Reborn as a Mantis
Chapter 3: Moulting
On the eighth day, Kai Shen's body began to feel wrong.
Not injured-wrong. He knew what that felt like.
This was different tight, constraining, like a coat he had outgrown overnight.
"Ah."
He recognised it immediately.
Ecdysis. Moulting.
He had written a paper on it once. Fourteen pages, with diagrams.
The outer cuticle would separate from the epidermis beneath. A new, larger exoskeleton had been forming under the old one. Now the old one had to come off.
The process left a mantis soft, pale, and defenceless for several hours.
"In other words," Kai thought drily, "the most dangerous thing that has happened to me yet."
He spent half a day choosing his location.
He settled on a hollow behind a curled piece of bark on the underside of a fallen pine deep enough to avoid casual inspection, sheltered from above, large enough to hang freely.
He cleared the space methodically. Removed anything that could snag.
Then he waited until deep afternoon, when the forest grew still, and he hung upside down from the inner bark.
And let it begin.
The old skin split at the back of his thorax.
What followed was not a pleasant ninety minutes.
Extricating oneself from a rigid outer shell while hanging upside down was, Kai decided, something that no amount of academic study had properly prepared him for.
Everything had to come free in sequence legs, antennae, the transparent covers over his compound eyes.
His grip had to hold through all of it.
He thought, at one point, about his old apartment.
The specific weight of the mug he used for coffee. The sound of rain on the lab windows. The ordinary small griefs of an ordinary life.
He put them away carefully.
There would be time for that later.
Perhaps.
When it was over, Kai hung beside the ghostly shell of his former self and waited for his new exoskeleton to harden.
Four hours.
Three creatures passed within a metre of him during those four hours.
None found him.
Stillness held.
When his new body had hardened enough to bear his weight, Kai stretched his forelegs and felt the difference immediately.
Larger. Heavier. Better.
[Moult Complete Stage 2 Nymph]
[Strength: 9]
[Speed: 12]
[Agility: 14]
[Perception: 17]
[Devour Power: 20]
[New passive: Camouflage Skin I (colour adaptation to resting surface active, requires concentration)]
Camouflage Skin had not come from any prey. It had simply emerged as though the system itself had looked at his sixteen days of survival and decided he had earned it.
He tested it: his colouring shifted toward the grey of the bark. Then, with concentration, toward the pale green of a nearby leaf.
Imperfect. Inconsistent. Slow.
"I'll train it."
That evening, for the first time, Kai moved deeper into the forest.
Past the edge of the fallen pine. Past his old territory. Into the wilder, thicker undergrowth where the prey patterns were unknown and the dangers were larger.
His old territory had been a beginner's area.
It had served its purpose.
He found a fat black cricket in a patch of dying bracken.
Gryllus species. Body almost as long as his own. Powerful rear legs built for jumping its only real defence.
"A cricket."
Kai had been waiting for a cricket.
He activated Stillness and began to close the distance.
One centimetre at a time.
He kept the fern frond between himself and the cricket's eyes.
He shifted his colouring toward dead leaf grey.
He moved only when the cricket moved, hiding his steps inside the vibration of its own.
Twelve minutes to close four centimetres.
At the end of those twelve minutes, Kai was directly above the cricket, positioned on the underside of a leaf it was about to walk beneath.
He waited.
The cricket walked beneath him.
He fell.
Both forelegs locked onto the cricket's thorax from above. His weight drove it into the earth.
The cricket's rear legs fired once in a massive kick that caught him across the side
He absorbed it. Did not release.
Nine seconds.
Strength +4
Speed +3
Agility +2
[Ability extracted: Jump Burst I (active: explosive acceleration burst, 30-second cooldown)]
Jump Burst.
He tested it once, briefly: a short burst across the bark. The acceleration was startling the kind of instant, total velocity he associated with the leafhopper he had eaten on day two.
But now it was his.
He sat in the dying bracken and looked up at the canopy, where the last light was turning the leaves copper and dark green.
Eight days. He was still tiny. Still, by most metrics, fragile.
But he was faster than before. Stronger. More aware.
"Keep accumulating," he told himself. "Just keep going."
He cleaned his forelegs and began to hunt again.