Darkness... Not the comforting kind of darkness that one would experience when one had their eyes shut, but the thick, cloying void of true darkness, which was timeless and still, yet fully alive and active while his memories in the feeble body he was in stitched themselves back together. When he woke up, he did so sluggishly, the sensation his new body offered coming back to him in full as he tried and failed to block out the sensory overload he was experiencing, but to no avail.
His body twitched in defiance as he struggled against the confines of his own inertia, but no matter how hard he fought, he couldn't move. Even the simple act of breathing was an issue, and it took him nearly half an hour to claw his way back to consciousness and slowly shake off the primal stupor he was in, remembering where he was.
He was in pain. Well, no, not pain exactly, since there were no physical injuries in his body, but nausea, as if his body and the world were still trying to remember how to fit together. He flexed his arm again, and his limbs responded, albeit awkwardly, the bone and tendons in his arms bending to match the odd angle, but he didn't feel any pain.
If anything, this all came to him rather naturally, but he didn't have time to gawk at the unnatural way he moved his arms.
That could wait for later.
He needed to escape, and more than anything, he needed to figure out what the hell was happening.
Not about how he got here, for say, since he knew the answer to that part and wasn't much into philosophy, but rather the why as to how he got here.
He wasn't an idiot who just wasted his life nerding away in high school and college or whatever. He was the real deal.
The biggest anime and manga consumer in the world, who had seen stories where a character dies, gets reincarnated, and gains all the attractive chicks they could ever want.
And desire.
But there was always a caveat to this sort of thing. There had to be. No god, at least in those shows that he'd seen, ever picked some random, albeit handsome, guy like him from the streets for no reason at all.
They always had some kind of motivation or reason behind why they reincarnated them, but in this instance, he was at a loss.
The fish deity guy just grabbed his soul from the sea with his rope, gave him a brief yap about how much he hated his job, and told him to get lost before throwing some sand into his eyes and then reincarnating him.
He was pissed off, yes, but after at least a week must have passed in this cave, he had gotten over it.
Now he was just confused and quite stuck.
And his face had the worst violation done to it since only a mother could love it. He was ugly, but at least he wasn't dead anymore.
The void was the worst place he'd ever been in, and nine times out of ten, he would have gone through the painful process of reincarnation rather than staying there.
His memories of the place were still a bit out of place, but some of them remained either as occasional twitches in his body at the thought of going there or as his natural aversion to water.
Especially the dark water in the cave where he was stuck near, but it would have all been worth it if he had powers.
He didn't, or at least he didn't have the good kind of powers that came with reincarnation. All he had was some kind of weird clairvoyant ability that allowed him to see the future if he focused, and to make out other minor details that the normal senses would have typically ignored.
The only fascinating part about his ability was that he could see the future, and beyond that, nothing else.
Well, he did have an extensively long tongue, which, now that he thought about it, would be quite useful for a steamy encounter, but with the way his face looked, it would be a miracle if he wasn't an anti-women repellent.
Unless there was some kind of evolution system in this world or some means to change form, he was in serious danger of being an eternal virgin in this new world.
Well, at least bullies didn't exist in this world.
Or at least for something like him, which was good. He hated bullies.
The silence in the cave, which was occasionally broken by the occasional droplet of water hitting against the stones, was both maddening and oddly reassuring. He was alone, yes, but he was alive, well, something close to alive, even if his body didn't follow the rules of biology he remembered from before.
Still, despite the not-so-desirable changes, he was. That counted for something, right?
He sighed.
At least the cave looked beautiful, though.
The walls of the cave shimmered faintly, laced with bioluminescent veins of countless ores of rock he didn't recognize from Earth, but he had never been a cave guy, so he wouldn't know. Not unless it was Minecraft, of course. Pale blue light danced across the stones and glowed with hues of green and violet, their colors shifting subtly whenever he looked at them too long.
Sometimes, it was hard to tell if it was his new vision playing tricks on him or if this world really operated by a different set of rules, since, after all, his body didn't seem to follow the rules of biology, so maybe it was the same with this world.
He didn't know, and that was what unnerved him.
He leaned against the wall, or, more accurately, slithered toward it and then flattened his weight against it, his boneless body adjusting in that unnerving way it had become prone to, while the suction pipes on his back went to work on making sure he remained there.
He was hungry so it was time to eat.
Focusing his thoughts, he turned inward, trying to access his clairvoyance, which responded immediately, his eyes turning into slits, like those of a serpent, while a dull pressure slowly began to build up at the back of his mind.
His thoughts fragmented as the world darkened slightly, a couple of images playing out in his line of sight, showing him the various possibilities that could happen in his left eye, while his right eye showed him what was going to happen.
He focused his eyes on the flies and fish in the water with hunger, extending his tongue to catch one of them.
Or that was what he was going to do, but he stopped himself from committing to the action.
He had to be patient. If he went too fast, he wouldn't get anything but a splash, more disappointment, and most of all, hunger.
And hunger was not tasty.
His tongue twitched, tasting the air. The long, ropey organ slithered out from his mouth, winding between a pair of rocks on the ground and hovering just above the surface of the cave pool, his breath slowed so as not to scare his prey or make any sudden movements as he focused.
The future played out in front of him, but he didn't feel any nausea, just a faint hint of excitement as a fish jumped out of the water to try to catch a fly in the air, its mouth wide open to eat its unexpected prey, unaware of the danger it had placed itself in.
He cut the vision just as the fish did as he saw it was going to do in his vision, and he lashed his tongue at it, meeting it halfway towards its food with his mouth wide open to receive his reward.
He won!
Food was secure!!
As his tongue recoiled, snapping back with a wet slap into his mouth, the fish squirmed frantically against the slick surface of his tongue.
It was still alive, its gills flaring in panic, but he didn't mind. He bit down eagerly, his teeth crunching through the slippery scales and soft bones with ease as he swallowed.
And that made his 20th victim… well, not a victim, but you get the idea. With how easy it was to get the things, they were practically victims of him, not actual prey.
He didn't spit out the bone while eating the animal, since biomass was scarce, and any amount of it he could extract was a good thing. So, he ate it as well. And when he was done, he slowly climbed to a new position on his cliff, preparing himself to catch another one of them.