Alexander's shock did not fade quickly.
He sat in the thin morning light, staring at the floating numbers before him. After a while they no longer looked like symbols; they began to feel like accusations. As the minutes passed, his thoughts moved as if through thick mud.
"How is this possible? How did I not notice?"
Each time he tried to answer himself, his mind returned to the same empty conclusion: the mushrooms. They were terrifyingly dangerous things.
He lowered his head and looked at his own body.
The change was not subtle. His limbs had lengthened. His frame had broadened, and he was now clearly a little overweight.
Yet in some parts of his body, his muscles had become more defined. Even beneath the scratches and torn flesh left from the battle the night before, it was possible to see it.
He had grown dangerously close to the size of an adult Nuxali. Still, the realization felt unreal, as if he were looking at someone else's body and merely borrowing it for a moment. Getting used to it would take time.
He forced himself to think the way he used to.
He tried to calculate.
The growth of his statistics had been uneven. Months of constant feeding and inactivity had made him fat. Because of that, his AGI and STR values were lower than they should have been, while his CON had skyrocketed. Even so, the numbers still gave him a reference point. They allowed him to estimate how long the ravine had held him.
Normally, by the time I reached one year of age, I expected my stats to barely pass ten, he thought slowly and methodically. But my body isn't normal. It grows faster… more than twice the normal rate.
The numbers in his mind slowly dragged themselves into place. The result landed like a dull blow, yet it was enough to shake him.
Five… maybe six months.
That long.
In that time, his body had climbed toward a level of strength it should not have reached until his second year.
The feeling that followed was tangled, unsettling, and strangely satisfying. Because power was still power. Yet there was also unease, because he had gained it not through control, but through dependence. The ravine had been a blessing; it had provided food, growth, and recovery. But it had also been a curse that tried to steal his future by hollowing out his mind. And it had not allowed him to grow in a healthy way.
His gaze drifted, and his heavy thoughts returned to the pack and what remained of it.
They were almost gone.
Only five remained.
The Queen was crippled. And of the four others besides him, most were still prisoners of the mushrooms. Worse still, a cold detail surfaced in his mind: despite all this biomass, despite months of abundance, neither the Queen nor Eowyn had produced a single drone. It was as if the fundamental purpose of their species had been suspended, replaced by nothing but eating, sleeping, and eating again.
The realization settled inside him like a stone.
Until the mushrooms were removed from their minds, they would do nothing.
Then another thought arrived. Clear. Final.
"I can't save them."
"Even if I could tear the addiction out of them, the pack is already functionally dead. My sister is gone. And Eowyn will not bow to a crippled queen for long, just like I wouldn't."
A new clarity rose within him. Quiet. Ruthless.
"If I stay under Eowyn, I'll only be exchanging one cage for another."
The decision began to form even before the thought fully finished, as if his body had already chosen it.
"I need to walk my own path now."
The thought grew into something larger, almost electric.
"It's time to build my kingdom."
The word kingdom sparked something in his mind. Right. He had grown now. He had become stronger. Yet he had never checked the one thing that mattered most.
He opened the System again.
[Traits]
[Brood Generation]
Allows the Nuxali to produce new drones using biomass and expand the swarm numerically. The template of newly produced drones can be set via [Genetic Assimilation].
He read it once. Then again, more slowly.
Everything looked the same as before.
Except for one detail.
The word that had always been there like a chain was gone.
Pending.
It wasn't there anymore.
A surge of excitement rose inside him so strongly it almost felt like hunger. He felt an immediate urge to use it, to prove that he was no longer trapped, to prove that he could create something that belonged only to him. But almost instantly another realization cooled that excitement.
He didn't know how to do it.
The System only told him the state of his body, not the method. It gave him the capability, but not the instructions.
He closed the interface.
Then he remained still. Closing his eyes, he listened not to numbers but to his instincts. He turned inward, trying to feel the new tensions within his muscles, the unfamiliar biological movements inside his body.
Hours passed like this in meditation.
Alexander remained motionless inside the hollow, forcing himself into a strange form of meditation. His breathing slowed, his attention turning inward, away from the ravine, away from the faint scent of fungus, away from the lingering echoes of battle. Instead, he focused entirely on his own body, on the unfamiliar currents moving beneath his muscles and bones.
At first, there was nothing.
Only the pain from his wounds. The dull ache in his back. The stiffness in his limbs.
But he did not give up.
Slowly, something subtle began to reveal itself. A biological process hidden deep within his instincts, something new, something that had not existed when he was younger.
Eventually, he managed to trigger it.
The moment it began, he felt it immediately.
The biomass stored within his body began to burn.
It wasn't painful, but it was intense, as if fuel were being consumed all at once. The energy released from it surged inward through unfamiliar biological pathways until it gathered in a place he had barely noticed before.
The Brood Organ.
Now that he was aware of it, the structure was unmistakable. A dense biological core hidden deep within his abdomen, an organ that had remained dormant until now. As the biomass energy flowed into it, the organ began to activate, preparing a complex process that Alexander instinctively understood as the beginning of egg production.
For a moment he allowed the process to continue, carefully studying the sensation.
Then he stopped it.
The flow of energy halted.
The Brood Organ fell silent once again.
It consumed far too much energy.
More importantly, Alexander had not yet decided what kind of children he wanted to create.
"I can't produce offspring carelessly," he thought. The idea had formed slowly but carried firm conviction. "That would be a disaster."
If he produced drones without setting a proper template, they would simply become copies of himself.
And that carried a dangerous consequence.
His own body was growing at an abnormal speed, far faster than a normal Nuxali. That accelerated growth worked for him because he could return his body to its previous state whenever he wished.
But if a drone inherited that same growth pattern, it would eventually destroy itself.
"Once growth begins inside another body… I can't stop it. After a drone is born, I can't alter its biology anymore."
The realization was brutally clear.
"In the end, it would kill them."
He opened his eyes and looked out into the ravine again.
The battlefield was still there.
Corpses.
Scaled Nuxali. Fallen members of his own pack, along with bodies left behind from the past. Biological material everywhere.
And every one of those bodies represented an opportunity.
He thought calmly. "I'm standing in the middle of a battlefield filled with corpses I can study… and new evolutionary paths I can explore."
He exhaled slowly.
"I shouldn't rush."
Even without the mushrooms, the biomass around him would sustain him for a while.