Devour & Evolve

You are the bottom of this dungeonYou are born as something weak. Your sight is short. Your reach is shorter. Whether the thing moving down the corridor outranks you or not — reading that, in the half second you get, is the only real skill here. You don't kill it. You eat itWeakened prey ends one of two ways. Devour it — your wounds close, your hunger drops, and its blood is written into your record.

Bind it — no healing at all. Instead it stands in front of you from now on. There is no taking it back. What you ate will never follow you; what you bound will never feed you. That single choice, made over and over, is the shape of a run. What you eat is what you can becomeAny species you have devoured even once can be born again as you, in a later life.

Pick a bloodline, start as a hatchling, and spend that whole life climbing its evolution tree. The next branch always reads "???" until you reach it. What you bind, you carry homeMid-dive you can plant a nest — not at a checkpoint, but on the exact tile you are standing on. Four of them, at least five floors apart, and the deeper you build the more it costs. Bound kindred move in.…