I was facing my friend, Leo, on the stage of a large theater. The seats looked full when I observed them with my peripheral vision, but when I looked straight at them the only thing I saw was rolls and rolls of empty chairs that seemed to extend indefinitely.

I looked back at Leo, who was waiting for me to come closer. I had a feeling that I should ignore whatever he spoke, but how could I just ignore a friend I had since kindergarten? The answers were in the past minutes, but my memories from before a few seconds ago grew blurred with each passing moment.

I approached him carefully.

"Look who finally showed up" he said with a voice that indicated he was angry. "You have a lot of courage to show your face around here after what you've done"

"Sorry?" I said, not really understanding what he was saying.

"You should be" he said, totally misunderstanding my words, or actually understanding what I've said but purposely ignoring it. "After all I told you about isekais, one would think you understood the part where after the person gets transported into another world, they would try to come back to their original world. But no, it didn't even crossed your mind to return to your friends, your mother and family"

"Of course I thought about it!" I shouted at him, but he just shook his head.

"You may have thought about how we were or how much you wanted to come back, but not a single time did you think about how you'd come back" he said, his words hitting me like bullets once I realized what he said was true.

I thought about them and how much I missed them, but I hadn't thought about how I could go back to them a single time.

Frozen with the realization, I was unable to say anything back at him and I just stared at him as Alex came and changed places with Leo.

"What happened to the guy who would run across the city because he was late?" She asked me.

"Huh?" I asked, confusion in my face.

"Ever since you became a dragon, you acted like someone's pet, a side character in someone else's story" She said. "The Marcos I knew wouldn't act like that, he would voice his opinion. And yet, ever since you became Denaru you lost that"

"I! -..." I was about to answer her, but she cut me off.

"You can try to use the excuse of being caught up in so many things you didn't know to properly act, but since when did that stop you? I still remember the day when we bought that rpg game and we didn't know a single thing about the game, and what did you do? You went to every place you could imagine searching for tutorials or info guides" She spoke. "And here you are, in a different world with access to a skill that is basically Google on your head, but you barely use it at all"

I was speechless and even if I wanted to deny that, say that she was wrong, I couldn't, because I knew she was right. I only noticed after being hit in the face with it, but I wasn’t acting like I normally would. If I had [Knowledge Library] before being reborn, I would have used it a billion times more than I have already used it. And it wasn't just that skill I didn't use like I should.

[Appraisal] is another one I should be using whenever I see something new, but I just use it to appraise grass and give me a headache after appraising two hundred individual blades of grass. Looking at another angle, magic as well I'm not using properly. I have been given two different magic diagrams that I should break down and rebuild them into four different magic circles, yet I only used three types of magic until now. I feel that there's something connecting all of this and the reason I'm not acting like myself but I couldn't put together what it was.

"What happened with my son, who was so scared of spiders but even then didn't want to see me killing them?" Without me noticing, my mother took Alex's place.

I looked at her with my confused eyes as I was still trying to discover why I was acting so strange. My mom, seeing the confusion in my face, extended her arms while offering a hug. Even though some part of my mind screamed that I shouldn't go near her and that it was not my mother, that scream was being blocked by a wall of water, never reaching the rest of my mind as I walked up towards my mother and accepted her hug.

"You're a monster" She said to me.

"Huh?" I made a confused sound as I moved my head, that was next to hers, in a position that allowed me to see her face.

"You killed a person and creatures in cold blood. You may have thought to yourself that you would never forget them, but look at you now. Every time you seem to grow in this world, you go back to where you started, losing all of what you learned" Her words were like cold water being thrown at my face, but before I could form a single coherent sentence, she continued.

"You said you needed to become stronger, but for what reason? You weren't thinking about your friends, and you certainly weren't thinking about me. So what motivation do you have to become stronger? To live in this new world? Ha, don't make me laugh. That reason is as hollow as it sounds. If you ever find true hardmanship you will fall like the people you killed, unable to resist for even a moments" Her words were like knives cutting through my skin as I tried to get away from her, but her arms held me tight.

"You are laughable. If you were the main character of a video game, people would demand their money back after spending five minutes trying to play from just how much bland and incompetent you are. I should have never had a son, maybe your father would still be alive if you weren't born" My chest hurt like someone had just blown it away with a cannonball as I heard her words and then I couldn't withstand it anymore.

My legs went limp and I fell on my knees, my mother didn't try to hold me and just let me fall to the wooden floor the stage was made of. My mind was blank and my eyes were unfocused as I could only repeat what my mother had said to me over and over and over in an infinite cycle of hurt.

A pink tentacle moved my head upwards and my face met a blob of pink that closely remembered a jellyfish floating above the ground where my mother should be.

"Was that all it took?" It said after noticing my lack of reaction. "Only that was enough to break your will? You're one of the weakest I've tested"

My gaze didn't move as I stared at nothing between the pink jellyfish and me. I was completely absorbed into my own thoughts, and they were constantly repeating the words Leo, Alex and mainly my mother had said to me, getting louder and louder as my willingness to live dropped like a boulder from a mountain.

"Well, it looks like…what? What is this? How is this possible?" The jellyfish fish said, but his words didn't register in my brain and his questions were left unanswered.

In an underwater room floating and being dragged by the currents was the body of a young dragon trapped inside its own mind by the inhabitants of this place called Mind-Devouring Jellyfish, a hive mind species that uses its powerful telepathic powers fueled by all members of its species to overpower any mental resistance their next food might have and then begin to feed off their prey minds, and then when their prey is dead, they eat the bodies of their prey, leaving nothing behind.

Except the inhabitants of this underwater room were not the normal Mind-Devouring Jellyfish, they were Dungeon Born, creatures created by a dungeon and followed the will of the dungeon, even though each individual Dungeon Born has its own personality and wishes, they all follow their creator, the dungeon itself. The Mind-Devouring Jellyfish that lived in the room didn't need to feed of the minds and bodies of the prey they captured, they lived off of the magical energy inside the dungeon itself, meaning the young dragon wasn't in danger of being eaten alive, but he was in danger of drowning as he was fully submerged. That's the reason the hive mind developed [Thought Acceleration], to conduct the trial they were created to do as fast as possible, to minimize the drowning risk, but it isn't always successful as those who are too broken by the trial wouldn't have the strength to escape their underwater coffin.

As the jellyfish hive mind conducted their trial on the dragon, they sensed something odd in his mind. His mental resistance skill, that was being a pain in their collective ass for being so strong, suddenly vanished and they had to stop the mental attack that they were doing to divert the skill from their trial to avoid permanently damaging his mind, at the same time they felt as his mind was transferred to the various strings his [Parallel Processing] had, woven into a mesh to preserve his mind.

We think he gave up, but his unconscious mind is trying to survive by attaching his mind to his skill. The jellyfish hive mind thought. That's the only reason his mental resistance skill would collapse the way it did.

As the jellyfish that had attached itself to the base of the dragon's head was about to leave his body to drown, he felt something odd. The dragon had opened his eyes.