A light breeze passed by over a fainted catkin. Her body shivered slightly, even though she was long since immune to the regular cold.

Slowly, her consciousness returned from the abyss of sleep. As her eyes opened, she unconsciously let out a pained groan as her whole body felt like it had just been torn apart and reconstructed several times over.

She struggled to get up as her legs screamed at her, her sore muscles complaining under the stress of her extremely low weight.

Falling back down onto the hard ground, she held in an annoyed groan. She had been severely injured before, but she had never felt like this, nor had she ever felt this tired.

Thankfully, her high vitality quickly got to work, and after a little less than an hour, her body was back to a functioning state. During that time, she inspected the changes that had taken place.

Firstly, the world now seemed a whole lot more detailed to her senses. She could virtually hear every single sound from everywhere on the island and could focus on specific sounds or block those she didn't want out. The same thing applied to her smell, however, it was far superior to her hearing. She could determine so many details simply by the smell alone.

Next, her sight had also gotten a lot better. Although not quite at the same level, she could still distinguish a blade of grass from 10km away.

Her sense of touch was a little better but was mostly the same. As for her taste, she wasn't sure yet since she didn't feel like eating.

What truly surprised her, however, were the many changes to her physical body. Firstly, her fur, tail, ears, and hair, which were all previously black, had all turned into a pale white for some reason.

She spent a little bit examining these changes before moving onto her other changes. Her body felt a lot easier to control, and her reflexes were much better than before. Although her speed and power didn't improve directly, she now found it much easier controlling her strength and speed.

As for the so-called sixth sense, she certainly felt it, but it wasn't really much use to her now. Even after sweeping through the entire island with both body and senses, she couldn't find anything that was worth her murdering it for Anima. Truthfully, the only real monsters left were a couple stronger-than-normal wolves, and even those struggled to reach a hundredth of the power of a real monster.

Hence, after desperately seeking something to kill, she came out empty-handed and filled with frustration.

"System, where can I find more monsters?" She asked, her voice still hoarse from disuse.

System~chan to the rescue~! Not on this island.

"Yeah, I know that much..." The catkin answered, even more irritated. Was the System being sassy? How did she even know what sass was? Questions, and no answers...

She gave up after trying a couple more questions, with more or less the same answers. She thus spent the rest of the day in a terrible mood, likely the worst one she ever had since waking up in this island.

As night fell, she sat at the beach, staring up at the sky. Her knees rested against her chest and her arms hugging her legs, as her body slowly swayed back and forth.

After a while, she fell asleep once more. For the first time in her life, she dreamed.

It was an arguably strange dream. She was chasing after a rabbit when trees started talking, and then the ground split open and a swarm of flying fish flew out, and then those fishes started to dance. After a couple of minutes, a whole bunch of weird monsters joined together with the fishes to dance as she, even in her dream, watched on in both horror and amazement.

When she woke up, she was a little confused. Although she only remembered some parts of the dream, it still made her smile and even giggle when thinking about it.

For the rest of the day, she started to get bored. Now that there were no more monsters to fight, no bloody battles to triumph in, no more hordes of monsters wanting to tear her apart, she finally noticed just how dull her life was.

Thus, as the days passed and her boredom only increased, she started sleeping regularly, as well as trying out a whole lot of new things.

She had originally wanted to try and swim away from the island, but she gave up before even trying at the mere thought of going into the water. She was a catkin after all, and water was her worst enemy, one she didn't even want to try and conquer.

Thus, stuck on the island, she started to try out new things. Battle techniques, trying to create some interesting things with the limited resources of the island and even cooking.

As weeks passed by, the System also started giving her ideas. It told her of objects and activities she had never even thought of before.

She built a small home on a flat plain near the beach where there were few trees, which she promptly removed. With a lot of trial and error, as well as the System's help and a speed and strength that allowed her to work and do things in an unimaginably short amount of time, she finally finished the building after a couple months of works and re-works.

It wasn't anything fancy, but it suited her taste. The System had given her a lot of ideas, with things like beds, furniture, trophies of defeated enemies and she even started making her own art, which she made by using clean white animal leather and using a mixture of plant substances, blood, and ink to draw with.

Although this lifestyle couldn't compare to the constant stress and excitement that came along with her previous one, she slowly started to not mind it. Although she would still find herself sometimes needing to vent her energy by purging the island of everything that moved and running around like a madwoman without a real goal or direction.

Years passed. The animals had all grown to fear her, respect her and even worship her. Some of the smartest critters, some comparable even to Emperors in intelligence, even started bringing her tributes in order to not be attacked during her purges, which had slowly become less common.

She quite liked this mindset of those animals, so she indeed left them alone. In fact, after a while, she forcefully stopped her outbursts forcefully, as she wanted to see if some animals could indeed rise back to the level of Kings and Emperors, or even beyond. Even though she knew that such a thing might take centuries.

She had also become extremely skilled in a lot of things. She had learned to refine wood and turn it into whatever she wanted, and she also slowly learned how to cut stone.

She even tried to make 'glass' at one point under the guidance of the System, who had become extremely helpful and chatty as long as the questions were related to mundane things like those. Unfortunately, she never succeeded, and she eventually gave up.

But that didn't mean that she didn't do other things. In fact, she had continuously upgraded her house into a full-blown mansion, even though she rarely used it. She learned gardening and came to appreciate the beauty aspect of things, a thing she had always ignored before.

Her arts also got a whole lot better. Between painting, wood and stone carving and even dancing, she became pretty good at all of them under the guidance of 'System-chan' as the thing always displayed whenever she asked for help.

Truthfully speaking, without the System, she might have turned insane due to the boredom. However, because the System continuously gave her new and interesting ideas, as well as giving her it's own opinions on the things she did, she instead turned into a much more peaceful creature.

Granted, 'peaceful' was a strong word. Although she didn't fight, the System also insisted she 'train'. Although she couldn't become stronger by training, the System claimed that she could refine her fighting style and create unique techniques for herself.

And since she often had nothing else to do, she obeyed the System. She learned to use her claws at maximum efficiency, trained her senses on the stronger animals around to immediately pinpoint a weakness in the enemy, and refined her own movement and attack skills to a whole new level.

Finally, after a whole 5 years of living without any real bloodshed, something happened.

It was a rather regular afternoon when it happened. She had been busy carving a huge statue more than 100 meters high, depicting a ferocious devil with flames and chains running all across its body when it happened.

Her sensitive nose picked up the smell instantly, and her ears heard the foreign noise. Her head snapped in the direction of the strangeness, and she could instantly pinpoint its location.

Something, or someone, had come from the sea.