[DING! Host killed a Homo sapiens. Gene Points +30.]
---
James stared down at the remains of the Stone Clan raider, slowly raising his front paw to rub the sticky blood off his pads against a patch of clean needlegrass.
Two human kills recorded on his mind now.
The barrier between a human consciousness and a wild predator wasn't a sliding scale; it was a binary partition. Once the index shifted from zero to one, the boundary vanished entirely.
When you maintain that baseline zero kill, your psychological composition enforces a complex network of checks and balances; your lingering morality anchors your identity, preventing the transition. But once that structural line is broken, the mind naturally constructs an endless loop of rationalizations to justify the execution of violence.
James felt that shift settling into his marrow.
When he first woke within this juvenile Smilodon body, he had assumed his human soul would prevent him from ever targeting his own kind. It was a deeply rooted, ancestral boundary. But the moment that first scout swung a stone point at his head, his beastly instincts took over. If a primate initiated a lethal attack against him, James would answer with the same.
With the threat eliminated, James swiveled his heavy, blocky head, his glowing green pupils locking onto Apache.
The boy was completely petrified, his limbs shivering against the mud.
'So this is the lone survivor,' James thought, his mind synthesizing the data from the tribal skirmish he had witnessed from the canopy. The Wood Clan's ambush had been a disaster; their line had been effortlessly dismantled by the heavier Stone Clan warriors, leaving only this twelve-year-old youth to run blind through the timber.
The raider he had just crushed had been tracking the boy to take him back as slave. But looking down at the injured, shivering youth before him, he felt zero impulse to expend the energy to kill him.
A lone, scrawny yearling primate carried zero structural threat to his territory.
More importantly, a highly irregular, speculative strategy suddenly crossed his human consciousness.
He wanted to run a behavioral experiment on this hominid asset.
'In my previous life, it was always the humans who does experiments on animals,let's see how they feel if I do the opposite,' James thought, his amber eyes pinning the boy's position with intense, focus.
The unblinking, predatory intensity of that gaze sent a wave of absolute horror through Apache's heart.
Having just witnessed his pursuer's skull crushed like soft fruit under that exact same paw, the boy was entirely convinced his own life would end like that. He squeezed his eyelids shut, his body tensing as he waited for the cold steel of the ivory sabers to shear through his windpipe.
One second... two seconds... three seconds...
The expected attack never came. Instead, the blinding, throbbing agony that had been radiating from his left shoulder blade suddenly ceased. A strange, numbness washed over his skin, accompanied by a soothing, warmth.
Apache slowly opened his eyes, the visual that met his pupils shattering his understanding.
The colossal golden tiger had extended its wide, blood-streaked paw, resting the heavy pads gently over the margin of the bleeding puncture wound on his shoulder.
The wound had stopped completely. The raw lacerations were rapidly tightening, the cell walls sealing beneath a film of newly formed tissue right before his eyes.
"How... what kind of power is this?"
Looking at the miraculous clotting event, Apache's primitive mind experienced a total shock. To stop blood loss and knit torn muscle without thread or fire—this was a thing only the forces that controlled the wind and the winter freeze can do.
He hadn't been cornered by a beast. He was standing in the immediate presence of a god.
Within the Clovis populations, primitive beliefs in totems are common among the various tribes. They believed that specific geographic locations, ancient flora, and powerful, high-tier fauna possessed supernatural powers(manitou)—acting as local guardians that could either curse a lineage or grant supernatural hunting skills to a faithful tracking band.
* The Wood Clan Totem: Anchored to the ancient birch grove near their cavern mouth.
*The Stone Clan Totem: Focused on the unique flint nodules harvested from the western ravines and used to make stone tools.
The hunters truly believed these physical anchors possessed an invisible, protective force field. During the solstices, the entire collective would assemble before the totems, offering portions of meat and fruits to secure their favor for the upcoming days.
"Great God... look past my ignorance! I did not see your shadow crossing the timber... I carry no meat or skins to lay at your paws..."
Realizing the tiger had actively intervened to preserve his life after crushing his executioner, Apache threw himself forward into the mud. He completely surrendered his body, his speech breaking into a continuous, frantic sequence of tribal prayers.
The Clovis phonetics hit James's ears as nothing more than a series of guttural, disjointed clicks and whistles. He couldn't decipher a single word.
But watching the boy drop his forehead flush against the dirt in a classic posture of total, religious subjugation, James knew the initial phase of his experiment had cleared the threshold. The primitive primate had accepted his authority without reservation. It was a bizarre, intoxicating sensation—acting as a literal God to a human lineage.
Prehistoric populations, lacking the mind for science, were naturally wired to categorize any anomaly under the index of the divinity.
---
[DING! Conditions are met. Congratulations, Host has unlocked the "Totem Faith" module.]
---
A sharp, digital notification resonated within his consciousness, interrupting his observation.
' Totem Faith? ' James thought, his jaws parting in surprise. His casual experiment had accidentally triggered a hidden layer of the System architecture.
---
[Congratulations to the host for winning the first believer. The believer's faith power can provide you with 5 gene points every day, Gaining a wider range of believer power, which will provide you with more gene points.( Comes with language translation function.)]
----
The system's explanation was simple, but the strategic potential made James's pulse quicken.
Five points a day from a single human believer?
If he could scale this operation—securing five believers, ten, a hundred, or a full tribal network of thousands across the mountain range—the passive genetic revenue would clear the charts. He would no longer be entirely reliant on the exhausting physical grind of tracking and harvesting dangerous megafauna to fuel his evolution.
But how could a solitary Smilodon manage the logistical expansion of a religious cult?
He couldn't spend his active cycles patrolling the valley floor looking for injured primates to heal with his limited storage of Healing Points; that was an inefficient use of his time, and it completely destroyed his mystique as a detached, sovereign deity.
James lowered his head, his eyes settling back onto the kneeling form of Apache.
"The tool for expansion is already sitting right in front of me," he realized. "A native missionary."
"O Great God... only hours ago, the western raiders overran our home," Apache cried out, his forehead pressed hard against the frozen dirt as he wept. "They have driven our mothers and youth into bindings... our line is erased. I beg for the power of your claws to split the Stone Clan, to bring our people back to the birch grove."
This time, as the Translation Engine processed the acoustic frequencies, the clicks and grunts dissolved into fluent, structured human thought within James's mind.
He understood every word.
"Help him launch a counter-offensive against a fortified tribe of thirty armed warriors?" James thought, his feline lips curling in a smirk. "An absurd, high-risk proposal. I'm an apex predator, not a mercenary for hire."
Yet, as his human mind analyzed the tactical layout, a far more elegant, bloodless strategy began to take shape. He saw exactly how to use this boy's desperation to wire his presence deep into the psyche of both clans.