Assassin Crow Evolution

The stage of meditation that Jimmy reached had its benefits, and its limitations.

For one thing, he felt calmer than he had ever felt as a crow. His mind was clear, he mustered a type of self-control that he couldn’t have reached before even if he tried. He felt peaceful, and for once, peace of mind did not bore him to death.

The bad thing, or the limitation was that he couldn’t pass past this stage of meditation no matter how long he waited.

After waiting for what he thought to be another two hours, sunlight passed through his pupils. Subconsciously, he knew that the sun rose above the horizon, which meant that he had been sitting here since yesterday afternoon.

There were a solid ten hours that he didn’t account for at the very least. They slipped past him somehow.

Jimmy dedicated so much time to meditation, and yet he was nowhere close to going past his current stage, and he especially wasn’t close to merging with the black Sentient Feather he had grabbed with his beak.

Giving up was not in his nature, not when he knew that he could benefit out of his stubborn perseverance, but his body gave up on him.

After nearly a day of not eating anything, his stomach gurgled like a raging storm, and it interrupted his meditation, because the gurgling was somehow amplified in his head.

"Motherfucker!" He opened his eyes and shouted.

The feather slipped out of his beak the moment he started being dramatic, but he was able to catch it again. It tried to float away, but it didn’t exactly fly at light speed. It was a feather.

Virena was asleep nearby, and she didn’t budge regardless of Jimmy’s outburst. A pile of bugs laid near her.

"That’s sweet," He calmed down, "She didn’t want me to go hungry."

Jimmy chowed down on the pile, swallowing a few bugs whole at a time. There were about fifty of them, be it beetles, flies, cockroaches and others. He was so hungry that he didn’t dare to nit-pick which ones to eat. He ate them all.

Yet, he was still hungry. He had gone shy of twenty hours without food, and since his hunger usually became unbearable halfway past that mark, he felt as if the bugs he ate didn’t even hit his stomach!

"Jesus Christ!" He nearly mustered a tear, "Do all big birds struggle this much? I don’t even think that actual eagles eat as much as I do."

Jimmy flew out of the hole in the tree he had meditated in, and started hunting. He was looking, and hoping for something meaty, but he was immensely hungry during his hunt, so he slapped down a bunch of flying bugs along the way. Only after he ate thirty more of them did he start feeling like his normal self again. His hunger simply began being tamed.

Other than that, he noticed that he had gotten a quarter of a pound lighter. Well, he noticed that he wasn’t as fat as he used to be.

This meant that his body had been so desperate for nutrition, that it had started burning through his fat.

As he flew, he said, "I guess this is the downside of evolving too quickly? You don’t know what to fucking expect."

Half an hour into his hunt, as he flew above the ground, he spotted a deer drinking water from one of the meadow’s creeks. Its large antlers waved around citing its reputation, that being that no one had been able to kill the deer yet.

Deer weren’t common here, or at least, he hadn’t seen any of them in the meadows before, but that didn’t matter, he knew a good meal when he saw one.

From a hundred feet away, he hurled a fireball at the deer, a blue one. He didn’t need to preserve his mana pool right now, and other than that, he wanted to give it a quick death.

"Blue Fireball," He whispered.

The intense, glooming beauty of the Blue Fireball he summoned, pierced through the air in the blink of an eye!

The deer didn’t see it coming, and at this point, it wouldn’t have been able to go far even if it did see it. Its confidence, its subconscious belief that a crow couldn’t hurt it, promised its downfall.

The fireball hit its abdomen, and dug through its flesh for a couple of seconds.

The wound itself was only two feet wide, which technically shouldn’t be deadly by itself, but the great, sun-like heat, and the fact that the Blue Fireball pushed into its abdomen by a few inches, was what made this shot so powerful.

The deer died within a few seconds. Its body could not tolerate such a sudden burst of pain. It simply topped over into the shallow creek.

[+1,600 system points]

[Total points: 13,455]

Jimmy landed near it, and started ripping off pieces out of the hole in the deer’s abdomen.

"Cooked venison," He nodded slowly, "Not bad."

Jimmy swallowed a couple of pounds of meat, and only then did he feel that he was well-fed.

For good measure, he ripped off a few more pieces of meat, and ate them.

Since he had to get back to meditating, he carefully tore through a large chunk of meat using his beak, roughly two pounds of it, and took it with him.

He figured that the meat would start to smell by the time he was hungry again, but he was sure that he couldn’t get sick from slightly rotting meat. His metabolism wasn’t nearly as sensitive as that of a human’s when it came to below-par food.

Jimmy stuffed the meat in that hole in the tree where he meditated, and then sought out crows, anyone he could run in on.

The first crows he ran into were Zoey and Julia. He distinctly remembered feeding them more than a week ago, on the same day when he met Virena.

He was surprised that they had survived the wars, and quite frankly, he didn’t care that they did. He found the both of them very irritating, and he knew for a fact that they snitched on him before, despite him specifically asking them not to.

Jimmy didn’t care to demand them to explain their betrayal, and focused on his goal instead.

He explained, "I killed a deer down the creek there, and I couldn’t eat it all. Go tell all the crows where the meat is at, and share it amongst yourselves. We shouldn’t let all that meat go to waste."