Chapter 24: On the road again

Sobek already had 26,000 experience points, but he needed 90,000 to level up. Staying in the vicinity of the oxalaias' nest he could have obtained several new points in just a few days, but when he returned to their islet he found that the oxalaias were already gone. Unfortunately, what he had feared had happened: feeling in danger, the oxalaias had taken their cubs and ran away all together. Sobek had done his best to not frightening them, but the arrival of the poachers had changed everything. While humans would most likely never return, at least not for a long time, the oxalaias had no way of knowing this, and no animal would have remained in a place where it felt in danger. The oxalaias had a head start of at least three hours and the water helped them to hide their smell. Sobek could track an aquatic animal, but only when it was stationary; there was no way to follow them if they were on the move and had hours of advantage. His nose was certainly not as powerful as the one of a t-rex. Sobek roared in anger, but he quickly bited the bullet and forced himself to calm down. After all, there was nothing he could do about it. He could have sought another favorable territory in the swamp, but he soon changed his mind. His goal, after all, was to evolve and to do that he needed humans. Thanks to the GPS in the cell phones that he stoled he knew that humans lived about five hundred and sixty kilometers to the west. If he wanted to meet them, it would have been more wise to follow the river and head there. And as he went he could eat what he found along the way. With [Ambush] he could afford to prey on even dinosaurs who dared to cross the river, and even some crocodiles. For now, he only had to maximize [Rapid digestion], but this only required 5 skill points; which meant that any other skill points gained after that could be saved for use after evolution. Sobek was sure that evolution would have granted him new skills, so accumulating skill points early could only be useful. The plan looked good, so he decided to leave the next day. Before returning to the islet, however, he had to feed himself first: he hadn't yet had a decent meal that day. The swamp was still full of fishes. With [Swim speed] and [Ambush] he could catch them without any difficulty. He also had [Rapid digestion], although not at its peak yet, and that means that he could hunt far more than before. He then decided that he would have spent that day hunting whatever came within range, so as to accumulate as many experience and skill points as possible. By the end of the day, he had devoured two onchopristis, eight lampreys (6,500 experience points each), hundreds of tiny fishes such as cephalaspis, and even a lipote, a river dolphin that went extinct on Earth in 2006 (7,000 experience points). When evening came he was surprised at himself: in total, that hunt had earned him 87,000 experience points! Apparently the days before he'd been so obsessed with hunting carnivorous dinosaurs that he didn't realize how easy it had become to hunt fishes. With [Ambush] and [Swim speed] at maximum level, he didn't even have to commit to do so. In just one day, his experience points had risen from 26,000 to 113,000, more than enough to level up! It was certainly not the result Sobek expected. If that were the case, he would have had no need to hunt dinosaurs; he would have only had to catch fishes on his way to human settlements. In any case, now he could level up again. After the usual ten seconds of pain he had reached 16 meters in length and 5.4 meters in height. At this pace, reaching 18, 19, 20 meters or even more wasn't a difficult task at all. Sobek felt encouraged by this. He reflected that he only needed two skill points to maximize [Rapid digestion]. He decided that before leaving he would have looked for a freshwater shark or some other predator so as to reach the maximum level for all his skills. That way he wouldn't even have had to stop to hunt on his way to west. With all abilities maximized, he would have used [Ambush] to get close to the fish, with [Swim speed] he would have jumped on it and kill it, and with [Fast digestion] he would just have had to swallow it and wait a few minutes to be able of returning to hunt again. The next day, so, he left immediately as soon as the sun rose to find food that met the requirements. With [Ambush] he could go wherever he wanted without anyone noticing. He searched incessantly for a stethacanthus or, why not, even an alligator, but he couldn't find anything good for hours. His only booty was a pair of onchopristis which he devoured to feed himself. Around noon, finally, something appeared in his field of vision. Initially due to the shape he thought that it was an alligator, but the System promptly corrected him. [Prey identified: Ambulocetus natans, ambulocitidae. Experience: 5,000 points] Ambulocetus could be considered the ancestor of all cetaceans: it was in fact the very first mammal to set foot in the water. Behemoths like blue whales and sperm whales existed only thanks to that animal. Its appearance was vaguely reminiscent of a crocodile, but the light layer of hair that covered it hinted at its true nature: only mammals had hair. Sobek attacked him in an istant. The huge descendants of that animal would have made a spinosaurus escape with its tail between its legs, but an ambulocetus was worth nothing in front of him. In no time it disappeared into his jaws and gave him the 2 skill points he was missing! Finally Sobek was able to maximize all his abilities. Seeing [Rapid digestion] rise to level 5/5 he felt a sensation of extraordinary victory, comparable to what he had experienced defeating the poachers. Now, every future skill point that he would have gotten would have been a investment for the post-evolution time. He could finally begin his journey to west. Before leaving, however, he wanted to do one thing. Instead of going west he headed east, the direction he had come from. He wanted to verify that the poachers hadn't gone to disturb the spinosaurs and therefore his family. He also felt a desire to see them again. With [Swim speed], which could now get him to 170 km/h, it took him less than an hour to return. However, he found no one waiting for him: the nest was empty. Initially he was panicked: he feared that the poachers had caught them. But then his common sense quickly reminded him that no ship capable of carrying so many spinosaurs would have gone unnoticed as it crossed the swamp. Looking closely at the beach where the nest was, he could recognize numerous footprints of spinosaurus that all headed into the water, but no sign of human passage. There was only one solution: the spinosaurs had migrated of their own free will. This was certainly not unusual: all animals tended to move during certain periods of time, especially herds. Unfortunately they seemed to have gone in the opposite direction to his. If he had chased them he could have reached them, but he had to go west, while they went to east. It didn't matter: what was important was that they were alive and safe. Indeed, perhaps it was better this way: Sobek would have saved himself another goodbye. Who knows if he would have seen them again... He banished those thoughts: he didn't have to focus on that sad things or he would have gone crazy. The only thing that mattered now was the mission: he had to grow, evolve, improve and form an army to stop the humans. That was his way of protecting his family: preventing humans from invading the continent was the only way to allow his brothers and sisters to live the life they wanted and not end up being clowns in some circus or zoo instead, or worse turning them in bags and beauty case. So he went back. He reached and crossed the whole swamp, and towards evening the clear water of the flowing river returned to take the place of the almost still and muddy one of the swamp. Now he just had to go straight to the human territory. =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= AUTHOR'S THOUGHTS Hi! Time to answer some other questions and report interesting facts: 1) The ambulocetus was an ancient cetacean that perhaps could walk as well as swim. Fossil finds testify that it was an ancestor of whales, which originated from terrestrial artiodactyl mammals. Its hind legs were probably better adapted for swimming than for walking on land; it probably swam by means of vertical undulations of the body, like the current otters and seals. It is hypothesized that the ambulocetus hunted like crocodiles, that is, lurking underwater without being seen by the prey and then ambushing it and grabbing it suddenly, so I potrayed it like this in the story. It also appeared in the BBC documentary "Walking with beasts" (references... references everywhere...). 2) The lipote (Lipotes vexillifer), also known as the Yangtze dolphin or baiji, is a probably extinct species of freshwater dolphin that populated the waters of the Yangtze River in China, declared extinct in 2006. Even if an alleged specimen was sighted in August 2007, it remains the doubt that it was just a neo-moth. It is the only species of the genus Lipotes and of the Lipotidae family and it went extinct because of us. Just to remind deniers that the mass extinction we are causing is already underway and we can see it with our own eyes... unless we decide to close them, of course. 3) In case someone don't know this, the max size of the spinosaurus (due to the most recent estimates) was 'just' 15.2 meters long. Even if ancient estimates posed a length of more than 18 meters, today we know that they were wrong. So Sobek can be considered a true giant with 16 meters of length. In this story I decide to pose the max length found in the wildlife as 15.8 meters, because there is always the possibility of gigantism; also I accept that zoo's specimen can be bigger because generally the zoo's animals are larger and healthier than the ones in the wildlife, because they have to confront with less difficulties (they have more food, more medical care, and they don't have to fight to survive). 4) Even if in Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom Wheathley ends up very badly, devoured alive by the Indoraptor, here I want to give him a better death. He dies in the same way, but unlike what happened in the movie, here he accepts that death with the dignity of a true hunter. Because in my opinion true hunters aren't the ones those who hide behind guns and kill only for fun or profit, but those who have the courage to fight an enemy that can kill them too. A hunt isn't a true hunt if the hunter has no chance of becoming the prey and the prey has no chance of becoming the hunter. So, even if Wheathley lived in the wrong way for the majority of his life, in the end he has this sort of 'redemption'. 5) What? Do someone of you doubt that we humans can turn a continent into a desert? We are already doing that right now. According to an estimate by FAO, the United Nations organization for food and agriculture, more than 420 million hectares of forest were lost worldwide from 1990 to 2020. In 2021 alone, 3.75 million hectares of primary tropical forest, the most important in terms of biodiversity and storage of greenhouse gases, were destroyed. Increasing deforestation and rising temperatures are rapidly causing deserts to grow in size across the planet. So, imagine how much forest would be destroyed if we humans REALLY needed to destroy them for our own survival: in the world of Eden, humans wiped out forests to better wage the Three Hundred Years War and mass murdered all large animals to avoid danger (after all, why risk a t-rex attacking your base camp if you can kill it early?). That alone had a devastating effect on life, but of course, there is more. On Earth with the intense pollution and climate change many insects like bees are in danger; and if bees will disappear, the entire ecosystem will collapse. On the two Eden's human continent, this is exactly what happened: the extinction of pollinating insects, added to the disappearance of all the large animals that fertilized the soil keeping it fertile, caused a complete destruction of the ecosystem, with thousands of plant species that disappear; and without the plant life, the animal life disappear too. In the end, nothing remained except an immense expanse of deserts and dry plains continually burned by the increasingly hot climate. Even the hardest species had a really bad time in such conditions. And remember, even if this may seem like a doomsday scenario, it is exactly the future where we are actually going. Even if Earth isn't still at such level, we are all moving in that way, and probably the actual generation will see the results of our environmental impact if we don't change very quickly. We are literally a step before the catastrophe, so if we will not be careful, we will face the consequences of our own mistakes.