I woke up when it was pitch black, and very hungry. My stomach was making some very unrealistic demands. 'I would kill for a hot dog right now.' I shook my head to get rid of the thought. 'When I get home I'll have a feast fit for 12 kings.' With another goal set, I get out of my hole. Only to find that I can't see any better outside. Whatever light the moon had was blocked by the leaves up above. At least I think there was a moon. I didn't see one when we arrived.

  Before I'm able to think about anything else, I notice that my vision had gotten a bit brighter. 'Alright, this Environmental Adaptation skill is op as fuck.' I really should have expected that. Considering it let me breathe in the literal void of space. 'If I don't eat, will my body learn to live off of magic or mana?' I ponder but decide that I would rather eat something than not. I'm not entirely ready to lose more of my ties to humanity. 'I'm already something not entirely human. Yikes.' I think about what the system did to my brain for telekinesis, and the mana core next to my heart.

  "I'm surprisingly not as bothered as I should be. I mean, everyone want's super powers right? What's wrong with my body being weirder than normal?" With that said, I throw any hesitation for changing my body away. As long as it doesn't change me too much, it should be ok. 'Superman was an actual alien. It'll be fine.'

  My very brief internal struggle dealt with, my eyes finally adjust enough to the darkness. It's not as bright as daylight but it's getting there. The only difference is the slight color loss. Which is strange since there should be little to no color at all. 'What are my eyes doing to do this? Is it because my EA skill is based on magic and not the physical world, thus not limited by how light works normally? That has to be it.'

  Before I can spend probably way too much time on trying to figure out how my EA skill is affecting me, I see movement off into the woods. I had gotten pretty lucky to not run into any monsters or animals, but I suppose it was about time for it to run out. The movement stopped shortly after I spotted it, but I never took my eyes off of the bush.

  "I probably shouldn't have spoken out loud." I say. Out loud. Again. 'Fuck, I'm so dumb.'

  I mentally reach out and grab a grapefruit sized rock. As it floats over to me, I see the movement again as the bush itself jumps at me. I immediately throw the rock but it travels far too slow. I had forgotten to let it build speed at all, so the blur that is likely a monster coming at me didn't even have to dodge the attack.

  With a panicked movement of my mental and real arms, I try to catch the thing flying at me with my telekinesis. Only to experience the extreme fatigue I felt when lifting the tree, but about 3 times as much. I passed out instantly, and woke up an instant after that. Just in time to see what looked like a massive flat faced cat with leaves for fur biting into my helmet visor. Leaving deep scratches in the fortified glass.

  "FUCK! GET OFF!" I scream in terror as my limbs are held down by the sheer size and weight of the beast. 'Why did using telekinesis on it take so much more energy than the tree?! Does it have something to do with living things? A tree is technically a living thing, and I can lift myself just fine. Is it a consent thing? Or a level thing? The system said I should be able to throw wizards for fucks sake!' My mind shoots off questions and answers rapidly as I continue to struggle.

  It wasn't all useless thoughts though. 'If I can't grab it, then I'll grab everything else!' With a desperate mental pulse, I feel something like several hands shoot out and grab something. I can't feel what they are, but i don't care. Everything is brought toward the monster. A shower of dirt and at least one real bush rain down onto it's back and sides. Which does nothing to deter the thing, but there were some rocks in that desperate grab.

  The speed at which they shot into the creature wasn't fast enough to even get it's attention for more than a second. 'Damn, again with the speed!' Thankfully my spacesuit is buying me a lot of time but it won't last forever. My mental hold on the fist sized rocks remain as I make them spin faster and faster in an orbit around us. I thankfully don't have to spend too much mental focus on the process as pretty much every bit of it is spent staring into a leafy hole with way too many teeth.

  A crack forms on my visor as one of the rocks finally smacks into it's head with enough speed and power to knock it off me. The noise it made was a strange sound. Sounding almost just like leaves rustling with a hissing wind? It was weird and hard to describe.

  I attempt to get up but my bulky suit makes that difficult. As I'm sitting up, I see it shaking it's head with a blood similar to tree sap pours down onto the grass. A rock lodged into it's skull.

  "Heh, I didn't think I'd run into Big Boss here." I laugh at my own dumb ass joke. Probably as a coping mechanism to the situation.

  The beast sways, clearly stunned but not down. I take the time to look at how many rocks I have. '5 more rocks and a... branch.' I sigh mentally as I drop the stick. I get the rocks to spin up again as I had accidentally stopped once it was knocked off of me. By the time they get back up to speed it has stabilized enough to come at me again. With a twitch of my fingers, another rock is sent directly at it. It tried to dodge but the rock clipped it's left hind leg. Another wind hiss sound as the leg becomes mangled from the hit.

  I don't let it get back up. Every rock is thrown against it one by one. It's still moving by the time the 5th one is thrown so I pick them all up again. As an act of mercy, I collect the rocks into a singular mental hand. Forming a rough rock hammer made from the smaller rocks. Once it had enough speed, I sent it arcing down toward it's head.

  I was expecting blood and gore from the hit. What I got was a collection of confetti and glitter.

  "What the fuck?" I mutter as I try to catch my breathe. My stamina was fine but I was still mentally reeling from the experience.

  "Oh come on! Really? Damn." Despite being butt hurt about the XP, I knew this would happen. Keji had mentioned that infants can't enter combat, so this was kind of a given.

  'Can I even eat this thing?' I walk up to the corpse. Walking around the spread of colorful paper and glitter glue. I've never butchered anything in my entire life thanks to living in a city, so I'll do what I can. Before I touch it with my hands though, I pause. 'Couldn't I just... use telekinesis for this too? I mean it's not alive anymore...' I use one mental hand and grab it by it's one good hind leg. With a cautious effort, I lift the beast up and dangling it in the air.

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

  'Now it's about the feel of a similar sized rock effort wise. A bit less since it's lighter?' I muse as my hypothesis is confirmed. If something has a higher level, alive, or doesn't consent I can't lift it. 'Tree's are alive and live for hundreds of years though. Maybe they don't have a level? I imagine you would need to have some kind of consciousness to use the system. Did the system lie about the wizard thing or is that for when I'm stronger? Questions for later.'

  With my musings put aside, I use another mental hand and grab one of it's front legs. Leveling the body out in the air.

  "Okay, so what the hell do I do now? Just rip it in half? Hmmm... Maybe I can separate it's skin like I did with the collection of rocks?" I mutter, not having fully learned my lesson about speaking out loud.

  My arms start to get tired from holding them up, and I realize that I don't even need to do that. I had been throwing the rocks without really moving my arms and hands in the fight, so I don't need to use them at all. I carefully lower my arms, and the bush cat, cat bush thing stays up in the air. 'Alright, now maybe if I just imagine the skin as like a bag over the meat, I could it just peel off?'

  With a third mental hand, I reach out to grasp the skin. It takes a bit and I have to imagine a rather disgusting image of how skin just sits over muscle as it's peeled off. With that horrid mental image, I pull when I think I have it. At first nothing happens, but I can see the excess skin being pulled on. So I put more mental strength into it, while also pulling on the body in the opposite direction.

  "Come on you bastard, peel!" I grunt as the amount of effort needed continues to grow. Before I give up and try to cut it first, which I should have done in the first place, I hear a disgusting ripping sound as it suddenly explodes into a mess of glitter glue. The pink substance filled with glittery paper as it floods down to the ground and splashing everywhere. I'd be disgusted if I could see the aftermath, but I'm glad I can't. I just won't think about it.

  'I'll have to move my base of operations...' I don't want to clean that mess, and the smell of what I can only assume is blood or guts will attract unwanted attention. 'Weird how the system let me see the things actual blood when the rock was jammed into it's head. Oh well.'

  Looking at my handiwork, it's terrible. The body mangled even more and pretty much just a rainbow ragdoll, while the skin looks like a green towel covered in the glue. I don't really care though. Job done to a relatively satisfactory level, I stretch the skin out to get a look at it.

  'Yeah that's ruined.' There are several holes in the hide. Along with a massive uneven tear down the middle. My telekinesis skill is... strong. Too strong. The only balance is that it needs time to build up power, but once it does it's game over for anything in it's way.

  'There's no way this is normal. This feels like I'm cheating. The system had said that there were other species with the same powers. Can they do this as easily as I can? Jeez.' With how the system seems to be working, there must be insanely strong beings out there. Hell I'm level one, and I just tore a monster apart with my mind.

  'Speaking of monsters... Does this have a core?' The system had confirmed that like the core I have, monsters also have cores. I don't know if it's all monsters, or just the magically inclined ones, but I was going to find out. I tried to send another hand through the corpse but I couldn't feel anything at all. Doing what I would have to anyway, I began to tear it apart some more. Focusing more on the bones inside the flesh that I knew were there, I was able to open it up some more. Not like I could see anything through the glitter and pink sludge.

  'Thank you system for censoring my vision because good God what the hell am I doing to this poor creature.' Feeling a bit disgusted with myself for what I can only describe as a sin against nature. I get the corpse into smaller chunks. I don't find a core though.

  'I checked all through out the chest cavity, and it didn't use any magic, so I guess there's no core.' As I finished my little experiment, I had an idea. With yet another mental hand, I grasped out at the glittery pink glue. I felt something take hold and I pulled. An orb of flowing pink sludge formed in the air as it was sucked out of the corpse.

  "Oh wow. Neat... and very gross. At least I won't have to bleed it out slowly. I could totally clean this place up too." I mutter as I collect every bit of the censored blood and other unwanted bits into one hand. Changing my mind about moving, I created an orb of trash. The dirt was cleaned, A collection of meat with the blood sucked out held off to the side with the now clean skin, and some bones held in another.

  'I guess I just throw it away?' I make the trash orb spin around in a circle, rapidly building speed. As it spins and gains speed, I put the stuff I want down next to the stream on some rocks. Once they were sorted into 3 piles, I focused back on the trash. It was spinning so fast it had become a pink halo in the air. Pointing in some random direction, because it felt fun to do, the ball of garbage was sent away instantly. I lost sight of it immediately. If I didn't know what was happening I'd have said it was teleported with how fast it moved.

  "Now I need to make a fire for the meat." I turned back to the river to check my spoils. The meat used to have the weird censored look but now it just looked like the raw meat it was. 'I guess the system deemed it safe enough with the trash gone.' The ruined skin was to the right. I'm not really sure what to do with it. 'Either use it as bedding or sell it at town. I can't tan it here. I also don't know how.' The last pile was a collection of bones that I had ripped out of it. Some teeth, some claws, but mostly just random pieces. 'I could try and craft something. A weapon maybe.' I'd have to experiment some more later.

  But first, it was time to eat. One way to make fire was with friction. Spinning a stick on some kindling with a bow or just with your hands. I didn't need either. Grabbing some random dry wood and a stick, I didn't bother with kindling. I used my telekinesis to spin the stick faster and faster, like a drill on the wood. Soon enough it started to smoke, and then caught fire. It took 10 minutes for the fire to really get going.

  I continued the trend of abusing my telekinesis skill by holding the meat over the fire with several mental hands. Slowly spinning them over the fire like an invisible spit. 'These skills are pretty damn cool.' I loved my skills. Well, most of them. One was... better to not think about it. I know that I'd have to get used to using it eventually but I needed time. I'm still scared. 'What if I end up in another universe? Or what if it just finishes me off? Turning me into nothin- Stop. Calm yourself. It's not a real blackhole.'

  My introspection made me zone out and some of the meat had fallen into the fire, becoming charred. I fished them out and saved what I could. I had gotten a lot of meat from the monster but I didn't want to waste any of it. The Dimensional Gate skill... I needed to get over that fear. If only to train my magic.

  "System, will there be more skills aviable to me after my next quest?" I ask, hoping I do because I would rather train something else for magic.

  "Depends. The skills you will be able to choose from will be based partially on your actions and how other species view you. Over 98% of the other species have a predetermined evolutionary path and rarely are new skills added to their development. You and your species are entirely unknown. In scientific, and magical limitations. The System will continue to observe you. You are the founder of your species in this universe. Try to make a good first impression." I had gotten somewhat used to the disturbing voice. Or more like forgiven it. 'Probably because it's actually useful this time. Since the next skill list is based on what I do and how I'm perceived, I'll need to cast magic regularly if I want more spells.'

  "What's my species impression right now?" I ask, a little bummed about not having a concrete answer.

  "Odd. Fear. Eldritch Outsider. These are the current top feelings from the various species you have met."

  "Wait, Eldritch Outsider?! Like, Cthulhu the tentacle horror?" I nearly yell with how surprised I am. 'How the hell did that come about?!'

  "The fact you even know of one of the unspeakable things outside the universe is evidence enough. Eldritch Outsider has been locked in as a permanent note attached to your species."

  'Oh... shit. That's uh... hmmm... That might work in my favor.' My feelings of horror and indignation at being confused as something beyond the veil of reality is quickly replaced when I begin to think of the possibilities. Then they came back in force. 'Wait... CTHULU IS REAL?! AND I JUST SAID HIS NAME OUT LOUD?!' I don't know how the whole eldritch horror genre works, but I have the gut feeling I need to never speak of them again. The system did refer to him as an 'unspeakable thing.'

  Putting the feeling of impending doom out of my mind, I munch on some of my more charred meat. It doesn't have a bad taste surprisingly. Kind of like if chicken had the toughness of steak. I had expected a more gamey texture, but it's not like I know what that's like anyway. I always ate the regular store bought meat, never anything wild. 'How did I fuck up first impressions that terribly? I know I probably lost some social skills from my 9 months of solitude but really? How?'

  As I ate my meat, holding it with my telekinesis of course, I started thinking of ways I could actually cheat the system...