The Holy Corpse contamination had been suppressed—which was good. But solving one problem didn't make the next one disappear.
"Mrow!"
Yimi's cry rang out across the open sky. The city far below looked tiny, every building a miniature. The suffocating environment somehow produced no physical discomfort at all. Well—some discomfort. The exhaustion from trying to merge with the Holy Corpse had stripped away even the raw strength enough to overturn a car, reducing her to near-helplessness. Less "Famine" and more "Famine, but aimed at the cat."
"Mrooow!"
"Host, your current situation is poor. It is strongly recommended you complete the Novice Combat Suit quiz now. Due to the emergency, the standard 100-question format has been reduced to a single question. Proceed?"
"Ask! Ask ask ask!"
The System loaded an image. "Who is this person?"
How would Yimi know? She'd watched TV, sure—but always curled in Grandma's lap, and Grandma only ever watched family soap operas. Yimi had never understood them, only registered a box full of people who liked to cry and laugh. Sometimes when Grandma's show ended and Mom wasn't home yet, she'd switch to something called Tom and Jerry—which Yimi found terrifying. Neither had anything to do with this.
But faced with life and death, her memory dug desperately through its furthest corners and dragged up a fragment: a short video the maid had been watching on her phone while slacking off on chores. Even the audio came back to her.
"Dog Eye Mi\\." Yimi had her answer.
The System processed.
"Your 2D concentration rating: Garbage."
"Meow?"
[Novice Combat Suit (Fake)]: No stat bonus.
Enchantment: Shapeshifting—Host may transform into human form.
Status: Bound
"Is this useful?"
"In response to Host's query: the lowest-tier combat suit paired with the lowest-tier enchantment is completely useless for your current situation."
"Mrow…"
The scene below expanded further. Yimi was truly about to die.
Dog Eye Mi\\. Yimi's not going to forget you.
"Hungry!"—With no other options, Yimi had no choice but to play her last card. Her Stand manifested behind her, scales in hand, ready to make things right.
But in a moment of life or death, even the "price" that Famine reflected back would not be small. She was going to be very hungry after this.
Before the devil appeared, a voice buzzed in Yimi's ear something that sounded like it had been filtered through a machine, all static edges and blurred frequencies.
"Oh my… an unfamiliar child. How did you end up in the sky?"
"Meow?"
"Why… you're a cat… and yet… it feels… fitting…"
A transparent, colorless silhouette—pixelated, somehow, not just in appearance but in voice, as though processed beyond recognition—barely resolved as a woman. She was falling in parallel with Yimi, inverted, deliberately chasing her downward.
"I feel like I shouldn't give it to you—you look so dangerous. But you also feel so right. Except you're not even human… what do I do? I'm so torn… Actually, you did speak just now, didn't you? Do you desire power?"
A pure white crystal materialized in the silhouette's hands.
"Meow?"
The figure hadn't been waiting for consent. She simply pressed the crystal into Yimi, and it sank into her like a stone into still water.
"Meow!! Meow?"
Yimi licked her three-petal lips. Surprisingly good.
For a moment she almost forgot she was still falling.
Tremendous power surged through the little cat, reshaping everything it touched—then hit some invisible threshold and reversed, pouring instead into the Holy Corpse, accelerating assimilation. The energy ran dry before the process completed, but the Holy Corpse's power was slowly becoming her own.
Then Yimi felt something pull her—a snap of displacement, in and out of another dimension in the same instant.
In that exact moment, evacuation sirens erupted across the entire city below, turning half-finished bathroom trips across town into a citywide crisis. For ordinary people, this disaster was about to hit ten times harder.
The space around a theater in the city center began to warp violently. Then came a deafening, airless explosion—no fire, no smoke, but with Yimi's landing point as the epicenter, a hundred-meter rift tore through the earth and buildings around it, appearing from nothing.
A Spacequake. The natural disaster unique to this world.
Natural disaster.
[Novice Combat Suit (Fake)]: Enhanced. Summons: Astral Dress No. 1
Angel: Annihilating Angel
Enchantment: Shapeshifting—can transform Host into human form.
Status: Consumed
At the center of the hundred-meter rift, empty of any living soul, Yimi floated safely to the ground on the lift of spiritual power.
To Mom, wherever you are: Yimi has finally grown up into a big cat. But…
"Meow!"
Who changed all my controls?!
The kitten tested her strange, unfamiliar limbs.
"Congratulations, Host! Achievement unlocked: [Changed!] Reward: Basic Human Privacy Knowledge (how to use the bathroom; why girls shouldn't show certain things to others, etc.)"
Yimi moved her new hands—positioned completely differently from where she expected them to be—to touch her own face. Smooth. Not a single hair. Not even her beloved whiskers. The only thing she could feel was a slight, soft chubbiness—baby fat.
The most disturbing thing, the thing that made even a cat feel something close to fear, was —
With slow, awkward hands whose length, joints, and finger count were all completely wrong, Yimi felt the top of her head. Then the sides of her face, where hair draped over her cheeks.
She had four ears.
Monster!
Yimi pawed at the pair on top of her head, trying to will them away with the Novice Combat Suit's energy. (Corrupted text.) It didn't work.
She tried the ears on the sides of her face—those disappeared successfully. She could make them come back too. But the ones on top of her head refused to go anywhere.
No time to mourn that she hadn't become a normal grown-up cat. Yimi stood upright on her new two legs and took a few experimental steps.
It went smoothly, no trouble at all. Maybe all that practice standing on two legs in the previous world had paid off.
Her enhanced vision was much better now. The colors were richer, sharper than anything she'd seen before.
Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the glint of a mirror shattered in two by the Spacequake. In it, she finally saw herself properly.
A little girl, no older than nine or ten. Blue eyes. A slender build that clashed entirely with the little cat's round, stubby, gas-canister body.
A pure white magical-girl outfit lent an air of fantasy. Atop her head floated something between a massive crown and an angelic halo—not resting on her skull but branching out from her forehead and hovering in two spreading arcs, leaving her tiny cat ears perfectly unobstructed. From the headpiece, sacred white gauze trailed downward.
Her hair was pure white, cut short to the neck. The little ears hadn't kept the cat's black markings—they matched the overwhelming white of everything else, except for one small dyed-looking streak of black at her left temple.
Yimi pointed at the mirror and jeered: "You're so ugly."
By cat standards, the more one-note a color palette, the uglier. And the figure in the mirror was almost entirely white.
"Host," said the System. "That is a mirror. That is you."
"..."
Yimi turned into an ugly weirdo.