After becoming an ant, [HeLa Cell] tried taking a few steps, only to tumble head over heels.
After finally managing to stand up again, its body began to twist strangely, making it look as though it were dying.
After writhing around in that creepy manner for nearly ten minutes, [HeLa Cell] slowly got the hang of it.
It slowly lifted a foot, then slowly put it down again. One step at a time, it walked along. (Though it didn't leave any footprints.)
At first, it walked very slowly, and its gait was strange. Sometimes it even staggered from side to side.
But as it gradually adjusted, it picked up speed.
[HeLa Cell] set out to explore the land in its ant body.
In the days that followed, [HeLa Cell] lived as an insect for a long time. Even it couldn't remember exactly how long.
But it had been at least two weeks, probably.
It remembered its form had changed many times as well. The form it had kept the longest seemed to have come about after it ate an earthworm. Thinking the creature was big, it had turned into an earthworm too.
Then it had found its surface too fragile and had nearly been killed by the sun, so it grew a shell as hard as an ant's over its body.
Since it had already grown a shell, it also grew ant legs and mouthparts. It looked quite a lot like a centipede, except its body was cylindrical.
It had even found an ant colony and lived among the ants for a long time. That was the first time [HeLa Cell] had experienced the feeling of belonging to a group.
It wasn't much, really. It just felt convenient, since sometimes it could reap without sowing.
Still, that period of its life was indeed worth looking back on.
Later, while hunting with the ants, it encountered a snake.
It was also the first time [HeLa Cell] had seen a creature so big.
With such a vast difference in size, [HeLa Cell] lost, as one would expect, and was swallowed whole.
If it hadn't encountered a venomous insect before and copied its ability, [HeLa Cell] probably wouldn't have been able to kill the snake so easily from inside its belly.
As [HeLa Cell] ate the snake, its body kept growing to accommodate all that energy.
But when it reached a certain size, it discovered that its body couldn't support that much weight.
It seemed an insect's body had its limits after all.
So [HeLa Cell] stopped being an insect. It turned straight into a puddle of thick black substance, then slowly transformed into a black snake.
It adapted to this body fairly quickly, probably because its form was very similar to its previous one.
After swallowing the rest of the carcass, [HeLa Cell] wriggled its body, preparing to leave.
Before leaving, it took one last look at the few remaining ants, as though bidding farewell to its life among them. Then it left without looking back.
It slowly crawled up out of the ground. Warm sunlight shone down on the earth, and also on the surface of [HeLa Cell], now a black snake.
Feeling the sunlight on its body, [HeLa Cell] wanted to avoid it because of its past experience, but it felt the warmth.
That put it at ease again.
It moved its dark body through the lush green grass, pressing a tunnel through it as it explored aimlessly toward the unknown distance.
After [HeLa Cell] had explored for a while longer, the first prey it encountered wasn't one it found. Instead, the prey spotted it first and came over to provoke it.
It seemed to be a dog. To this day, [HeLa Cell] still didn't know what breed it was. In any case, it was a large dog, with a yellow-and-black body.
When the black dog saw [HeLa Cell] in its black-snake form, it shuddered in fright. Then it bared its teeth as if angry, a low growl rumbling from its throat.
As for the outcome...
[HeLa Cell] glanced at the black dog, whose neck it had wrapped itself around. The dog was still struggling weakly, so it tightened its coils again.
The black dog's four limbs flailed violently a few times, then it stopped moving altogether.
Flicking its forked tongue, it slowly loosened its tightly coiled body and slithered once around the black dog, its eyes constantly sizing up the dog's body.
Finally, [HeLa Cell] stopped at the dog's head. Then it slowly opened its little cherry mouth and began swallowing the dog from the nose.
The black snake's mouth stretched to an incredible size, looking as though it would split open at any moment. But no matter how wide it stretched, the mouth was like rubber, showing no sign of tearing. Instead, it just kept stretching wider.
After it swallowed the entire dog, its body was stretched out of shape. From a distance, it looked like a snakeskin sack stuffed full of things.
[HeLa Cell] laboriously shifted its body a couple of times, then lay still where it was. The black dog in its belly was being digested at a speed visible to the naked eye.
In just a few moments, it had been completely digested, becoming energy for [HeLa Cell].
It had also grown from a little snake less than a meter long into a huge black snake as thick as a thigh and nearly two meters long.
It tried moving forward and found that, because its body was too large and [HeLa Cell] couldn't move forward by undulating like a real snake, it was now moving extremely slowly.
If it was slow, it might as well change forms.
Its enormous body slowly began to melt, turning once more into a long mass of thick black liquid, which then gathered into a lump.
The black liquid writhed constantly, like a silkworm pupa about to emerge from its cocoon.
The liquid slowly took shape, gradually becoming the dog it had just devoured, though its body was a little bigger than the dog's and looked a little fiercer.
[HeLa Cell] raised a paw and took a big step forward, then promptly fell flat.
All right, it looked like it needed a little more time to adjust. After all, this was its first time transforming into a creature that walked on four legs.
Half an hour later, [HeLa Cell], now fully accustomed to the body, walked with light steps, holding its dog head up and looking around.
This body was convenient to use. Although it couldn't dig holes, it could run and walk quite fast while conserving energy. Using it was completely different from using its previous body.
It lowered its head and took a couple of bites of the lush green grass on the ground. After swallowing, it continued looking for food.
After passing through a thicket, it saw a large tree not far away. There also seemed to be a tuft of white beside the tree, and it seemed to be alive.
[HeLa Cell] slowly approached. The tree gradually grew larger in its eyes, and the tuft of white became clearer and clearer, until at last a beautiful girl appeared before it.