Chapter 1: Kai Shen
The southern forest was thick with mist, and in the undergrowth, something very small was thinking very hard.
"Tch... tch..."
A pale green mantis clung to the underside of a fern frond.
Before long, it stopped moving, twisted its triangular head almost completely around, and stared at its own foreleg with unmistakably human dismay:
"Six legs. Six. What kind of sick joke is this."
Kai Shen, which was the name of this mantis, was astonishingly a human soul reborn into the body of an insect.
Kai Shen could not understand.
In his previous life, he had been a third-year entomology student. He had never harmed a fly. He had, in fact, spent three years carefully cataloguing flies.
Why, then, had he been dropped into the body of one?
Well not a fly. A mantis. But still.
"Could it be punishment for all those specimens I pinned?"
Kai shook his mantis head and set aside the philosophical questions.
There would be time for an existential crisis later.
Right now, what mattered was the one thing that had appeared in his mind the moment he woke up in this tiny green body
A system window.
[Kai Shen]
[Strength: 1]
[Speed: 3]
[Agility: 5]
[Perception: 8]
[Devour Power: 0]
[Abilities: Devour (consume prey to grow stronger; chance to absorb prey's ability), Stillness (suppress movement and body heat at will)]
He read it twice.
Then he read the Devour ability description again.
"Absorb the prey's ability."
Kai Shen felt something loosen in his chest.
In his previous life, he had loved insects precisely because of how ruthlessly efficient they were.
A mantis was already one of the most perfect ambush predators nature had ever designed.
And now he was one, with a system on top.
"Fine. I can work with this."
His Perception stat, already his highest, fed him a constant stream of information.
The vibration of a beetle crossing bark twenty centimetres away.
The pressure change of a moth's wings passing overhead.
The faint chemical trace of something smaller, much smaller, crawling up the stem of the fern directly below him.
A fruit fly.
Kai Shen activated Stillness.
He had not chosen to learn it the ability simply engaged, the way a reflex engages, his limbs locking and his body temperature dropping a fraction.
To the fruit fly below, the fern frond was empty.
He waited.
The fruit fly climbed higher.
One centimetre. Two.
It landed on the edge of the frond, six centimetres below Kai's position, and began cleaning its face with its front legs.
Now!
Kai Shen dropped.
Both raptorial forelegs snapped shut around the fly before it could register the threat.
In less than a tenth of a second, the fly had gone from alive to not.
Warmth spread through Kai's body, surging from his gut outward.
Strength +0.2
Speed +0.1
Agility +0.1
The gains were almost laughably small.
Kai stared at the numbers and thought: this is going to take a while.
But then again
"In my last life I studied insects for three years just to graduate. I know how to be patient."
He cleaned his forelegs methodically and looked down at the forest floor below the fern.
Alive with movement. Full of prey.
He had his whole life ahead of him.
He intended to use all of it.