In the middle of the night, System, dragging his swollen belly, finally jumped back to the pile of rocks near the pitcher pnt. He then jumped into a gap between the rocks that he'd chosen as a potential nesting site the previous day.

  There was a slight movement, and a small cricket dashed out from System's chosen gap, after which it quickly dashed into a narrow gap in the gravel nearby.

  System didn't give any thought to his behavior of occupying the cricket's nest. He completely ignored the cricket's escape and began to rest quietly.

  Before entering a dormant state, he swallowed some of his [Corrosive Mucus] into his stomach to help improve his digestion speed.

  ...

  When System left his dormant state a few hours after sunrise the next morning, his body and mind had been completely restored to their peak state.

  His balloon-like stomach had also returned to its normal size, and all of the slime he'd swallowed the previous day had been fully digested.

  After crawling out of the crack between the rocks, System jumped toward the mud puddle where he'd st seen the slime the previous day.

  It was still sitting motionless in the mud, and most of the ants inside its body had already dissolved. System could no longer tell that the specks of color floating inside the slime's body used to be ants.

  Perhaps because he'd eaten so much slime, System found that he'd developed a resistance to the slime's herbal fragrance. Its influence on his mind was now negligible.

  He quickly grabbed a twig and tried to lure out the slime using the same method as the st time. He hopped and climbed his way up a nearby tree and tossed down two twigs near the slime, but there was no reaction.

  The second twig even bounced directly off of the slime's body, but that only resulted in the slime jiggling for a while before slowly returning to its previous unmoving state.

  The slime seemed to be indifferent to what was going on around it.

  It seemed to be impossible for System to continue his tactic of driving the tiger to swallow wolves against the slime and ants in a short period of time.

  He didn't have the courage to face the slime himself. Although it didn't react much after he'd thrown the two twigs, if System took the initiative to hop over and start biting off chunks of slime, he would likely find himself suffocating inside the slime's body before he even knew what happened...

  ...

  System left decisively. Except for occasionally returning to the mud puddle to see if the slime had recovered, he spent his time exploring the surroundings and working at his old job—robbing ants.

  This was all part of the heavenly cycle. A few days ago, it was the ants who were robbing System, but now it was his turn to happily rob the ants.

  Thirty meters away, he found another ant nest inside a rotten tree. It was a separate colony of the reddish-brown ants from earlier that had fought against the slime. The scale of this second ant nest inside a dead tree was even rger than the previous one.

  The reddish-brown ants were very fast. System's first few robberies didn't go smoothly at all, and his body suffered quite a few bites from the ants' mandibles.

  In the process of snatching food from the second ant he'd targeted, a quarter of one of System's antennae was bitten off. After his antenna was damaged, his sense of bance got a little worse, but it didn't have much impact overall.

  After robbing these new ants three times, he'd basically adapted to their attack patterns and behaviors, and his subsequent food snatching went much more smoothly.

  Although his movements were still a little awkward, he never got injured again, and as the number of robberies increased, his movements grew more and more skillful.

  Through observation, System discovered that the habits of these reddish-brown ants were slightly different from those of the bck and brown ants, especially in terms of how they handled food.

  Instead of breaking any food they found into tiny pieces that a single ant could easily carry back to the nest, they cut the food into small pieces three to five centimeters long, then several worker ants cooperated to carry it back.

  This habit of the reddish-brown ants was quite convenient for System. He could safely snatch rge pieces of food as long as he stayed about five meters away from the ant nest.

  Thanks to the ants always carrying rge pieces of food, each time System robbed them, he got enough food to st him a long time. While he ate his stolen meals on high tree branches, he could also keep a lookout for any other decent food the ants were hauling back.

  System saw massive eggs from an unknown insect, caterpilrs, plump pnt seeds, dead earthworms, and more. Although these reddish-brown ants were smaller than the bck and brown ants, they were obviously better at hunting, and they also caught a much wider variety of prey.

  When he saw the reddish-brown ants diligently carrying a variety of food back to the nest, System was reminded of the feeling of eating at a buffet in his previous life. There was always a rge assortment of food passing by—so much that he didn't even know where to start.

  He even managed to snatch a spider and a centipede from the ants. The corpses of these two insect hunters were very fresh, and it was unknown how the ants had managed to hunt them.

  ...

  Over the next few days, System spent his time snatching food from ants, exploring his surroundings, and observing the slime.

  There was basically nothing unusual that happened in the process of robbing the ants. During his exploration, he discovered seven more ant nests containing a total of four different types of ants.

  In addition to the bck and brown and reddish-brown ants that System was already familiar with, there were also rge bck ants over two centimeters long and small grayish-brown ants half a centimeter long.

  The grayish-brown ants had a special means of attack. Their stingers could spray acid that reached a long distance away. System had suffered quite a bit the first time he'd encountered them.

  The several types of ants scavenged somewhat different types of food, so System's robbery career was progressing very smoothly these days. He'd robbed and eaten nearly a hundred different types of meat.

  Apart from discovering the ant nests, System's exploration wasn't going very well recently. He didn't find any other slimes within a few hundred meters of his current nest.

  He'd encountered two more magical creatures, but he could only choose to avoid them.

  One was a blue and gray bird with blue electric light wrapped around its feathers. System hid in the bushes as soon as he saw it from a distance to prevent being eaten by the bird as a snack.

  The other was a bat that glowed with a blood-red light that he saw one night. Bats were also hunters who liked to catch insects. When System saw it, he immediately pressed his body tightly to the ground and gave up on foraging for the night.

  However, while he had no luck looking for other slimes, the slime he'd already met had recovered its vitality after resting in the mud for three days.

  Its body shape had recovered a little, though it was now slightly smaller than it used to be, and it went right back to its old behavior of foraging for leaves and branches in the forest.

  Slimes and ants were like mortal enemies. With just a little guidance from System, the slime soon started a fresh battle with another nest of ants.

  This battle's result was exactly the same as the previous one. Although the type of ant was different, the slime's appearance when escaping from the ant nest was basically the same. The slime hopped away full of ant corpses, and fallen bits of slime were scattered all over the ground during its escape.

  System finally had a second opportunity to eat this getinous food.

  Over the course of nine days, he was able to gorge on slime two more times using the same method.

  Because of the rge amount of experience provided by the slime, he leveled up to 10 on the ninth day, and his body grew to ten and a half centimeters long.

  The talent [Molting and Growth] was upgraded to its maximum level of 13 just as he'd expected, and he also learned the condition for the third metamorphosis—reaching level 12.

  Being able to undergo his third metamorphosis at level 12 was undoubtedly good news for System.

  Perhaps it was still difficult for other grasshoppers, but it was easy for System who was endlessly searching for meat every single day.

  Even if he didn't deliberately try to maximize his level-gaining efficiency, just by randomly snatching food from these ants, he could easily reach level 12 and complete his third metamorphosis within thirty days.