The labyrinthine caves of the World Erosion Ants were a masterpiece of subterranean engineering—and a graveyard of many strong beasts.
The tunnels stretched in a thousand directions like a pit of stone puzzles designed to swallow everything.
In the center of a hollowed-out chamber, where multiple paths met, the darkness was broken only by the wet, rhythmic sound of tearing flesh.
Dreleon sat in the dirt, his royal bearing replaced by the primal posture of a scavenger.
In his transformed form, with golden eyes and massive mane he sat.
Before him lay the carcass of a World Erosion Ant.
A species so dominating, that every single one was at least low-grade with some Mid-Grade and, the king being High-Grade.
They were different from normal creatures, because with their special trait: Weight strength, which grants them 150x strength of their Weight; and the powerful horde, they ruled this part of the jungle.
And Dreleon was eating a mid level ant raw.
With its Mid-Grade weapon being, a metal ball.
He used his teeth and his bare claws, driven by a savageness that would have horrified even the erosion ants.
One might wonder why a pacter of the royal line had been reduced to this—eating insect meat in a hole in the earth, massive but still an ant.
The answer was simple: a particular Snake had kicked him into this pit and told him it was necessary.
His mind drifted back to one day ago, to the serene but suffocating atmosphere of the White Jade Palace.
The Snake, draped in her elegant human form, had stood before him with a terrifyingly calm expression.
"To master the Middle Pillar, 'Devour', you must first understand that your body is a lie," she had said, her sapphire eyes gleaming.
"An ordinary animal is a collection of specialized parts.
The heart pumps, the lungs breathe, the brain thinks.
They are separate functions.
To learn Devour, you must dissect these functions at the microscopic level.
You must make every single cell in your body capable of processing all functions at once."
Dreleon had frowned, his brow furrowed in confusion.
"What does that have to do with devouring? And is this even possible?"
"Everything, but it's still not possible to transfer every function in a cell, so as to achieve a necessary mastery of devouring, a routine training is necessary." she replied with a deceptive gentleness.
"To truly Devour, you must make every cell a template—a void capable of holding the function of another being's power.
By consuming them, your cells mimic their functions, adding their strength to yours."
Remembering those words now, Dreleon felt a wave of nausea that had nothing to do with the raw meat.
Lately, whenever he was alone, his thoughts were filled with her.
It was like a charm working against his soul.
He sought to hate her—he wanted to kill her for what she had done to him—but he lacked the capability.
Instead, he found himself performing a grotesque act of self-deception, showing a twisted kind of love toward his master just to keep his mind from snapping.
The so-called routine training had been a sequence of successive tortures.
He had lost all sense of time, becoming nothing more than an experimental rat in her hands.
The pain of having his cells rewritten, dismantled, and forged into templates was an insatiable agony that left him hollowed out.
Suddenly, a sound like a million swarming bees vibrated through the stone floor, waking him up from memory.
Dreleon froze.
From the darkness of the neighboring tunnel, a black tide emerged.
It was a swarm of World Erosion Ants, thousands of them, moving as a single, crushing sea of ants that destroyed everything in its path.
He knew instantly that he was no match for a tide of this magnitude.
Even with his beast body and telekinetic space mastery, he would be ground into paste.
Closing his eyes, he activated his Space Domain.
Unlike before, he didn't try to run or attack.
Instead, he used a trick he had developed in secret, born from the desperate need to hide from the Snake during her experiments.
By making the space around him chaotic, he blended into the natural chaos of the environment.
In moments of calm, he used the space element to ensure light never touched his skin—reflecting the rays around him so he became a literal void in the air.
He was invisible.
It was a simple trick designed to fool savage beasts, though it had never worked on the Snake.
Even in total darkness, she had always seen him, capturing and torturing him regardless of his invisibility.
But against the ants, it was his only shield.
As the black tide surged past, mere inches from his hiding spot, a new sensation hit him—one far more terrifying than the ants.
His stomach felt like it was filled with hot acid.
Hiding was not a solution, he had to act, or he was unable to take the pain anymore.
Because he had messed with his own biology, making every cell almost a Master Cell, his energy consumption had spiked to ten times its normal rate.
The penalty for his evolution was absolute.
In the past, his Lion Clan physiology allowed him to go a month without food, losing only a bit of muscle weight.
Now, if he didn't eat every day, it felt like the onset of death.
His body had become a furnace that demanded constant fuel.
The 150x strength of the ant he had just consumed was
being integrated into his marrow, but the energy required to maintain that new template was draining him dry.
Equivalent to eating every hour, which even when literally eating every hour was not enough.
As the last of the swarm passed, Dreleon looked at the remains of his meal with a desperate, frantic hunger.
He finally understood why the Snake called this knowledge "Devouring."
It wasn't just a power he used on others.
It was a hunger that was devouring him from the inside out.
To live, he had to consume.
He reached down, tearing another strip of meat from the carcass, his eyes glowing with a dark, predatory light.
The training was only half over, and the human was already gone.
In his place stood something far hungerier, a Predetator.