image alone planted a brand new fear inside him.