Fluid covered his body as he floated around, covered in a strange golden liquid. Finally, his eye snapped open, and he realized in horror that he only had one, less than a centimeter long. Blood was filling up the cavern his egg floated in. Hundreds of thousands of leeches around him floated in their eggs, barely moving while he swam around. He barely knew up from down as he swam around in a circle while blood seeped in and heard a banging sound.

Apparently, his ADD hadn’t gone away from something as simple as a stray thought arrested his sudden pacing. He would have smiled if he had anything more than a sucker on his front and back end. But, instead, he curved his body in the approximation of one. He was alive and had a system like in anime and movies. To think his truck had been his truck-kun all along. Even his cheating bitch of an ex-wife had underestimated him. All he had to do was find somewhere secluded and train, and he would get back at her.

He slowed down and got back on task. Silas was a lot of things like a procrastinator, a Walmart employee, and a few years divorced. While all those things were necessary, he also didn’t like confined spaces, with a few exceptions. It was time to be born.

Silas swam in a circle before ramming into the side of his egg and bouncing off.

His plan was clearly foolproof, but his execution had much to be desired. His gills sucked up some fluid around him, and he felt good. So he opened his sucker and drank some. It was more than good it was like cheesecake mix, but it hit the stomach like a salad.

He saw that the other eggs were full of the stuff and wanted it. All he had to do was get out, and he could get far away from this egg sac before whatever was banging on his progenitor got inside. Silas sucked up all the stuff he could and felt good. There was no more golden stuff in his egg

Level Up

Silas lvl2

2 Stat points

He needed to contemplate many things before adding his stat points, but before he knew it, they were dumped into Strength. His impulse control had seen better days; if he wanted to eat more gold stuff, he needed the Strength to break into their eggs.

He meant to get out of this situation; he needed the Strength to break out of his eggshell and escape.

After adding two whole points into Strength, bringing it from 5 to seven, nearly a 50% increase, Silas looked at his skills. He hadn’t heard about thresholds in most games, but they seemed easy enough to get through. Unfortunately, his skills weren’t enough, and he felt hungry enough to swallow a lot of gold stuff.

He flexed his spinless body into a smile, then swam over twice as fast as he had before. The reincarnated leech didn’t know if it was an energy boost from the food or more Strength alone, but when he rammed the side of his egg, he felt something give. He pressed his body into the tiny weakness in his egg and pressed hard.

Minutes moved by, and he looked at his screen while he worked his body like a hand drill, slowly but inevitably opening up a hole in his eggshell. Finally, with a wet tear, he fell through and landed on the eggshell of another leech. This one wasn’t moving, and its golden fluid-filled egg looked delicious. The little leech lifted itself up and turned to where his own egg had been to see the ruined remains. When he looked back at his egg, he wasn’t so sure anymore.

Yes, he could get into it, but if he did, it would burst, and he would lose all the precious golden liquid. So there wasn’t a point to trying. But, of course, thinking and going along with it were two different things. He had another idea as he stared at the egg. Before, he had used his body to ram the egg, but he had another tool.

Silas opened his mouth and sucked on the soft mucous eggshell of his possibly dead brother/sister. Leeches were hermaphrodites, so he was officially bisexual. Well, not really, but he did feel the eggshell of his sibling crack. Good, delicious golden nectar flowed through his proboscis, the tube he had instead of a tongue, and his body shivered. After he pulled away, his dead sibling fell, and he looked around with his lone eye.

There was no level up, but Silas didn’t expect one. Another bang echoed through the corpse; he was still very much trapped within, and he made his way to the egg of another of his dead siblings. Silas felt his sucker attached to it and felt when he leveled up.

Level Up

Silas lvl3

+2 Stat Points

Constitution 7

It felt like his body doubled in toughness, and hundreds of thousands of eggs were still filled with the golden stuff. Most of his siblings hadn’t bothered to move after ma died. Then he saw the silver of a blade cut an opening through his mother’s carcass and knew it was time to go.

He had a plan made up on the spot, but it was a plan all the same. Blood had already filled the cavern, and the second that blade was removed, blood would flow out of the body. So Silas dropped himself into the blood at the bottom of the pool and waited.

You have fallen into a pool of the dead and gained the Affliction

Curse Of Inherited Vengeance – After bathing in your mother's blood, you will stop at nothing to slay the adventurers who slew her.

 Unlike his sister’s girlfriend’s brother, Silas was never possessed. But as the will of his angry dead mother invaded Silas’s mind, he could relate. It felt like someone had taken a hatchet to his mind, cut out where he stored his desire for revenge and rewrote it before jamming it back in.

The silver blade was pulled back, and with the cursed blood, he flowed out while his eye saw his siblings hatch in unison. As he followed the blood to the brackish swamp water where large fish swam around the feet of an adventurer, he wasn’t feeling safe. The second his eyes locked on the pants of the adventurer, he swam down toward the man’s boot to see no way to breach it. For a long, dangerous moment, his mind scrambled to find a way to inflict some damage while his siblings splashed into the water to freedom.

When he finally convinced the curse of inherited vengeance that he couldn’t meet out its wrath, his eye widened as a 25lbs catfish opened its mouth and sucked him in.