HERO OF THE SUPER WEREWOLF

Successfully starting a fire didn't mean the battle was over. Albert quickly gathered the stones he had collected earlier and arranged them around the fire, leaving only one opening for ventilation. Then he got back to digging—creating a firebreak. Starting a fire in the wild without a firebreak? That was a disaster waiting to happen. 

Once he had cleared a wide circle of bare earth, ensuring the fire wouldn't spread and ignite a prairie wildfire, Albert dug up the deer meat he had buried earlier. Beginning where he had skinned the animal, he carefully carved out strips of meat and laid them on the stones. 

Stringing the meat onto branches was impossible with just claws, but Albert wasn't worried. Thanks to the memories inherited from this body's original owner—courtesy of that strange dream—he knew exactly what to do. Taking a few steps back, he sat down and closed his eyes. After a moment of deep concentration, his body began to change. 

His neck, which had been leaning forward, pulled back. His towering shoulders shrank, and the pronounced curve of his spine straightened. Within seconds, the massive snow wolf was gone. In its place sat a scrawny, naked teenager with a tangled mess of hair cascading past his waist. 

Albert looked down at his hands—filthy, nails black and disgustingly long, his arms so thin they looked almost skeletal. But they were human hands. He flexed his fingers, the familiar dexterity almost bringing him to tears. 

"I'm not on Earth anymore," he muttered. "I've been dumped into some weird fantasy world where I'm a freaking snow wolf—a shapeshifter. Fine. Whatever. At least I've got hands and can walk on two legs. That's better than nothing." 

Wiping away his tears, Albert steeled himself and returned to the fire to continue cooking the meat. That's when he realized something: in his wolf form, he wasn't just some "big dog." The strips of meat he had carved earlier were as thick as his arm, and the "small" fire he had built was anything but small—it was big enough to roast an entire sheep. 

"What the hell?" he groaned. "How does a wolf the size of a grizzly bear turn into a scrawny teenager? The mass doesn't even add up! This is so unscientific!" 

Grumbling under his breath, Albert shifted back into his wolf form to finish preparing the meat. 

 The deer meat strips, each as thick as four fingers, were skewered haphazardly on branches and propped up near the fire. As the heat rose, fat began to seep from the meat, sizzling and crackling as it dripped into the flames. A rich, mouthwatering aroma filled the air. 

Albert swallowed hard, his stomach twisting with hunger. He blew on a piece of cooked meat to cool it down, then took a cautious bite. 

It was… bland. 

Sure, the texture was there—tender and juicy, just as deer meat should be—but without salt or seasoning, it was like chewing on damp cardboard. For someone who had once indulged in the rich, complex flavors of Chinese cuisine, this was borderline torture. 

Still, he couldn't stop eating. He was starving—his stomach felt like it was glued to his spine. And when you're hungry enough to consider eating raw meat, flavor becomes a luxury you can't afford. 

He devoured what he estimated to be at least ten pounds of meat (judging by his human form's sense of scale) before finally feeling somewhat full. Of course, his taste buds had long since given up, numbed by the monotony of unseasoned protein. 

"No wonder this tribe of thirty or forty snow wolves can barely make ends meet, even with over two thousand cattle and sheep," Albert muttered, picking his teeth with a claw. "They're practically living meal to meal."

He slumped beside the dying fire, catching his breath. "And that's with most of them staying in human form to conserve energy. The wolf form? A total calorie black hole. No wonder I'm always hungry—running around as a giant wolf probably burns more energy than an ultramarathon." 

From the fragmented memories he'd inherited, Albert knew that the snow wolves' human forms were relatively normal—at least by human standards. The tribe traded with human caravans that passed through the grasslands every year, bartering for essentials like salt and pottery. They even had a human drifter living among them, a man who had floated down from the southern inland sea. Compared to that guy, the scrawny teenager Albert had possessed was about average. The rest of the snow wolves, though? Most adults were at least as tall as Kevin Durant, with the build of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Even the smallest among them, Bentley, was built like Hugh Jackman's Wolverine. 

But the wolf form? That's where things got ridiculous. Using his current height as a reference, Albert estimated that his wolf form—not counting the tail—was over eight feet long from nose to hindquarters. 

The sheer size of the snow wolves' wolf forms wasn't their only advantage—their combat prowess was downright terrifying. From the fragmented memories Albert had inherited, it seemed the snow wolf tribe had no natural predators except for nature itself. No wonder they could scare off grizzly bears. No wonder the grassland king had once offered five thousand cattle and sheep in exchange for their help in battle—a deal that had ultimately led to the death of Albert's (or rather, the original owner's) mother. 

Even in the most fragmented memories, a mother's image is never lost. In the dream, the first adult snow wolf Albert had seen through the original owner's eyes was his mother. To be honest, she was the reason he'd been so stunned when he woke up. The snow wolf women were nothing like the "beast-girls" he'd imagined from Earth's pop culture. They were built like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his *Terminator* days—massive, muscular, and with no visible mammary glands, just a chest rippling with sheer power. 

"With genes like that, how did this kid end up so scrawny? No wonder the original owner had such a rough time," Albert muttered. 

Thinking back to the memories he had seen, Albert couldn't help but feel a pang of sympathy. The original owner hadn't been bullied or ostracized by the tribe. Snow wolves were a resilient and tight-knit people, unafraid of nature and willing to share their meager resources with human drifters. They weren't the type to abandon their own. But teenagers—no matter the species—tend to overthink things. After losing his mother, the original owner had felt like a burden, a useless mouth to feed. 

So, when the tribe migrated to a new grazing area, the kid had slipped away, transformed into his wolf form, and found a remote spot to wait for death. He got his wish—but Albert, who had been living a comfortable life back on Earth, got dragged into this mess as his replacement. 

"Teenagers are all the same," Albert sighed. "They don't value life until they've lived a little longer. Dying solves nothing. Living is where the possibilities are. Hell, even I don't want to die, and look at the mess I'm in." 

Shaking his head, he pushed himself up and began smothering the fire with dirt. "Food problem solved. Now I need water. My mouth feels like a damn desert. This area doesn't look dry, so where's the groundwater? Huh? What's this?" 

Near the shallow pit where he had buried the deer meat, Albert spotted a cluster of low-growing plants, barely eight inches tall, hidden among the waist-high grass. If he hadn't been digging, he would've missed them entirely. The plants had rosettes of leaves and upright spikes of cylindrical flowers—not particularly pretty, but oddly familiar. 

"Wait… that's plantain! The in-game model from that MMO I played looked exactly like this!" Albert smacked his fist into his palm, his exhaustion momentarily forgotten. He'd spent hours gathering herbs in game, and the plantain model had been based on real-life images. 

"If I remember right, plantain is edible in spring and can be used as medicine when mature. It's supposed to help with diarrhea and act as a diuretic, right? Perfect. I'm digging this up!"