by Ivan Kal
Ever-Changing Body of Klyn: Your body has been forged by your bond with your creation. You become of one mind and will. Your body is no longer on a linear path of progression, but rather your power is now solely in your own hands. You may manifest any aspect that you have consumed a source of, at the expense of your own energy.
Morgan found his screens and then found the place where Klyn’s screens used to be. He saw that he had six forms, his former ones seemingly still saved, but also one more that was free.
Ever-Changing Body of Klyn
Rank (Mythic)
Consume 30
You are able to consume all matter. Anything that you have consumed you can replicate.
Basic Form 20
Your arm is able to assume the form of a modified human arm.
Sword of Dawning Form 18
Your arm is able to assume the form of the Sword of the Dawning.
Whispering Spirit Bow Form 17
Your arm is able to assume the form of the Whispering Spirit Bow.
Basic Eye Form 3
Your eyes are able to assume the form of basic human eyes.
Night Eye Form 4
Your eyes are able to assume the form of the Midnight Fire Owl eyes.
He noticed that he no longer saw a stat screen for Klyn, or rather his body now. So he moved to his own stat screens and looked.
STRENGTH
45
AGILITY
70
CONSTITUTION
40
INTELLECT
51
WILL
70
WISDOM
40
CHARISMA
20
LUCK
20
The numbers were the same as they had been before he changed, which didn’t surprise him. He had replicated the same body. The first thing he did was save his current body as his Basic Form. He didn’t need the arm one anymore; it was redundant. Next, that also meant that his Basic Eye Form was also redundant, so he decided that he could experiment a bit.
He felt for his energy supplies and figured that he had enough for some tinkering. He focused and started to change his muscles. He had consumed a lot of monsters that were stronger than him. He started with the body structure of the behemoth that he had consumed. He needed extra mass for that, so he pulled out the corpse of the one that he had taken and started consuming it and feeding himself body mass. He changed his muscles, scaling them down a bit for his size. He didn’t want to turn into a hulking monster just yet. Their shape was relatively the same, but he could keep his outward appearance the same while he changed himself beneath the skin. He didn’t want a tough, leathery hide.
After he was done with muscles, he started on the bones, replicating the same matter as that of the behemoth’s bones. It was incredibly powerful, but also heavy. By the time he had changed himself he felt like he weighed almost twice as much as he had before, which put him almost at 200 kilograms. Once he was finished, he glanced at his stat screen.
STRENGTH
85
AGILITY
80
CONSTITUTION
80
INTELLECT
51
WILL
70
WISDOM
40
CHARISMA
20
LUCK
20
He had effectively doubled his strength. His speed hadn’t gone up much, but the monster hadn’t been that much faster compared to how Morgan had been. His constitution had soared up as well. He started feeling very good about this new development, but then he noticed that the energy drain had spiked again. It was still below his regeneration rate, but now his core was filling in much slower. So there are drawbacks.
He saved this body in the slot where his basic eye used to be, and named it Improved Basic Form. The drain wasn’t that much greater that he couldn’t use it in most situations, but he would probably want to switch to the weaker form when he wanted to regenerate energy faster. He rearranged the positions of his forms, renamed his basic form to Simple Basic Form, and then switched to it, the extra mass going into his bracelet, which could hold about ten times of his regular weight in mass. With it, he had way of drawing in mass easily and changing into bigger forms, as well as allowing him to store it there when he wasn’t using it.
The bracelet had just gone from a very useful item to something essential. He looked at it and remembered that some items would adapt to the size of their wearer. To test it out, he bulged his arm at the wrist, and the bracelet increased in size. He narrowed his eyes and then decided that he needed a more secure place for it. He pulled it out and then put it on over his upper arm. He focused on it, and energy flew out of his core as he shrunk his arm, the bracelet shrinking with it. Then he moved the skin and flesh and muscle away until only bone remained and the bracelet became something like a ring around the bone.
Morgan grinned like a maniac and then had his flesh close up over it.
I’m a shape shifter. Then he started giggling, which turned into full-blown manic laughter a few moments later.
Ves is going to love this.
He managed to get himself under control and began thinking about more things that he could do, but soon he realized that his energy was getting low with all the changes he’d gone through. And he knew that he needed to rest. He took out his bedding and then set it up.
Tomorrow, he was going to test out everything.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Morgan woke up feeling incredibly rested. He got up into a sitting position, his legs crossed, and then looked down at his hands, opening them and closing them. They felt like his arms, as if nothing had changed, but he knew that it had. He took a deep breath, and let the implications of what he had done set in. He didn’t regret it, but he could recognize that he hadn’t been exactly one hundred percent rational when he’d made the decision to consume his entire body. It might have been the right decision, but it had also been impulsive.
Which wasn’t that much of a stretch for Morgan.
He realized that he hadn’t looked through all of his notifications in his haste to test things out yesterday, so he brought them up. A lot of his skills had gained a level or two, but he had also gained a few new skills. He had gained an Elemental Alignment for the remaining four elements, although all of them were at level 0. He hadn’t even known that skill could be at that level, and he didn’t know what it meant. He had also gained Body Manipulation skill, which made sense, and it had already gone up to level 5. He took a glance at his abilities, and saw that a few of them had leveled up as well. He had never really been sure what those numbers meant. He knew that there were just a numerical value placed on how powerful his ability or skill was, but there were no hard numbers—things were just sort of nebulous. The higher the level of his abilities, the stronger they were, and the shorter their cooldowns. But abilities were like macros that his soul-implant executed when he pressed a mental trigger, so he didn’t know why they even had levels.
His skills were his own understanding, his own knowledge, although even that was augmented by Sabila. She fed knowledge directly to his head when he leveled up a skill. Its number represented his mastery of the skill: how fast he could execute it and how much focus and energy he had to expend in order to accomplish something. Skills didn’t have cooldowns, but having to focus on using them was obstacle enough.
He saw that he had no new notifications and frowned as he realized something: he hadn’t gotten any exp for killing the two Rzan and their undead abomination. That made him even more confused about who, exactly, they had been. He couldn’t speak with Sabila until he leveled, though, and he was still a bit away from doing so. He would need to wait until then for answers.
With his notifications dealt with, he turned back to his body—and then something occurred to him. Klyn had been able to survive as long as it had energy. It needed it to grow and change, but ordinarily, as a hand and his heart, i
t hadn’t been a drain on Morgan core. Now, he knew that there was a slight energy drain, which confused him a bit. He was in his Simple Basic Form, which had the lowest energy drain on his core. But he knew that his body ran on energy now, it looked and felt like a real body, but its nature had been changed. It didn’t need food, or water…or even air.
He decided to test things out. First, he focused and stopped his lungs from breathing and sending oxygen through his body. Nothing visibly changed, and Morgan frowned. The sensation was weird; he wasn’t used to not breathing, but his brain wasn’t freaking out. After about a minute, he figured that he could start shutting down more organs to see what happened, but then he noticed something. His energy regeneration was ticking down, getting lower as time passed.
Morgan’s eyes narrowed as he got an idea. He stood and started moving his body, lightly sparring with the air. The more he moved, the more his regeneration dropped. When he started moving at full speed, his energy regeneration reversed and his core started draining.
He smiled and stopped moving as he had his lungs take a breath. Almost immediately, the drain started slowing, then he started seeing his energy replenishing again. He realized what was happening—the reason why his body required so little energy from his core was because his body itself was providing for the bulk of his energy needs. Oxygen was flowing through his veins, allowing his body cells to get energy from the food he ate and his body stored. When he had consumed his former body and recreated everything, he had done the same to his body’s energy supplies, which meant that he technically didn’t need to breathe or eat. If he didn’t, though, he would need to supply all the energy required to run his body from his core. A human body was a fairly efficient system for producing energy, though, and as he focused deeper on his body with his Body Manipulation skill he started to feel the sugars being broken down.
He started thinking if he could make the system even more efficient, and lower the energy drain on his core even more. Tilting his head, he started tinkering, changing his inner organs and looking for a more efficient setup.
Experimenting with different monster organs, he started seeing improvements. As it turned out, his human organs weren’t all that bad, but he managed to change his lungs so that they delivered more oxygen to the body and increased his heart’s power. That increased his body’s energy consumption on its own supplies, but lowered it on his core. Then he pulled in some mass from his bracelet and converted it into glycogen, filling his liver and muscles with it. He didn’t even need to eat anymore; he could just consume mass and convert it into what he needed. Not that he wanted to stop eating, as he enjoyed it immensely.
He pulled out a monster’s corpse out of his storage in the corner of the room and consumed some of its mass to replenish what he had spent from his Bracelet of Mass Storage. His simple form’s stats had changed somewhat. The increase in energy generation of the body made his energy regenerate faster…and then he got another idea.
He didn’t really need to have very high stats for this form. He could just use it exclusively when he wanted to regenerate his energy more quickly. So, he tweaked it again so that it consumed almost no energy from his core, but only survived on what his body could create. His stats dropped a bit, but he didn’t plan on using this form for combat. When he was done, he renamed the form to Regeneration Form and saved it.
Then he switched to his Improved Basic Form. He had limited form space, and two of his slots were taken up by his weapon, plus one for his new eyes. He knew that he would probably unlock more slots in the future, but for now, it was a limitation that required efficiency. His improved form was consuming much more energy from his core—still not enough to go into draining his power, but close, likely because his body couldn’t provide all of the energy itself. He started changing its inside, but then realized that he could do with a bit more space. So he enlarged his body slightly, giving himself a few centimeters of height, broadening his shoulders a bit. He scaled his own body upward, as he didn’t want to mess with any kind of equilibrium. He had a suspicion that Sabila was helping him be able to control everything perfectly even when he was not used to balancing in such an awkward form, too.
Then, he started streamlining the organs. He increased his heart, his lungs, his muscles and made his bones slightly denser—and they were already made from the same material as the behemoth that he had consumed. He only changed them slightly by adding in mineral deposits of scarletite into the bone structure. Then he closed down the holes between his ribs over his heart and behind it, adding more protection. Getting a better idea, he switched the location of his heart to the other side and placed a plate of solid bone over it and behind it before putting in a thin layer of scarletite over the bone. It was a balancing act to let the small round plate be flexible enough that his ribcage could still expand and contract, and afford him a good deal of protection.
With that done he started thinking what more he could do. He toughened his skull—a no-brainier. Ha, I’m hilarious. His eyes were normal human eyes, but he had consumed the eyes of some pretty powerful monsters that had good day vision. He experimented with a few, but the small gem that he used as a light source wasn’t exactly the best thing to let him test things out on, so he came back to his regular human eyes. He still had the form for Midnight Fire Owl eyes anyway.
Then he continued tinkering, trying to get the drain on his core as low as possible by increasing the energy generation of the body itself. He wanted this body to be his standard variant, the one that he used most of the time, but since he could now change its insides, he picked and matched from the parts and materials that he had consumed in the past.
Once he started seeing diminishing returns, he started filling in his body with energy supply by converting the corpse’s mass. The body consumed a lot of energy, and quickly, which meant that he would need to eat often and in large quantities. Alternatively, he could just convert nearby mass into energy.
He glanced at his stats again and grinned as he saw a few of the changes.
His strength had jumped to 90 and his agility to 85. That wasn’t a big increase, but it was enough. His constitution, though, had jumped to 100. He felt that that was his current limit, or rather the limit of the bodies he had consumed. He would need to find a stronger monster and consume its body if he was to make more improvements. He renamed the improved form to Main Form, then switched to his Regeneration Form to increase his regeneration speed and refill what he had lost by changing his body. He was already at almost half of his supply, and his Body Manipulation as well as Energy Manipulation skills had increased by several points each. Thankfully he already had a lot of the knowledge about bodies in general, his Harvesting, Skinning, and Medicine skills providing most of his base, so his knew skill leveled up quickly.
Finally, he looked at his last free slot. His intention from the start was to create a full-on combat form, something that would give him a massive advantage in a fight, but he needed to be very careful about this. He knew that he wanted a form that was extremely powerful, maybe even large. He could just copy the exact body and size of a Demi Behemoth, which would be very powerful, but he had consumed the bodies of many monsters, and why limit himself to the exact form when he could improve it? I’m going to be like some kind of a chimera, Morgan thought to himself.
He planned on making use of his bracelet to its fullest. Inside of it was more than a ton’s worth of mass—enough that he could draw on it for his arrows when in his Main Form, as well as use it as a source of energy in a pinch. It could also be used to heal, as if he got damaged he could just draw in mass and heal up the wounds. But, for his ultimate form he wanted something that would empty the bracelet completely, or at least a lot of it, and turn him into a real monster, a shape-shifting form like from the games and books on Earth.
He didn’t start with full-body transformations, but instead went body part by body part to keep the energy consumption low. He started with his head, trying the entire head o
f the behemoth, aside from the brain of course. The elongated snout and big teeth didn’t really do it for him, he tried a few more but then decided that perhaps it would be best if he didn’t change his head that much, at least outwardly. Instead, he started making other alterations. He replaced his naval cavity entirely using the sensory organ from one of the wolves that he had consumed.
As soon as he connected everything, he recoiled—the smell in the room was atrocious, and he realized that most of it was coming from him, from his raiment that had been soaked in blood and was now sleeveless. He grimaced as he realized that he had probably been announcing his presence to some of the monsters outside, but he still needed the raiment for its set bonus. He abandoned the idea of an improved nose. He wasn’t used to it, and it would take too long to adapt. Because of that, he didn’t touch his ears, either.
Which left him without much else that he could do to his head other than scale up the size and skull thickness. As he started thinking about what size he wanted the new form to be, he realized that he didn’t know if his clothes would change as well. Some items could adapt somewhat to the user’s size, but not all. He started increasing his size and felt the clothes starting to restrict his growth. He paused before he destroyed them and frowned in thought.
Solutions passed through his mind until he decided that there was only one thing that he could do: consume his gear and recreate it from his own body. It would technically be like he was walking around naked, but until he found some better gear it would probably be the only thing he could do. That would mean re-saving his other forms with his armor as part of them, but that was an easy fix. He sighed, then removed his quiver, satchel, and belt.