Before I knew it, a thunderous growl reverberated through the air and onto my soft metallic skin. I angled myself to receive the retraction from the object beyond the dancing leaves and stoic wood. There, I perceived an enormous entity the size of the biggest historical man-made airship.
A ginormous pale serpent with talons on every spine-looking part of its fins decided to take a normal walk on the literal sky.
Numerous hard-shelled creatures, both big and small, could be seen taking refuge on the hardened scales on the bottom of the air-slithering titans, with many more outlandish avians hanging around the creature to feed on those closely-attached organisms. A full blown ecosystem! Heck, I won't be surprised if those birds even built a nest on top of that island-sized legless-lizard.
The fact that I could zoom in on the details of the light refracted to my body, no matter how faint it was, is absolutely mind-boggling. It was like a superpower or some sort compared to the feeble body of my former humanoid form.
Yet whoever sent me here to this world didn't even bother to give me a 'System'!
Like, I knew that not all fantasy gods and deities looked closely to the trending storytelling literature on the market, but it was still outrageous of them to not pry on one! To me, atleast!
Am I being unreasonable? Maybe! But wouldn't you be disappointed if you kept-on hearing about how good this certain latest high-tech gadget was from your friends only to find out that they could barely function properly when you bought it?
Although, now that I mention it, I barely met with any sort of gods or supreme being who was supposed to be the middleman to these reincarnation stuff. Granted, I did see those spectacularly eldritch-horror sights, but one couldn't really count them as gods and the likes.
Maybe there were no gods, and the real reincarnation just happened randomly or systematically from time to time.
And it's not like I'm a religious person as well.
Though, that's that and this is this. Who would have thought that I would be dying at my ripe age of twenty?
But still, it felt really lonely to know that there was nobody giving any mission or expectation to me like those protagonists in the isekai novels I read. I partially removed my memory on the transmigration genre because it painfully reminded me that I'm still systemless.
The unrelenting disappointment aside, I decided to take a casual stroll on this forest, all while trying to get used to the head-bopping, hip-thrusting, self-swinging motion to control this body of condensed yogurt.
"Blorboblob!!'
Gah! It was also hard to navigate things because I didn't know which one was my back and front from this orb's point of view! A gigantic senile tree stood still in front of me, and I still crashed into it because of how wack my sense of vision was!
And I didn't even choose to live like this... It was as if Stockholm syndrome had a sequel!
To cleanse my mind of negative and demeriting thoughts, I had this method I often practiced when life felt incredibly hard to live through.
It was called 'Productive Spite'.
The concept was, to just let all of your dwelling negative emotions be simplified into a single issue with a cause, and then blame the world you lived in to be the very source of this amalgamation of issues that you possessed.
Channel your anger! Sneer cheekily upfront! And direct all of your spite to the world so much so that the thoughts of overcoming all of that would be like the greatest revenge one could accomplish to later spit back on this cruel and uncaring world!
The key to accomplishing your goals and achieving things in life is to first acknowledge and embrace the fact that there would be pain and obstacles trying to hinder you in your path!
Courage is not an absence of fear, but a mastery of fear! To gaze back into the abyss and maintain an uncomfortable eye-contact with it, that's what humanity must strive upon!
Systemless? I'll deal with that later! It's not procrastination if you had already thought of numerous solutions in your head! Well, it's still technically procrastination, but at least it was a better one!
With that comfortable mindset, I went for a casual P.W.
A 'Productive Walk'.
After all, knowing your surroundings and environment is the first key to survival.
Time went silently ticking in my head as I lurched myself constantly across the soil and grass of this forest. With it, so did the passing of time in this world.
"Wlarb, tlrow, thrwew. Wlarb, tlrow, trhrew."
Counting the amount of time had passed, it should be around the proximity of 240 minutes to 320 minutes, depending on whether the counting in my head was faster or slower than a real passing of time.
While I had consistently counted up to 18,256 seconds—which was around 24,320 heartbeats of human's equivalent; I still had less trust in myself due to my lax nature as the majority of my life was accompanied by a smartphone near me all the time.
The result of the P.W wasn't as satisfactory, but progress had been made.
As in that 4 to 5 hours, I had already covered and familiarized around 20 kilometers of ground in an expanding, spiral path from where I originally arrived to this world. That was around 219 football fields, mind you!
Fortunately, that amount of pumping and hopping around was enough to increase my mobility proficiency to a passable level.
I can even do a sick flip.
Aside from the amount of wonders and creatures that I found in this uncannily big forest, which I would talk about very much later—this body was surprisingly resilient!
At one time I thought I would dissolve underwater like a powdered sport drink so I avoided bodies of water as much as I can, in which, my peculiar mind became so obsessed with it to the point that I began to haggle myself on what it would feels like to commit a cannonball on the river near me as a sentient living greyish slime.
Intrusive thoughts won over as my last two brain cells decided to fight for third place. And so, after disrupting the river ecosystem, now I know that I literally have the property of malleable steel with the jiggle physics of a sentient gelatin.
It might be late to realize that, but my current state of form heavily reminded me of that one popular mob type in JRPG.
There was this farmable type of monster called the Metal Slime.
It was a normal video game mook that shows up regularly in large numbers, exhibits suicidal overconfidence, goes down in a sword strike or four, gives a little experience, and drops items that are shop fodder, better off sold, or subject to the in-game's antidote effect…
On the other side of the trope spectrum, a Metal Slime is everything but normal, an uncommon monster with an uncommon reward that's uncommonly difficult to obtain from the monster before the battle ends. It also often appears at a very uncommon rate.
Though, assuming it's not of the "strip it bare before it dies" variant, there are many ways a Metal Slime can be difficult to kill.
For example, if the game has a mechanic where the mob is able to escape, it may be a feat to take action against it at all! It could also have high defenses, such as a 98% chance to dodge attacks, or defense power so high it reduces all your attacks to 'scratch damage'!
Heh, this type of 'annoyingly hard to kill' Metal Slime could as well give an insurmountable amount of experience to those who killed it—which attracts its own pack of speedrunners and power leveler.
If I was in for a god's sick joke, I really hope that I'm the latter type of Metal Slime where this jello-body of mine would be invulnerable to most type of damage. Even with the debuff of being targeted for the experience value—if such a system exists in this world—it's still a better chance of survival!
On another note, this slime-tastic form was also brimming with bottomless amounts of stamina! 4 hours of almost nonstop ego-jogging, yet I haven't broken a single sweat!
Well, not that I could sweat in the first place.
Within that long jog, I had also been practicing my thought-to-speech skill like a toddler cramming their night for a sudden oral exam.
It still needs a tough work as this body didn't possess a vocal cord or some sort––
Rather, this body grinds and moves the internal structure like a metal-grinder turned instrument, where I need the correct amount of movements to create a certain type of sound.
Yes, on the first glance, this place might look like a fine fantasy world but things still work by certain logical principles instead of magic being the explanation for everything.
Personally, a good concept for a fantasy genre for sure, but a realistically worse type of world to dwell in if you only want the vibe and jazz of living in one…
I still wondered whether that magic exists in this world, though.
Indeed, I really went unga-bunga with my nerding despite not much having been confirmed yet.
Outside of my enthusiastic info-dump, I still need to find out what fuel this body takes as quickly as possible, as I couldn't really put my fate on the personal assumption that this body purely runs by converting oxygen into nuclear fusion energy.
I tried eating grass, but I didn't really know how to consume them to begin with. So instead of feasting, it looked as if I'm thrashing around the forest for absolutely no reason.
I also tried to soak in the river. There wasn't any noticeable change so I got out of the bath a minute-after, before the water current kidnapped me into the deeper stream.
Maybe I recharged my energy with sunlight? If that was the case, won't I be significantly weaker now that the world of the yellow afternoon took over the sky?
But before I could experiment even further, something had been blocking my path from exploring the orange-hued forest even further, something that I managed to hide away from for a short while during my early jogging session.
It was a dark-green rabbit with the same body size as me. Unlike the earth-animal it took reference to, this beast had four hind legs for walking on their longer bottom part, supporting the front upright posture of a torso, which would make them some type of a dwarven-size centaur if there was one.
Both of their clawed hands were barely touching the ground and were bigger than their four legs combined, hanging menacingly from their small shoulders.
Red glowing eyes and sharp fangs were bared. Hints of flames and determination to hunt were noticeable in their eyes.
As for me? I'm scared shitless.
Not because of the rabbit, but because I still didn't know what type of Metal Slime I am!!