Hunger...
He was feeling very hungry as he wandered through the forest, alone and lost.
Ever since his pack was attacked, he had been chasing after the enemy to take revenge, but his body was growing weaker and weaker.
The enemy always stayed close enough to attract his attention, but never far enough away for him to forget about it.
This chase lasted over an hour.
Without him realizing it, the last few minutes were basically him running in circles around the same area while chasing the enemy.
This enemy was a strange white fox, which, despite showing several times that it had the agility to escape, never strayed too far from him, as if it were guiding him to a specific place.
And to Lohan, who was absorbing the memories of this Goblin, it became clear that the place the fox was prowling with the Goblin was the area around where he had disconnected from the game!
’Is this fox another Player?! How does it know that I disconnected here and that when I returned to the game I would connect again? And how did it know that I would connect again at this time?!’
The Goblin’s simple and foolish mind did not notice small details, but Lohan, with a human mind, quickly picked up on these details.
And that was even more frightening than dealing with the Goblin.
In the games he watched in the other world, he knew that the greatest enemy was never the monsters, even though Players died to monsters from time to time. In worlds with PVP enabled, the most frightening and treacherous creatures were other human Players.
Goblins have basic and shallow instincts, thinking only of the food they would eat and the women they would abuse.
Humans are not like that. Humans are greedy, manipulative, cunning...
Continuing to absorb the Goblin’s memory, Lohan saw his theory prove itself more and more correct.
When the little Slime formed from particles of light in the Goblin’s vision, the little fox darted between the trees at a speed she had never shown before and disappeared, clearly leaving the Goblin to deal with the Slime on purpose!
"But why do you want to deal with me this way? Wouldn’t it be easier to just attack me with the strength you showed?"
From the Goblin’s memories, Lohan saw that fox use her stealth and high speed to deal with a group of 10 Goblins all by herself!
Unfortunately, the memories began to fragment and disappear, even though Lohan continued to devour the Goblin’s brain.
"Is that the limitation of Lv 1 of this skill? Not bad."
Lohan could spend some Biomass to raise the Skill’s level and absorb more memories, but seeing that there was nothing useful in that Goblin’s empty head, he gave up.
While continuing to devour the Goblin’s corpse with the help of the Clone, Lohan read the new Skill he had unlocked.
[Chemosensory Aptitude Lv 1]
[The outer membrane can detect odor particles and mana residues in a much more refined way.]
This skill was the reason why the Goblin was so fixated on Lohan as soon as he saw him.
[Chemosensory Aptitude] was an innate ability that allowed Goblins to "smell" in a much more advanced way, allowing them to easily detect the path to something delicious.
And for the Goblin, Lohan was an unparalleled delicacy.
A beautiful ball of Mana completely saturated with magic (for his level), something that if he ate, could not only satisfy his hunger, but keep him satisfied for several days!
After receiving this skill, Lohan could also "smell" his surroundings.
But at that moment, the only thing he could smell was the foul odor of the Goblin he was digesting.
What was once just another creature, upon activating this skill, Lohan felt as if he were eating garbage.
’HOW DO I DEACTIVATE THIS?? BLARGH’ He thought desperately, controlling the urge to vomit, even though he didn’t have a stomach to vomit anything.
As soon as he thought about deactivating this skill, the odors around him magically disappeared, returning to the peace he felt.
Although the smell was gone, the disgust he felt for the Goblin’s body still lingered.
But Lohan was in no position to refuse such a biomass-rich meal, so despite his disgust, he persisted, absorbing as much as he could and using this new biomass to heal himself and recover Mana.
Since the Goblin was also a low-level creature, its body didn’t have that much Biomass. With Lohan and the Clone’s absorption speed, in less than two hours he finished absorbing it.
’Damn, is the Elf still in that place?
Thinking about it, Lohan quickly rolled in that direction.
To go faster, he even bought another evolution.
[Viscous Flow Lv 12 → Lv 13] 13.53 Bio - 0.61 m/s → 0.67 m/s
With a speed of 0.67 m/s, Lohan finally reached the speed that a 1-2-year-old human child had when walking.
That may seem good, but that was the speed of a child walking. If the child ran after him, Lohan would be helpless.
That’s why he had to use viscosity so well in the previous battle, because even a Goblin, with small, disproportionate, and deformed legs, still ran several times faster than him.
As a creature that terrorized villages of adult humans, if they were slow, it would be easy for any human to exterminate them.
But this was already a good start for Lohan.
He wasn’t that far from the place he had agreed with the Elf to start the conversation, so in a few minutes he got there.
Fortunately, this time there was no other competing Slime around to fight him for the girl’s Mana Stone, just the Elven girl looking around worriedly, but when she saw the small blue and shiny ball rolling towards her, with a Slime Core and a Mana Stone almost completely digested inside it, she smiled and waved at him.
"Little friend, you finally made it!"
Meanwhile, in the distance, a white fox watched the scene with even more curiosity, hidden from both the Slime and the Elven girl.