I take a moment to simply marvel at the changes to me.

  Everything moves faster within me, my three conjoined personalities forming a complex web of interconnected information. My mind feels firmer, and I begin slowly assimilating the remaining memories. They don't feel as intimidating as before, and are now seamlessly being integrating into my base of knowledge.

  It's night out now. I spent more time making myself than I expected. My form is unchanged from my natural one, and I'm still air color. I check my memories, and discover that the sun only went fully out of sight a couple minutes ago. This marks the start of my second night.

  I walk up to a tree and bash my fist into it to test my durability. The arm breaks, but manages to crack the bark. I turn my arm white to actually see what broke, as I do not have bones or muscles whose structure can be deformed.

  It looks cracked and wrinkled, slightly smaller too, mostly around my fist but also in the rest of my arm. It slowly expands, the cracks mending themselves, becoming less wrinkled and misshapen the longer I watch. It takes a while, but eventually it returns to it's normal form. I make sure that its fully healed, examining it from every angle, then hit the tree again. This time I try to play an active part in the healing process, to help mend the... damage.

  Surprisingly, my attempts to help do nothing to actually help it heal, just distort it when it finishes healing.

  Why does it wrinkle?

  A good question. I punch the tree a third time, watching the arm as I do so. When it impacts the tree it does damage, but it also crumples slightly. From what I can tell, parts of myself take all of the strain and simply... cease to exist, lowering my surface area and making the surrounding area wrinkle to prevent an actual hole from opening up in my skin. Hold on, surface area?

  A thought strikes me, and I test it out. I form my hand into a cube, then form my other hand into a cube. I compress one of them into a thin sheet, then compare the two. The compressed one clearly takes up less space, but why? Surface area. When I morph, the limitation for what I can turn into isn't volume or mass, it's Surface area.

  What happens when I grow then? Does my volume grow, or is it actually just my surface area? So many questions, so many implications, so many uses. I could do it later, but why wait? I turn to begin experimenting when I realize something. My arm is white.

  I know I made it that color earlier, so I could see it better, but it's night. It shouldn't look that bright with how little light is bouncing off it. Curious, I feel the ground for a stick. Once I find one, I hold it up to my arm to see if i'm glowing. The stick stays dark. Even when I put it as close as I can to my arm, it remains the same brightness, covered in shadow. Curious. So i'm not emitting light, but i'm clearly brighter than my surroundings.

  Even more strange properties of my body, I guess.

  Back to my other experiment with the tree, I add a bunch of folds and wrinkles into the arm, shrinking it while keeping the same surface area. I punch the tree in a different spot, and feel the damage. Then I puff up my arm, sacrificing the surface of my fingers for more overall volume. I hit the tree, and feel the damage done to it. It's greater than when I hit it with my smaller arm, but only slightly. Can I manipulate my weight and mass by making myself thinner? I'll test it later, in the morning.

  When I can, y'know, see.

  I need to be more durable. I need to upgrade Multiplier more, and everything else. While I may get big, for my size i'm practically made of glass. Not ideal. But before I go back into worm mode (The best mode!), I need to try one more thing. I need to see if I can make more than one mouth. I take my hand and make a second mouth with it. Or at least, mouth shape. It lacks the all devouring void of my actual mouth. I imagine it having one, but nothing changes.

  I stick it in my actual mouth to see if it needs to pick up it's properties, but it doesn't change. I pull my hand out and morph it into a ball, then open one end like a mouth. It still doesn't work. I try a few more variations and combinations and mental tricks to see if I can get it to work. None of it yields anything but failure. Guess I'm stuck with the one. I shrug, and dive back underground, shifting into my default worm form mid dive.

  Back to worm time I guess, for however long it takes for me to hit Multiplier level 10. I'm going to spend a significant portion of my life down in the depths, aren't I?

  ------------------------

  One extremely long worm time later, I finally manage to reach level 10 in Multiplier.

  Capacity: level 44 (108900) → level 224 (5040000)

  Speed: level 26 (68.2) → level 104 (436)

  Growth: level 9 (9.9) → level 30 (60)

  Multiplier: Level 2 (1.1) → level 10 (2)

  I, uh, I may have gone a bit overboard with how long I stayed down here. At around level 150 in Capacity I realized that shooting for level ten miiiight have been a bit too high, but I was committed. It did mean getting to this point took me FOREVER, and I had to actually save up for the last three Multiplier upgrades.If I hadn't I would've been down here even longer, and the boredom would've killed me.

  While I was eating, I experimented with my body a bit using my newfound ability to multitask, and made a very interesting discovery. My control over myself has massively improved, having had both many upgrades and a lot of time to practice, and I can now compress myself. First, I start making lots of tiny tendrils, making them longer and longer. They use up a buttload of surface area for how small they are, which makes them perfect for shrinking myself. Then I weave them together in a braid like structure so that they aren't flapping all over the place.

  Using this method I'm actually able to compress myself to just barely bigger than my empty and unmodified state, even at max capacity. I only did it once, because the room started to cave in on me. Whenever I sell, I leave behind a space so big it feels like an entire cavern, and gravity has started to feel more and more like a suggestion rather than a rule. I'm moving over 40 times faster than I was at the beginning, and moving around feels like how I'd imagine dancing on the moon feels.

  I can jump from the bottom of my cavern to the top, wait a second for gravity to kick in, then slooooowly start to fall down. Probably an impressive feat of strength, not sure how it would compare to the dragons and wolves and who knows what else.

  I've had to turn myself into a grappling hook every time I sell, because if I didn't it would take me more than a minute to fall back down to the ground. Can you tell I'm bored by the way i'm talking? I feel like i've been down here foreeeeeeeeever.

  Ugh. The only reason he didn't force us to go up already was that we promised him we'd go back and visit the dragon wall and pet the friendly dragon. He has not stopped complaining about the wait.

  As the one with the strongest emotions, I am sorry that you must suffer through the boredom of digging for so long. Be assured that your prize, 'petting the dragon', will be worth it.

  Yippee! I'm gonna pet a draaagon~ I'm gonna pet a draaagon~ I'm gonna pet a draaagon~

  Please don't break into song again. I'm still recovering from when you decided that nyan cat was the best thing ever and somehow sang it in five different voices at once for three hours. The voices were desynced too.

  I'll do it again!

  I shudder at the thought.

  Speaking of which, we should be surfacing soon. We tried not to go too deep this time, and mostly stayed at the same depth for the express purpose of making going back up faster. not the same place, the same depth. I make sure my whole body is air color, check my climb/launch limbs for any breaks, finding none. I just hope all my underground excavation hasn't messed with the surface.

  Light suddenly begins to reach my eyes, and I instantly slam all of my limbs into the ground, killing as much of my momentum as possible. I still fly out, just with a lot more debri and a lot less momentum. My eyes swivel around my body, taking in every detail of my immediate surroundings.

  Massive jagged spires pierce high into the sky and deep into the ground. Craters bigger than me dot some of them, and large revines pocket the ground like open wounds. There're so many of them, the craggy spikes blocking line of sight and yet creating a beautiful, hazard-filled picture. This is a devastated land. Did I do this somehow?

  No, I didn't. The greenery has already adapted to the extremely height challenged and inconsistent environment, trees and vines bridging gaps and growing between nooks and crannies. Also, there's no way my random digging would make something this precise from so far below. Are those bridges?

  I don't get any more time to observe, because a large rock suddenly shoots out from behind one of the shards, on a perfect path through the debri to hit me. I contort my body to dodge, and the strike passes by harmlessly. Enemies?

  I grapple onto a nearby wall and pull myself towards it, aiming to get out of sight from whatever just shot at me. I morph into worm as I do so, allowing me to slide right through it. I come out the other side to find a very surprised purple wolf awaiting me. I'm close to my max, which means i'm nearly at my biggest. The wolf looks smaller than a normal wolf to me, but the trees next to it's paws give away it's size. Both of our sizes, actually.

  The wolf reacts fast, even with the massive speed difference. They leap at me, mouth open as if to bite me. I angle my mouth towards them and bite down, taking off their left leg-

  Flavor explodes into my mouth. The wolve tastes delicious.

  I land on a slanted spire, and dazedly worm through the rock behind me, heading back down. What was that? I've never tasted anything i've eaten before. That was so good. I want more of whatever that was.

  That's what i'm thinking as I fall into empty space. A dark red wolf is there, already midair, leg outstretched in preparation. They lash out with their paw and smack me in the side, claws ineffectually scraping my skin, their arm barely avoiding my mouth.

  I'm flung sideways, bouncing off the angled walls, my skin almost entirely shattered. From just that one strike, i'm at deaths door. I shakily exit worm form, standing upright on broken, misshapen limbs. My eyes are cracked too, my vision fragmented yet still understandable. The pain is dealt with, relegated to information about damage rather than a distracting sensation.

  The wolves hesitate, not having expected how fragile I am, before moving in to finish the job, leaping from pillar to pillar.

  Alright, I guess we're doing this.

  I enter worm form again, shifting my body differently to compensate for the cracks. This time i'm not trying to run away. Within my mind I plot their trajectories and likely locations, and tunnel my way through towards where one of the more stationary ones lurked. I exit the wall at maximum speed, right through the wolf, killing them instantly. Flavor explodes into my mind once more, but i'm ready for it this time. Both to properly enjoy it, and keep enough of me actually paying attention to the outside.

  I spot some of the other wolves and compare where they are to where I predicted them to be, modifying my calculations accordingly.

  I'm going to eat all of them. None that I see will escape.

  With my speed, it would be embarrassing if any did. Speaking of which, how exactly am I... moving? I don't have biomechanical things inside me exerting force together to cause movement, nor am I puppeteering myself around like some disembodied soul with a convenient puppet they found lying around.

  When I walk, moving my limbs is as easy as thinking. Or shapeshifting. Is there a difference?

  I kill another, relishing in the taste of it's flesh. I also notice that the other wolves are beginning to try and predict my moves, as they seem to be moving somewhat erratically. I forgot to factor in their intelligence and how fast they would begin forming counter-plans. No matter. It's accounted for now.

  What could be the difference between my shapeshifting and movement? Both alter my form, just one more than the other. But does it really matter?

  7 down. I hit my max and sell, now perhaps even deadlier for my smaller size. More precision would be required to go through their brains or vital organs if my momentum was that difficult to control, but its much more manageable at this size. So I just climb around in them for a moment until they become mostly hollow. It must be a truly torturous experience, feeling yourself get gutted from the inside, but I don't care.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  I wonder... If my shapeshifting doesn't need a point of reference besides the rest of my body, does my movement need one either? It sounds like a bit of a stretch, but the logic is solid. No meaningful difference between shapeshifting and movement, so the same rules should apply! And the rules of shapeshifting are a lot more lenient.

  I stop moving in the middle of a rock, and retract all my tendrils. Now there's nothing to pull me forward, so I shouldn't be able to move. At least, that's what conventional physics says.

  But as proven multiple times, my body doesn't use conventional physics.

  I start moving forward, slowly at first, then ramping up my speed. I thread my way through a couple rocks, just watching the wolves. They've congregated in another flat patch and are watching me warily. Safety in numbers thinking.

  To bad for them, i've been limited this whole time. always having to use other things to move really limited my speed, even if I didn't realize it. Now, that limitation is gone.

  I circle them, increasing my speed as I do so, surpassing my previous fastest quickly. But I keep going. Two times. Three times. Four times. I hit my limit at five times my previous speed, and the wolves are panicking at how fast i'm going.

  I stop circling, freezing midair. I'm smaller than the wolves, barely the size of one of their paws. All of them lock onto me, eyes trained to my motionless form. Their ears lay flat and their tails hang low. I slowly turn my mouth towards them, and the smallest among them lowers themselves closer to the ground. The brownish ones start warping the ground beneath their feet, a fireball appearing above the head of the largest red ones, and the white ones wisely chose to stay on the ground.

  Then I dart forward and knife through all of their heads, removing brains and spinal stems alike. No last-minute magic bullshit for you.

  I double check to make sure that they're all dead-dead, and none of them had undead powers or something, then eat them fully. And some of the ground beneath them, but what does it matter. I can fly now!

  Did we get all of them?

  I check back through my memories and count how many I saw vs how many I killed, and conclude that I did not. I missed 3. The initial wolf that slapped me did not pursue me out from under that knocked over shard, and I saw them heading away from me early on. Only the very edge of their tail was visible, but it's enough to know that they survived. Of the other two, one is a white camouflage wolf that was standing atop one of the shards, and it was completely invisible until it moved away when it thought I wasn't looking.

  There might be more like it, so i need to keep my ears peeled. Don't got ears. My vibration sensing organs then. The final one is a small purple one that ran as soon as it saw me. All of them seem to be heading in the same direction, so it should be a simple matter of catching up to them.

  I float upwards, shifting from my dog-giraffe form that I had used to finish off the rest of their bodies and back into worm near the top of the spires, just before the clouds begin forming. Then I point myself in the general direction I saw the trio of survivors moving in, and take off in a perfectly straight line.

  No escaping on my watch! You guys are too tasty to let go.

  Hey wait a second, that sounds evil. Can you not think things like that?

  Nah. Tasty is tasty.

  Fine. Just never say this stuff out loud, it'd make us look like the bad guys.

  Are we not?

  No............ we aren't. This is in retaliation to them attacking us unprovoked.

  Our tunnels might've done something to them though. We don't know. They might also think that they are acting in self defense.

  Since when did you get all philosophical?

  When It started annoying you.

  Regardless, we cannot let them escape. The consequences are unknown, but they were using large scale destructive magic. If they had been a bit more coordinated and aware of our capabilities, we would not have stood a chance. Surprise and speed are our biggest weapons for now, and letting them escape would spread that information.

  No matter who they are, they die today.

  Wow, cold! Heartless even!

  That's what we made them for.

  True. Are you annoyed at my comments?

  No.

  Dang.

  Hah.

  "What was THAT?!" I all but scream.

  "No clue, now shut your mouth and keep running unless you want to bring it straight to us." The senior wolf barks.

  I shut my snout.

  That thing was terrifying. When I hit it, my claws didn't even manage to penetrate it, but the force of my strike severely wounded it. Problem is, after that, whatever chance we had at killing it vanished. It got it's feet under it, and immediately leveraged it's superior speed and digging capabilities to exterminate us as efficiently as possible.

  On an open plane, we would've either destroyed it or forced it back under. But here? In the shattered remains of a fight between two of the strongest earth elementals to ever exist? It forces us to split up and obstructs our view, while giving it the perfect environment to hunt.

  That's why it waited so long to surface. It was searching for the perfect spot to take care of us. Or the place packed with the most earth mana.

  "Was it some kind of crystal elemental? The way it cracked resembled some of the crystals the denizens bring back up from the mines." I don't shout this time, only speaking loud enough to be heard over the roar of the winds.

  The senior scout cocks his head slightly.

  "Don't think so. The thing was too quiet. If it'd been a crystal elemental, we would have heard it shatter when you hit it. Or when it shifted. Or when it dug through the earth. Or when it did any number of things that should have made more noise than a squirrels sneeze, but didn't. No, I don't know what that is or where it came from, but someone in the rest of the pack might. So shut up and run faster."

  I stifle a grunt, but accept his words. Our third companion, a smaller purple wolf, remains silent. She hasn't spoken a word this whole time. The fourth, and final one of us is also a scout. He's missing his tail, and it's throwing him off, but I can see him using his wind magic to compensate.

  From what I can gather, he survived by using his wind magic to carry his image a little behind him, and the creature somehow didn't notice. I got a good look at the void it uses to eat when I smacked it, and I honestly never want to see it again.

  "SHIT! SHIT! IT'S COMING!" She yelps from my right, and almost loses her rhythm in her sudden panic.

  "What?! Where?" The senior asks.

  "Behind! Above! It's so fast! It'll be here in seconds!"

  I slam into an angled spire, killing all of my momentum and knocking it down, which gives me a relatively flat surface to stand on. The others do the same. Something blurs overhead, and then it's gone.

  But it comes back.

  Slowly, almost mockingly, the creature backs up into view, pitch black eyes pointed right at us and void-mouth open wide. in a split second it's visible, a white so bright it should hurt, but somehow doesn't. It contorts itself out of it's worm form, and into a much more defined, unfragmented version of the bipedal form I witnessed earlier. It stares at us, silently.

  I activate my fire armor, turning my fur from it's luscious dark red to a blazing blue. It may be mana intensive, but any kind of armor is worth it right now.

  The purple one begins trembling, and tries to hide behind me. I don't stop her.

  I shudder from behind Azar. Hiding behind him doesn't do me any good, but it breaks line of sight with that... thing. It's mind is unlike any i've ever seen, coiling through and off itself, reshaping and adjusting it's very structure every moment, so fast it looks nearly smooth. Like one of those machines the denizens are so fond of, but a million times more complicated. It watches us with endless hunger, examining us for any weakness.

  I'd try a mind attack, but anything i sent at it would probably be shredded in an instant. Something clicks within the mechanical monstrosity that is it's consciousness, and the flows change slightly. It turns it's head to our fourth member, the wounded scout.

  Faster than I can perceive, he's dead. His mind vanishes, and his body uncloaks. Or rather, what's left of it. Just his limbs and bits of his tail and skin.

  Before his limbs even begin to fall they're gone, devoured in an instant. It stands where he used to, far closer now.

  *whimper*

  I cower lower, doing my best to press as close to the ground as possible and avoiding eye contact. Azar snarls, bearing his teeth. I'd tell him to shut up if I wasn't so afraid to move.

  "What are you?" Bulut asks.

  It's minds currents change again, spinning slightly more to one side than the other. Then it's chest caves in. The sides of it's now caved in chest expand, covering up the gap while leaving a small hole. A violent crash sounds from behind us, and I turn to spot a small hole in one of the spires. Did it just launch compressed air at us?

  There's a whooshing noise, and then it begins emitting noise from the hole. The noise seems random at first, but slowly, the noises start resembling something an actual mouth would make. Then more wolfish noises, getting closer and closer to what Bulut said.

  "wH?t aRe Y?u"

  "How dare you!" Azar roars, and charges at the thing.

  "Stop!" Bulur shouts, but it's too late.

  It dodges with ease, and suddenly all of Azar's legs are gone. He almost falls, but the creature catches his now limbless form. It's comparatively smaller body holding him up by the scruff of the neck as he screams in pain. It stares into his face for a moment.

  "Ho? dar? YoU" It mimics in it's distorted voice.

  Then it opens its real mouth and bites his head off. And shoves the rest of him down it's throat, completely unbothered by the flames still acting as his fur. After finishing off the rest of his body, it vanishes once again.

  There's a yelp from my right, then silence. Bulut's gone too. I stay very still. I ignore the sounds of blood splattering against the greenery. I stay perfectly, absolutely still. Maybe if I stay still, it'll forget i'm here and I'll get to live.

  It walks over to me. This is it. This is where I die.

  It picks me up with both hands and just stares at me. Is it confused as to why i'm smaller than the others? Maybe I can injure it before it eats me!

  I send out a lance of mental mana, it's construction sloppy and haphazard, but i don't really care because any attack is better than no attack, and it hit-

  Ow. Ow? What was that? Was that a headache? A pang of frustration? Is frustration supposed to taste good?

  That felt like something touching our mind. We ate it. It tasted similar to the wolves, just more ethereal.

  Ah, okay. Is that why this one's dead? They seem to have gone limp. I check their vitals by shoving my arm down their throat and threading myself through their body to check for a heartbeat, I find one. Odd. Eh, living or not, their taste doesn't change.

  I devour their maybe living body, relishing in the unique flavour of their flesh.

  What do I do now?

  Let's go investigate that bridge we saw!

  Great Idea. we'll do that.

  I rise up from the crushed wildlife, turn air color once more and take off, back to where I came up. It was fun watching their reactions to my visible form, but they must've had good eyesight to be able to track me by my floating eyes alone. Impressive for things made of flesh. Or it might've been some other magic thing. Not sure.

  I arrive back at the general area, and move to where I saw the maybe bridges. Upon closer inspection, they seem to be made out of long, still living vines. The vines have been tied together and laid out across a large gap between two areas, and two footpaths branch out from the bridge on either side. Must be a frequently traveled area. Frequently traveled by what though?

  I dip down into a nearby ravine, and begin eating. If i'm going to investigate this I want be as small as possible, and so I need to get to my max and sell. Speaking of which, can I upgrade anything?

  There is a new upgrade available.

  More mouths: level 0/1 current possible mouths (1)

  Interesting. When did that pop up?

  After we hit level 10 in multiplier.

  Well, we won't say no to more mouths.

  More mouths: level 0/1 → level 1/1 possible mouths (6)

  I form a smaller mouth on my end opposite to my main worm mouth, then four more, all connected to tendrils. I start taking bites out of the ground as I pass, little nibbles just because I can. Are these mouths limited in size like my main mouth? I can obviously shrink them, but can they get bigger than my main one? I stretch one, and discover that yes, it can't get bigger than my main mouth. Seems my mouths all have a body-to-singular-mouth ratio that they can't go over.

  Well, I have an idea that'll help me eat faster... what if we curved our mouths so that they fit to our main mouth like puzzle pieces, then we place them all around the main mouth like a flower? That way we can eat six times as much at once! Like a Worm Hydra!

  Not a bad Idea. I pause in my digging and move the mouths up, growing them to their max size. I place them around my main mouth, then squish them to it, making them look like one shape. My front is now distinctly not-worm-shaped. I start eating again, and the difference is massive. I reach my fullest in record time, then convert and head back through my new tunnels to check out the caves, keeping my mouth closed so I don't grow even an inch.

  I wonder what i'll find in there! People Sized spiders? People? Giant insects? Something else with thumbs?

  Patience.

  I get to the caverns again, and now that i'm small, the opening is a lot bigger. Four times my current height big. I'm going to presume that whatever made that bridge is sapient and sentient, which means they might have language. I'll use the trick I came up with while messing with the wolves, where I make a cavity within myself, then mimic vocal cords and slowly push the air out. I forgot the slow part the first time.

  I have yet to test the limits of the sounds I can make, so i'm sure I could replicate electronic music or something if given enough time and practice. Anyway, how do I want to approach this? Invisible? base form? Spider form?

  WEAPONIZED CUTENESS!

  Weaponized what?

  Weaponized cuteness! We can turn into a ball and bounce in! I'm sure someone will find us cute, and maybe try to make us their pet, and then we'll have all the time in the world to listen in on their conversations and figure out their language! It's genius! They'll never suspect a thing.

  Uh. What's 'cuteness'? I would like to ask the same.

  It's when something is cute! Wait no, you guys wouldn't get it. it's something only I can see.

  Mhm. I'm going to pretend this plan won't go horribly wrong and go along with it anyway.

  You're the best!

  I shift from my humanoid form into a perfect sphere, then color myself a dull white, like aged paint. not glaring white like usual, a more subdued, natural color. Then I bounce right into the dark, compressing and lengthening myself to mimic how a creature like this would actually bounce, brimming with confidence and completely ready to tackle whatever species lives down here.