Chapter 659: A Wild Cat

[So this is the new version? And why did you choose that form, Sys?]

{Affirmative. As previously explained, sexual relation is no longer necessary in linking Master’s soul to bonded individuals. Though Master cannot seize complete dominion over the beastkin with this alone, I can form a bond from this. Should I proceed?}

[As long as you don’t cause trouble for me, sure. There’s nothing she has that I don’t have anyway. I just want to watch her life a bit, since I was getting bored of bullying them. But I still find your form mocking, though.]

{Then her memories will be intercepted promptly.}

[Stop ignoring what you don’t want to answer!]

And the white space began to bleed away little by little, the pure white slowly giving way until it revealed the images and the full reality that played itself out all around Benjamin...

Around Benjamin and another, more feminine, version of Benjamin who stood there dressed in a clean white garment and looked out through a pair of golden eyes.

The world kept playing itself exactly as the events had happened in the past, moving forward as if the two of them were nothing more than ghosts that the living world could not perceive or react to in any way.

A bird flew through the space where Benjamin’s chest should have been. A branch swayed through the space where Sys was standing.

The exact moment Sekhmet was first born—a squalling, fur-covered thing with her eyes still sealed shut, her mother’s rough tongue cleaning the birth fluid from her body—and then every single stage of how her entire life had unfolded from that day all the way until the precise second she cowered in front of Benjamin under extreme fear.

Every bit of that long stretch of years was not only seen clearly by Benjamin, it was also felt by him in complete detail as if he himself had lived through each moment.

He felt her first kill—a rabbit, small and quick—and the pride that came with it.

Inside this particular space time refused to run the way it normally did outside, because the speed at which thoughts and memories could be processed was several thousand times faster than ordinary time.

Only a few short seconds had actually passed in the real world while all of this was taking place. Benjamin watched centuries of life unfold in the space between one breath and the next.

One specific part of Sekhmet’s long life that managed to catch Benjamin’s full attention was the exact point where she first came face to face with Zanya.

Some years after the day of her birth inside a dense forest—tall trees whose branches wove together so tightly that only thin shafts of sunlight ever reached the ground, ferns that grew higher than a man’s waist, a stream that ran cold and clear over smooth stones—her own mother had chased Sekhmet and all of her siblings out of the only home they knew and forced them to go fend for themselves with no further protection or help of any kind.

Benjamin felt her confusion of that moment. He saw the way Sekhmet had turned back toward the den, expecting to be called back, expecting this to be a game or another lesson.

From that moment onward she was left living practically as nothing more than a wild animal that had to survive on pure instinct alone.

She ate what she could catch, drank from streams and puddles, slept in hollow logs and under bushes, or in the branches of trees when the ground was too dangerous.

She learned to avoid the larger predators and to fight the smaller ones.

Sekhmet somehow managed to keep surviving in that harsh way for more than a full century. She learned to speak in short, broken sentences to the few travelers who passed through the forest and did not try to kill her.

She learned to hide when she heard voices, and learned to run when she smelled blood.

But then a new and stronger power entered the same forest and the entire ecosystem around her began to change in ways she could not control.

There were suddenly no more easy prey animals left for her to catch and eat. The deer had fled. The rabbits had vanished. The birds had gone.

And so Sekhmet had no choice left except to venture a short distance outside the safety of the forest trees in search of something she could hunt.

There, beyond the edge of the trees, she came upon a unicorn—a horse whose coat was a pale blue color and who had a single sharp horn sprouting directly from the center of its head.

The creature stood in a small clearing, its head lowered, its horn gleaming in the afternoon light. It was the most beautiful thing Sekhmet had ever seen... And it was also the largest meal she had seen in weeks.

Not having ever eaten a creature like that before, Sekhmet lunged forward at the unicorn with a speed so blinding that the animal barely had time to react, and she tore its heart straight out of its chest with her claws.

In the middle of that violent attack she received a powerful kick from one of the unicorn’s hind legs and immediately had to hold her own head with both hands because of the sudden sharp pain that exploded through her skull.

Her vision went white. Her ears rang. She staggered backward and nearly fell. But the wounded beast only managed to run a few more meters away before its legs gave out completely and it collapsed to the ground where it died.

Sekhmet then began to tear open the soft belly of the fallen unicorn with her claws and started eating the still-warm flesh that was inside.

Her body was clearly in a state of severe malnutrition after so many years of scarce food—her ribs pressed against her skin, her hips jutted out at sharp angles, her fur had begun to thin in patches—and the way she tore into the meat and swallowed it was fast and almost frantic.