Oh god... disgusting! What is this? Arghh.... Headache of Death. Not cool!
I cursed inwardly and blinked as I tried to get my bearings and the sun burned my eyes. Apparently it was noon and the sun was burning down mercilessly on anyone who didn't immediately flee into the shade!
I rolled around and rubbed my eyes with my hands, but had to be careful not to scratch myself with the long dangerous-looking fingernails.
Wait, hands?! I looked startled at my hands that ended in sharp and slightly curved claws and fingernails! And I had arms!
Slowly it dawned on me again what had fluttered in before my feeding coma in system news. I had turned into another monster, this wendigo! Were wendigos, if I remembered correctly, not some mythical creatures that had once been humans and had been cursed by cannibalism with an eternal hunger?
Urgh... I hope I don't start to want to eat everything like wild and bestial now... Whereby, by the devourer trait I had already always a certain hunger feeling.
BUT there had been something. I had resisted the curse or not? Hah, I was lucky!
Slowly, I rolled over and heaved myself up on my knees and hands into a sitting position and plopped down on my butt. I blinked once, twice, three times and stared again in amazement and with my mouth slightly open at my hands, my lower body and my legs.
I actually seemed somehow... Like a human being. Except for the gray skin. The claws or long curved fingernails. And certainly more! But still, HUMANE!
I desperately needed to find a reflective surface to see what I actually looked like now. After all, a clear improvement to being a mole. And somehow there was more in me... something deeper, darker, more magical? The whole thing didn't feel like a simple further development, but embodied untapped potential. How I knew that exactly, I don't know, but something inside me felt like it was just a tiny fraction of what I could be now with this new body.
With a wandering glance, I looked around at the place where the dead wendigo had lain before. There was nothing left, and my devourer trait had sucked out even the bones and everything else.
Suddenly, I looked around further as I became aware of the difference in the clearing and the surrounding area out of the corner of my eye. Where before there had been a really idyllic little meadow and clearing surrounded by trees, now everything was bare and one could well have compared it to a forest fire! The meadow was no more, and I sat in the middle of a dusty and almost ash-covered clearing, while around me only bare and dried-out trees without any green towered into the sky.
The clear, blue sky was deceptive when you looked at my surroundings, and my jaw dropped at all the destruction around me.
What the hell? It was all that purple miasma mist, wasn't it? And I just... ate it? Urgh... I'm so glad I didn't see that under the ground before, or I would have run away in a panic! And if I had run away and later devoured the wendigo, I would have caught the curse! Ohhhh fuck, how lucky can you be!
Mentally thanking all the good spirits and gods, I pushed myself up, trembling slightly, still weak on my legs, and stood on two legs for the first time since my arrival here in this world. And it felt so gooooooood!
How I had missed the feeling! Yes, as a mole it had also been fun, and something new, but I'm used to walking around on two legs, having two hands and a head. Now it just feels soooo much.... better.
I looked down at my arms and hands again, fascinated, and turned them slightly back and forth in the sunlight, while my light gray skin seemed to reflect the sun slightly, even if it wasn't like the glittery vampire movies he had seen in many an advertisement in his old life!
If I judged correctly, I had also grown quite a bit and was now about thirty centimeters off the ground, at least a rough estimate.
Still excited about this unexpected development, I remembered what else I had unlocked. Something about shapeshifters. Instinctively, I knew again, as if the information had always been there and had been uploaded directly into my subconscious, what it meant.
I could, not as I first thought with the name, simply take on any shapes, but rather physical properties of everything I ate! This meant that I had achieved a perfect harmony between shapeshifter and devourer, and could now not only assimilate the properties and abilities of all organic or magical things, but from now on also the physical characteristics! So, as far as I know, if I devoured enough humans, I not only gained their properties, but with enough cell samples I could also transform into a human with any appearance. If that's not overpowered, I don't know what is. Feels a bit like cheating, but do I care? Nope!
Next, I checked my emotional side, which I had completely lacked as a mole, and noticed that I actually felt something more, even if it was more delicate and still with a strong tendency towards eating. Whether I developed more emotions when I turned into thinking and more compassionate beings? Or devoured them? Creepy thought! I was actually quite content with it, as it is now. I still knew from my old life, how emotions can degenerate and backfire, and preferred a logical and calculated understanding as I had him now at the time.
And I don't even want to start with my hero complex, which had arisen from emotions and had cost me my past life...
Pah, thoughts for my future self.
Visibly pleased with myself, I took my first steps forward, which at first were more like stumbling than actual steps, but after a few minutes limping across the former clearing, I quickly caught myself and got used to it.
Now, to my next goal! So, besides devouring more, becoming more powerful, and enjoying my life of course; finding a water surface and finally seeing what I looked like!
I sniffed instinctively in the air, and was only briefly startled why I did that, until I perceived various smells. And not only my smell had improved extremely, but also my hearing, that brought me distant rustling and even the quietest wind closer.
Further away to my right I heard a soft bubbling, which sounded to me damn like a small creek or river. With the new goal and nothing else interesting far and wide to do, I wandered off in the direction of the running water, which I could hear from this direction further away.
On the way, I passed the dead trees and wondered if at some point I could also secrete such a deadly miasma that simply killed everything in a wide radius around it. Hopefully, of course, in a controlled way, because I didn't always want to destroy everything living around me. I had a slight jump in my step and drove with my claws experimentally over the bark of the dead trees, and noticed very much to my satisfaction how easily my good five centimeter long claws at the end of my fingers gently penetrated like butter into the dead wood and drew furrows.
It was really remarkable and I had a childlike desire to try out everything possible with my body and to explore the limits. After all, it was good to know one's limits, especially if it gave me exactly the advantage I needed in a fight for life and death.
So I scratched playfully and with great pleasure over the various surfaces that I came across on the way, jumped in zig zag back and forth, tested my jump height, and sprinted short distances to test my speed.
Overall, it was remarkable how good my sense of balance seemed to be, how stretchy and flexible this body was, and how good and easy it felt to perform any movement, no matter how small or large. When I pressed against stones, I couldn't do much with my current strength, but as soon as I used my claws, every surface that had been natural to me simply melted away like butter. And I didn't just mean the claws on my hands, but also on my feet! And the most spectacular thing I found out while experimenting was that I could vary this melting under my claws and thus even crawl up surfaces on all fours!
I imagined the horror movie posters from my old life, where small children like creatures crawled along the walls and ceilings, and with how much terror I had always felt only at these images. And now? Now I was such a monstrous creature myself! Simply marvelous! I could not suppress a laugh and giggle, and even in my child's voice resonated a dangerous deep undertone, which would have simply scared me as a human.
After a total of twenty minutes of running, stopping, experimenting, testing and everything else I had done along the way, I finally came to a greener part of the forest, which had gradually shown fewer signs of the miasma and was now completely gone. A small one meter wide stream greeted me, and I grinned with anticipation at finally being able to see my outside completely. With a quick glance around and checking that I was indeed alone, I took the last steps towards the water.
What greeted me in the shallow water with only a slight current in the surface made me grin even wider.
Exactly what I had expected from a real wendigo, and not from this emaciated version on the clearing, greeted me with an evil-looking grin in the water surface.
My head consisted of a bony skull, which, however, looked like a skin and moved along with my grin and blink, while two white antlers stuck out above my sleepers and protruded a good ten centimeters above my head, slightly turned. My head was not at all human-like and more like a beast bent forward, as was the case with a horse's skull, and bloody tattoos decorated the white skull from the forehead down to my mouth, which showed crocodile-like round teeth when I opened my mouth as if to bite.
Just below my head, the unnaturally mobile bone skull ended and merged seamlessly into a light gray skin and from there into my shoulders and arms. On my shoulders, dangerous-looking bony spikes protruded, the top ones seeming to point dangerously forward, and the rest running in a row from both shoulders to the middle of my back, where they became smaller and smaller until they ended in my spine.
My body itself was more masculine in shape it seemed, especially when you looked at the genitals, and besides the gray skin showed scattered black hair, almost as if a black wolf fur would develop in the future.
It was just interesting to see me like this and I playfully tried out various dangerous looking poses and grimaces, which would surely make every little child and most adults run away screaming. Especially when I thought about how abysmally creepy my deep child's voice sounded and the mental cinema, as I crawled over walls and ceilings to get to my victims and to hunt them.
Did these thoughts make me feel bad? No, not at all, I noticed. Somehow, as I had already noticed, I lacked a kind of emotional, moral and ethical compass. I was what I was. An all-consuming and all-consuming monster that would grow stronger and more powerful with every happen.
But that didn't mean that I would walk around stupidly and just kill everyone. I knew exactly that I would have to proceed strategically and cleverly in order not to attract attention. Such a mass disappearance of creatures of any kind in an area would be noticed soon enough if I was not careful!
I giggled again and bared my teeth. Satisfied with my final performance, I took a few steps back and stretched my new body as I had seen athletes do in the billboards preparing for their competitions. My inner bones cracked and I shook myself comfortably as my muscles, tendons and bones warmed up and relaxed.
And now it was time to hunt, feast, consume, and see what skills and external changes I could make to my body!