I sat there.
A slime.
On a cave floor.
Unable to close my eyes, unable to pinch the bridge of a nose I did not have, unable to do anything except vibrate slightly with the sheer, overwhelming absurdity of what had just happened.
What the fuck did I just —
The thought could not even finish itself.
I needed to see.
I needed to see what I was.
My sensory awareness gave me a general picture — small, round, gelatinous, a bluish translucent blob — but I needed confirmation.
I needed to look at myself the way a person looks in a mirror, with eyes and distance and the objective clarity of reflection.
I moved.
My body — my slime body — could move by contracting and extending, shifting mass from one side to the other in a rolling, oozing motion that felt deeply unnatural but was, I had to admit, surprisingly efficient.
I rolled across the cavern floor, navigating around scattered debris and crystal formations, heading toward a shallow pool of water that my sensory perception had identified near the eastern wall of the chamber.
The pool was small.
Groundwater, seeping through the limestone, collected in a natural depression in the rock.
Still.
Clear.
Reflective.
I looked.
A slime stared back at me.
Round.
Blue.
Translucent.
About the size of a dinner plate, maybe eight inches across, with a faintly iridescent surface that caught the crystal-light and scattered it in tiny rainbows across the water’s surface.
No eyes.
No mouth.
No features of any kind.
Just a quivering blob of sentient jelly.
I blinked.
I did not have eyelids, but I blinked.
Some reflex from my previous life, some ingrained muscular memory that had no muscles to work with, manifested as a brief contraction of my entire surface, a ripple that traveled through my body like a shudder.
Overwhelmed.
That was the word.
Not scared, not panicking — overwhelmed.
The sheer volume of information, the impossibility of the situation, the cognitive load of existing as a completely different form of life — it pressed down on my consciousness like a physical weight, and for a long, quiet moment, I simply sat by the water and did nothing.
Then, because I was still me, and because I had never been good at sitting and doing nothing:
“Raphael.”
「Yes, Host.」
“What abilities do I have?”
「Listing current abilities:」
「1.
Fluid Adaptation — Host body may alter viscosity and surface tension at will.」
「2.
Bio-absorption — Host body may absorb and replicate organic compounds through direct contact.」
「3.
Sensory Mimicry — Host body may detect and replicate biological stimuli patterns.」
「4.
Pleasure Response Integration — Host body may generate and transmit biochemical pleasure signals through contact with organic tissue.」
「5.
Synthesis — Host body may extract, combine, and process memories, biological data, and magical information from absorbed materials.」
「6.
Fluid Storage — Host body contains an internal pocket dimension for storage of liquids and dissolved materials.」
「7.
Dissolution — Host body may break down organic matter on contact when desired.」
「8.
Reproductive Simulation — Host body may mimic biological functions of absorbed organic templates, including reproductive and pleasure responses.」
I stared at the list.
Each entry appeared in my consciousness like text projected onto an invisible screen, clean and clinical and utterly, devastatingly absurd.
Reproductive Simulation.
Pleasure Response Integration.
Bio-absorption with memory synthesis.
I could — the system was telling me I could absorb memories.
From organic contact.
From biological fluids.
From —
A sound interrupted my spiral.
Low.
Deep.
Resonant.
A vibration that traveled through the stone floor, up through my body, and rattled my consciousness like a pebble in a tin cup.
Not a roar — not this time.
Something quieter.
A rumble.
A snore.
The sound of something vast and ancient and scaled breathing in its sleep, the exhalation pushing air through the cavern with the force of a slow wind.
The Storm Dragon.
I turned my sensory awareness toward the ice wall.
Toward the golden eyes that I knew were there, half-seen through the frozen barrier.
The dragon was asleep — or something close to sleep, a dormant state behind the first broken seal, aware enough to have roared but quiescent enough to settle.
Two more seals, I thought.
Two more layers between that dragon and the outside world.
Then I looked at the abilities again.
Really looked at them.
Not with the knee-jerk horror of a man who had just been reborn inside a woman’s body, but with the analytical part of my mind, the part that had written stories about this world, that had spent hours theorizing about skill interactions and evolution pathways on internet forums.
Reproductive Simulation meant I could mimic biological functions.
Pleasure Response Integration meant I could generate and transmit pleasure.
Bio-absorption meant I could extract memories from organic contact.
Synthesis meant I could combine and process those memories.
In plain terms: I could fuck women, absorb their memories through the contact, and synthesize that information into usable data.
I would have laughed if I had a mouth.
Instead, my body wobbled — a gelatinous, rippling shudder that was the slime equivalent of a bitter, incredulous chuckle.
Of course.
Of course the system had decided to make me a sex slime.
Of course it had.
Because the universe had a sense of humor, and that sense of humor was filthy.
I turned my attention back to the woman.
See — because I already knew her name, I had written her name, I had created this character and described her and given her a backstory and a death and a purpose — lay on the cavern floor, exactly where she had collapsed.
Her dissolution had not stopped.
The gray translucency was spreading, the skin on her arms and legs now almost fully transparent, the outlines of bone and muscle visible like shadows beneath fogged glass.
Her breathing was shallow.
Irregular.
Fading.
「Warning: The organic female is approaching critical condition.
Estimated time until complete dissolution: 18 hours.
Immediate intervention required to prevent death.」
“Damn it.”
I moved.
Fast.
Faster than I expected a slime could move — my Fluid Adaptation allowing me to shift my viscosity, becoming less gelatinous and more fluid, streaming across the cavern floor like a living current of blue jelly.
I hit the cavern entrance at speed and poured through the narrow passage, emerging into the tunnel system beyond.
The forest.
I needed herbs.
Healing materials.
The Jura Forest was supposed to be rich in magical flora — plants with regenerative properties, mosses that could knit flesh, fungi that neutralized poison.
I knew this.
I had written about this.
I had spent paragraphs describing the ecosystem of the Jura Forest in my fanfiction, drawing from the light novel’s lore, and now that knowledge was the only thing standing between See and complete dissolution.
The tunnel opened onto the forest.
Night had fallen — or was falling, the sky above the canopy a deep bruise of indigo and fading orange, the last light of dusk filtering through the ancient trees like gold through stained glass.
The air hit me — clean, cold, alive with magicules, thick with the scent of wet earth and pine and the distant musk of large animals.
I began to search.
One hour.
That was how long it took.
One hour of rolling through the undergrowth, my sensory perception scanning every plant, every root, every patch of moss, cross-referencing what I found against the knowledge I carried from my previous life.
I found what I needed — clumps of regenerative moss growing on the north side of fallen logs, a cluster of neutralizing fungi near a stream bed, leaves from a healing tree that I recognized from the light novel’s descriptions — but the process was slow.
Laborious.
Tedious.
And nothing — absolutely nothing — like how it was portrayed in the source material.