The journey from the cave to this riverside had consumed 2 days and nights of ceaseless experimentation. As soon as his transformation had stabilized enough to allow movement, compulsion had taken over.
The compulsion was not emotional. It was structural. A mind rebuilt to process reality as data could not abide operating within an unexplored system. His new form was a machine whose specifications he did not yet understand.
That was unacceptable.
The first hours had been chaos. The world he had always known—grasslands, acacia trees, rocky escarpments, the winding river—revealed itself in layers that his previous consciousness would have found incomprehensible.
Heat signatures glowed everywhere. Small hyraxes, invisible to ordinary vision, burned like faint coals in cracks of distant rock. Insects became moving points of heat against the cooler air. Even the earth itself radiated stored warmth along patterns of density and moisture.
Sound unspooled into bands. Infrasound tremors from distant elephant herds rolled through his bones like slow thunder. Ultrasonic clicks from bats carved delicate filigrees of information in the air, each echo mapping the world in high-frequency outlines. The calls of unseen birds, the rustle of rodents in dry grass, the grinding movement of worms beneath soil—all of it arrived simultaneously.
Smell detonated into a chemical atlas. Every animal carried a unique signature: the iron-salt of fresh blood, the ammoniac tang of fear, the heavy musk of territorial marking, the subtle threads of reproductive readiness. The river had layers—algae, stone, rotting vegetation, and fish.
For a brief period, even with his upgraded architecture, it threatened to crush him. Every vector of reality slammed into his awareness at once.
His mind adapted, and filters constructed themselves. Prioritization hierarchies emerged. Signals were categorized, ranked, suppressed, and elevated. By the end of the first day, he could choose.
Focus here. Mute that. Elevate this band of sound. Reduce that wavelength of light.
The world did not become less. It became ordered.
Day One: Velocity
He chose a flat stretch of savanna—a corridor of packed earth between low scrub and scattered boulders.
He walked it first, marking distance by memory with perfect accuracy.
One hundred paces. Slight incline here. Small depressions there. Rock outcropping at the far end. Sparse acacia roots beneath the surface—possible instability under extreme force.
Then he ran.
The first acceleration was cautious: faster than any human had ever run, but still within a band his older body could have just approached for heartbeats in moments of absolute desperation. It felt effortless. His lungs barely acknowledged the effort. Muscles fired with such efficiency that force translated almost perfectly into forward motion.
He accelerated again.
Biomechanics that had once bound him shattered. His heel bone—now a lever arm more akin to an ostrich's—gave his calf muscles impossible mechanical advantage. His tendons stored and released energy in oscillating waves; his muscles no longer simply contracted but resonated.
He shifted posture. Head lowered. Shoulders tucked. Spine curved into a predatory arch that turned his whole frame into an aerofoil.
The air responded differently.
He felt it as pressure on his skin, in the vibrations along the micro-riblets that now textured his flesh. His drag profile flattened. Turbulence slid away in organized vortices.
Numbers formed in his mind with each stride.
60 mph
120 mph
200mph
300mph
He kept going until the very earth itself began to object after reaching 410mph.
Micro-fractures spiderwebbed beneath the surface of his footfalls and radiated outward. Grass ripped from the soil in sheets. The shockwaves of each impact propagated as low seismic events.
Game animals within fifty meters dropped where they stood—not dead, but stunned, their nervous systems overwhelmed by the pressure differentials ripping through their insides.
He slowed.
Limit discovered.
Not his.
The planet's.
Day Two: Force
Night cloaked the savanna in shadow.
He preferred it that way.
He found a boulder—a granite monolith half-buried in a hillside, its mass at least ten tons. Under starlight, it was just a darker shape against dark surroundings. To his eyes, it was a cold mass distinct from the slightly warmer rock around it, its crystalline structure visible as subtle differences in thermal emission.
He gripped it.
His hands—longer fingers, broader palms, carbon-reinforced bone—sank into minuscule imperfections in the rock. Pressure climbed.
The stone that had withstood millennia of weathering surrendered in seconds. Hairline fractures deepened into visible cracks. The boulder tore free of the hillside with a sound like a mountain exhaling.
He lifted.
Ligaments held. Bone held. Muscles held. At no point did he feel close to any threshold.
He pressed it overhead.
Then he threw it.
The boulder became a crude projectile, tracing a high arc against the stars. It smashed down through acacia trunks, obliterating them, then burst against another rock face in a spray of shrapnel.
He spent hours like that. Testing leverage. Angles. Punching stone. Kicking trees. Ripping stumps from the earth. Each impact taught him something about stress distribution, about how his own tissues flexed and returned, how the fascia webbing across his frame dissipated and rechanneled force.
By dawn, he understood something with absolute clarity:
In any direct contest between his flesh and the materials of this era, his flesh would win.
He had become a walking violation of every ecological balance.