"GIVE ME REAL FOOD!"

  The 5 guards were startled, shocked, and spooked.

  "What the heck just happened?" This question first came to their mind as their slow brains gradually comprehended its significance. 

  "He-he spoke…, he spoke?"

  "Holy Shit! He spoke?!" They freaked out.

  Seeing this, Sebastian nodded to himself inwardly as he rammed against the iron cage again to drive home his point.

  The past 1 month of his life was not spent in vain.

  While he recovered, while he learned information from the old toad, he was biding his time, observing his surroundings, observing his captors, getting information, and deducing clues for his ultimate escape plan.

  Through his observations, he already confirmed that these guards could not understand it when he communicated with the old toad openly.

  For long, he had always wondered about the strange phenomenon where he could communicate with other predators without any language barriers. His system explained it as due to the origin magic essence but he was still not clear.

  Despite not being clear, this did not prevent him from exploiting it.

  Apparently, this ability to harness the ever-present origin magic essence to communicate was exclusive to predators, it was not available to variant humans, at least not Atlantians.

  From Atlantis's technological and magical development, they may have created devices to bypass this obstacle but these guards didn't have one.

  When he communicated openly with the old toad, to these guards, it was like they were both croaking and making weird shrieking noises.

  Now that he communicated for real with them, not only that but with their language, it was a given that these guards would be spooked.

  How is this possible? How can a shark speak? It may be possible with magic but how can it speak Atlantian? How did it learn to speak Atlantian?

  These were the thoughts that were in the 5 guards' minds, Sebastian could read them like a book after spending so much time with them.

  Boom!

  "GIVE ME SOME F*CKING REAL FOOD!"

  "I WANT FOOD, NOT DEAD MEAT!"

  "…"

  "The Megalodon even learned f*cking too?" The 5 guards shuddered.

  Seeing them shivering in fear, Sebastian didn't push them further least they broke. He already achieved his objective, now the next thing was to watch and wait, and of course hope.

  The crux of his escape plan was strength and the fastest way to get this was breaking through to the purple tier.

  After the detailed breakthrough information that the old toad revealed to him, he was already confident in breaking through. The only unfortunate problem that hindered him was his level. 

  After he failed his evolution, he suffered a penalty of losing 2 levels.

  Now, this was coming back to haunt him.

  This didn't put him in a dilemma for long though. To counter this, he drafted this meticulous scheme to reject already dead meat for fresh food.

  With fresh food, he could get experience. He wasn't sure if Atlantians already extensively researched the beast evolution phenomenon, but he put all his hope in this gamble, keeping faith that it would work.

  His little confidence came from the fact that an important subject like evolution would be high-tier research, it would not be made available to crack troops and fleets. 

  He hoped that his captors were classified among the crack troops.

  Amid his hoping, his eyes secretly lit up as the fish took the bait. Doctor Statham personally came to inspect the commotion after receiving the guards' reports. This involved his precious test subject Afterall.

  The Doctor was surprisingly in glasses this time, he was probably interrupted amid an intensive research session.

  After entering this chamber, the Doctor had an interested expression on his face as he adjusted his glasses. 

  "Interesting, such intelligence, he actually learned to speak Atlantian!"

  Sebastian heaved a sigh of relief on seeing the look in the doctor's eyes. He knew that look, it was the look of a crazy doctor having found an interesting test subject, it was that look of curiosity that could level mountains and tear heavens.

  "It wants real food, right? Give it real food then". 

  While the guards rapidly went to work to fulfill the order to Sebastian's relief, the Doctor's eyes shone as he stroked his beards.

  "Such intelligence! If I extract his brain juice, perhaps I may succeed in creating a miracle tonic to boost intelligence and treat brain diseases".

  Sebastian felt his soul shudder on hearing this, it took a lot of his willpower to prevent his eyes from glaring hatefully at the Doctor.

  "Be patient Sebastian, exercise patience". He consoled himself.

  2 minutes later, tons of live prey were dumped inside Sebastian's cage.

  [You have activated skill: Crushing Bite.]

  Crunch!

  …
2 days later, Sebastian sighed and switched to plan B.

  After his sudden outburst 2 days ago, the Doctor reacted according to his prediction and indeed started allocating live food to him.

  Despite this success, the Doctor was not stupid. The prey that was given to him was mostly fish with the lowest-ranked bloodlines, fish, and crabs with little to no value.

  Most of this prey had not even taken the first step in their evolution journey yet, they were not even white tier, which meant that eating them gave Sebastian nothing other than filling his stomach.

  Due to this, despite eating a lot of live prey during this period, Sebastian was not able to level up even once. Life was hard.

  He was not too disheartened by this though, the old toad already predicted something like this which made him take it in more calmly.

  Left with no choice, he could only switch to his plan B.

  Even after so long, Sebastian remained faithful to his rule of always having a contingency plan. For this grand escape, it needed even more meticulousness for him to create plans with contingencies.

  After over a month of planning, he was slightly confident in his chances of escaping though he may not be able to evolve before doing it.

  He would have loved to wait till he leveled up and evolved first but unfortunately, time waited for no man. It was remaining less than 2 weeks before the time indicated in his system clue would elapse. 

  After weeks of planning and biding his time, he was ready for action.