As he woke up he realized that he was still in complete darkness.  The only other thing with him in this dark space was a screen in his view.

Thinking about it, it was probably about time he gave himself a name.  Names were, after all, pretty important for monsters because...actually he couldn't remember exactly.  Apparently a lot of the things he had learned or known while looking at the system with god level access that he hadn't learned naturally had been taken away again now that he was done.  It kind of made sense and was ultimately probably for the best.  The most unfortunate thing was that he couldn't even remember all the things about his new species.  

Regardless, he should try and think up a good name for himself.  Names could be added to so something short and simple for now would be best.  Maybe something like Jeyl?  It seemed like he could take that name but it also felt like there was room for more.  After a little bit of fiddling around he finally decided on Jelin as his new name.  He saw it attach to his small status screen and smiled.

He considered about checking the class part but then dismissed the screen instead.  He didn't have enough information about classes right now to make a good choice.  As he looked around at the darkness he realized that something was wrong.  He was starting to feel a little cramped and constricted curled into the fetal position and his evolution should be over so there should be no good reason to still be complete darkness like he was.  He tried to stretch and encountered physical resistance.  Quickly coming to the conclusion that he was in something like a shell or cocoon, he started pushing harder while directing all the force at a single point in front of him.

As he struggled to try and break free, he started to hear some sounds from the other side as well.  Before long he saw his little shell pierced and had to squint against the sudden brightness coming in from the new hole.  When his eyes finally adjusted he could see several hands reaching in to try and pull him out.  He managed to wiggle an arm free and put it where they could grab it.  Soon, the hole was being quickly widened while the hands pulled him free.

The pull actually ended up harder than anyone expected and he ended up being yanked out and landing on his back to stare up at bright and rather beautiful full moon through a clearing in the treetops.  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath to steady himself and clear his mind.  When he opened his eyes again and looked around he had a smile on his face.  The cocoon he had been pulled from looked like it was made of arachne webbing and the skeleton rat was sitting on top of it like a decoration.  All around him were three arachnae girls and two manteae girls.  Some quick introspection told him the links had changed ever so slightly but were still present.

He sat up and began inspecting himself, starting with his hands and feet.  As far as he could tell, he was now about the size of a young child.  He wasn't entirely sure about his appearance yet but he assumed he looked kind of like he was around seven or eight years old, just according to his intuition.  As he checked the rest of his body he had a brief moment of dread when he realized that he was naked but it quickly passed when he remembered that he was also mostly a monster now and it probably didn't matter out here in the middle of the forest.

<Why the cocoon?>

He asked as he stood up and pointed.

<To keep you safe.>

He was pretty sure it was Scratches who answered him.  He could tell who he was looking at but the subtle changes with the links had made it a little different and hard to tell who said it exactly.  He figured that some time and practice would solve that problem and decided to just move on for now.

<How long was I unconscious?>

<The bright light appeared in the sky three times and the old home fell apart.  Three more times the bright light appeared.  I'm...happy...that you finally woke up even though it is the time of dim light.>

<So about a week, huh?  I guess that sounds about right.  Hmm...I think I might also have to start a little school for you girls so you can learn about things like day, night, time, and other things.  Anyways, where's the queen bee?  How's everyone's injuries?>

<We would be happy to learn!>

<The smallest one has been recuperating in her nest which we placed behind you while you rested.>

<Most of us have healed enough to fight again.  The smallest one is still healing.>

As they all gave their own reports he listened and walked around to both check out how things were and check his own physical condition.  He noticed that there were a few webs around in the trees, and some even had some bugs in them.  His stomach started making some noises as he realized he was hungry.

<Sorry.  I just realized that I'm hungry.  Can I have some of your catches?>

Legs almost squealed in delight as she immediately to one of the webs, presumably hers, and started pulling some of the near dead bugs that hadn't been wrapped yet off the sticky web before bringing them back to him.  There was a brief moment where the memories of his past life told him that the human he used to be would have considered the idea of eating live bugs appalling.  His current self, however, seemed to find the idea appetizing and after thanking Legs he took the bugs from her hand and promptly shoved one into his mouth to start eating.

He didn't think there were actually enough of anything around to get full much less keep all the girls full so after he finished what he had been handed he considered himself well-fed enough to just list it as a problem for later.  He looked around a little more and started thinking.  Although he had lost most of the detailed knowledge he had temporarily been given from the system, he still had just enough general and fuzzy knowledge to know that monsters still lived on the same or similar rules to other living creatures.  That meant that they needed to make sure they had food, water, and shelter.

Food he could already tell was sparse right now and shelter seemed to at least be partly taken care of.  He wanted both of things to improve and, from what he could figure, the best way to do that would be to try and find water.  A good source of water would make other creatures gather and help with the food.  This didn't seem like the best location for shelter either, so setting up their new home near water seemed like the better idea.  The only problem now was trying to figure out where a good source of water was.

<Have any of you found water?>

<There was some water when it rained.>

<I see.  That won't work.  We need to find a place with a lot of water on the ground.  Enough water to cover me.>

Conk seemed to shy back a bit from that.

<That's a lot of water.>

He mentally added a note to teach them about lakes, rivers, and the sea as well.

<We'll need to find something like that.  It's the best place for us to build a good nest for all of us.>

Some of them nodded and some of them just looked at him questioningly but none of them disagreed.  Apparently they had finally been getting more diverse personalities over the past week.  He thought about it for a bit and decided to elaborate a little bit.

<We can wait until the brighter time if you want.  Then we can go after resting and eating.>

They all nodded this time and spread out to lie down and rest.  He watched them all for a bit and then sat down to think for a bit.  He was no longer immune to the need for sleep and sustenance, resistant to damage, resistant to pain, or inexhaustible.  There were probably some other traits he had lost that he hadn't realized yet.  He was definitely a little stronger as far as being able to move around now but he had to realize that he had gotten overall weaker in many ways.  

He wasn't tired at the moment since he had just awoken from his evolution so it was a good time while the others were resting to to fully run his new self through a circuit.  He started with simple things like pushups, crunches, and a light jog.  He even tried a bit of tree climbing.  While resting from the exercise he moved onto trying out his skills.  He had already begun to feel a little of the effects of [Intuition] and his racial skills were all passive buffs so he didn't feel a need to try to do anything with any of those right now.  Instead he decided to first try to work on his [Linguist] skill.

Until now he had been using telepathy through the link and he could kind of understand that the words that could be heard and sent in the link weren't exactly in any language specifically.  After all, even the fox in the dungeon hadn't completely understood the meaning behind his nickname until he explained it.  Especially now that he had a new body that likely didn't even work exactly the same as a human body, he should relearn how to talk.  The only language he knew was the one from his past life so he started to try and say every word he could remember from his past life.  Eventually it became more of a mental exercise leaving his body feeling like it needed to do something.  As he continued talking to himself, quietly to not wake the girls, he started walking around and trying to inspect everything and everyone around.

As the night wore on he pieced together all the things he had learned.  As he had figured, he was more physically capable but less sturdy and the slight feeling of tired muscles told him that he could naturally gain strength and not everything was run like a game even if this world had some kind of system.  That thought with his intuition told him that he could also probably gain skills naturally through hard work.  As far as [Inspect] went, it seemed to be pretty much as the description had told him when he chose it.  Trying to use inspect on things caused a blip of information to form in his mind but it was truly limited to things in his own knowledge or knowledge through deduction.  For instance, no matter how hard he tried he would never be able to figure out what kind of grass was at his feet since he had no knowledge other than it being grass and no amount of further deduction would add to that even subconsciously.  Whereas trying to [Inspect] one of the girls led to a result of [Lesser Child Arachne].  From what he could tell [Intuition] and [Inspect] synergized well together.

[Linguist], on the other hand, synergized quite well with his minor shapeshifting abilities.  After a little while he had gotten bored and figured out that he could change his voice slightly when he wanted.  With his new body, some of the sounds his old language required seemed harder to produce, although some of that could have been from speaking it in the past before his body developed to the point his new one had.  The shifting ability helped with that as well, though, which told him that should he come across languages that needed more unique sounds to be spoken well that he would have an easier time of it.  

Happy with his discoveries he sat down with his back leaning on a tree and began humming a bit while playing around with shifting his voice while hoping that he wasn't tone deaf.