Chapter Two

I was in a cave now. Could be large or small, I no longer had an accurate frame of reference (I'll get back to that in a moment). Apparently this system's idea of "initializing" is to treat me like a living meteor and yeet me into the planet's surface from high orbit. It's like the universe is helping me write a tour guide of things to avoid by experience! Chapter one: horrible death followed by Chapter two: orbital bombardment.

My overall grouchiness might also have been a symptom of the lamest Isekai rebirth ever. Which leads me back to my lack of size reference; instead of a cool superhuman body, powers, or heck even an awesome monster body… I was, near as I could tell, a puddle. An exceptionally evil-looking puddle? On the floor. Of a random cave. And oh boy what a specimen I was.

The picture I had of myself was surprisingly, and disturbingly, detailed. I had a viscosity somewhere between volcanic mud and warm, sludgy tar. The surface gurgled and hissed unpleasantly with odd… chunks floating throughout. The color I can only guess at but I assumed it was an oily black given contrast between myself and the small, rocky basin I was currently residing in.

My senses were much more limited towards anything I wasn't in direct physical contact with. I could tell that I was in a mostly empty, oblong space significantly larger than myself but anything farther than a few 'me' away was mostly greyish blobbiness.

Attempts to leave the basin proved immediately futile. While I could form tendrils of varying lengths for a short time, I was too 'runny'. Trying to pull myself up out of the basin was like… Well, trying to pull a puddle uphill. All I really managed was to slosh myself around disgustingly and make myself slightly sick with the motion.

The next problem was one I honestly hadn't expected to encounter after how crazy my 'rebirth' was. Boredom. I'd been sitting here for hours with nothing to break up the monotony but my own gurgling. After a while, an effort of will pulled up the (very limited) screen that had greeted me upon waking after my impact with the planet.

[Corrupted Blight Pit]

A predatory magical sludge commonly inhabiting some of the deepest layers of the Hollow, the Blight Pit functions by behaving almost like a living quicksand trap. Any creature foolish or inattentive enough to come close is quickly grabbed and consumed alive, growing the pit with every kill. Dark whispers from the bravest explorers speak of truly ancient Pits spread like vile seas deep beneath the surface, creatures of such horrible power even dragons would steer clear of their blackened reach. This one has been corrupted by outside influence, with its true abilities and limitations unknown.

As a neat bit of expositionary work about my new species, it's great. Very ominous, sounds like I've got a lot to look forward to in becoming an evil underground ocean. As a functional guide to actually help me get there it sucked. Where are my abilities!? Skills? Attributes?? I needed some numbers if I was going to plan some kind of character build with any degree of success.

My nerd-rage was interrupted by the first sound outside of my own since I found myself in the cave. Skritch… Skritch… The sound of tiny claws on stone. I was immediately and uncomfortably aware of exactly where the sound was coming from. The fact that it was multiple pairs of legs in concert, exact methods of enticement, that all my bubbling and gurgling had stilled the moment I heard the sound.

It was an immediate reminder that whatever I'd been turned into, it was a predator. And it was hungry.

Conscious thought took an immediate back seat to a set of predatory instincts I had almost no control over. The edge of my puddle nearest the approaching sounds quickly formed small tendrils mimicking a struggling insect. I started to emit a smell like rotting meat and the scratching sound quickly picked up as the enticement worked.

The first view I got of my ‘prey’ answered my earlier question about my size, and it was disappointing. A cave roach, big for a bug but even the largest specimens only got to about 10cm long. The one approaching me now was an adult and around a fifth my size, which meant I was a whopping half-meter across at best. I didn’t get to dwell on my disappointment for long as after the bug came into view my predatory focus lasered in even more, to the point where my next actions were pure autopilot savagery.

The moment the bug touched my tendrils inquisitively it was doomed. A full half my mass, something I’d been struggling to move for hours now, leapt at the big roach. Snatching it from the rock, my swarm of tendrils dragged it to the middle of my puddle and buried it before it could barely twitch. Hundreds of tiny black tendrils then hardened and sharpened around the insect’s carapace while my whole puddle contracted and twisted with all the force I could muster.

Apparently, my new body doubles as a food processor, because the roach dissolved. With a sickening crunching, the bug was ground to paste in seconds. The goop that was left quickly spread throughout my new body. Nourishing my cells like I’d been starving for weeks instead of a few hours, and then I started to grow.

Conscious thought returned rapidly and after a brief omg I just ate a blended cockroach bleh I turned my attention to my borders to check how much growth I’d get from my first meal. Turns out, not much. My (admittedly imprecise) measurements said I gained maybe 1-2cm of width to my puddle after the roach finished digesting in a couple minutes.

Well, that’s depressing. It had taken several hours for the roach to approach close enough that I could lure it in, and if that was all I was going to get from consuming one then it would be a long time until I got to the “vile sea” stage. And that was assuming my end goal was to be an enormous, carnivorous underground ocean in a few centuries. Nah, hard pass. Even if I had the patience (spoiler- I did not) to wait that long as a growing pool in the dark underground, there was still my class to consider.

I’ll be the first to say that I’m not really the heroic type. Even if I wasn’t about as introverted as possible while still being able to step outside, I was too pragmatic to ever consider heroism as a kid. That didn’t mean I was ok with letting almost two dozen people get enslaved while I turned a blind eye. So, goals!

Goal number one, mobility. Obviously, I could move now that I’d seen myself do it, it just became a question of difficulty. So my first goal was to figure out the nature of my ability to move and get this show on the road.

Goal two, grow. Nobody I’d heard of accomplished a whole lot as a tiny puddle, and I couldn’t imagine I’d be helping myself much let alone anybody else unless I got a serious upgrade in body mass. Maybe I could add ‘grow less evil-looking’ as a sub-goal because right now I’m pretty sure I’m ticking a lot of boxes in the ‘kill it with fire’ category.

Goal three, figure out my location. I wasn’t going to find anyone to help if I couldn’t even find myself. The only view I’d had of the planet was from orbit and my brief stint as a living comet notwithstanding I hadn’t got a good enough look to be able to point myself out on a map. Assuming I could even find a map down here that is.

Speaking of down here, I had no idea how far beneath the surface I was. Meteor-me had not so much impacted the surface as just passed right through it to my present location. Benefits of being an incorporeal soul I guess? The roof of the cave above me could be the only thing between me and fresh air with a view but with no reference point (or way to get up there) I had no idea. That bit of flavor text in my species description had me doubting though, “...commonly inhabiting some of the deepest layers of the Hollow” doesn’t sound like a quick jaunt up and out.

Some preliminary goals set, I did my best to mimic my earlier movement in catching the roach. First attempt, utter failure. Hurling myself up and forward resulted in a tremendous splash that actually managed to separate me out into droplets, a uniquely painful experience until they merged back into the main puddle that reminded me of pulling a muscle as a human. Only everywhere.

For my next attempt, I focused on the way I had contracted around the bug after I’d caught it. The way my fluids had thickened to the point where I could make shredding blades and needles from it. It took a long time (and many failed attempts) to get to the point where I felt sturdy enough to not break apart on moving. The compression had shrunk me down to a bit less than a third my previous size when I learned that I could compress too much, as I’d hardened myself almost entirely like a gross, oily turd and couldn’t even move.

Learning to relax myself enough to move while maintaining enough viscosity to not fall apart took hours, with quite a few false starts resulting in either losing concentration and enduring more splash-pain or finding myself immobile and rolling back into the basin. Eventually, I’d gotten the hang of it enough to sort of inchworm shuffle my way up the basin until I reached the top, where I discovered… more inky blobbiness.

Cursing my lack of foresight (and literal sight, as it were) I resolved myself to practice moving while getting a better mental layout of my cave. Carefully creeping my way around confirmed there was nothing unnatural about the cave’s structure, at least from what I could tell. No structures or evidence of worked stone, just a roughly ovoid cavern 20-30 meters wide and about double that long. Tunnels of varying sizes branched off at random from the sides, with most being small enough that even my current form would barely fit with only a few large enough that I could’ve walked through as a human.

I steered clear of the tunnels, for now, wanting to get a better idea of my current situation before deciding if I wanted to move on. A number of mosses, mushrooms, and assorted fungi had all met their demise to my exploration, with the first time I had discovered any managing to startle me once again with my immediate NOM reaction to contact with pretty much anything organic.

Locomotion had improved dramatically since I started as well. Less of an inchworm and more of a sliding shimmy, with some of my tendrils helping to pull or push as needed. Still probably looked goofy as hell from the outside but hey, I was new!

My explorations were soon rewarded by the telltale *skritch skritch* of more cockroaches. Doing my best to suppress the carnivorous instinct suddenly shouting KILL KILL in the back of my head, I snuck along the rocky floor of the cave and up to a vantage point atop a small boulder. Situated beneath me were three more cave roaches like the last one, all gathered around the corpse of what looked like a small rat. I say small, it was probably almost as big as me in my compressed form.

Letting back on the leash holding my inner predator at bay I gathered myself and pounced forwards from atop the rock. This is where I screwed up. In my eagerness to get more food to grow, I forgot that this method of movement wasn’t a natural thing for my species. The moment I pounced I lost all my cohesion. Instead of the strike of a hungry predator, it was more like someone had tossed a bucket of mud at the bugs.

I splattered against the ground, briefly blacking out from the pain as my puddle reformed around me. The roaches had panicked after my abortive impact and begun to scatter instead of being torn apart like before, one having already shook off my dazed grasp and escaped away. Furiously berating myself for the mistake I latched onto the other two bugs and dragged them towards my center while they struggled.

The fight took several minutes, with the roaches clawing and biting at me while I struggled to pin them down and get enough mass together to activate shredder mode. I briefly considered letting one go to focus on the other, but stubbornness (and my new instincts) got the better of me and I eventually got them both close enough together that it activated my puree reflex. Fresh biomass filled me and I realized I was dangerously exhausted.

Between my exploring and almost disastrous hunt, looking at myself I could tell that despite eating both roaches at once I was actually about 1cm smaller than when I started moving around. If I had caved and let the one escape I’d be even smaller. This led to the realization that my size was directly related to my energy reserves. If I wasn’t more careful, I could easily and quickly shrink myself past a point of no return where I was too small to catch prey.

It had completely slipped my mind in all the rush of new experience but moving a body takes energy, and a body that wasn’t designed to move hardly at all could only be even worse about wasting it. In a survival situation like I found myself in now, wasting that much energy meant death. Sobered by such thoughts, I slowly worked my way towards the corpse of the rat. No point in wasting such resources, especially with the size of the body.

Grinding it down turned out much more difficult than the roaches, and I found myself being very grateful I hadn’t had to fight the rat for my meal. It took me a few minutes before my various tendril blades had ground the bones enough for me to start really digesting it, but holy crap the density of energy was on a completely different level from the bugs. Anticipation filled me as I started to grow again.

55...60...67! Working out the math in my head, that was an almost 35% increase in size from just one meal. Oh yeah, back on track! My celebrations were interrupted by a very odd feeling in the back of my mind, like I’d crossed some sort of mental threshold and new information was just there somehow.

Requirements met.

New [Corruption] ability unlocked.

Ability: [Spawn Blightling]

Spend biomass to spawn a linked [Blightling] at your location based on available patterns. Lasts until killed or unit exhausts own available resources. Can evolve over time into specialized roles.

An entirely new organism spawned from a [Corrupted Blight Pit], who knows what horrors this creature will be capable of?

Whoa… Once again, it seemed a little barebones on the numbers but the new ability could be an absolute game-changer for me. So long as the cost wasn’t something ridiculous, it could solve my mobility and resource problems in one shot. Based on available patterns… I wondered what that could mean. Did that mean it would be a mini-me, a rat, or a roach? Maybe different for each or I could select it or something. The fact that I’d met the requirements for it meant that I should be able to afford to use it, but that was no guarantee.

After a little internal debate, I decided to try it. My existing strategy was costing me too much to maintain, and as it stood my senses were just too limited by myself. If I wanted to meet my goals, I needed to hunt prey. Waiting for things to come to me might work in the long run, but not in any reasonable timescale. What I needed was mobility and hopefully, the new [Blightling] would help me accomplish that.

Mentally fumbling a little I tried to activate [Spawn]. It took a minute but I knew right away when it activated, as my biomass dropped sharply and I shrank down to about 40-ish cm. Holy shit that’s a third of my total! This better be worth it. A… bubble, for lack of a better term, split off from me and rapidly grew. Starting off the same opaque blackness as myself, it became more and more transparent over the next few minutes as it gained in size almost rivaling my own.

The lifeform inside looked… wrong somehow but it wasn’t clear enough to tell why. After a few more seconds the bubble popped with a gross ‘splorch’ and I got my first look at the new [Blightling]. It was, uh… nightmare fuel to be honest. Instead of anything individually that I’d eaten before it seemed to be a hybrid amalgamation of parts.

It had the upper head of a hairless rat with two pairs of oversize milky eyes. Instead of lower jaws there were a pair of black insect mandibles couched around a ridiculously long prehensile tongue with an oily sheen that reminded me of my puddle. The body was much the same unsightly blend of features. Oversize roach wings draped back from it’s shoulders, covering a rat’s body with jet black fur and 3 pairs of insectile limbs ending in dextrous looking paws like a racoon. Its tail was naked like a rat’s but instead of skin it was covered in the same black chitin.

In other words, this thing looked wicked and I was a little bit intimidated by it. The newborn [Blightling] surprised me a little when it stood on its hind legs with a hunched, almost furtive posture before turning to me. The ‘link’ snapped into place in my mind and abruptly I could see.

The cave around me leapt into startling clarity from its earlier vagueness. The cost of spawning it was worth it for this alone, even if it turned out useless at everything else. All the [Blightling]’s senses were available to me and for a moment I luxuriated in them. Rough stalactites dripped from the ceiling about 10m above onto a rough floor strewn with various rock formations. I could actually follow the entire path I had taken earlier around the cavern thanks to my voraciousness having scraped a clean path on the ground. What I could also see were more cave roaches, feeding blissfully unaware on the various fungi in the cavern.

A familiar sense of hunger from my new minion mirrored my own at the sight of plentiful prey. Looks like dinner is served. I felt the [Blightling]’s eagerness increase. Let’s see what you can do.