Viers had divined the future as if he was the Oracle of Delphi. From the way the water flowed, he deduced the shape of the river ahead. The river of time could not be stopped nor predicted with 100% accuracy but Viers had thousands of stories in his head that served as his guiding stars as he sailed downriver.

He arrived in this world during spring. Viers familiarized himself with the world he had reincarnated into, getting ready for the challenges ahead. When summer came, Viers was embroiled in the fight between forces of good and evil in the town’s underworld. He took his position as a mercenary of the evil side and got quite a bit of benefit by doing morally questionable things. But Viers wasn’t concerned about his ‘light side’ or ‘dark side’ from the first place; as long as he benefits, it was all okay in his book.

The boy with the name of Viers housed a soul from another world. His first priority was gaining power, then using that power to live the life he wanted to have. Through the vision of her mother, Farley –who hailed from a family of cultists– reached out to him first. The work she gave was risky but lucrative, Viers didn’t mind doing some ‘dirty work’ to further his future prospects.

Supposed the side of good reached out to him before the evil-doers did, if they also presented Viers with suitable benefits, Viers didn’t mind becoming their criminal-executing, demon-slaying, and witch-burning inquisitor. If that was too dark for the ‘good guys’, then he didn’t mind reading the holy scripture and singing praises to the Goddess every day. Taking care of children and providing alms for the poor was also A-Okay. Even becoming the church’s janitor and cleaning their shit-filled latrine was acceptable. As long as the church gave him a price that could satisfy him, Viers would treat it as a profitable job and be professional about it. However, he didn’t want to spend his life doing the same old routine until he died so after he amassed enough funds and sufficiently grew in power, Viers would travel the world seeking wonders to satisfy his adventurer spirit. Whether good or evil in the path Viers chose, he would go adventuring at the end.

But the good guys didn’t make contact first so Viers’ story was tied with the Cult of Dumuzin.

At summer’s end Farley unfurled the plot to him. A great scheme was in the making and the climax would be at the winter solstice. He had done some grunt work for the cult during summer, getting closer and being favored by one of the cult higher-ups. He was asked by Farley to save her and her sister’s life by murdering her dad, the cult’s big cheese.

From there, Viers deduced the future path that fate had paved for him. According to typical xianxia or xuanhuan stories, during autumn, he would start rising like an ascending phoenix. Defeating his fellow cultivators from the same generation, then got noticed by the older generation. He would complete hard assignments using his ingenuity or cheat abilities and make wondrous achievements one after another. People would flock to him, pulled by the slipstream of his rising. Viers would make allies and enemies both because in the stories, one couldn’t have one without the other. With Farley as the start, he would also get closer to the other higher-ups such as her siblings and father, uncovering their backstory, motivations, burden, and so on. And then, when the final arc started, it would start with dramas spicing on about the heated battle. The arc would end with his victory but the next plot was already set in stone during the steps he took to get there, and he got the girl in the process.

Viers didn’t like it.

Too long, too complicated, too troublesome, too time consuming, too boring.

After his time in Luxore town, he wanted a fresh start. He didn’t want his past haunting him more than it already was; he didn’t want things to be more convoluted for him. That’s why he stopped involving himself with the cult’s activities. During his first cult assignment, he ended up killing Leon, which in turn created a chain of events that made Rose an angel’s chosen. Who could say if the cult assignment he accepted next wouldn’t be setting a stone rolling down the hill that would create an avalanche?

What if the next unbearable asshole he killed had a formidable background? Sometimes conflict was inevitable no matter how much he tried to avoid it like his experience with Soris. The more involved he was with the cult, the more seeds of potential disaster he would sow and his opponent was most likely the good guys that he suspected had plot armor guarding their lives.

That’s why Viers decided to strike the problem at its core and ignored everything else. His target was Benjamin Styra. Viers would kill him, then get as many benefits as he could while using the least costly method, simple.

He used an entire season to make and polish his plan; the rest of his time he spent upgrading his battle strength and future foundations.

Everything else was secondary.

***

Benjamin Styra had done it.

The man had accomplished a genocide, including the lives of his own subordinates and family. The man who looked much older than his real age. Stood triumphant under the black sky with thousands of floating souls. He was the last man alive so Benjamin was sure that his plan had succeeded.

“At last… it is finished,” Benjamin muttered softly.

The soul-sucking Arte was over and he dissipated his barrier. His eyes were aglow with the spark of success. Victory was so real to him that he could taste it.

Now I just need to send these souls to Dumuzin, but I should take Farley and Gwen with me first. Lord Dumuzin will be pleased, I shall become his favored—

“Umgh?”

Suddenly, Benjamin felt uncomfortable in his abdomen. In the next few seconds, he felt a disgusting feeling of something moving inside his own body.

“Ugghh!?”

What? What the hell is happening?

The thing inside his stomach expanded. It was as if Benjamin had eaten food for three people. The sudden expansion hurt him greatly, not to mention the shifting of his organs. The unexplainable inside of him kept getting bigger and bigger until the pain rose to his throat. By then Benjamin already had difficulty breathing. Benjamin’s danger instinct had gone off like an emergency siren. He was sure he was under attack and his life was threatened.

“GGhhhagh…”

Benjamin fell on his knees, hands on his throat, trying to unclog his blocked airway.

I need to do something! Arte… WHAT THE FUCK ARTE SHOULD I USE!?!?

The problem arose suddenly like a bomb went off inside his body, Benjamin wasn’t able to provide a suitable countermeasure. Even if he could prepare, he would be powerless, for no Arte could be cast inside his own body.

“hhHHoooghh….”

‘It’ went into the older man’s lungs with precision, as if ‘it’ had a mind of its own. Benjamin’s stomach swelled like a balloon, he could see ‘it’ wriggled by looking at his own belly.

Benjamin gritted his teeth as if wanting to grind his own molars to dust to bear the pain. He knew he needed to do something, anything. He tried to think, to struggle. A thousand jumbled thoughts were racing in his head. Panic, confusion, fear, all kinds of emotions filled his mind. And then, something else came and drowned everything into cosmic insignificance.

“HwuaGGh!?”

The man felt ‘it’ melting his organs. His stomach tore, intestines ripped, throat burned, and lungs dissolved… slowly but surely, with extreme agony. The sensation was unlike anything he’d ever felt before.

Benjamin fell on his back, on the snow-covered plaza of stone-pavement, not far from the lifeless bodies of his children. He looked upwards to the souls filling the blackened sky. In the end, he softly whimpered.

“…help…”

Light faded from his eyes as blood flowed from his mouth. His frozen expression showed unspeakable unwillingness and desperation, but the man was no longer capable of changing it.

Benjamin Styra died, the moment he had completed his grand scheme. Without reaping his benefits, without giving what he sacrificed any meaning. He died just like any man.

And from the corpse’s torso, ‘it’ burst out in blood and gore after melting enough flesh and organs to enter the outside world. It was a radium-green colored slime, emerging savagely from the body of the cult leader.

The dangerously colored slime slowly turned into a human. Wavy brown short hair, sharp and decisive eyes, and grim expression. He was naked and had a slightly chubby body. The young boy’s face was dark and joyless.

“I succeeded, but…”

Viers left the sentence unfinished as he looked towards the unbreathing pair of sisters.

…It doesn’t feel like a victory.

The last living man in Luxore town stood on top of the corpses of thousands. He survived, he planned for this, he was the victor.

His victory tasted like ash.

***

How to kill someone easily? Kill them from the inside. Viers wanted a super move that could kill people no matter how strong they were, so he had the idea of invoking an Arte from the inside of his opponent’s body. After all, how many people could defend or protect their inner organs?

But no matter how much he practiced, he couldn’t do it. He even asked Nakala, Teldo, and Amay about this and they all told him it was impossible.

Realizing that such a cheat-like feat could never be easily done, he changed his perspective. If he couldn’t do it from the outside of this opponent’s body, why not do it from the inside? He just needed to go inside them then wreak havoc inside the guts, and voila.

A classic strategy, a cliché strategy… and Viers gained the tools for it, Arte Size Down.

He spent a lot of time practicing this Arte because he foresaw the massive potential in it. After months of study and experimentation, he managed to create the opposite of this Arte, Size Up.

After successfully testing he could decrease and increase the size of objects, he tried to change the size of insects. However, he was unsuccessful no matter how much he tweaked his Arte. After a week, he accepted the feat of manipulating the size of living beings was impossible for the current him. He hypothesized because living beings were more complicated than dead objects.

Then Viers thought of shrinking a ‘less complicated’ living being, and he already had an ideal candidate. The small-fry of a lot of video games, a slime.

Viers used Size Down on slime.

It’s super effective.

Scientifically, there should be a sophisticated bodily system of nuclei, protein, chemical, and whatever else making up the organism known as slime but Viers wasn’t too concerned about it. This was voodoo mumbo jumbo magic, science can submit or be deported like illegal immigrants from this reality. Since he realized the stone he shrunk had less mass than the original, Viers accepted the laws of magic superseded the laws of physics in the world of Dunias.

After testing if Size Up worked as intended, Viers sought a water element slime so he could become a slime himself. It wasn’t hard to find a slime of this category, they were a lot and weak, the very definition of small-fry.

Then Viers thought, why stopped there? After he evolved two of his other monster forms weeks earlier, he had some knowledge about how to choose the evolution pathway for his slime form. It took some effort but he evolved it successfully, the formerly water-blue colored slime became radium-green colored. This slime could become corrosive if he chose to, hazardously so. Viers gained another deadly monster form.

When the winter solstice approached, Viers just needed to feed himself to Benjamin. He left a bottle of Red Fairy for a ruse, he didn’t actually need it or use it in any way. Slime-Viers, with the size of an ant, infiltrated Benjamin’s bedroom and went inside his mouth after he fell asleep. The journey of his tiny amorphous form was long and arduous, to say the least, but he made it through sheer will.

When Viers climbed into his mouth, he became even smaller and used another stealth-type Arte to avoid waking him up. Then he stuck his jelly body into Benjamin’s throat because he didn’t want to combat his stomach acid.

Patiently, he waited, until the very end.

Viers didn’t know Benjamin’s plan, no one did. So he didn’t make his move until he was 100% sure.

Despite having no eyes to see, ears to hear, or any other sensory organs, Viers could actually sense his surroundings quite clearly. It was the so-called Mana-sense. Because a regular slime had low intelligence, it couldn’t use its Mana-sense skillfully. This was not the case for Slime-Viers. Despite having no brain in this form, his human intelligence and cognitive ability were unchanged.

He might be less than a 1mm blob stuck inside Benjamin’s throat but he could hear his voice clearly. Thankfully, like all villains in the final phase of their plan, Benjamin liked to talk.

Viers thanked his lucky stars he was inside Benjamin’s body when everyone else got their soul taken. Viers had no defense against something like that. He was still level 1 despite his best efforts and all his cheats didn’t have any protection for soul-based attacks. Still, since he was inside someone’s body and Benjamin himself created some kind of barrier before activating the soul pulling technique, Viers was safe.

In other stories, should he get hit by the soul pulling attack, his mysterious cheat flower would react and save him. But was he someone who had that kind of plot armor? Viers had no intention to find out or rely on such things in the first place so he stayed hidden. Not even when his 'love interest' was in a dire threat.

He regretted Farley’s and Gwen’s death but he didn’t want to risk himself. If he killed Benjamin before the soul-pulling started, who could say the Demonic Soul Absorption Field would not activate? Perhaps it was a time delay technique, perhaps there was a fail-safe system installed, Benjamin himself also seemed wary of attack and despite being heavily wounded, August was there. Anyway, he thought the best way to dismantle a bomb was to let it go off.

He was not a hero nor a hero wannabe.

Because Benjamin was a piece of shit and his monologue annoyed Viers, the slime decided to kill him brutally. Using a certain alien gory and super famous scene as inspiration, Viers chestburster-ed him after corroding his organs.

And so Viers survived, now he must decide what to do next.

***

Viers took a deep breath and exhaled them.

“Arte — Water Clothes.”

Using Kala’s fire clothes as inspiration, Viers created an Arte suitable for him who frequently needed clothes. It didn’t create a real material like Kala’s, only a not-see-through water shirt and long pants. It would dissolve in two hours, more than enough time to find real clothes.

…I must get out of this town. If someone found me alive, they would be suspicious. Thankfully, town destruction is one of my anticipated scenarios. I have made preparations to run away. Gotta take whatever benefits I can first.

While thinking, Viers took the inventory ring from Benjamin’s fingers. As he tried to take August’s ring, he felt a pulse from his left wrist.

“Mm?”

The pulse was very vivid, it was from his tattoo.

“…! This is…”

The black tattoo was an item he got from the lamia trials. The Affinity Connecting Sculpture that Kala’risyah gifted him. The statue was telling him there was a suitable catalyst for raising his affinity nearby!

Is it something in their space ring? Aahh, don’t tell me!

Something clicked in Viers’ mind and he looked upwards, towards the thousands of will o wisps in the air.

The tattoo came off from his wrist and turned into a wooden snake sculpture, floating above his palm.

“Snake, is it the souls?” Viers asked the semi-sentient statue.

Viers felt the statue pulse again. Somehow, he felt it was telling affirmation.

I see, I SEE! So this statue isn’t just capable of upgrading my water affinity but can add another affinity as well! As expected of an item from a legendary era!

Viers felt as if he was just struck by a thunderbolt. His brain worked as fast as a quantum computer to weigh the benefits he would acquire.

“Snake, will all these souls allow me to reach tier 5 soul affinity?”

Affirmation again.

“Will I lose my water affinity?”

Now, it was denial.

“Very good! Then I offer these souls as a catalyst! Give me the mastery of the ethereal spirit! Haaahahahaha!”

On top of a mausoleum of silent corpses, Viers took up a mantle of power. Made of the spirit of the fallen, weaved by a legacy of the lamia.

“THIS,” Viers challenged the world, “IS MY HOUR!”