Chapter Text
It wasn't a bad life, nor was it a particularly good one. If I had to describe it honestly, I would say it was simply a life—thirty-seven years of it, lived in a way that was stable enough to avoid disaster and ordinary enough to leave almost no trace behind. I had a steady job, a small apartment, a routine I could manage without much effort, no serious debts hanging over my head, and no grand dreams waiting to be fulfilled. In other words, I had reached the age where a person stops expecting miracles and starts measuring success by how uneventful the day was.
I had learned long ago that happiness didn't arrive the way it did in movies. There was no dramatic soundtrack to announce the moment you found meaning in your life, no perfect instant when everything suddenly clicked into place and all your doubts vanished at once. Reality was far less theatrical than that. You simply kept moving forward, one day at a time. You worked, you slept, you ate, you grew older, and if you were lucky, you did all of it beside someone who made the repetition feel a little less empty.
I never got that part.
I wasn't especially ugly, and I certainly didn't think I was unpleasant to be around. But there are people who seem to have been born slightly out of sync with everyone else, as if the rhythm of their lives never quite matches the rest of the world. I had always felt like one of those people.
"Mikami-san!"
I looked up.
Tamura was hurrying toward me from across the street, waving one hand with exaggerated enthusiasm. Walking beside him was a dark-haired woman I recognized immediately.
Miho Sawatari.
Receptionist.
Popular.
Pretty.
The kind of woman who seemed to belong naturally to a completely different world from mine.
"Sorry for making you wait," Tamura said with a grin. "She insisted on coming."
"Because I wanted to greet him properly," she replied, lowering her head slightly toward me in a polite bow.
Even her voice sounded carefully gentle.
"It's nice finally meeting you officially, Mikami-san."
I gave a small nod.
"I've seen you around a few times already."
"Hm? Really?"
"Of course. Hard not to notice the person everyone talks about."
She blinked in confusion.
"They talk about me?"
"Well... you know how offices are. Rumors about dating someone from management. Rejecting half the building. Things like that."
It was meant to be a light joke, or at least I had tried to make it one. But the moment the words left my mouth, I saw her shoulders tense slightly.
Idiot.
I always did that. Said something just a little off and ruined the atmosphere without even meaning to.
Tamura let out an awkward laugh and placed a hand behind Sawatari's back.
"Come on, he's just teasing."
"Y-Yeah... I guess."
I looked away.
Even after all these years, I still didn't understand how to talk to people.
Especially women.
"Well," I said at last, trying to recover some sense of normalcy, "since you came all the way here, at least let me buy you dinner."
And then I heard the scream.
Just one.
Sharp.
Desperate.
I turned my head instinctively.
A man was running through the crowd, clutching something shiny in his hand.
A knife.
Everything happened too fast after that. People scattered out of his way. Footsteps pounded against the pavement. More screams rose up around me. Tamura froze in place, his face going pale as he stared at the man charging through the street.
Thinking after that took less than a second.
I shoved Tamura away.
Then I felt the impact.
Heat.
An unbearable heat tore through my back, so sudden and violent that for a moment my mind refused to understand what had happened.
What the hell is this? It's way too hot... Give me a break—
(Confirmed. Heat Resistance successfully acquired.)
My legs gave out before I could fully process it.
The asphalt felt cold.
Strangely cold.
...Stabbed?
Am I really going to die like this...?
(Confirmed. Piercing Resistance successfully acquired. Initiating Physical Resistance... successfully acquired.)
"Get out of my way!"
I heard the man disappear into the crowd.
Then silence.
No...
Not silence.
Panic.
Voices.
Tamura was saying something, his voice shaking so badly I could barely make out the words.
"M-Mikami-san, you're bleeding...! You won't stop bleeding!"
Ahh...
I really didn't want to hear that right now...
Damn it, this was starting to hurt...
(Confirmed. Pain Nullification successfully acquired.)
Well... shit.
The pain and panic were beginning to blur my consciousness. The heat slowly faded, replaced by an icy sensation crawling up from my limbs. The burning in my back disappeared entirely, and in its place came a freezing cold that spread through my whole body as if my blood itself were turning to ice.
That...
That's probably bad...
People die once they lose too much blood, right?
(Confirmed. Constructing bloodless body... successful.)
Ah.
I see.
So this is what it feels like.
To die...
I don't want to die.
I tried to speak.
And failed.
Shit.
I think this might really be—
The pain and heat were gone now. All that remained was cold. Freezing cold. It felt like I would turn to ice where I lay.
(Confirmed. Cold Resistance successfully acquired. Combined with previously acquired Heat Resistance. Skill has evolved into Temperature Resistance.)
At that moment, what remained of my oxygen-starved brain cells suddenly stumbled across a flash of brilliance.
OH SHIT, THE FILES ON MY HARD DRIVE!
Gathering the last strength I had left, I desperately forced out my final regret in life.
"T-Tamura...! If something happens to me... take my computer, okay? Put it in the bathtub, turn it on, and fry the whole damn hard drive for me..."
(Confirmed. Electrical data destruction cannot be executed. Additional information required. Substituting with Electrical Resistance... successfully acquired.)
It took Tamura a moment to process my request.
"I-I'll do it...! I promise...!"
Using the last bit of strength my body could still produce, I forced out one final sentence.
"Just kill my PC for me... please..."
...
...
......
It was an ordinary life.
A pretty mediocre one, honestly.
I graduated from college, got a stable job at a construction company, and with my older brother taking care of our parents, I settled comfortably into that gray routine called adulthood. There was nothing glamorous about it, nothing especially memorable, but it was stable, and stability had a way of becoming its own kind of comfort when enough years passed.
I worked.
I ate.
I slept.
And then I repeated it all over again.
I wasn't unhappy.
But I wasn't happy either.
I simply... existed.
And yet, after thirty-seven perfectly ordinary years, there was one impossible truth I couldn't ignore.
I was still a virgin.
Amazing.
Getting stabbed to death was already humiliating enough, but dying without ever having had a proper relationship felt like some kind of cosmic joke carefully designed to mock me. My poor manhood was probably crying as my consciousness faded away.
Sorry about that.
Guess I never managed to turn you into a proper adult.
If reincarnation really exists...
Then next time, I'll live differently.
I'll be more aggressive. More decisive. I'll stop standing at a distance and actually chase after the things I want.
Not necessarily by stabbing people, obviously, but you get the idea.
(Confirmed. Unique Skill "Predator" successfully acquired.)
...Huh?
The voice echoed inside my head again.
Cold.
Artificial.
Emotionless.
And honestly, it was starting to annoy me a little.
I mean, there I was, dangerously close to turning forty without ever touching a woman. At that rate, I probably would have ended up as some enlightened hermit living in the mountains.
A celibate sage.
The Great Sage of Abstinence.
(Confirmed. Extra Skill "Sage" successfully acquired.)
...Very funny.
(Extra Skill "Sage" has evolved into the Unique Skill "Great Sage".)
I couldn't help feeling insulted.
Who the hell was naming these skills?
"Great Sage"? Seriously?
That wasn't a unique skill. There were probably millions of guys like me in the world. I'm pretty sure the entire internet could confirm that.
If this was some kind of divine joke, it had a terrible sense of humor.
I wanted to keep complaining.
But my thoughts slowly began sinking into darkness.
And just before disappearing completely, I had one final unexpected realization.
Death...
—----------------------------------------------------------
Everything was dark, but no, dark wasn't really the right word for it. Darkness still implied the absence of light, some faint possibility that if enough time passed or enough eyes adjusted, shapes might eventually emerge from the black. This was something far more complete than that, something deeper and more absolute, as if the very concept of sight had been erased from existence and taken the rest of the world with it.
It was almost funny.
If someone had asked me to explain nothingness, this was probably what I would have described. Some clumsy, half-forgotten definition from the depths of the internet, the kind of thing you might find buried in a corner of Wikipedia no one had visited in years: "Nothingness is the absence of perception, matter, and existence." Yeah. That sounded about right. And somehow, for reasons I still didn't understand, that absurdly stupid thought was enough to drag my mind back into motion.
My name was Satoru Mikami. I was thirty-seven years old, an office worker, single, and, professionally speaking, an unfortunate virgin. And after shoving my coworker out of the path of a knife-wielding maniac, I had ended up getting stabbed like some irrelevant extra in a crime drama.
Alright.
I remembered all of that clearly, which meant I was still conscious. And if I was still conscious, then I was probably still alive.
...Probably.
There was no reason to panic yet. Panic had never really been my thing anyway. The last time I had completely lost my composure was back in elementary school, when I became convinced an earthquake was going to destroy the building and ended up wetting my pants. Just a little, but still enough to leave a lasting impression.
I tried opening my eyes.
Nothing happened.
...Huh?
I tried again, harder this time, but there was still nothing. A faint chill ran through me, and I immediately tried to calm myself down. Maybe I was sedated. Maybe I was in a hospital. Maybe I had gone through surgery and was still under anesthesia. That would make sense, right?
Instinctively, I tried rubbing my eyes, only to realize my arms weren't moving at all. The chill deepened.
Wait.
I tried moving my right hand.
Nothing.
My left.
Nothing.
My legs.
Nothing.
A heavy silence settled over me, and with it came a very unpleasant realization.
...Where the hell were my limbs?
No, wait.
More importantly—
Where was my head?
Woah.
Woah, woah, woah.
This was getting seriously terrifying.
Calm down. Calm down. Inhale... exhale... inhale... exha—
...
I couldn't breathe.
Panic slammed into me so suddenly that my thoughts nearly scattered. What the hell do you mean I can't breathe? I desperately tried inhaling again, but nothing entered. I tried exhaling, but nothing came out. There was no air, no lungs, not even the sensation of suffocating. Just... nothing.
And somehow, that was worse.
Much worse.
Because my body wasn't even reacting like it was dying.
Trying not to completely lose my mind, I mentally checked my physical condition. Maybe I was paralyzed. Maybe I was hooked up to machines. Maybe—
No pain.
Not even a single ache.
No cold. No heat. No pressure. Nothing.
Only a strangely uniform sensation surrounding my entire body.
...No.
"Body" wasn't really the right word either.
But it felt...
good.
Ridiculously good.
Like floating weightlessly in warm water, with no muscle tension, no exhaustion, and no discomfort weighing me down. Pure comfort. For a second, I almost forgot the terror. Then I remembered I still didn't have arms, or legs, or a face.
Ah, right.
Shit.
I tried moving again.
Nothing.
The anxiety came rushing back immediately.
I'm not in a coma... right?
No.
This felt way too strange to be a coma.
What if my nervous system had been destroyed? What if I was simply trapped inside my own consciousness? What if this was all there was? Endless darkness, no movement, no speaking, no feeling, just thinking forever.
A nonexistent nausea twisted through my nonexistent stomach.
No.
No, no, no.
I don't think I could endure something like that.
And then, suddenly, I felt something brush against my body.
I froze.
Well... metaphorically.
The sensation was faint, light, almost insignificant, but after that absolute nothingness it felt like a miracle. A thin texture. Sticky. Delicate. Strangely familiar.
Spider silk...?
The realization made me absurdly happy.
Seriously.
Just moments ago I'd been trapped in total sensory emptiness, and now I could feel something again. Even if it was just some damn spiderweb, it was still contact. Still proof that something existed outside my mind.
Driven by relief, I tried moving toward it.
And then it happened.
My consciousness shifted slightly, and I felt the ground beneath me scrape against something like wet stone. I stopped immediately.
...
Huh?
...
Did I just move?
I waited a few seconds in disbelief, then tried again. Once more, I felt movement. Slow. Clumsy. Like a soft mass sliding across rock. But definitely movement.
A wave of relief hit me so hard I almost laughed.
This... this at least proved something important.
I wasn't lying in a hospital bed.
I slowly moved across the uneven ground, feeling rock, moisture, more rock, and the occasional fragment of spider silk clinging to my body as I crawled blindly through that absolute darkness. Rocks. Spiderwebs. More rocks. It was strange how desperately my mind began clinging to every tiny sensation just to avoid feeling lost. Every texture became important. Every slight change in the surface felt enormous.
And then I bumped into something different.
I stopped immediately.
The surface beneath me was smooth, not perfectly even, but far softer than the rough stone I'd been sliding across until now. I slowly moved my body over it and felt something hard beneath me, though not cold. I had expected it to be cold, but instead it emitted a faint, steady warmth, like glass that had been sitting under sunlight for hours.
Crystal...?
The sensation was strange. Irregular. Crystallized. Smooth in some places, sharp in others. I focused all my attention on it, and for the first time since waking up, I felt like I could actually perceive something beyond simple touch. Not exactly see it, but vaguely understand its shape, as if my entire body itself had become some kind of dull sensory organ.
Hmm...
I still didn't understand anything, but at least it confirmed something important.
I wasn't trapped inside a room.
I wasn't inside a medical capsule.
I was... outside.
Probably.
Or inside something enormous.
A cave, maybe.
I continued moving slowly alongside the crystal, keeping my senses focused on everything that brushed against me, though "senses" was a very generous word for whatever I possessed now. I didn't even know where my head was, or if I still had one. I couldn't smell anything either, and I wasn't even sure I possessed that sense anymore. I didn't breathe. I didn't blink. I couldn't really hear. I simply... perceived.
And the more aware I became of my current state, the more uncomfortable a certain thought floating around in the back of my mind became.
My body felt soft.
Flexible.
Fluid.
Gelatinous.
As if I wasn't made of flesh and bone anymore, but some semiliquid mass capable of deforming freely. Similar to...
No.
No, no, no.
Come on.
That would be ridiculous.
I immediately decided to ignore that possibility before suffering a premature existential crisis.
Yes.
Denial.
My favorite coping mechanism.
Instead of dwelling on it further, I focused on something else. Out of the five traditional human senses, there was still one left untested.
Taste.
Although, considering I had no idea where my mouth was, that presented certain logistical difficulties.
So...
Now what?
And then—
A voice crossed my mind.
(Use Unique Skill "Predator"?)
(Yes.)
(No.)
...
...
Huh?
My consciousness literally froze.
What the hell was that?
The voice didn't sound human. It had no tone, no emotion, no intent. It was cold and artificial, like a computer reading text directly into my brain. My first thought was that I had finally gone insane, which, honestly, seemed perfectly reasonable given the circumstances.
So those weren't hallucinations...?
Wait.
No.
That actually made things worse.
Because it meant the voice was real.
And it also meant the bizarre list of skills I had heard while dying probably hadn't been my imagination either.
(Predator)
That didn't sound particularly friendly.
I decided to choose "No."
Instantly, the voice disappeared, leaving behind absolute silence. I waited a few seconds, but nothing else happened.
...Was that it?
It wasn't going to insist?
What a polite system.
Honestly, I had expected something more like an old RPG forcing me to repeat the same answer until it accepted the main quest. Well. Good enough.
Temporarily ignoring the terrifying existence of mysterious voices inside my head, I decided to continue my little sensory experiment. I slowly moved forward until I felt something thin and fragile brushing against my body.
Grass.
Or something similar.
Instinctively, I leaned forward, letting my entire weight rest against the crystalline surface and the nearby plants. And then it happened.
The contact area began to melt, and for exactly half a second I panicked with the kind of raw, animal terror that leaves no room for thought.
AM I MELTING!?
But no. It wasn't me.
The crystal beneath my body was slowly dissolving instead, breaking apart into tiny particles that were then drawn directly into me as though my body had been waiting for them all along. The plants followed shortly after, and I could feel them disintegrate in a way that was somehow both intimate and completely alien. They broke apart, dissolved, and were absorbed into my body without leaving behind any trace of flavor, scent, or even the faintest chewing sensation. They simply ceased to exist as separate things and became part of me.
...
...
So that was how this worked?
I ate with my entire body?
The realization left me completely still.
First of all...
I'm not human anymore.
So... yeah.
That really was it.
I slowly moved my body, focusing for the first time on sensing my own shape, and a soft mass responded elastically to the motion. Boing. The sensation spread through my entire body in a strangely uniform way, as if there were no bones, muscles, or organs dividing one part of me from another. There was only gel. A lot of gel.
...
Ah.
No.
No no no.
Come on.
I tried denying reality for a few more seconds, but it was already hopeless. Even without seeing myself, I could clearly picture my own shape now.
Round.
Soft.
Ridiculously viscous.
A slime.
I had literally reincarnated as a slime.
I mean... it could've been worse, I guess. Compared to a lot of fantasy monsters, slimes were at least relatively adorable. But still.
Why me?
Out of every possible mythical, magical, or legendary creature in existence, why had I ended up as sentient jelly?
I mentally sighed.
Or I would have, if I still had lungs.
Honestly, the odds of dying from a random stabbing and then reincarnating as a monster in another world had to be astronomically low. And yet here I was, somehow living proof that absurd things could happen if the universe felt like mocking you hard enough.
....
...
......
Chew.
Chew.
Chew.
Another crystal disappeared into my body.
Why did I keep doing that?
Well... why not?
It wasn't as if I had anything better to do.
Several days had passed since I finally accepted the fact that I was now a slime, or at least I thought several days had passed. Time was difficult to measure when you were trapped in absolute darkness with no sun, no sleep, no hunger, and not even the comforting misery of exhaustion to mark the passage of hours. There was only constant movement, endless absorption, and increasingly strange thoughts drifting through my head.
Although, honestly, the crystals stopped being the most important thing pretty quickly.
Because there were spiders.
Lots of spiders.
Way too many spiders.
And not normal spiders, either.
SPIDERS.
Huge ones.
Monstrously huge.
The first time one of them brushed against my body, I nearly lost what little mental stability I still had left. That thing had legs like spears and a massive body covered in stiff hairs that vibrated faintly whenever it moved, and the sheer wrongness of its presence made every instinct I had scream at once.
And they were everywhere.
The first one tried to devour me.
Or something close to that.
I didn't even fully understand what happened. I only felt pure danger, and then I started bouncing desperately between walls and rocks until I accidentally escaped. It was humiliating, but it worked.
Thankfully, most of the monsters seemed to ignore me after that. Maybe they perceived me as just another insignificant slime. Or maybe I simply wasn't worth eating. Either way, I wasn't going to complain.
Another, far worse problem appeared shortly afterward.
Teleportation.
Sometimes, while moving across the cave floor, something beneath me would faintly glow—or at least I thought I could perceive it—and the very next instant I would appear somewhere completely different. There was no transition and no warning. One moment I was surrounded by spiderwebs and crystals, and the next I was somewhere else entirely, where the air felt different, the humidity changed, the temperature shifted, or distant sounds of monsters moving through the darkness reached me from far away.
It was absurdly disorienting.
And honestly, I was beginning to hate this place.
Meanwhile, I kept eating crystals.
Absorbing them was... strange.
I could clearly feel my body breaking them down internally, separating their components, classifying information, and storing it somewhere inside me. It was always the same process: absorb, decompose, store. Again and again, with no variation except the growing sense that something about it was deeply unnatural.
Because there was something disturbing about all of it.
I never expelled anything.
Never.
Not even once.
I didn't need to use the bathroom. I produced no waste. I returned no matter to the world. I simply continued absorbing endlessly, and yet my size didn't seem to change much either.
So...
Where the hell was all of that going?
(Received. Ingested materials are being stored within the Unique Skill "Predator." Current storage usage: less than 1%.)
...Huh?
I stopped completely.
It talked again!?
Wait.
Since when was I even using that skill? I was pretty sure I had picked "No" earlier.
(Received. The Unique Skill "Predator" has not been manually activated. Passive absorption of materials occurs automatically.)
...Ah.
Well, that was mildly terrifying.
But it was also the first real "conversation" I'd had since waking up in this place, so honestly, I didn't even care anymore.
I decided to keep asking questions.
"So... what exactly does it do?"
A brief silence followed before the answer came.
(Received. The Unique Skill "Predator" possesses the following primary functions:)
(Predation: absorbs targets into the body.)
(Analysis: studies and processes absorbed targets.)
(Stomach: stores materials within a space isolated from time.)
(Mimicry: reproduces analyzed forms and abilities.)
(Isolation: neutralizes and decomposes harmful substances.)
...
...
What the hell?
And... wait.
Who exactly was this voice answering my questions anyway?
Was someone actually there?
(Received. This is the effect of the Unique Skill "Great Sage." The skill has taken effect, allowing more immediate accessibility.)