Constantly creating skin sacs full of modified blood, only to feed the human, eat them and repeat the process a couple hours later, for what must have been a day or two, was fairly boring.

But at least, that rest had let it realize some of its mistakes early on, before they became a problem.

To start with, it finally realized why its rib snapped from a mere six foot drop back in the pit, something that shouldn't happen from its meagre weight and Endurance points, even if the human added some of her weight onto it.

It had made its bones too hard. Bones didn’t snap and crack at every impact because they could bend, and the wolf had somehow just… not considered that. In its attempt to make its bones as hard as possible, it had also made them brittle. Thankfully, taking the connective tissue that made up its bones, and making it a little bendier, was easier than it had expected. The idea, surprisingly, came from its eyes.

The insides of its eyes had smooth muscles, which were muscles that were small enough to be on the 'cellular' level, and numbered in the 'billions', a number it couldn't quite conceive of, but vaguely understood. These muscles were called 'cilliary' muscles, and helped with altering the shape of the lens.

And technically... it could also make tendons small enough to be on the 'cellular' level, with them being some of the stretchiest while also relatively tough tissue that bodies had.

It just had to grab a bone, and weave microscopic strings of tendon tissue throughout the white strands, partially fusing them together.

And that thought brought it into a rather sudden contemplation.

The new way of using its Skill that it had discovered after the fight.

It could directly grasp onto its current body and start making changes, which were affected by time in a normal fashion, like when it stuck its bones together and healed them in a matter of minutes while asleep by using its mind like a physical force, a direct and immediate approach that was severely limited due to the gradual nature of most changes, while this method of use was almost entirely manual.

If it wished to give itself an eye using this method for example, it would have to sleep for the entire duration the alteration would take, or the change would simply stop the moment the wolf stopped paying attention to it. It was only really good for moving in its sleep and for emergency fixes, which it never had to do until just now, and probably why it hadn't even 'unlocked' this way of using the Skill until then.

The usual way the skill worked was by grasping onto a more conceptual body, with far more time to consider and tweak changes that would only start applying themselves as soon as it decided it was done altering itself.

Manual, real-time change, or conceptual dreamscape change that would only truly begin when it decided that it was fine with said changes and had let the [Devourer] Skill fade away to let it rest.

Unfortunately, neither option would allow it to just... make a copy of its body and test how its new experimental bone would work in practise.

So it would have to make a sacrifice. It picked its right foreleg's humerus, one of the few isolated and relatively easy to break bones, and changed the bone's connective tissue to match its test bone's structure. With that done, and realizing it got sidetracked, it went back to what it was doing before the sudden bout of inspiration.

Fixing its mistakes.

The second mistake it had to fix, was that it had forgotten to allocate some of the [Devourer] Skill’s essence to replace the hormone production that its reproductive organs were responsible for, so it quickly did that as well. It could just put the organs in its abdomen, but it preferred to have that space available for something else, whenever it got a good idea.

And after that, it was back to its routine. Create a skin sac full of modified blood, feed the human, bite it off, sleep for the changes to come faster, repeat.

It was boring.

Resting had become boring, a thought it never could have possibly imagined that its mind would complete.

But its 'test bone' was done, so it had to... well, test it. And the only way to test how much damage a bone could take, was by trying to break it. The problem was that it couldn't. Its body was far, far too tough, and it didn't have the strength to snap its right humerus, or even bend it enough to see how far it could bend before snapping, no matter which way it bit itself or tried to find something to slam its leg against.

It was frustrating.

So it went to sleep, and decided to use its mind, entering the manual, real-time mode. As it had manipulated its body while asleep, it did the same now, gripping onto the bone and using the full force of its mind to grab the two ends by the joint, before pressing down in the middle of the bone.

It felt the start of a headache at the mental effort, but it worked.

Then it used more force, bending the bone as much as it could go. The damage was done on both sides, as strands of hardened connective tissue fused with microscopic tendon strands were strained and frayed, but much to its utter astonishment, it almost managed to take the curved bone and turn it into a gentle crescent shape in the complete opposite direction before it broke.

Even the way it broke, had changed. Instead of snapping on the point of pressure in two, like a normal bone, it instead pinched and flattened on the sides of the point the wolf was focused on, allowing the bone to bend even further, just a bit, before the strands all started snapping apart.

When the wolf let go, it simply moved back into place, slowly. It was damaged, with a lot of the connective tissue snapped and losing structural integrity, and bent out of shape, but still able to support weight, still structurally well enough to be useful, not sliding and scraping around in pieces like a normal bone would.

And the bendy nature of the bone would naturally diffuse impact, so while it was softer than its current bone structure, it was far more difficult to break, far more useful after breaking, and it was also a natural defense against any attack. It would have to expend some essence from the skill to supply these microscopic strands of tendon tissue with blood and energy to prevent them from drying out, but that was hardly an issue for the foreseeable future.

This... was amazing. And it wasn't anything more than a whim, a random idea it decided to test.

Despite the pain and the extremely uncomfortable grind of frayed bone writhing in its flesh, it was absolutely ecstatic. It quickly set the bone to fix itself, which took a few minutes more to heal than its current bones would take. After confirming the usefullness of its experiment, it changed every single bone in the same way, and applied the change, which would only take a day to fully apply, and set the Skill to take whatever essence it needed to keep the fused microtendons from atrophying and drying out.

It wasn't a lot, thankfully. A rodent a day, maybe?

Then it woke up again with a massive, satisfying stretch, feeling like it was finally ready to face whatever mess its antennae were informing it of up ahead.

It wasn’t difficult to interpret, it was just strange. After a hundred or so feet down from the bend of the pipe, the sensation of rock tightly surrounding the pipes suddenly cut off, and that meant open air. It was some kind of cube-shaped vertical tunnel, through which went a ton of pipes, many connected to something distant and many just rusting away. Dangerous terrain at best.

Still, it wished to make sure that it wasn’t passing by an easy opportunity to the surface, and they would have to go through there to continue anyway.

It bent down, and hooked its canines into the human’s clothes, but before it could drag her, she started struggling, putting her hand on the iron pipe and pushing away.

“Wait, wait. Stop.” She said, and the wolf stopped with a confused grumble, unhooking its teeth from her garment.

She brought her injured arm to splay out by her side, using some weird mana technique, then started making a strange… sawing motion?

“Cut. Uh… bite. Bite this off.” She whispered, gesturing and poking towards her injured arm's shoulder.

It tilted its head. Did she want it to lick her wounds?

It moved forward and nosed her left hand away, hooking its canines on the shredded remnants of cloth around her arm.

Mentally ordering its teeth to not cut through skin, a command of dubious effect, it quickly but carefully moved back, cutting through cloth. It stopped at her shoulder, then straightened, letting the crusty fabric peel away.

It didn’t really need its eyes to know that the limb was infected beyond saving. The stench was quite vile. Licking it wouldn’t really accomplish anything but leave the wolf with a bad taste in its mouth.

The human was starting to breathe harder, but after a moment of inaction, she resumed with her strange motions, making her hand and fingers flat before making a chopping motion at her shoulder, repeating that “Cut.” word constantly.

It had no idea what she was trying to convey, and just continued staring at her, tilting its head this way and that.

Then she curled her fingers into rough, soft approximations of claws, and closed them around her upper arm before making some sort of sudden, jerky, tearing motion by twisting her wrist outwards.

“Come on, please. I’m sure you can understand. Cut!” She whisper-hissed at it, and the wolf grumble-growled at her, perplexed.

She growled, much like itself, then blindly extended a hand towards its snout. Confused but not particularly alarmed, it allowed her to paw at its neck before finding its muzzle, which she gently but insistently guided towards her arm.

With a sort of baffled curiosity, it lowered itself into a crouch, and allowed the human to press its snout into her upper arm, despite the ugly scent clogging the air. Then she jammed her fingers under its jowls, and it grumble-whined in confusion as she tried to wiggle her fingers between its teeth, curling its lips open and tonguing at her filthy fingers out of instinct.

It was beyond confused at this point, so with a mixture of confusion and curiosity, it relaxed its jaws, ordering its teeth to be blunt. The human hooked her finger at its bottom canine, and twisted her wrist to use the back of her palm, forcing the wolf’s jaws open. With its mouth stupidly hanging open, it waited to see what she was trying to do.

She raised her hand, clumsily pawing at its newly-healed ear, before grabbing onto its fur and tugging it down, until its jaws were surrounding her arm, then she used some sort of mana-pressure to close its lower jaw, a fairly gentle pressure, pressing down on its snout with her functioning hand.

Then she tightened both of her holds, grinding its teeth against her arm, and pushed away.

“Cut. Cut.”

The realization was sudden.

It was mildly embarrassing that it hadn’t realized sooner. The human was asking it to bite her arm off. Of course she was, the thing was completely useless at this point, just weighing them both down, and infected on top of that.

Its mental evaluation of the human went up a little bit.

Just to show that it understood, it tightened its jaws on its own, and allowed its teeth to cut slightly, just breaking skin. The human’s breath hitched, before resuming, fast paced as she settled back on the pipe, lifting her hand to the top of its head and aggressively petting it between the ears, some... form of approval?

“Yes, yes. Just… bite it off. C-Cut.”

It chuffed as best as it could through her rather thin arm, and tested around with its tongue to make sure it could cut through her arm in a single clean yank.

It was rather surprised to note that it felt like it could, just a thin strip of flesh maybe to remain after it pulled its head back, its canines just a little too short to meet.

...When had its canines grown so large?

Actually, did the human become smaller?

Leaving aside those thoughts, it lowered itself, and lightly growled in warning. The human’s hand left as she placed her wrist in her own mouth.

“Cfuuht.” She urged, muffled through her wrist, and the wolf did exactly that.