The couple invited Greg to stay in their house, and Greg, not knowing where else to go, gladly accepted. In return, he also shared his part of the wolf meat and even helped in cooking it.

  Eka was gravely injured, so Bog bandaged her up with leaves and natural herbs found in the area, and after dinner, she went to sleep first. The male goblin had also slept after a while because he was injured too and needed some time to rest and recover.

  Greg was left alone by the fire and he stared into the flames, thinking about how he could take over this settlement. The idea had come to him a few hours ago, and at first, everything seemed easy.

  He thought he could just kill the old chief with raw power and declare himself as the new king.

  Yes, not the chief, but a king, because Greg was planning to grow this barebone village into a powerful kingdom he could comfortably live in and maybe introduce some niceties from the modern world to really have a content life.

  But for that, using force was not the correct option. Being a tyrant goblin king could give him quick succession, but the people... uh, the goblins would hate him, and everyone knew how a tyrant's rule came to an end.

  Greg looked to the side and the two goblins were sound asleep under a thin blanket, if you could call that stitched piece of clothing a blanket at all.

  "Ugh..." He sighed. "I really need to raise their standard of living after I deal with their starvation and infrastructure problems."

  The one-room house Greg was in had no door, and he had observed all evening how the goblins went about their day and lived their lives.

  First, the village chief had eleven people in his faction. They were the ones that made groups and hunted for smaller animals and food. The rest of the village was about thirty more people, especially after the sudden attack went ahead and cut their numbers in half.

  Before, their numbers were close to one hundred, but now these goblins were just above fifty. So, the normal thirty or so villagers survive by hunting and gathering alone.

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  Each family would pick out one or two male goblins and give them jobs to find food. The female goblins were in charge of breeding and preparing food and taking care of children.

  "Truly a primitive way of living."

  Each month, more of the goblins died because they were working alone or joined the chief's faction to work with a larger group. That's how the chief grew more and more in power and had managed to keep his plates full and his family fed.

  Greg took out the black wolf's core he had extracted earlier and swallowed it directly in the calm of the night. As it was pitch dark, nobody saw him, and he made sure the couple were asleep too.

  His body started to glow a little, and that might attract some attention, so he hid behind the fire and even used a spare blanket provided by the couple to cover himself up.

  After the whole process was done, and just what Greg had expected, he didn't gain those special black flames. If he had to guess, abilities like black flames of wolves or spider silk or whatever those centipedes had were native to those creatures, and he could not gain something reserved for their kind only.

  Instead, he gains their sub-ability or something related to their physique by eating their cores. More tests need to be done to really figure everything out, but Greg was in no hurry.

  He got up and tried to jump around and flex his body, and his suspicions were right. Eating the wolf core gave him speed and maybe improved his stamina too. So, if he could slay more of those wolves, he would gain more of these benefits before things plateaued out like with the centipedes.

  Greg was in no mood to sleep yet, and he didn't feel tired either after eating the End Core, so he got up, walked close to a perimeter, and jumped over the thorny bush to get outside without alerting the goblin guards.

  Next, he ran up a tree and continued to move in a direction he remembered from last night. And his suspicions were right when he found another goblin settlement a few miles away.

  He memorized the place and traveled another way to find another small settlement, then another, and by the end of the night, he had found five such villages in close enough proximity, and from the looks of it, they were attacked too.

  There was also a village that was completely destroyed, and when Greg investigated the area, he saw those thin lizard/dinosaur-like creatures eating away the goblin bodies.

  Because of the "fresh food," they were scattered around, and Greg used this advantage to kill a whole group of nine without anyone noticing. Their cores were easy to collect, and eating one gave him an ability to control the length of his claws.

  "Another copyright incoming," Greg laughed, sitting on top of a primitive goblin house and seeing the sun that was making its way up the horizon.

  But he didn't leave just yet. No, there were more than fifty dead goblins spread throughout the area and he wanted to see what their cores might bring him.

  When he was done collecting all of them, he distanced himself from all the corpses and only took a few Runners' bodies to some faraway tree. He quietly found his way to the top, and after getting a comfortable spot to sit, Greg began eating all the fifty cores in one go.

  His body began shining with a brilliant light like it had never before, and when he was done, he felt like a completely new perso... goblin!