Chapter 3: Where in the Hell am I?
I-I was reincarnated as a what now?
A mud octopus?
Like, an Octopus-octopus?
The ones with 8 tentacles that happen to appear in not so family friendly Japanese comics?
That octopus?
This is a joke right?
This has to be a joke!
I wanted to be a human, or a dragon, or a snake, or something that I'm at least familiar with, but the I got reborn as something with no bones instead?!
That explains my skills too! I had a bad feeling when I saw that I had a skill called
But if I was just born then why is my
That doesn't make any sense... unless... Did I ink in my egg?
Oh my god!
The place that I just came from had to have been my egg because the system says I was just born, and if my
This is so embarrassing! I feel like I'm a kid who wet the bed again except for the fact that there isn't any parent to clean it up!
Wait, then is that what the taste was from? No wonder the darkness was so repulsive! I was tasting my own ink!
Oh I'm seriously happy that there's no one around to see this.
System! You better never tell ANYONE, about this understood?
I thought that the system would answer me but it went quiet again. I guess that it won't reply to that but its fine, I'm fine, I'm just happy that I'm out of that egg.
Speaking of getting out of the egg, I should probably find out where the hell I am.
How do I activate my skills? Hell, how am I supposed to swim?
I again realized that I am no longer in the body of a human male with 2 arms and 2 legs but rather am now an octopus with 8 tentacles and a beak mouth on my ass!
The good news is that I've got control over one tentacle as it was the one that I used to break out of my egg.
The bad news is that I've still got 7 other limbs to wrangle under my control, and lemme tell you, I do NOT want a wandering tentacle that I can't control ANYWHERE near me.
Looking down at my tentacles I can see how they all curl around each other, and when one comes into contact with another, I can feel my own suckers on my skin.
Ewwwwwwww!
I know that this is technically my own arm but I still don't want tentacles roaming all over me!
I don't care if I'm not a human anymore, I still have my dignity!
As I look down at my own body the most notable thing about me is that I'm just a brown octopus, which probably explains the "mud" aspect of my species.
Do I get anything special with this?
An attack? An ability? Anything?
Maybe slightly cooler tentacles?
Nope. Nothing that I can see. It's fine. I'm not mad. Definitely not unfair.
I still can't see anything around me though.
At first I thought it was just dark, but now I'm also realizing that it's probably attributed to my ink that was in my egg.
Alright!
So if I leave this ink cloud, not only will I be able to see, but I also won't have to taste this horrible crap anymore!
Seriously it tastes like rotten eggs combined with pilk, and its embarrassing dammit!
It also doesn't help how I can kind of taste it from my tentacles. I'm still note used to my arms having their own unique palate.
I slowly begin to try to move my body, of course I think that the easiest way for me to figure out my new body is to just take what I've already learned from my one tentacle and apply it to the other 7 but its still hard.
Whenever I try to move other tentacles they curl around each other crazily, especially if I ever try to flex them.
I kind of scrunch up into an octopus ball and I'll be the first one to say that I am still not used to being covered in my own tentacles.
How do octopuses swim again?
Don't they kind of grab onto stuff and move themselves like that?
Wait no, maybe they of propel themselves with their tentacles instead of swimming?
Or is that a squid?
I don't know dammit!
Screw this! I'm not your normal octopus and I'm probably not going to swim like your normal octopus!
I'm special goddammit!
After struggling for a few minutes so far I can only really say that I've gotten 4 out of 8 of my tentacles under my control but to be fair I wouldn't really even describe it like that.
I feel like I've got 1 tentacle for fine movements and the other three I can just make them move in a direction I want.
But still! this is enough!
I also discover that I actually can mainly move through tubes on the side of my head.
I think they were called siphons if I remember correctly?
I sorta suck water in with them and then propel myself in a direction I want through the funnels.
Of course I'm not used to having these on the side of my head, nor using them so I still "walk" like a newborn gazelle.
I slowly, and awkwardly propel myself away from the original cloud of ink and voila!
I see... blue,, black, orange, and little bit of green. Is this a wall?
Wait, of course! This is a nest!
I obviously wasn't born into a random place with absolutely no protection, my unseen and probably not present octo-parents probably hid me somewhere safe!
SO... using my ingenious deduction skills, I am probably in a cave!
An underwater cave to be exact, it seems like this octopus is the same as the ones I was familiar with in that sense.
One thing I will say that I like about being an octopus is my vision!
I think I read somewhere that octopus are technically colorblind but I can tell you for a fact that I'm not!
In fact I think my field of view is bigger, to the extend that I think that I can still see some of the ink blob behind me!
AND, behind that I can also see some, rocks? Plants?
I'm not exactly sure what they are but there are a bunch of orange little blobs that are in the peripherals of my vision.
Using my 4 semi-functional tentacles and new funnels, I rotate myself 180 degrees and am staring past my ink blob to the orange bits behind it.
Low and behold, I know that they are! They're eggs! Octopus eggs... Crap.
I guess that makes sense for octopi to lay a bunch of eggs like this, but It never really reached my mind in this situation.
I was more concerned about moving my body and getting out of the ink cloud but, yeah... there are easily hundreds of them, no scratch that, thousands, maybe even tens of thousands I probably can't see them all.
There's also definitely some underneath others, but it looks like I was lucky enough that my egg was on the outside of the nest so I could get right out.
It also looks like I was the first one to actually get out. Thank god for that.
I don't know if I would have been able to mentally handle being covered in baby octopi.
Actually, would they even be friendly?
Would I have been attacked from the get go?
Is this like a battle royal once we all hatch we battle to the death and the victors consume the losers?
My skin funnily enough turned a little bit white as I imagined this as I realized that maybe I should try to get out of here before all of these eggs hatch.
As I looked around the room, or cave rather, I saw that it was fairly big. It makes sense though, the momma octopus would've had to fit in here and lay all these eggs.
But, typical unlucky me, happens to have been hatched on the opposite side of the cave from what I imagine is the entrance.
After all its the only big hole that I can see in the cave so I begin propelling myself towards the roof of the cave and the towards the hole.
I decide to go to the roof first because in the off chance that the other octopi start to hatch, I don't want to be anywhere near them, thus making the roof the best choice because its the most empty place in the entire cave.
As I squirmed my body limbo-dancing towards the exit I suddenly felt chills go up my non-existent spine.
Are they h-hatching? Already? I stutter as I begin going towards the exit with renewed vigor and turn away from the eggs.
Nope. I was wrong. I don't think I'm panicking because of the eggs, rather I would say it more so due to the snake that is staring at all the eggs from the cave entrance at the moment.
You've gotta be shitting me...