I left the creche worried for Nadi. Maybe that was unnecessary—all my mothers seemed genuinely happy about it, and it was a normal part of growing up for Uli—but my past lives’ sensibilities rebelled at the idea.

  At least Uli didn’t breed in their very first heat. The pedicide issue aside, my new species had enough cognitive capacity to understand the risks and enough emotional maturity to guide their young through this part of maturation before going on to be treated as an adult.

  Girls coming into their estrus cycle for the first time tended to do so a bit early, and all across the tribe, mothers were teaching their daughters about what it means to be an adult. It was a very different practice than the boys and their First Blood, thankfully. Not long after, though, the rest of the women began to come into season.

  I had noticed the monestrous nature of Uli before, growing up in the creche, mostly by the absence of one or more of my mothers at a time around this time of year. Outside of the creche, it was much more apparent. The females were rarely seen in this part of the tribe’s camp the rest of the year, but it became a common sight to see one of the tribesmen collect one of his mates and bring her back to his tent for coupling.

  Daru was no exception to this. I glanced up from where I was resting in his tent when he walked in with Loma-ar Nuiq, the female who I was pretty sure was my birth mother.

  “Oh, Mali, you’re here. Good, I can show you how—”

  I leapt to my feet. “I’m good! I’ll give you some privacy!” I shouted, rushing out of the tent.

  Uli weren’t shy about that sort of thing, but I did not need a demonstration of how to breed my mother by my father.

  The worst part was the smell. I could now tell it was the season for mating because my own sensitivity to it was rising, as I too was coming into adulthood.

  While the females were going into heat, the males were going into a rut.

  Again, higher cognitive function helped here. The males weren’t smearing themselves with their own urine to attract a female mate, since we had a system in the tribe for that. But aggressions were higher, and the boys who were coming into adulthood were all the more eager to challenge others and prove themselves.

  Unable to hide out at home in the tent, it was hard to dodge these teens undergoing a rutting period. Worse still, my own biology was pushing me to aggression, telling me I had to prove my worthiness to potential mates, and I felt myself almost eager to seek out battle.

  Instead, I walked far, far outside of the camp, away from the smells of the Uli and the conflicting desires between my mind and body. On my mental list of pros and cons of being an Uli instead of a human, this was another one for the cons.

  Being a non-human species was intellectually interesting, and I kind of loved having four arms, especially figuring out on my own all sorts of different ways to exercise with the new limbs, which I did out in the rocky barrens away from the tribe to burn off some of this uncomfortable energy. With my physiological muscles having caught up with some of my Brawn stats, I could finally push myself a lot harder when it came to my physical fitness, though not yet to exhaustion. It would likely still be a few years before I could push myself to one hundred percent effort without injury.

  The Blood was pretty interesting too, rituals for acquiring more aside. Between sets of exercise, I focused on the flow of my Blood as I was taught, and used my new skill to aid in my recovery.

  As far as skills went, it was one of my simplest, with some of the most potential. Unlike the healing magic of Argadia, which required learning increasingly powerful spells and leveling each up, [Blood Restoration] could, at a high enough level, outperform even [Major Healing] and even restore lost limbs. The downsides were that it couldn’t be used on others, and that it required a state of concentration to convalesce, so it couldn’t be used until after a battle was won. Fortunately, I was skilled enough at meditation and focusing my mind to a task, most especially the sensations within my own body.

  I had needed to get [Blood Augmentation] to level 3 before [Blood Restoration] clicked, but that came quickly. In fact, it was already at level 4. My skill growth seemed faster in this life, but at the cost of my stat points, which were all still unchanged, aside from my Blood quantity. Though perhaps it was more accurate to say that my skill growth came faster as a result of my stat points from my previous life. That, and the fact that I had someone actually willing to talk to me about them and teach them to me, which was certainly an improvement on the Five Guardian Faith.

  Once I felt restored, I ended my meditation, opening my eyes to find that I was no longer alone.

  I had gone far enough away from camp to not be bothered by other Uli, and that remained true. The new creatures surrounding me weren’t my peers looking for a fight.

  “You must be uqandu,” I said up to the horrific monsters before me.

  When my father first told me about the uqandu, I had nicknamed them centaurs, given the fact that they were described as walking on four legs while having two arms on a more upright torso. Immediately, I struck that nickname and came up with a new one for them: mantises.

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  At my voice, the closest one leapt and struck, snapping out one of its raptorial forelimbs at me. I deflected it with one of my upper arms, rolling away from the predator and coming to my feet, quickly surveying my surroundings. Even with [Blood Augmentation] leveled to 4, the grab had sliced up the flesh of my arm, nearly to the bone; without the skill, I probably would have lost the hand.

  I hope that doesn’t become a theme of my lives, I thought as I began to focus my Blood.

  Despite the threat to my life, I was relatively calm. Panic wouldn’t suit the situation, and I wasn’t sure I could outrun them, so I needed to keep my wits about me and fight. I had the stats and a handful of skills I could use, including enough Blood to land a handful of [Blood-Empowered Blow]s, so long as I timed them right. I had to reserve some energy for [Blood Restoration] afterward, too.

  In order to get the most out of my blows, I studied my opponents, finding myself glad to be fighting something that wasn’t another Uli for once.

  The uqandu was mentally renamed from centaur to mantis mostly due to its “arms”, which had likely been at least partially for climbing in its evolutionary past. As the animal evolved to grow larger, it had lost much of the function of grasping for climbing purposes and focused the front appendages into weapons for striking down prey and holding them in place, likely to be eaten alive—which I hoped to avoid.

  Daru had called them smaller, which made me wonder what size the mammoth mirulu were, because these were anything but small. They were larger than a full-grown Uli, at least, and I still hadn’t reached that size, making them much larger than me.

  I could also see why we didn’t eat them much in turn; the hind legs were slender, considering the overall size of the beast. Not much muscle on them, considering the size. They probably spent a lot of time idle, presumably setting ambushes, but they could clearly motor when they needed to. They probably lacked endurance, as a result, but I didn’t want to test that running back for camp.

  No, the only part that was probably worth eating—and I must have been hungry, to be thinking about that—were the hip flexors and maybe the spinal erectors from where the body became upright. Tenderloin and sirloin, maybe?

  Assuming they had any edible muscle inside at all. They were so lanky that it must be exceptionally lean, and I couldn't imagine that would be nice to eat raw. At the very least, at this size, they almost certainly had bones and muscles to move, because they were too large to only have muscles attached to an exoskeleton. Also, they were fuzzy, though that could have been setae bristles instead of hair or fur. Or maybe they were technically feathers. Evolution was completely different on this world than on ones with humans. The specifics weren’t that important.

  What was important was dodging front limbs that were basically jagged swords and might actually cut off one of my limbs if they cinched down hard enough, and figuring out where in turn I should hit back. Assuming they had a cardiovascular system like my own, the heart should be roughly in the same place in the upper torso. Otherwise, the head was always a safe bet, though I did want to avoid those teeth.

  The uqandu had large, bulbous eyes for stereo vision, but the jaws were more like some kind of dinosaur. Fortunately, the jaws were squat, made for tearing the flesh of prey that it was holding down, rather than a primary weapon. Unlike the Uli and the mirulu, they had no tusks.

  I processed all of this nightmare creature’s physiology relatively quickly, thanks to my 61 stat points in Brain, but the mantises were moving fast now that the battle had started, and the one on the left was already closing in on me. Making a quick final calculation, I rolled into it rather than away, then punched up at its sternum with the [Blood-Empowered Blow] I had been focusing before its limbs closed down on me.

  My past life’s Will-boosted skill, which itself had already grown to level 3 from my training these past months, absolutely obliterated the large predator’s upper torso.

  “Oh right,” I said out loud, as my Brain caught up with the reality of the situation. They were large and scary looking, but they were just animals, and I had an entire life of dedicated training behind me. I had honed in on an assumed weak spot to decisively end things, but when it came to the difference in our relative strength, they were all weak spot.

  Gore showered the area as the rest of the mantis’s body slumped to the ground.

  The other uqandu paused briefly at the display of ultraviolence, but they weren’t built for running. They let out a screeching cry and descended on me all at once, and I allowed myself a wicked grin as I let myself give in to the aggression of my adolescent rut instincts to fight and show my worthiness as a mate.

  It was only after I was finished that I realized how far I would have to walk to the shore to wash myself off before I could return to camp.

  * * *

  With the uqandu all dead, I got a chance to study their remains a bit more closely. The front limbs had definitely gouged my flesh, but they weren’t sharp so much as violently quick when they struck. Still, with a bit of sharpening, I wondered if I could use them as stand-ins for my mandiblades, left behind to my descendants in Argadia.

  Presumably not, or the Uli would already use them. They probably became too brittle once dry, and with no mana circuit to run through them and reinforce the material with, in the end it was just bone. Or chitin. Or some other hard biological analogue.

  Still, I used one to poorly cut open some of the mantises’ backs, a poor butcher’s dissection, until I freed the pieces of meat I had assumed might be tasty.

  As an Uli, I ate them raw. They were a bit too chewy, like that. If I could slice them against the muscle fibers into discs and cook them up, though, I could see them being delicious. Probably not worth the risk for the average Uli.

  My main concern was how close they were to camp. I would need to report seeing them, at least, to the tribe chief, though I hoped some scavenger would take care of the evidence of my battle, since that would be hard to explain.

  Pulling up my System, I confirmed that my Blood stat was unchanged. I had hoped that killing the predators might increase my Blood, but if that had been the case, the Uli wouldn’t have come up with their ritualistic practices, and instead killed uqandu as part of the path to adolescence. It was possible they were just too dangerous for it, and that it was a way for adults to gain strength after becoming tribesmen, but no; animals weren’t sapient, and so didn’t have a System, and so didn’t have stats the same way we did.

  In Argadia, I had learned that animals didn’t provide levels, which was also the case for humans and demons. It was only monsters which resulted in levels. Whether that was due to souls and the lack thereof or due to being made from magic, I wasn’t sure.

  Here, killing other sapients—people with souls—increased my Blood, but killing animals didn’t. Did that mean they didn’t have souls? Or were nascent souls not enough, and they needed to reach maturation before they gained sapience and a System, and thus stats? If the rules were completely different in every world, which was definitely possible, it would be very frustrating to figure them out each time. Perhaps Detective Gudell could enlighten me the next time I saw him.

  Staring at my System status, I looked at all the skills I had gained as Tovar that were locked away to me in this life. It was times like this that I really missed having mana. [Clean] would have made short work of this mess. With a sigh, I began my long walk around the camp’s perimeter to reach the ocean and bathe myself off so I could make my report.