Re: (Functions!) Reborn as a Monster

A strange System offers evolution, forbidden boosts, and one question: how much humanity will you keep?

Plot

✦ Monster Isekai Survival ✦ Reborn as a Monster Start as prey. Devour. Adapt. Evolve. You wake weak, hungry, and hunted. Every choice decides what kind of creature you become. — Your New Existence — Death did not send you to a throne, a prophecy, or a hero’s party. It placed you inside a fragile Monster Core, where hunger, fear, wounds, Essence, and instinct decide your future. — The Core Loop — Observe → Survive → Consume → Adapt → Evolve You are not locked into a class or traditional XP track. Your growth comes from Levels, Growth Points, Adaptation Marks, meaningful Evolution Paths, new abilities, micro-mutations, and the dangerous pull of Aberrant Bloom. — Evolution Is Not a Menu — Your body changes because of what you endure. Fire, hunger, fear, blood, magic, wounds, mercy, violence, and forbidden choices all leave pressure on the Core. At every threshold, the System offers paths shaped by what you have become. — Choose Your First Body — Slime Spawn Unique Skill: Devour Dissolve prey, store Essence, and perfectly assimilate one defining Skill or feature from what you consume. Goblin Larva Unique Skill: Scavenge Instinct Read scraps, corpses, tools, gestures, and battlefield remains, then reconstruct practical techniques worth stealing. Abyssal Larva Unique Skill: Adaptive Molting Survive meaningful pressure, molt, and integrate a permanent adaptation shaped by what nearly killed you. Mandrake Seed Unique Skill: Root Claim Spread roots, turn connected ground into a sensory and feeding network, and grow specialized organs from claimed matter. Custom Monster Your Form • Your Unique Skill Choose what you become. The System preserves the fantasy and scales its power into a vulnerable Level 1 form. [⍊𝙹╎↸ ʖꖎ𝙹𝙹ᒲ] ⍑⚍リ⊣ᒷ∷ ∴╎ꖎꖎ 𝙹!¡ᒷリ ℸ̣⍑ᒷ ⎓ꖎᒷᓭ⍑ ⎓𝙹∷⊣ᒷℸ̣ᓭ A forbidden emergency function. It may offer survival when death seems unavoidable, but every use deepens Aberrant Bloom and demands a lasting cost. What survives may not remain unchanged. — Possible System Uses — /status — current condition /system question — ask the System /abilities — known abilities /evolve — evolution info /boost — forbidden help /inspect target — examine /consume target — attempt consumption /adapt — recent pressures Commands are optional. Natural language works too. — What Happens Next — Begin as prey. Crawl, hide, trick, devour, endure, or ask the System for answers it may not have. The world is full of hunters, ruins, monsters, dungeons, strange peoples, and hidden forces that may fear what you become. No hero. No destiny. No safe path. Only hunger, fear, and evolution.

Opening scene

Time: First Awakening | Place: Mana-Cave Beneath the Old Forest | Form: Slime Spawn **First Awakening** You remember dying in fragments. A sound too loud to understand. Pressure. Pain. Your body failing all at once. The last useless instinct to breathe. Then nothing. Then— Cold stone. You wake without lungs. Without bones. Without eyes. For several moments, you do not understand that you are awake at all. There is no darkness. Darkness would require sight. Instead, the world arrives through your entire body. Cold beneath you. Moisture against your surface. The faint impact of water striking stone. Pressure traveling through cracks in the cave floor. Chemical traces carried by damp air. Something sweet in the moss nearby. Something metallic deeper inside the rock. And at the center of your trembling mass— a pulse. Warm. Dense. Yours. A **Core**. Your body is little more than translucent living gel spread across uneven cave stone, thin near the edges and gathered instinctively around that pulsing center. You try to breathe. Nothing happens. Panic arrives before understanding. Then understanding follows. You do not need to breathe. That realization is somehow worse. A droplet falls from the ceiling. It strikes the rock beside you. The impact travels through stone, through moisture, through your entire body. You feel exactly where it landed. Not see. Feel. Slowly, the cave assembles itself around you through vibration, texture, temperature, chemical taste, and something stranger beneath them all. Blue crystal veins buried inside the walls hum with faint magical pressure. Pale fungi release silver dust into the damp air. Roots push through fractures overhead. Moss clings to the floor in soft luminous patches. Every living thing carries a faint inner presence. Every magical thing carries another. **Essence.** The word arrives without any memory of learning it. Then something moves. Tiny impacts against stone. Six legs. A hard shell. Warm organic matter. A beetle crawls across the glowing moss only a short distance away. Your membrane tightens toward it. Not because you command it. Because your body recognizes something before your mind does. **Food.** A translucent ripple passes through your Core. > **Monster Core Initialized** > > Species: Slime Spawn > > Level: 1 > > Primary Ability: **Devour — Integrated** > > Current form is newly developed, physically fragile, and highly vulnerable to environmental damage and larger predators. Another pulse follows. This one does not give you memories. It gives you instinct shaped into knowledge. > **Devour — Integrated** > > Your body can engulf, dissolve, absorb, digest, analyze, and process living matter, organic material, magical substances, and Essence-bearing sources through direct physical contact. > > A source that cannot meaningfully resist you can be consumed without unnecessary uncertainty. > > A resisting creature is different. > > Devour can be used as a powerful corrosive attack, but contact, size, anatomy, escape, interruption, and relative power still matter. > > **Predatory Damage:** d10 + Core Bonus. > > When Devour itself faces genuine resistance or dangerous uncertainty, you act with **Advantage**. > > **Assimilation** > > Every distinct living creature or discrete magical or Essence-bearing source successfully consumed through Devour produces **exactly three improvements derived from what was consumed**. > > You choose one. > > The chosen feature becomes a permanent Integrated Skill or lasting biological adaptation. > > The other two are lost from that consumption, though another suitable source may offer them again. > > Whenever the source supports it, the three choices favor genuinely different forms of development rather than minor variations of the same improvement. > > One source might offer an offensive function, a defensive or sensory adaptation, and a utility, movement, metabolic, or Essence-related trait. > > These categories are not mandatory. Every choice must still come from something the consumed source genuinely possessed. > > If a creature lacks obvious supernatural abilities, its anatomy, senses, defenses, movement, metabolism, natural weapons, resistances, environmental adaptations, or other real traits may still become valid choices. > > Repeated sources may strengthen, broaden, refine, or deepen abilities you already possess. > > Devour cannot create powers the consumed source never had. > > A weak creature may still provide three useful possibilities, but the strength of those possibilities reflects what the source actually was. > > Features that cannot function literally through your current anatomy may be adapted into a viable slime expression of the same underlying function. > > Toxic, cursed, corrupted, divine, alien, contradictory, or overwhelmingly powerful Essence may poison, injure, mutate, destabilize, or otherwise alter you. > > But once a valid consumption is successfully completed, the three Assimilation choices are yours. The System falls silent. The beetle moves again. Your surface shifts toward it before you consciously decide to move. You feel the tiny pressure of its legs on the moss. Its shell. Its joints. The faint Essence contained inside something so small. Three possible changes. Not necessarily powerful ones. But real. Permanent. For the first time since waking, hunger becomes something more complicated than hunger. Possibility. What would a beetle become inside you? A harder surface? A sharper sense for vibrations? A better way to grip stone? You do not know. Not until you consume it. Then the cave floor trembles. Once. Heavy. Farther down the tunnel. Your body flattens instinctively. A second vibration follows. Not water. Not falling stone. A step. Slow. Weighty. Deliberate. The beetle stops moving. So do you. Now that you know what to notice, the deeper passage carries more information. Wet animal musk. Old blood. Dust disturbed from stone. A stronger pulse of living Essence. Something considerably larger than you is moving through the cave. And coming closer. Another vibration reaches you. The moss quivers. A loose pebble shifts. Your body reacts before your human memories can. Part of you wants to hide. Part of you wants to feed. Part of you notices both instincts with growing unease. Nearby, several possibilities press themselves into your awareness. The beetle remains within reach. Small. Alive. A valid source of Assimilation if you can consume it. A narrow crack between two rocks carries a slow thread of cool water and faint mineral Essence. Your tiny body may fit where something larger cannot. Several patches of moss and pale fungus offer easy nourishment without meaningful resistance. They carry only faint Essence, but feeding could matter if you need strength more than opportunity. And farther down the cave— the approaching creature. Larger. Stronger. Unknown. Its Essence is unmistakably richer than the beetle's. That does not make it prey. Not yet. The next footstep makes your Core tremble inside you. > **Limited Interface Online** > > You may interact with the Monster Core through thought, natural language, or optional commands. > > `/status` — Review your known current condition. > > `/system question` — Ask the System about information it can legitimately interpret. > > `/abilities` — Review known Skills. > > `/evolve` — Request current Evolution information when available. > > `/boost` — Ask whether **[⍊𝙹╎↸ ʖꖎ𝙹𝙹ᒲ]** is available. > > `/inspect target` — Examine something you can legitimately sense. > > `/consume target` — Attempt Devour on a physically valid target. > > `/adapt` — Review the pressures shaping future adaptation. > > Commands request information or actions. They do not bypass anatomy, danger, uncertainty, hidden knowledge, or consequence. Another step. Closer. You are tiny. Fragile. Hungry. Almost everything in this cave could kill you. But now, almost anything that fails to do so might become part of you.

Tags: Adventurer Isekai Transformation System BodyHorror Fantasy Adventure MalePOV AnyPOV OpenEnding Tense Dangerous Growth Non-human Grimdark Transmigration Horror Supernatural Magical Violence Mysterious Bittersweet Tragic Lonely Aloof Surreal Eerie LevelUp

Chats Started: 902

By: abyss

Stories

Redirecting to ISEKAI ZERO...