Chapter 38: The Time of All Living Beings – To Be an Animal 3

This time, Elden became a wolf.

His world was filled with scents. The earth carried the traces of countless creatures, each leaving behind a trail that his senses could distinguish with astonishing clarity. He could smell prey hiding beneath the shrubs, recognize the presence of other wolves from the marks they left on trees and rocks, and even detect subtle changes in the air that warned of an approaching storm. To him, the world was no longer merely a collection of shapes and sounds. It was an intricate web of scents that revealed what had happened, what was happening, and what might lie ahead.

His body was powerful, his limbs sturdy, and his teeth sharp enough to tear through flesh. Yet he was not alone. He belonged to a pack, a group of wolves whose lives were bound together by shared territory, common dangers, and the constant struggle to find enough food. Each member had its place within the group, and although their relationships were not governed by human reasoning, Elden could feel the significance of belonging to something larger than himself.

They hunted together, rested together, and protected one another from the dangers of the wilderness. Through their movements and scents, he gradually learned to recognize the other wolves, distinguishing familiar individuals from strangers and understanding, through instinct rather than conscious thought, how to move alongside them. When the pack hunted successfully, Elden experienced the satisfaction of a full stomach and the relief of knowing that hunger would no longer torment him for a while. When they traveled for hours across snow-covered ground, he felt exhaustion building in his muscles, each stride becoming more difficult as the cold air filled his lungs. And when winter settled over the land, he found warmth sleeping beside the other wolves, their bodies pressed together beneath the freezing night sky.

There was a peculiar comfort in that existence, a sense of security that came not from being invulnerable, but from knowing that he did not have to face every danger alone.

Then the seasons changed, and the food began to grow scarce.

The pack was forced to travel farther in search of prey, crossing unfamiliar territory and encountering rivals who had no intention of sharing their hunting grounds. The scents of strange wolves appeared more frequently along their paths, marking trees and rocks with warnings that neither side was willing to ignore. For a time, the two groups avoided one another, each searching for food while carefully watching the movements of its competitors. But as hunger tightened its grip, the distance between them gradually narrowed, until the tension that had been building for days finally erupted into violence.

Elden fought alongside his pack.

He bit and clawed, his body moving with the instinctive precision of a creature that had never learned to separate thought from action. There was no time to weigh possibilities or consider the consequences of each movement. He responded to the shifting bodies around him, lunging when an opening appeared and twisting away when an enemy's jaws came too close. He felt teeth sink into his shoulder, felt blood spreading through his fur, and felt the earth shift beneath his claws as he struggled to maintain his footing. Pain sharpened his awareness without slowing the desperate rhythm of the fight, while snarls and snapping jaws filled the air around him.

The battle stretched on, each passing moment demanding another burst of strength from bodies already pushed to their limits. Yet the wolves of his pack refused to abandon one another. Whenever one was forced backward, another pressed forward to cover its retreat; whenever an enemy attempted to break through their formation, the others converged to drive it away. Their survival depended not on any single wolf, but on the combined efforts of the group.

Eventually, the rival wolves began to retreat.

Elden's pack had survived, but victory came at a terrible cost. Several members were injured, their movements stiff and uncertain as they limped away from the battlefield. One of the younger wolves had fallen during the fighting and never rose again. Its body lay motionless on the trampled earth, the scent of blood lingering in the air as the other wolves gradually withdrew.

Elden remained beside the fallen animal for a long time.

He could still smell the faint warmth of its body, a trace of life that had not yet entirely disappeared. Around him, the surviving wolves moved restlessly, their steps uneven and their behavior strangely unsettled. Some approached the fallen wolf before withdrawing again, while others remained at a distance, unable to do anything that might change what had happened.

Something inside Elden resisted leaving.

He did not understand why. There was no human explanation forming in his mind, no clear chain of reasoning that could account for his reluctance to abandon the body. He simply remained where he was, breathing in the familiar scent that was gradually fading and listening to the uneasy movements of the others. For a while, the world seemed to have narrowed to that single place, to the body lying before him and the silence that had settled over the surviving pack.

Then the others began moving again, and the demands of their existence slowly drew him back into motion.

Life did not stop because one of its members had died. The pack still needed food, the wounded still needed time to recover, and winter would eventually return. Whatever the loss meant to those who had survived it, the world continued moving around them, indifferent to their desire for things to remain as they had been.

Years passed, and Elden's body gradually began to weaken.

His movements grew slower, and his senses, once so sharp that the faintest trace could reveal the presence of another creature, began to lose their clarity. The younger wolves grew stronger, their limbs carrying them across the wilderness with an ease that his aging body could no longer match. Territory he had once defended without difficulty became harder to protect, and hunts that had previously required only patience and coordination now left him exhausted.

At first, he continued trying to keep pace with the pack, pushing his body whenever the others moved on and struggling to overcome the weakness that increasingly limited his movements. But instinct could not restore the strength he had lost, and determination could not force his aging limbs to respond as they once had. Eventually, he fell too far behind.

The pack left him.

Elden watched as the other wolves disappeared into the distance, their shapes gradually becoming indistinguishable among the trees. He remained where he was, breathing heavily, until the last traces of their scents began to fade. Even then, he waited, as though some part of him expected them to return once they realized he was no longer following.

But they did not come back.

Winter arrived, and the snow grew deeper. Without the pack, finding food became increasingly difficult. His weakened body could no longer pursue prey over long distances, and the cold drained his remaining strength with every passing day. He searched for shelter, eventually squeezing beneath a rocky overhang where the wind could not reach him as easily. It offered little protection, but there was nowhere else to go, and even a narrow space between stones was better than lying exposed beneath the open sky.

The world around him was quiet.

There was no pack, no warmth, and no food. Only the cold ground beneath his body and the faint scent of snow drifting through the air.

He had lived as a predator, a creature whose strength and instincts had allowed him to hunt, fight, and survive in a world filled with danger. Yet he did not die in battle, nor did his life end beneath the jaws of a stronger animal. There was no final confrontation, no enemy to defeat, and no last display of strength that might have given his death the appearance of a worthy conclusion.

He died alone.

In his final moments, Elden came to understand something that no amount of strength could change. Even a creature shaped by nature to survive, equipped with sharp teeth, powerful muscles, and instincts refined through generations, could eventually reach a point where survival became impossible.

The wolf's life ended beneath the cold stone, far from the pack that had once been his world.

And the trial continued.

His next life began before the memories of the previous one had fully settled. Then came another, followed by another, until the transitions themselves became difficult to distinguish.

Elden became creatures so small that a single human footstep could destroy their entire world. He lived as insects whose lives lasted only a handful of days, their brief existences consumed by the relentless search for food and opportunities to reproduce before their time ran out. He became fish swimming through vast oceans, sensing the movements of currents, navigating the darkness beneath the waves, and fleeing from predators that appeared without warning. He inhabited creatures that lived deep beneath the earth, in places where sunlight had never reached and the surface world existed only as an unreachable distance beyond layers of soil and stone.

He also became animals that migrated across continents, following instincts that had guided their ancestors for generations. Their journeys carried them through forests, across plains, over mountains, and through landscapes whose dangers and opportunities changed with the seasons. They did not know why they traveled along particular routes or why certain movements felt necessary. They simply followed the impulses that had been passed down through their existence, responding to the changing world in ways that had long since become part of their nature.

Through these lives, Elden experienced existence from an ever-widening range of perspectives. He knew the terror of prey pursued by a predator, the desperate effort to escape when every movement brought danger closer, and the helplessness of a creature whose body could not move fast enough to outrun death. Then he became the predator, feeling the hunger that drove the hunt and the instinctive concentration required to close the distance between himself and his quarry.

He experienced the frantic struggle of a mother trying to protect her young, only to become the helpless offspring who depended entirely on a world he could neither understand nor control. He felt the relief of finding food after days of hunger, when the first mouthfuls finally quieted the pain in his body and restored enough strength for him to continue. Then he experienced the hunger of a creature that searched desperately for nourishment until its body became too weak to move, leaving it unable to reach the food that might otherwise have saved its life.

There was no fixed pattern to these transformations. No warning came before one existence ended and another began, and he was never given the opportunity to prepare himself for what awaited him. In one moment, he might be swimming through the ocean, carried along by the currents and surrounded by the shifting light above the water. In the next, he would find himself rooted in the earth, incapable of movement as the seasons changed around him.

Sometimes he retained fragments of his previous memories during a new life, allowing him to recognize the continuity of the trial even while experiencing the world through an unfamiliar body. At other times, the instincts and perceptions of his new existence overwhelmed those memories, burying them beneath immediate needs until they resurfaced only after death returned him to the darkness.

Yet whether he remembered each life as it unfolded or recovered its details only afterward, the experiences remained within him.

Every death left a mark. Every moment of fear, every instinctive act of survival, every brief sensation of satisfaction accumulated within his consciousness. The marks were not always clear enough for him to identify individually, but they did not disappear. They gathered in the depths of his mind like drops of water filling an ocean without a shore, each one adding to a vastness he could neither measure nor comprehend.

And still, the trial continued.

At some point, Elden lost the ability to distinguish one life from another.

He no longer knew how many times he had died. A hundred? A thousand? A million? The numbers had lost their meaning long ago. He had lived through so many existences that attempting to count them would have been like trying to number every grain of sand in an endless desert. Even the memories of his earliest transformations, once so vivid that he could recall the texture of grass beneath his body or the cold soil surrounding his roots, had become buried beneath an immeasurable accumulation of experiences.

Time itself had become an unfamiliar concept. Every life had possessed its own rhythm, its own limits, and its own way of responding to the passage of time.

Yet no matter how different those lives had been, one truth remained constant.

Every living creature struggled to survive.

Some did so through instinct, responding to hunger, danger, and opportunity without ever needing to understand the reasons behind their actions. Others were driven by fear, their lives shaped by the constant effort to avoid whatever threatened to destroy them. Some fought to protect their offspring, their mates, or the companions with whom they shared their existence. Still others were carried forward by the impulses that had shaped their very being, following patterns they could never consciously explain.

Their circumstances differed, and the distance between their lives could be immense. A blade of grass reaching toward sunlight had little in common with a wolf defending its pack, just as a fish fleeing through the ocean could scarcely be compared with a tree extending its roots through the soil. Yet all these existences belonged to the same vast circle of life, each distinct from the others, each connected to the world that sustained it .

And within that circle, the struggle to continue existing was always present.

A blade of grass stretched toward the sunlight, seeking the energy it needed to grow. A tree extended its roots through the earth in search of water. A bird searched for food to feed its young, driven by the urgent demands of offspring that could not yet survive on their own. A wolf defended its pack against intruders, risking injury to preserve the group upon which its own survival depended. A fish fled from the shadow of a predator, its body reacting to danger before its mind could do anything beyond urge it to escape.

Each followed a different path . And beneath all their differences lay one simple truth :

They lived.

Because they lived, their existence mattered to the world that gave birth to them.

They struggled, adapted, sought nourishment, avoided danger, and responded to the conditions that shaped their existence. They endured whatever their bodies and environments demanded of them, sometimes surviving for longer than their circumstances seemed to permit and sometimes perishing before they had been given much of a chance at all.

Their lives did not need to be extraordinary to matter.

They did not need to possess intelligence, strength, ambition, or the power to change the world around them. They did not need to become heroes, accomplish great deeds, or leave anything behind that others would remember. Their existence was not made meaningful by the judgment of some greater creature capable of measuring their worth. They had been born into the world, had lived within its bounds, and had struggled to continue living for as long as their circumstances allowed.

And because they had lived, their existence had mattered to the world that had brought them forth.

The realization was simple, perhaps even obvious. Yet it had taken countless deaths and an immeasurable number of lives for Elden to begin to understand it.

Then, at last, after lives beyond counting.

he became human.