The sound of the chamber door slamming open woke me up.

  Shit, I thought as I tried to shake myself out of my bleary-eyed state. I quickly scampered back behind a cage, trying to get out of sight in case the wizard looked over towards me.

  If he was headed back to the row of cages with the slightly larger creatures, like the rabbit and the duck, I would probably be fine. To my dismay, I watched the wizard head over to the smaller cages.

  I watched in rigid horror as he pulled out a tarantula from its cage. That’s right, he tried a rat-tarantula chimaera after a couple of failures, I remembered suddenly.

  Unfortunately for me, the tarantula cage was only a few cages away from the gecko cage.

  Will he notice? Or are enough cages empty now that it won’t trigger any alarm bells for him?

  I barely breathed as the wizard turned, grabbed another rat, and headed towards the center of the room and began his experimentation. As before, his attempt failed, and he exploded into a fit of rambling anger, shouting about the waste of core crystal and his time, and stomped on the unmoving rat-spider.

  Then he turned to my old cage, and all hope was lost.

  “Hmm?”

  The wizard arched an eyebrow and stepped towards my cage, then slowly turned and looked more closely at the rest of the room. His eyes narrowed as his gaze fell onto the cages of birds and he spotted the dead leftovers I hadn’t been able to eat.

  “...Interesting.”

  Eerily calm after his earlier outburst, the wizard wiped his hands on his robe and began chanting as he brought his hands together, creating a circle with his fingers in front of his face. As the spell finished, a magical lens of some kind appeared in his hands, and with supernatural precision, he turned and looked through it directly at my hiding spot.

  A finding spell. I’m toast.

  The wizard walked over as I racked my brain for a solution, but it was too late. With a flick of his finger, the cage I was hiding behind shifted to the side, revealing me in all my gecko-scorpion glory.

  Pausing only momentarily, the wizard smiled. “Very interesting,” he said as his lips turned upwards.

  He reached towards me, and with no other options, I succumbed to my fate.

  “Arise, my pet!”

  Agony seared through my entire being. I tried to move, and attempted to scream, which came out as a mere squeak. Light painfully assaulted me as I managed to get control of my vision, and I surveyed the room around me.

  I was back.

  “It’s alive!” the fanatical, disheveled man screamed.

  While the wizard cackled and danced his celebratory jig, I thought back to my last memories. I had been caught, and the wizard, confounded by my changed appearance, began dissecting me to figure out why.

  Dissecting me while I was still alive. The pain had been unimaginable.

  Glaring up at the wizard, I felt a hate quite unlike anything I had ever felt before. I have to escape from here.

  As my thoughts had faded and my brain shut down in my previous life, I had wondered if I would come back again, or if I would simply die after getting a second chance. After all, I wasn’t dying in the time explosion this time around, simply dying a mundane death from more damage than my body could handle. I checked my system to see if I could learn anything.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  

  WARNING! is about to die!

  WARNING! has died. Searching skills and attributes for posthumous actions...

  [Time Loop] initiated.

  Huh.

  I ruminated on that while the wizard finished going through his celebration routine, eventually stuffing me in my cage and giving me a grasshopper. I mechanically ate it so he would leave and I could process my thoughts.

  My time loop ability had given me a second chance, but I hadn’t given it a closer thought after that, because I had been focused on trying to escape and to save Timothy. Now that I had looped again, and not from the time explosion, I had to come to terms with what that meant.

  Am I… immortal?

  Immortality in the usual sense meant living forever, but this was different. I was trapped in a time loop. At the moment, that seemed like a good thing, because I had goals. But what happens afterward?

  What if I accomplished everything I set out to do, grew old, and died peacefully? Would that trigger my time loop as well? How many loops before awakening back in this tower would become a living hell? My memories from my former life were basically gone, but I had a deep sense of unease about this. I looked back at the message from my system about posthumous skills and attributes.

  If I gained other posthumous actions, maybe they’d replace time loop…

  Shaking my head, I brought myself back to the present. I was worrying about “tomorrow” when I still hadn’t figured out “today.”

  For now, solving my problem just got a lot easier. I had potentially infinite tries to figure out how I was going to save Timothy and beat this wizard.

  And, thanks to the wizard, I had a veritable buffet of experience, profiles, and potential skills right in front of me.

  Having reached Level 4, I had three skill points I could use right away if I wanted to. I hadn’t had time to look at what I had unlocked from the profile in my last loop, so I did so now.

  The only skill the profile awarded was called [Flight (Minor)]. It, unsurprisingly, granted starlings with the gift of flight, but the caveat that came with it being a minor skill was that it required having wings. Damaged wings couldn’t fly. I made an educated guess that there was a [Flight (Major)] still out there in the world which could grant the gift of flight without the same restriction, but I had no idea how long it would take to come across that.

  I had unlocked a similar skill from the profile which I had considered purchasing, [Regeneration (Minor)]. It allowed the creature to regrow damaged body parts, so long as it survived the damage. The caveat for that was that the skills took time to fully regenerate the lost part, potentially months for a fully amputated appendage. This also required rest and food, and the creature would need to survive the initial bleeding. As with [Flight], I assumed there was a [Regeneration (Major)] which would heal the user a lot more quickly.

  However, I also suspected I could solve the regeneration issue for myself with [Amalgamation]. If I had the stored mass and switched my Loadout to a new body part, it stood to reason that I would heal in the process. Of course, similarly, I also presumed I would get less mass back from the absorbed body part during the change if it was cut off. It was something I probably needed to test before I made a decision.

  In total, I had the choices of [Flight (Minor)], [Infectious Bite], [Mighty Leap], [Regeneration (Minor)], [Venom Resistance], and [Venomous Sting].

  Honestly, I wasn’t thrilled with my skill offerings, which is why I had continued to bank my points. Once I was engaging in real combat, I might want the offensive skills, but right now it was insufficient against the wizard. [Flight] was probably the best buy for escaping the tower, but it could wait until I actually took the starling form and had wings. Instead of pre-purchasing skills and then needing something else later, I instead practiced quickly bringing up the skill purchase options. If I could make it a nearly automatic process, I could buy a skill on demand when I needed it.

  Wait. Don’t grasshoppers have wings?

  I needed to shrink to escape the cage anyway, so I made the same change as last time into a grasshopper with a rat’s tail. Unlike last time, I had plenty of room in mass storage to get back the 50% mass return from my rat size, which was a huge advantage over last time.

  Paying a little more attention to my limbs, I discovered I had two pair of walking limbs as well as a pair of hind jumping limbs, but no wings. I tried to jump, but bungled it horribly. Presumably, I needed [Mighty Leap] to perform it correctly.

  As I made my way out of the cage, I thought about the difference between grasshoppers and birds. Bird wings were different from insects in that they were actually the bird’s forelimbs. Maybe I should try it? I’ve got the mass available.

  I considered my available profiles and mass and set up my Loadout:

  

  Head:

  Body:

  Limbs:

  Tail:

  When the change was complete, I first had to deal with a wave of nausea at how wrong I felt. This was the first time I had used three profiles at once, and it was an order of magnitude worse than two, which I had grown used to.

  Once I recovered, I looked down at my body, and mentally frowned.

  Now that’s weird.