Chapter 8 Rat cave

[Name: Adrian Walts]

[Level: 1]

[Species: Rat rat (adolescent)]

[Skills: Bite(level: 1)]

[Ability: Flesh stack(level: 1)]

[Partial Evolution: Monstrous muscles +1, Growth +3, Efficient stomach +1, Carving claws +2, Agile prehensile tail +2, Dextrouss limbs +1]

[Health: 5/5]

[Mana: 0]

[Strength: 6]

[Speed: 4]

[Durability: 1]

[Intellect: 14]

[Will: 5]

[Skill point: 0]

[Evolution point: 0]

I looked at my stats before I even opened my eyes and I liked what I saw. Seeing something with your eyes closed was still strange to me, it was like using a VR headset and only words are visible while the background is completely black.

Aside from mana and durability everything else increased this time. A total of 7 points increase, strength and intellect went up by a whopping 2 points each. The intellect didn't increase in the growths before so why the sudden up. Not complaining tho, I like bigger numbers. From the looks of it adolescent last longer then the other stages, seeing as how it's gonna take more than one growth to transition into the next stage of my growth.

I wake up I realise I was still next to mother rat, I just gave her a nod and slowly walked away. I stretched my new body, I definitely feel stronger, my claws are significantly sharper than before. Unlike the cat's claw mine was alot flater, it is designed for cutting rather than piercing afterall. My tail was also longer and bigger too, I also have more control over it somehow. Before it was like using your feet to grab things but now if felt more like an actual third hand. A bigger longer hand attached to your butt, the butt arm.

I tried picking up a few small pebbles with my evolved tail and to my surprise it was quite easy, it felt comfortable to use, even more than my arms actually. Like a right handed person is more comfortable using their right are or a lefty with their left, I've become a tail handed person.

Speaking of arms mine are stronger, longer and more flexible than before. With a few touch I could feel the muscle bulging beneath the skin, I'm actually quite ripped underneath all this fur.

My claws are half the size of the fingers they are attached to, it made holding things on my paws quite awkward but not too hard that a few days of practice couldn't improve. I took the pebbles from my tail and started scraping of the sides with my claws, it was hard but not impossible.

After a few hours of playing with the stone, I turned the smooth oval pebble into something more of a flat disk. Playing with stone was harder than it looks, making stone tools was difficult and they are too small to be actually useful. The right size for me is still rat sized, I need better material, stone just ain't it. Any stone tool I made will be vastly inferior to my claws and other body parts in general. I'll have to skip the stone age all together.

I'm not gonna get the things I want inside the rat cave so I decided to venture out but on the way to the surface I change my mind and instead decided on exploring the rat cave. I'm not so small that I need to avoid the adults now, they are still bigger and stronger than me but I am at a point where I could actually harm them and make them regret picking a fight with me.

I went in deeper and deeper, seeing many mothers with their babies much like mother rat. The females are much bigger than the male, I don't know if this was the norm for rats on Earth as well but the difference is huge, I'm talking two to three times the size. And they also have a lot more babies too, mother rat only gave birth to nine of us but this other mothers are popping out twenty to thirty. Is mother rat sick? Is she not getting enough food? I mean I'm not really around much so I don't know if she got out herself through the bigger tunnels or other rats delivered the food to her. And where the hell is father rat? Did he died somewhere and can no longer provide for the family? Will mother die if someone doesn't get her anything soon?

And most importantly do I have to take care of the rat family? I'm not prepared for such responsibility. But I don't really mind it much, not like I have any thing better to do anyway.

That will have to wait, exploration comes first. I need to learn more about rat society, for the better a rat I became the better I will understand myself. And I can't become the best I can be without first knowing who or what I am. So I went deep.

The rat cave was an intricate puzzle of tunnels interconnecting one another. It's also far larger than I had previously thought, I can navigate through smell so I know I'm not lost but it's so huge I fell like I'm walking in circles.

Some parts are near the surface while few goes down deep. I poke my head out the surface here and there and I was surprised by what I see, the rat cave, wait it's actually not a cave, no nevermind that I thought it was connected to that one farm but no its actually connected to several farm! Either that or it's a really big farm, with several different crops and animals grazing the field and a dozen farmhouse.

While on the cave exploration I caught a wiff of something. I head there with not much regards, and on the way the number of rats increase more and more as I got closer and closer. I don't know what was there and it must be quite something if this many rats are gathering around it.

I was quite small so I easily squeeze though the more congested areas. The tunnels got wider and wider until it was large enough that a human could walk and jump without hitting the top. On closer inspection the walls have old worn out lamp and other equipments there.

It took me a moment before I realised we were in a mine, an abandoned mine. The rats here numbered in the tens of thousands and they were gathering arround something. I couldn't really see it form here with my small stature, so I climbed the wall.

It was hard climbing with my claws, they were sharp but I couldn't just pierced the wall and pull my weight on it, my claws were designed for cutting so I end up cutting the wall. Until I find a stretegy that works, and that was by facing my claws inward. This way even if I cut down the wall, the claws all goes towards a single point eventually meeting eachother and stop there cutting. It's hard to remove them once they are like this but I can actually with it so it is what I do.

I didn't even climb that far I didn't needed to. I could easily see the thing that the rats were surrounding, it was a big ass rat, the size of a car. It's bigger than a hippo or rhino, a bit smaller than an elephant but longer than it. There were also other bigger rats, the size of dogs, surrounding it.