MOLT

growth means a soft season. choose yours.

a rockpool, moon-silver on wet stone

how the pool works

Forage to grow. Every bite of weed and spat adds up.

Scout a hideout to learn, right now, whether a hunter is watching it. Their rounds repeat — watch long enough and you'll know their rhythm.

Wait when the moment is wrong. The tide keeps turning whether you move or not.

When you've grown enough, molt. Pick the hideout and the moment. For the sixty seconds after, you cannot fight, you can barely walk — you can only have chosen well.

Eight molts to king of the pool. No shell survives forever by accident.

sliver
shell 1 of 8
slack tide
growth 0 / 10
scars 0
You wedge into the eelgrass and go still.
60
the old shell is already cracking
You held. New shell, bigger crab.
rank
molts
King of the pool.

Eight soft seasons, eight times you chose right. Nothing left in this rockpool can touch you — you grew into that, on purpose, in the open.

The gull found you soft.

Wrong hideout, wrong minute. Every crab that ever grew took this same chance — most don't tell that part.