Charlemagne found himself in total darkness when he awoke. The first thing that he noticed was that he was in a rather cramped spot. One foot was literally poking him in the eye, while the other had somehow gotten stuck behind his neck. His wings were pressed tight against his body, which was pressed into his face. The rooster’s razor-sharp beak had completely sliced through a few feathers, but that didn’t stop his abundant plumage from enveloping the rooster’s mouth and nostrils, which would have tickled had the bird been ticklish.
The second thing Charlemagne noted once he had processed that he was stuck inside an egg like a baby chick, was that there was no air in the egg. That was evidently something that he still required, because his lungs were protesting at the lack of it.
Charlemagne did not remember the first time that he had hatched, for obvious reasons. But, like other chickens, he had used an “egg tooth” to break through the hard shell made mostly of calcium carbonate. The second time Charlemagne hatched he had no need for such a crutch. A light peck was all it took for the side of the green and blue swirled egg to detach and slam into one of the farm’s walls, knocking it over.
Like the non-mythological and later mythological phoenix of antiquity, Charlemagne was reborn.
The first thing that he did was eat his egg, because, unlike a baby chick, he could put the calcium and other trace minerals to good use. He was also ravenous from his slumber, which had wrought a number of changes to his body as well as his mind. Even as he ate, his newly enhanced intellect wondered if he had made the right decision.
The squiggles asked Charlemagne, “Do You Wish to Remain a Rooster, or Do You Wish to Become More Like Your Patron? On the surface, it was a question that required a binary answer. There was an implied “either or” in the phrasing. Charlemagne was not a philosopher by any stretch of the imagination, but he had experience with the squiggles being able to interpret his feelings. And so, after careful consideration, the rooster chose to show the squiggles how he imagined himself in the future, when he had dreamed that he and Grimfalk hunted together in the forest of N’dali. Although the young rooster only remembered short snatches, he recalled that Grimfalk and he had slain hundreds of Assassinadders and then found two roast pigs lying abandoned in the forest.
In the dream, Charlemagne was as large and as strong as Grimfalk, but he still looked like himself. There were some changes, to be sure. For one, his wings were both longer and more useful, allowing him to carry Grimfalk through the air so he could ambush his prey from an unexpected angle. His beak had also lengthened to provide additional reach, which came in handy when bifurcating the delicious snakes, and it was serrated like a knife to better hold on to prey. A set of pharyngeal teeth had also made an appearance, which would make it easier for the rooster to consume large quantities of meat quickly, something that he had struggled with in the past. The tiny spurs that grew from the back of his legs had changed the most, turning into wicked blades that could slash a tendon, disembowel an abdomen, or slit a throat. Finally, dream Charlemagne’s plumage had lost its color and become almost as dark as the night itself, making it difficult to see the rooster in anything but broad daylight.
The squiggles had accepted Charlemagne’s offering of a half-forgotten dream without argument and had designed for him a custom devolution program. And although the rooster was having second doubts, the results of the process were undeniable. Charlemagne eventually ran out of eggshells to eat and asked the squiggles to pull up all his changes.
Charlemagne’s grasp of math was still exceptionally fuzzy, but he thought that the raw increases to his attributes were not as impressive as they had been last time. Despite this, his body was overflowing with vitality and power. His muscles felt more compact than before, like they were coiled snakes ready to strike at any moment. His tendons were wiry but supple like braided steel cables. His bones had also been affected by the transformation, making them both lighter and stronger than they had been before. The exceptions to this were the bones in the wings and the sternum, which had received even more reinforcement and thus were incredibly strong while remaining closer to their original weight. Even the rooster’s feathers, which were made from the same material as the hair and fingernails of mammals, had been transformed. Gone were the white spots that had been sprinkled across the rooster’s body, leaving behind feathers blacker than coal, as black as the infinite void of space. Mana had infused each feather, leaving Charlemagne’s plumage as resilient as Kevlar armor and far more stylish.
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The only thing that confused the rooster about the new body was his size. He had been slowly but steadily getting larger over the past few days. The cause was his Mana Core. As his skill ticked upwards, both the quantity and quality of the mana pumping through Charlemagne’s body increased. By the time he fought the human Champion, he had been so large that he was unsure how he was going to mate with his hens without completely crushing them. It was ironic that his size had been reduced to more manageable proportions just after he had lost all his hens. A pang of sadness over the loss struck him, the unfamiliar emotion troubling yet somehow comforting at the same time.
Turning his attention away from his newly transformed body and his mixed feelings, Charlemagne asked the squiggles to display his first unread message. It was another one of the video recordings sent by his Patron, Grimfalk.
“Charlemagne, my boy!” the enormous dinosaur deity greeted his follower. The rooster could not help but feel that Grimfalk’s face was somehow even more frightening when he was happy than when he was upset.
“I’m so glad that you made it through that last fight,” Grimfalk continued. “I don’t know what exactly that human was, but you should be prepared to fight more of them. You have a lot of experience with humans, so you know that they are persistent little things. Anyways, you don’t need me to tell you how to handle things. Listen, I was upset about the whole chick thing, but then I realized that every living thing on the farm besides yourself would have been killed when the human self-destructed there at the end. I gotta hand it to you, I wasn’t sure you’d make it out of there alive, but boy, did you show them! I can’t imagine the look on Brett and Fellissa’s faces when you came from behind and took out that overgrown half man, half machine guy.
Anyways, that human must have been packed full of good stuff, because you started another devolution right after eating him. You’ll probably feel a little weird after this devolution or maybe the next one…losing your wings will be a bit of a bummer, but the tail is one hundred percent worth it, let me tell you. So much fun. But where was I? Oh yeah, funds have been pretty tight up here, but I was able to afford an upgrade for when you hit level 25. What I think you should do with it is…”
Both the video and audio garbled out for a few moments, before returning to their normal, higher definition than real life quality.
“So yeah, have fun with it, go a little wild. But if you could do me a solid and see if you can find another farm nearby that has hens, that would be great. All right, I don’t have much time left, but I want you to know that you’re doing an okay job. Maybe next time you can figure out a way to keep your hens and chicks alive. See you around!”
Charlemagne was left with mixed feelings after watching the message from Grimfalk. He had been worried that the great hunter would be mad at him for losing the flock under his care, but the apex predator had praised Charlemagne’s performance in the fight against Raul and had even purchased him an upgrade. Although the memories of his talk with the God of the System were extremely hazy, he recalled with shame that he had not spoken up to defend his Patron’s honor.
Putting aside the unpleasant memory, the rooster turned to the second message. It was from the squiggles.
The patch notes continued for quite a while, but the mention of Settlement Token reminded the rooster that he still had the carrot-shaped token sitting inside his stomach, at least the last time he had checked. Recalling that his mana was slowly replacing that of the carrot’s shielding, he decided to check on the progress that had been made while he was unconscious. So, he pulled a bit of mana out of his core and sent it questing down into his stomach, noting that the magical substance was easier to manipulate than ever before, and was relieved to discover that the Settlement Token was still down in there. Intrigued, he seized control of an even smaller portion of the mana swirling around inside his digestive tract and used it to prod at the dense mana that surrounded the carrot, gathering as much information as he could before his wisp of mana was absorbed by the shield.
What he discovered excited him.
