Andy became, over a stretch of time he had stopped trying to quantify, the most efficient predator in his weight class.

  This was not a boast. This was a statistical observation, confirmed by the simple fact that everything in the open water that was approximately Andy's size was either already eaten, currently being eaten, or making strategic life choices to be somewhere Andy was not. He had carved a territory in the midwater column between the deep thermal currents (too warm, too big) and the surface (too cold, within striking range of the aerial predator he refused to forget), a comfortable band where the organisms were plentiful and his glowing horn served as both hunting tool and involuntary advertisement of his position.

  He had tried to solve the glow problem. Spent an embarrassing amount of time concentrating on the horn like a man trying to will an erection away at a funeral. The horn remained lit. The horn did what the horn wanted. The System offered no dimmer switch, no toggle, no settings submenu. [QUERY NOT RECOGNIZED], as always.

  So he had done what any sensible predator with an unavoidable glow would do: he had turned the liability into a tactic.

  The horn's light attracted things. Small organisms drifted toward it the way moths drifted toward lamps, drawn by a tropism that predated consciousness by several billion years. They came to the glow. Andy was waiting behind the glow. The result was a hunting strategy so simple it was almost embarrassing: be bright, be still, be patient, let the food come to you.

  He called it "The Lantern."

  His laziest named attack. Also his most effective. They drifted in, mesmerized by his big glowing tip, and he ate them. Passive income through predation. Ethically questionable. Strategically brilliant. The kind of thing that would get him banned from a vegan subreddit. Also, he was now literally luring organisms toward his horn. The jokes continued to write themselves and Andy continued to be the only audience.

  [XP: 127/250]

  But passive income wasn't enough. The Lantern brought in one or two XP per kill now, the organisms it attracted too small and weak to yield the three XP he'd earned as a cell hunting peers his own size. He needed bigger kills, and that meant hunting in the spaces between his territory and the dangerous deep water.

  It was during one of these excursions that Andy encountered the photosynthetic colony.

  The colony was beautiful. He was aware that "beautiful" was a strong word for something he perceived through chemical signature and pressure waves, but it was the first thing in the open water his senses had rendered as something other than "food," "threat," or "rock." A floating cluster of photosynthetic cells, hundreds of them, arranged in a slowly rotating disk, each one pulsing with a faint glow that his nerve net registered as warmth and his chemoreception registered as a bouquet of sugars and oxygen.

  A plant, basically. A living engine of caloric production that converted light into nutrients and released the excess into the water where heterotrophs like Andy could find it.

  His first instinct was to eat it.

  His second instinct, arriving a fraction of a second later and overriding the first with the quiet authority of a thought that was smarter than the thought before it, was to not eat it.

  Because the colony was doing something interesting. It was producing. Constantly, steadily, without pause, it was converting light into nutrients and releasing those nutrients into the water, and the nutrients were attracting smaller organisms, and the smaller organisms were, yes, food, but they were also XP, and they were arriving in a continuous stream because the colony was a continuous producer, and if Andy ate the colony he would gain, what, maybe fifteen or twenty XP from the kill? But if he left the colony alive and hunted the organisms it attracted, he would gain a steady income of small-XP kills that, over time, would substantially exceed the one-time payout of destroying the source.

  He was thinking about farming. Literal farming. The colony was a crop, the organisms it attracted were the harvest, and Andy, the heterotrophic jellyfish with a glowing horn and a history of stabbing everything he encountered, was considering the agricultural model.

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  "I said I wouldn't photosynthesize," he thought, circling the colony with the speculative interest of a real estate investor. "This is outsourcing. This is supply chain management. This is absolutely not me becoming a plant farmer. This is me becoming a plant farmer's customer, which is completely different, and I refuse to acknowledge the irony."

  He set up shop next to the photosynthetic colony.

  The arrangement was immediate and productive. Colony produced nutrients. Nutrients attracted grazers. Grazers were small, slow, distracted by the feeding, and completely unprepared for a twelve-millimeter jellyfish with a calcium lance emerging from behind the colony to ruin their dinner. Andy hunted with the casual efficiency of a fisherman at a stocked pond, and the colony, having no nervous system and therefore no opinions about anything, continued producing.

  [SYMBIOSIS DETECTED]

  [YOU HAVE ENTERED A MUTUALISTIC RELATIONSHIP WITH: PHOTOSYNTHETIC COLONY (TIER 1)]

  [SYMBIOSIS BONUS: +15% XP FROM ALL KILLS WITHIN SYMBIOSIS RANGE]

  [NOTE: PROTECTING YOUR SYMBIOTIC PARTNER FROM HARM WILL MAINTAIN THE BONUS. ALLOWING YOUR PARTNER TO BE DESTROYED WILL END THE SYMBIOSIS.]

  Andy read the notification twice. Mutualistic. Both parties benefit. The colony got a predator that killed the grazers that would have otherwise eaten it. Andy got a fifteen percent XP bonus on all kills within range.

  He was a protection racket for a plant.

  The moral implications were complicated and Andy elected to ignore them.

  "Mutualistic symbiosis," he narrated, drifting beside the colony with the proprietary satisfaction of a man who has just signed a lease on a very good apartment. "The predatory jellyfish provides protection. The photosynthetic colony provides a steady stream of lured prey. Only one party has the cognitive architecture to recognize the arrangement, and that party is choosing, wisely, not to think too hard about it."

  [XP: 164/250]

  The XP was flowing. Symbiosis bonus stacked with the exploration bonus, and the grazers came in waves, and the compound effect of multiple XP multipliers on a steady kill stream was the kind of exponential growth curve that made Andy's inner gamer weep with joy. The colony earned protection it didn't know it needed. The grazers earned a quick death they definitely didn't want. The circle of underwater life spun on.

  He protected the colony. Not out of altruism (although he liked to think there was some residual vet-tech compassion in the gesture), but because the XP bonus was too good to lose. When a larger organism approached with feeding intent, Andy intercepted it, horn-first, and the would-be herbivore either fled or died. He was essentially a bouncer at a nightclub, except the nightclub was a plant and the troublemakers were anything that looked at it funny and the bouncer had a glowing horn and no concept of proportional response.

  [XP: 198/250]

  [XP: 211/250]

  He was getting close.

  The hunting sessions blurred together, a rhythmic loop of patrol, kill, absorb, patrol that was both meditative and, Andy recognized, the first thing in his second life that resembled contentment. Not happiness. Not peace. But the satisfaction of competence. Of being good at something. Of having a territory, a strategy, a symbiotic partner, and a glowing horn that turned out to be as useful as it was conspicuous.

  He thought, briefly, of the vet clinic. Not of Megan (that door was closed, not because it didn't hurt but because opening it didn't help). He thought of the long shifts and the routine procedures and the satisfaction of doing a job well, of knowing that the animal on the table was better off because he was the one holding the instruments. That was the thread connecting Andrew Snodgrass the vet tech to Andy Snodgrass the predatory jellyfish: the quiet pleasure of applying skill to task and seeing the result.

  He had traded a stethoscope for a calcium lance, patients for prey, the operating table for the open water. But the feeling was the same.

  [XP: 237/250]

  [XP: 244/250]

  Six more. Five. Four.

  The colony rotated. The grazers arrived. The horn glowed. The spike struck.

  [XP: 250/250]

  [TIER 3 EVOLUTION AVAILABLE!]

  [CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE REACHED THE THRESHOLD FOR TIER 3 EVOLUTION.]

  [YOU WILL NOW CHOOSE YOUR EVOLUTIONARY PATH.]

  [THIS CHOICE IS PERMANENT AND WILL DETERMINE YOUR ORGANISM TYPE FOR TIER 3.]

  [CHOOSE WISELY.]

  "Choose wisely." As if the System were a wizened elder handing him a quest item and not a bureaucratic notification informing a jellyfish that it was time to become something else.

  Andy floated beside his photosynthetic partner, his territory, his twelve-millimeter kingdom of glowing horn and stinging tentacles and named combat moves, and felt the now-familiar pull of the evolution threshold.

  The colony rotated, oblivious.

  "Thanks for everything," Andy thought toward it, because thanking a plant was absurd and he was going to do it anyway. "You were a great business partner. Best symbiotic relationship of my life, which admittedly is a short list. Actually, it's my only relationship that's lasted longer than three months, which says something about me that I'm choosing not to examine."

  He opened the evolution menu.

  Time to choose. Time to get bigger. Time to see what a Tier 3 horn looked like.

  He was trying not to be too excited about that last part.

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