The pond had an edge.

  Andy discovered this the way most discoveries happen at his scale: by bumping into something and having an opinion about it. He had been hunting near the thermal vents, methodically clearing the local population with the workmanlike efficiency of a man punching a clock (a clock made of siphonophores, but the metaphor held), when the chemical gradients shifted in a direction he hadn't encountered before. Not warmer or cooler. Different. Foreign compounds. The equivalent of stepping out of your apartment and smelling a restaurant you'd never noticed.

  He followed the gradient.

  The pond was connected to something larger. A narrow, rocky channel where his warm water met a cooler, faster current carrying chemicals and organisms from somewhere bigger. On the other side was a body of water so vast that his nerve net registered it as sensory static, too much information from too many directions, a library when he was used to reading a single book.

  He had been living in a tide pool. This whole time. A warm, sheltered, geologically heated tide pool, and he'd been strutting around it with his glowing horn like the king of the kiddie pool.

  [NEW TERRITORY DETECTED]

  [OPEN WATER BIOME: SIGNIFICANTLY HIGHER BIODIVERSITY, LARGER ORGANISMS, INCREASED ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS]

  [EXPLORATION BONUS: ENTERING A NEW BIOME FOR THE FIRST TIME GRANTS ADDITIONAL XP FOR KILLS, DISCOVERIES, AND SURVIVAL EVENTS.]

  [PROCEED?]

  The System was asking permission. That was new. "Proceed?" was the kind of question that contained, within its politeness, the implication that turning around was the sensible choice.

  Andy proceeded.

  The channel was narrow enough that his tentacles brushed the walls on both sides, and then the channel widened and the open water hit his nerve net like stepping out of a closet into a cathedral.

  Space. Depth. Distance. The tide pool had been a warm bathtub with thermal vents and a ceiling made of surface tension. The open water stretched in every direction beyond his sensory range. He was, for the first time since reincarnating, truly small. A tiny organism in a body of water that did not care about his horn or his combat moves or his twelve millimeters of predatory intent.

  Cooler here. Thinner nutrients. He was going to have to work harder for every XP.

  And the organisms were bigger.

  This rearranged his understanding of the food chain with the subtlety of a slap. In the tide pool, Andy had been apex. The biggest fish in a very small pond, a cliche that hit differently when you had recently been a fish in an actual pond.

  The open water hosted things that would eat him without noticing.

  He sensed the first one as a pressure wave, large and moving, displacing enough fluid that it reached him from several body-lengths away and sent him tumbling backward like a cork in a bathtub during an earthquake. Something big had just passed through his vicinity. Not hunting him. Just moving. Going about its enormous business, and its wake had tossed him without a second thought.

  If the tide pool was the kiddie pool, this was the ocean, and Andy had just shown up with his little horn out.

  He stabilized. Extended his tentacles. Reoriented his spike toward the direction of the disturbance. Waited.

  The thing came back.

  It was somewhere between fifty and a hundred times his size. Something that had evolved beyond the colonial stage into a body plan his tide-pool experience had no frame of reference for. It moved with a slow, powerful undulation that displaced water in rolling waves, and Andy, at twelve millimeters, was well within the size range of "snack."

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  He did not engage. He did not heroically charge. He did not name a combat move.

  He hid.

  The mineral deposits near the channel mouth provided cover, pockets of shadow where a small jellyfish could tuck its bell and wrap its tentacles close and become, for a tense interval, as invisible as possible. Which was not very invisible, because the horn had recently developed a faint luminescence that he had attributed to combat adrenaline but was now beginning to suspect was permanent.

  His horn glowed. A soft, blue-white light at the tip, barely perceptible in the bright tide pool, obvious as a lighthouse in the dimmer open water.

  "My stealth weapon," Andy thought, watching the massive shadow pass overhead, "has a nightlight. This is like putting a bell on a cat. Like painting a sniper rifle neon orange. Like, and I cannot believe I'm saying this as a jellyfish hiding behind a rock, having a boner at the worst possible time."

  The horn-as-phallic-metaphor was getting less metaphorical with every evolution and Andy was choosing to simply not think about it.

  The massive organism passed without noticing him, or without caring, which amounted to the same thing when you were twelve millimeters of terrified colonial enthusiasm crouched behind a rock with a glowing horn you couldn't turn off.

  [SURVIVAL BONUS: +3 XP]

  [STEALTH RATING: POOR. CONSIDER EVOLVING CAMOUFLAGE OR REDUCING LUMINESCENCE.]

  "Consider reducing luminescence. Oh, I would LOVE to reduce luminescence. Please tell me how to turn off the glowing horn, System. Is there a dimmer switch? A setting? A hat?"

  [QUERY NOT RECOGNIZED.]

  Figures.

  * * *

  The open water, despite its terrors, was also full of XP.

  The exploration bonus was generous: double XP for new-biome kills, a flat bonus per new species, plus a survival modifier that scaled with danger level. Dangerous meant everything he did was worth more, a calculation his gamer brain found irresistible and his survival instincts found deeply concerning.

  He hunted carefully, nothing like the brazen, horn-first, Attenborough-narrated hunting of the tide pool. Slower. He mapped pressure waves and chemical signatures, built a mental model of who was where and what was bigger than him. Big things, avoid. Same-size things, fight. Small things, eat without ceremony, because the XP counter demanded feeding and sentimentality was a luxury for organisms that didn't have a glowing horn painting a target on their face.

  [XP: 78/250]

  The shadow came again.

  Not the same one (different chemical signature), but equally large, moving through the upper water with a deliberate, searching pattern that Andy recognized because it was the same pattern he used. Something up there was hunting.

  The shadow dove, angling away from Andy, toward the surface.

  He felt it through the pressure waves: the shadow angling sharply upward, accelerating, breaking the surface with an explosive displacement that sent shockwaves through the entire lake, and then it was gone. Not into the depths. Out. Through the surface. Into whatever was above.

  Something lived above the water. Something that dove in to hunt and returned to wherever "above" was, big enough to displace water like a bomb going off. The lake's organisms scattered in its wake like prairie animals when a hawk descends.

  There was a world above the water. Air. Land. Creatures that flew, or walked, or existed in forms so different from his own that they might as well have been alien.

  The thought landed hard. First concrete evidence that this world had more to it than water. The evolutionary tree had branches that extended out of the lake, onto land, toward forms that walked and flew and maybe, at the very distant top, had hands.

  [NEW SPECIES ENCOUNTERED: UNKNOWN (AERIAL PREDATOR)]

  [OBSERVATION BONUS: +5 XP]

  [NOTE: AERIAL ORGANISMS OPERATE IN A BIOME CURRENTLY INACCESSIBLE TO YOUR SPECIES. SOME EVOLUTIONARY PATHS MAY GRANT BIOME TRANSITIONS IN FUTURE TIERS.]

  Biome transitions. He could eventually leave the water. Eventually, through the right choices, he could evolve into something that left the lake behind.

  "Some evolutionary paths may grant biome transitions," he repeated to himself, floating in the open water with his glowing horn and his four tentacles and the satisfied calm of a man who has just been told that the highway he's been driving on connects to the road he actually needs. "I'm on my way. I don't know where yet. But I'm on my way."

  [XP: 83/250]

  He turned his attention back to the lake. Two hundred and fifty XP stood between him and the next evolution, the next step on a path that led, if the System's breadcrumbs were to be believed, out of the water and into whatever waited beyond.

  The shadow did not return. But Andy remembered it, and filed it in the growing catalogue of things he intended to understand once he had a brain complex enough to understand them.

  For now, he had hunting to do.

  And his horn was glowing, which was bad for stealth but undeniably cool, and Andy Snodgrass, twelve-millimeter jellyfish, knight of the primordial pond, future land creature (he was manifesting it), chose to take the glow as a good sign. A beacon, not a target. The universe's way of saying "this guy's got a big, impressive horn and he's not afraid to show it."

  He was choosing to believe that. The alternative was that the universe was just trying to get him eaten, and he'd already been through that once with the amoeba, and once was enough.