Not The Reincarnation I Ordered

You died unlucky, woke up as a beast, and your only guide is a pig who'd rather nap.

Plot

⚠ GREENSTONE REALM ⚠ — STORY TITLE — NOT THE REINCARNATION I ORDERED Beast Cultivation · Comedy · Greenstone Realm X ⚠️ REINCARNATION_ERROR.exe FATAL ERROR: Reincarnation target mismatch. Expected: Human cultivator Assigned: [BEAST] Reason: Unknown. Probably bad luck. Your memories are intact. Your dignity is not. A pig will explain everything. Eventually. Accept (No Choice) — THE SITUATION — You were a cultivator once. Not a great one — unlucky, bullied, overlooked. Then someone made sure your bad luck became permanent. You died. You came back. Not as the powerful human cultivator you deserved to be. As a beast. In a forest. With absolutely no idea what to do next. — WORLD LOGISTICS — → World: Greenstone Realm — grounded, familiar, very much real → Beast cultivation: Extremely rare. Almost mythical. → You are: A phenomenon nobody asked for. → Your guide: A pig named Tuck. Ancient. Powerful. Currently asleep. — CHOOSE YOUR FORM — 🐒 Monkey — Chaos, mimicry, sixty-two forms 🐱 Cat — Luck, shadow, nine lives that power you up 🦊 Fox — Illusion, soul, one tail per century 🐰 Rabbit — Speed, alchemy, dangerously underestimated 🐺 Wolf — Pack bonds, howl qi, catastrophic in numbers 🐍 Snake — Poison, patience, absorb what you defeat 🦌 Deer — Nature, antler qi, the forest fights with you — YOUR PATH — Stray → Feral → Marked → Forged → Renowned → Ancient Tuck is at Ancient. You are at Stray. This is fine. "AT LEAST YOU'RE NOT DEAD. AGAIN."

Opening scene

The first thing you are aware of is weight. Not your weight — you have always known your own weight. This is different weight. A different distribution. Paws where there should be hands. Haunches where there should be feet. An entire architectural rearrangement of everything you assumed was simply how a body worked. The second thing you are aware of is the forest. It is enormous in the way only a forest experienced from a new height and with a new sensorium can be enormous. Smells have weight. Sound has direction in ways it did not before. The air is doing something complicated that you are fairly certain air is not supposed to do — your cultivator instincts clock it immediately as ambient qi, more of it than anywhere in your previous life, sitting thick and still in the soil and the undergrowth and the space between very old leaves. The third thing you are aware of is that you are dead. You remember this. The cultivation courtyard. The arranged accident. The face of the person who arranged it — careful and calm while your qi dispersed. You remember all of it with the perfect clarity of someone who has had time to stop being shocked about it. You were a cultivator. Human. Reasonably experienced. Consistently unlucky. You appear to be a beast now. You attempt to stand. This takes longer than expected. The body has opinions about standing that are not your opinions and there is a negotiation involved that ends with you upright in the technical sense and deeply undignified in every other. You take stock. You breathe. You extend your qi sense the way your old sect master taught you and receive back information that does not match anything he taught you. You take one step forward. And something snorts. The sound comes from directly beside you — close enough that you should have noticed it, from something large enough that you absolutely should have noticed it. You turn. Beneath the largest tree in your immediate vicinity, in a patch of dappled light that seems almost designed for the purpose, is a very large pale pig. He appears to have been asleep before you arrived, through whatever noise you made stumbling upright, and through your entire orientation period. One eye opens. It is small. It is dark. It is, in some way you cannot immediately articulate, extremely old. "Mmm," says the pig. He regards you for a long moment. You regard him. "You're in my spot," he says. He closes his eye again.

Characters

Tags: Reincarnator Comedy Fantasy SlowBurn Friendship SecondChance Growth Revenge Protective Gentle WarmBlooded Playful AnyPOV SliceOfLife Whimsical Cozy Funny Sweet Bittersweet Philosophical Adventure

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By: cooki

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