So the good news is that I’m going to be turning 10 soon, after which I’ll finally be considered an adult. The bad news is that I’m not what I thought I would be. I guess it was a bit foolish to just assume that I’d be reborn as a human, but being born as some sort of a lizard/human hybrid wasn’t really in the cards for my expectations. Instead of peach and brown and so on, the people I see on a daily basis now are greens and browns and blacks and scaly, and rather reminiscent of an alligator to my mind.

The Lizard Folk, as we call ourselves, are surprisingly human in many ways. For instance we’re bipedal, we have a language which is functional albeit a bit simplistic and inconsistent so it likely wouldn’t stand up to modernization, which… Is probably not a problem. Because we aren’t modern. As far as I'm aware, this entire world isn't modern. There’s some leather working and rudimentary weapon and tool use going on, but on the us Lizardfolk are downright primitive, with the majority of our manufactured goods either being stolen from people who intrude on our territory, or crafted in a painfully inefficient manner, such as taking 2 weeks to weave together a waterproof basket. And we need goods like that, because we live in a swamp.

Our tribe is not the only thing in this world, clearly, we have to steal from someone, right? Unfortunately the hatchlings are allowed very little contact with outsiders. We’re downright xenophobic, and will usually attack other sapient creatures on sight. As well as other not so sapient creatures, because while we’re technical omnivorous, we do tend to prefer meat. I guess one could say we follow something of a paleo diet.

We’re big though, or at least most of us are. An adult lizardfolk will usually stand a little over 2 meters tall, and usually weighs somewhere in the 100 – 120 kg range, or at least that’s my best guess, you probably won't be surprised to discover that primitive tribes don't exactly have an excess of properly calibrated scales. The tail is a nice touch though. It’s not prehensile, but it’s rather majestic and usually sticks out a meter or more in its own right. Some of our biggest are quite a bit larger than that, with the High Chief rumored to stand around 5 meters tall, though I've never seen him to have any confidence in that being an accurate claim. I can say that the chief of our tribe is massive though, close to 4 meters one way or the other.

Well, if everyone else is so comedically huge, what about me? I’m probably about as tall as I was in my last life, but my build and stature are so much smaller than my peers even the women are built heavier than I am. In terms of pure physical power, I’m probably on the weaker side even by human standards.

While the vast majority of other hatchlings fell naturally into the role of a warrior, which suits their wild and vicious temperament rather well, I knew I didn’t want to be one as soon as I realized that there were alternate options. At around 5 years old I was able to attract the attention of a shaman, and started learning his stories. Every year that passed, I was able to assign a few ability points to my attributes. It was actually very hard at first, to go from the man I had once been to… What I am now. For many reasons.

To begin with it turns out that in this world, much like my own, when you are born you don’t start with a fully developed and functional brain. I was able to retain enough presence of mind to prioritize the attributes I thought were important and recover much of my mental faculties and even memories, though many of the memories of my life on earth are blurry or otherwise lost now, I was able to recover much of it.

Why did I lose so much of my mind and memories in the first place? That's a tough one to answer in a world with a system. It might be attributable in part to limitations associated with my race, it might also be a matter of the time where my brain was so woefully underdeveloped having caused severe long term damage, and it might just be because it's been another decade since even the most recent of those memories.

This is my life now, my new world, and yes, even my tribe, though I care about them more in an abstract fashion than I care about individuals within the tribe. I still think of myself as a human, but I don't have much in common with the humans I’ve seen here. I also think of myself as a lizardfolk, though I’m clearly very different from them as well. I hate to say it, but I don't belong anywhere or with anyone anymore.

Back to the topic of having taken a different approach to this life despite being well positioned to go the warrior route, though, there are many reasons for it. As a human I lived a life where I placed great weight on development of all forms, including an emphasis on physicality. I know that within the tribe personal physical strength is what matters, yet I don’t want the depredations of age to weigh quite as heavily on me this time, so when I reached my first birthday and every year since, when the system prompt appeared and allowed me to assign attributes, I prioritized my mental attributes and my toughness in the hopes that I won’t find myself falling apart quite so early in life this time. That's not the only reason, not even close, but it was a factor and probably makes the most sense to you right now in the context of our last conversation. I have ten years' worth of discovery to share though, so we can loop back around for additional explanations regarding my decision making in being physically weak later.

According to the elders, after we hit adulthood additional attributes will be nearly impossible to acquire. Once we’ve officially reached adulthood, the only remaining area we can improve is for certain exceptional individuals to get another class and to level it up. A lot. That's it. Training lets you access abilities when you level up, but it doesn't improve your attributes. The options are very limited, and the system in this world is omnipresent, with the ramifications of that omnipresence being downright disturbing. I'll get more into that later, I won't have a choice but to explain it, but right now it's sufficient that you know that those early attribute assignments are critical. Aside from that, it becomes more immediately relevant to discuss classes.

According to the elders, humans almost always start with a very good class; the average run of the mill human is weaker than the average run of the mill Lizardfolk, but it’s not nearly enough of a difference at level 1 to justify the disparity in the upper bounds of strength. The classes humans and elves and dwarves and so on begin with may start off at level 1, making them weaker than all but the Lizardfolk children and, according to the warriors, weaker than many of those. But unless they spend their days behind walls and actively avoiding confrontation, they’re not weak for long. As early as level 2 they’re a close match to the average lizard folk, but their classes supposedly can reach all the way up to level 20.

I don’t have any first-hand knowledge or even remotely reliable accounts of how powerful someone who has reached level 20 in a class might be, but stories told about high level people are pretty worrisome. Some examples of the sort of exploits they can perform include being able to wipe out a village with a single spell, summoning demons, hacking off the heads of 100 warriors in less than 10 seconds, and so on.

I'll get into explaining how I learned some of the rest of this later, but as much as I'd like to dismiss those fantastical claims as nonsensical, even at lower levels the difference from one level to the next is absurd. The normal human style classes start coming into their strength after a handful of life or death fights. Lizardfolk? Most of them pick up the standard racial class and never get an option to level up in a new class from there… But even though human classes can soon outshine them, you still end up needing to take some serious risks to get to that point, while the standard Lizardfolk warrior class leaves a person tough right away. Even the run of the mill Lizardfolk is monstrously powerful, tougher than all but the strongest of humans back on earth, but very few lizardfolk ever succeed at progressing further after having selected a racial class despite spending ample time fighting enemies both internal and external.

Surprisingly, there are Lizardfolk that do progress beyond the normal racial classes, after much hardship either progressing to a stronger racial class, or eventually managing to pick up one of the same sorts of classes that a human might get: Warrior or Barbarian for instance. These exceptional Lizardfolk are few and far between, and those that do progress beyond the racial classes are usually veterans of many battles, but their existence at all is a clear statement that the racial classes provide an immediate power boost at the expense of long term development, but do not represent an actual racial limitation, rather it is a class based limitation and by choosing the racial class you gain immediate strength but will likely never see personal growth again.

Regardless, the shamans noticed that while my physical strength was rather laughable, I was wiser and smarter than my peers, so they did something irregular. Not unheard of, just irregular. They tried to get me to pick up the shaman class by having me spend some time around each of the shamans in the tribe. I didn’t get a class. Or, more accurately, I received the prompt letting me know that the class would be selectable, but I ignored it at that time, much like I’d previously chosen to avoid the lizardfolk warrior class when I received that notification.

The shaman class was tempting, and so was the druid class which was offered after spending a month learning about magic from our high shaman, Fork. But "Lizardfolk Shaman" tells me that it was a racial class. As much as I wanted to be able to use magic, I didn't want to cripple my future potential. Mental Voice Me provided me a warning, he said that I needed to be careful with my class selection. I’m not entirely sure about the druid class, it might be a regular human style class and thus imbued with extensive potential, but by this time I’d learned that the humans were able to use other types of spell casting classes, and considering everything else that I knew about the differences between human and lizardfolk classes, I felt that a human style class sounded a bit more appropriate for me than being able to talk to animals and turn into a squirrel.

Don't get me wrong, Forks bear form is pretty intimidating I guess, but I’ve seen our chieftain shred a 7 meter alligator with nothing but his claws, so I’m less impressed by the size and strength of a brown bear than I could be. So instead, I studied the magics our shamans wielded as best as I could without developing the ability to use it, and I greedily devoured every piece of lore they could provide, every shred of information about the world around me, the geography, the races, the cultures, the classes, I learned every language they knew, practiced every skill they were willing to demonstrate, and generally soaked up as much information as a bunch of xenophobic half lizards could throw my way. It wasn't as much as I'd like, but it's a pretty staggering pool of knowledge for a backwards swamp village.

Oh, right. I should probably explicitly mention that gaining superhuman levels of strength and ability aren’t as special as I would’ve thought if I didn’t have any world context. Even discounting the more fantastical stories and leaving it to the immediately observable, the strength levels here are on a completely different scale compared to what I was used to back on earth. Even among our racial warrior class members, meaning the majority of my race, individuals can shatter a small tree with a fierce blow.

And so, returning to the shaman and druid classes, although the things I saw them do and which I consequently knew I could learn by accepting their class would be powerful, much more powerful than what I considered a warrior to be capable of, I also learned the state of the lizardfolk. Lizardfolk are in a constant state of retreat. Not literally that we’re in a perpetual march of death, but rather other, more capable races have driven the lizardfolk out of the grasslands, the mountains, the deserts, and basically everywhere except the swamps… Where we are also losing territory, in bursts, over time. Just not as quickly as in other areas because we’re better at swimming than many of the other sentient races, and probably even more significantly, because they don't view the land as desirable.

Why are we losing? Well aside from our abysmal technological development, which I think is honestly a big part of the lizardfolk’s poor performance, and aside from the classes we choose being inherently short sighted and foolish choices, there’s also a culture of “might makes right”, with the shamans only being allowed to serve in an advisory capacity while the strongest lizards are the ones that actually run the show.

Ultimately the chief is the strongest warrior in the tribe, and taking his place is as simple as challenging the current chief in public and defeating them in a straight up 1v1 battle which, for that position at least, will usually end with either the incumbent or the challenger dead. Usually with the loser’s body to serve as the central dish of an impromptu feast held later that night. And finally, there is the matter of natural talent. That one is a bit of a doozy.