I Reincarnated into a Single-celled Organism! - Chapter 258

As my consciousness returned, so did my senses. I began to feel heat. There was a smell of salt, fish, and something floral like wildflowers. My eyelids felt heavy, but as soon as my brain started to work, so did my Parallel Processing. I began to fix the things that were wrong with my body. My consciousness didn’t reside in my brain, but in every cell of my body. Perhaps that was the only reason I was still alive. Yet, even with a trillion different places to hide my consciousness, I was still rendered unconscious. It was like every cell of my body had been twisted and damaged, a full-body apoptosis that nearly wiped me out. This was done by an energy I neither understood nor expected.

Yet, once I was able to access my skills, I was able to begin the repairs instantly. It only took a brief period before I opened up my eyes. I was lying in a simple bed under a coarse, woolen blanket. The ceiling above me was made with weathered wooden planks, and the only light came in front of a nearby window with curtains that blew in the cool breeze. I glanced down to see a young girl with sun-kissed hair tied back in pigtails. She couldn’t have been much older than sixteen.

She had a bowl of liquid in her hand and a wet washcloth in the other. She seemed to be leaning over me, staring down at my body intently while gripping the wet cloth in her hand. Her cheeks were slightly red, but then her eyes flickered to mine, and she realized I was watching her.

“Ahhh!” she cried out, causing her to spill the bowl of water down her dress. “Y-y-y-you’re awake!”

I tried to respond, but my throat was still dry and unusable. The words came out as a rasping cough. I had intended to be reassuring, but she seemed to have taken my words for something else, as she looked between her wet body and my body, currently naked from the waist up, and then began to shake her head.

“I-I was just cleaning you! I was cleaning!” She looked like she was about to cry.

I opened my mouth again, but before I could say anything, my stomach growled. It wasn’t because I was hungry, but because I was in the process of fixing my body, and my digestive system had just kicked back on. However, she seemed to latch onto that immediately.

“You must be starving! I’ll go get food!” She stammered, racing out of the room like she was being chased.

As soon as she was out of the room, I stopped paying her any mind and started focusing on myself. I was also trying to remember how I had even ended up in this situation in the first place.

I remembered fighting Dr. Mengele. I defeated him, and at the same time, the underground realm collapsed as a result. It had mostly been held open by the mycelium, and once it had taken a critical amount of damage, the realm and everything in it were destroyed. That portal within the lake would disappear, and no one would ever be able to visit that realm again. I didn’t feel bad about it, though, as the antecedent beast was a catastrophe waiting to happen and needed to be wiped out.

As for my own well-being, I hadn’t been worried. I assumed I could just dig myself to the surface. This was something Dr. Mengele had implied was possible, but perhaps that was just one more trap he had planted. It was a clever ploy he used to exploit my ignorance, and the result was that I nearly died. When the space collapsed, I came to realize it wasn’t located underground, but within a pocket realm similar to Schrodinger’s Box. Its collapse caused me to be tossed out into a chaotic space outside of this reality.

This place was similar to the spatial storm that came into the antecedent’s castle in Schrödinger’s box. It caused extreme and constant damage, threatening to tear apart and destroy my body. Thankfully, I was at a higher level and had some experience, so I was able to protect myself and heal. However, with no reference point, movement became meaningless.

Although people often think in terms of standing still or moving, the truth is that all movement is relative. You may feel like you’re sitting still, but you’re sitting on the surface of a planet spinning, causing you to travel a bit less than the circumference of the planet every twenty-four hours. Then, you’re traveling the orbit the Earth takes around the sun once a year. The sun travels around the galaxy, and even that galaxy is spreading at the speed at which the universe expands.

Back in the old days, European explorers took to the seas on wooden ships, but once they left the coastline, they experienced a problem. Out in the open ocean, there was no land in sight. Every direction looked the same, and so one had no way to orient oneself. They depended on heavenly bodies, the moon, sun, and stars, to guide their way. This was fundamentally why constellations were created: to help give a point of reference for the sailors to know what direction they were heading.

Yet, for me, it was even worse. I couldn’t even tell if I was moving. I could will myself in a certain direction, but there was nothing around me to indicate that I was making progress. Furthermore, I had no clue if I was getting closer to the world or further away.

This space had also left me disconnected from any other parts of my body. I couldn’t feel the direction needed to reunite. I didn’t want to commit suicide because I had no confidence that my consciousness would be brought to another part of my body. In the end, I cut my body into sixteen pieces, and then had each piece go a different direction. This was further weakened me, but it gave me a point of reference for movement in myself.

Yet, even then, my bodies grew too far away from each other to where I lost my senses again, and I was starting to lose all hope when one of my bodies discovered a crack. I raced toward it and took an incredible amount of damage in the process. However, I seemed to breach into this world. As for the rest of my bodies, they are seemingly lost to the void, but at least a piece of me survived. I had made it to a world and awoke in this coastal village.

I was just about done fixing my body and fully waking up when the girl returned with a small wooden bowl in her hand. This time, it was steaming hot and smelled of fish. She carefully placed the bowl by my bedside.

“Please, eat.” She looked at me. “You have been unconscious since my father fished you out of the endless sea yesterday.”

“The… endless sea?” I was trying to get my bearings, but I did not remember this name.

“Mm!” She nodded. “My father is the village’s best fisherman! Only he was skilled enough to sail those treacherous waters. There are even dangerous sage beasts out there, but he’s managed to fight them off.”

She seemed to be both proud and worried about her father. As for me, I felt a bite of relief over her using the familiar word sage beast.

“And… where are we located?” I asked, sitting up in bed and pretending to eat her soup.

“Our village is called Saltbend.”

“The region?”

“Ah, I know that!” She suddenly closed her eyes like she was thinking for a moment. “Silverwood… It’s the Silverwood region.”

I frowned. Silverwood was not the name of any of the regions I was familiar with in the Audra Lightning Province. However, that wasn’t too abnormal. The provinces were allegedly extremely large, each one run by someone at the behest of the Lord. As for whoever ruled over the lords, that was a level I hadn’t encountered in Arcford. Perhaps I’d need to go to the capital before I learned about them.

“Do you know what province this is?” I asked gently.

She tilted her head. “What’s a province?”

I blinked and then shook my head. “Sorry, it’s nothing.”

Perhaps it was too much to hope that a mortal could even be aware of the provinces. It wasn’t uncommon for those who hadn’t evolved to remain in a very small area their entire lives, rarely venturing from home. Wait, was I starting to think like a paragon? It was no wonder that they looked down on mortals who must live simplistic lives in their eyes.

I decided not to ask this girl any more questions. I would just investigate using my own senses for a bit. She seemed to be waiting for me, so I quickly scarfed down the fish soup. I realized that after eating sage beasts was different than eating normal animals. After enjoying sage beast, all normal meat had a murky, unfulfilling taste. When I finished, I was going to ask for the way outside, but before I could do that, there was a sudden shout.

There seemed to be some kind of commotion going on outside.