Now that I had [Time Loop], it had been added to the attribute list for potential upgrades. That was interesting, but I already knew what I was going to pick. I chose [Chimaeric Core] again, but this time, I was given a second option.

  

  [Upgrade total available mass storage]

  [Upgrade mass intake conversion rate]

  [Upgrade mass return absorption rate]

  Interesting. Now that I had my 10g of mass storage, I could upgrade more than just my available storage. “Mass intake conversion” probably referred to how much mass I could store while eating. At present, the most I could store was 50% of what I ate. Raising that would eliminate the need to purge when I was trying to consume a larger creature’s profile quickly, but so would just having a larger stomach. That can wait. “Mass return absorption” was probably how much mass I got back when I changed my Loadout from a larger body part to a smaller one. I had less experience with that but it also seemed to be at around 50%. I could see some benefits of that—it would have been easier to switch back from a grasshopper or scorpion to a rat if that were 100%—but only if I had the mass storage available to make use of it.

  Both of those probably cap at 100%, so there’s a finite upgrade path for them… in the future. For now, I’ll increase my total available mass storage again.

  

  [Chimaeric Core]: Requires [Bound Soul]. The control core which operates and modifies the [Amalgamation]. Mass storage: 10/100 grams.

  I chortled internally. I had been really worried that it would grow linearly, only giving me another 10g, but it grew by a factor of ten instead. I might have just barely been able to make 20g work, but I could definitely make 100g work.

  Pulling the dead gecko towards me, I started to eat.

  I managed to get my scorpion body before the door to the chamber swung back open and the wizard returned to perform another chimaera experiment.

  At that point I was all scorpion except with a grasshopper head. I had consumed around 30g of the gecko, which gave me about 40% of the profile, purging my belly regularly, and was trying to polish off the gecko before the wizard returned.

  When I heard the door, I retreated from view, pulling the gecko towards the back of the cage with me. I couldn’t exactly remember what the wizard attempted next—a duck and a tortoise, maybe?—but whatever it was, I remember it was larger than me as a rat-scorpion, not smaller. The wizard was overconfident and had moved on from smaller creatures. He had also taken to completely ignoring me, so I wasn’t too worried about him noticing that my cage was empty.

  Sure enough, he didn’t even glance at my cage, and strode over to the larger cages to acquire his “resources” for his next experiment. I watched as he cut, sewed, chanted, and failed once more, again displaying a shocking level of immaturity when he did. He strode out the door, and I sighed in relief.

  The issue was what I remembered happening next.

  A small boy in tattered clothes quietly slipped through the door, mop and bucket in hand. The child was maybe eight years old, incredibly scrawny and visibly battered.

  Timothy.

  My heart ached for the boy. He was alive, which was wonderful, but if time had truly looped and this was the same as before, he wouldn’t know me.

  “You’re cute for an abomination,” he had said to me.

  He had named me.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  I wanted to go to him, but I was a scorpion now. Would he know me? Would he like me? Would he fear me, or try and crush me?

  I watched, sadly, as he cleaned the wizard’s mess.

  No squeaks came from my cage, so nothing pulled his attention to it. When the chamber was cleaned, he dragged the mop and the bucket full of bloody water and viscera out the door. It shut with a thud behind him.

  It was depressing watching Timothy go, but I needed to gain power in order to save him from the time explosion. I had another day to grow as much as possible. I had to get to work.

  

   profile 100% complete. Added to [Amalgamation]’s Loadout options.

  After polishing off the gecko’s corpse, I had gained another 45g of stored mass. Physically, I felt awful. The scorpion’s stomach wasn’t quite as good at purging as the grasshopper’s, but I had managed to do it as needed to get the rest of the gecko eaten. I used it to swap my head to .

  Geckos were carnivorous. That made a gecko’s head much more suited to eating large amounts of meat than the grasshopper, which had been an uphill battle. Ideally I would also have been able to get the gecko’s body right away, since it would be a larger stomach, but I was still short by an unknown amount.

  By my calculations, the whole gecko was around 75g, compared to the scorpion’s 50g and the grasshoppers 10g. The head had been heavy, costing around half of what I had stored from the second round of gecko consumption. The bulk of the rest of the gecko’s weight was likely the body, compared to the limbs and tail. I probably needed around 20g more mass to switch the body, and I’d likely want to switch the limbs as well for mobility.

  Regardless, the best option was to kill some more creatures and get another level. Now that the mess of dead chimaeras was cleaned up, I wouldn’t be able to finish the rabbit profile right now, not that I really held out any hope of eating an entire rabbit with my tiny stomach. Instead, I made my way over to my next target.

  Standing in line with the bird cage, I snapped my stinger down and quickly pulled the corpse towards me.

  

   (Level 2) defeated. Reduced experience gained.

  Hmm. I had chosen the starling because it was around the same size as the gecko, and I was curious if the bird’s body or limbs would give me the wings as well and enable flight. That would come in handy for my escape and survival. I would still come back and eat this, but given how I now out-leveled it, I didn’t get enough experience to level up. I glanced around at the other birds nearby.

  

   (Level 1) defeated. Reduced experience gained.

   (Level 2) defeated. Reduced experience gained.

   (Level 3) defeated. Experience gained.

  Level up! You have reached Level 4.

  You have earned an attribute upgrade and a skill point.

  It had taken me a bit more murder than planned, but after killing a handful of birds, I had gained another level. The crow had been a challenge, and it would have definitely been a fight I would have lost if it hadn’t been in stasis.

  I would need a bit more mass to grow back to rat size, so I again selected [Chimaeric Cote] and chose the option to upgrade my total available mass storage. It grew by another factor of ten to 1000g, which sounded like more than enough to restore my original body.

  However, actually storing that much mass would require eating two kilograms worth of food. In a race against the clock, I wasn’t sure I could do that before the wizard came back for the next experiment. What was next after the duck-turtle? I had been so focused on getting fed grasshoppers that I hadn’t been paying enough attention.

  Eating the crow would be ideal. It looked to be around half a kilogram, easily five times larger than the Starling. I doubted I would have enough time to get a complete profile, though. Should I eat the sparrow, then? It’s smaller than the starling, but that’s not as useful…

  After some hesitation and second guessing, I decided to focus on the starling, as I had initially planned.

  It was a struggle eating any more after making myself sick on the gecko, but it didn’t take long until I could switch my body from to . That refreshed my belly, which made it much easier to eat. Eating almost my body weight in dead starling would have been impossible, but with half of it going into mass storage, I just managed to swallow the last bite of bird. It would have been nice to purge, but I apparently didn’t have a gag reflex as a gecko, and it didn’t seem possible.

  

   profile 100% complete. Added to [Amalgamation]’s Loadout options.

  Too full to eat another bite. Too full to move…

  I glanced over at the dead sparrow, crow, and woodpecker. Damn it, I have to do something about those, hide the bodies…

  My vision blurred. I had been awake for two days, killing, eating, purging, and so on, and now—paired with a full reptilian belly—it was catching up with me.

  I should hide, too…

  My concerns were crushed under the weight of my fatigue as I fell unconscious.