With the sun rising in the background, the faint sound of waves crashing on rocks reached my ears.

A sound that is basically background music for any and all creatures living in coastal areas, but for me, it felt like I just heard a symphony played by hands of the goddess of music herself.

Like a rusty machine, my body stiffened as I mechanically turned to face its source.

Freaking finally… Thank fucking D, I’ve made it to land!!

You! Yes, you stupid crab over there! Take back that contemptuous expression if you don’t wanna end up as my dinner tonight! I already have a score to settle with your kind!

I know it seems like I’m being overdramatic right now, but trust me, I’m actually downplaying just how excited I am right now.

Truthfully, the number of times I almost gave up during this grueling journey is downright insane when you take my ridiculous willpower into consideration, and I’m not exaggerating here.

Being the overly eager for revenge fishie that I am, I made the mistake of slaughtering the first two water dragons I came across right after I returned to the living area.

The result? Well, whoever’s behind those bastards was alerted, and then the dragons stopped roaming individually and went around in groups instead, with at least one ancient dragon in each squad.

And why would he do that, you ask? That’s because every seasoned warrior has that one cheat ability– with a bit of disparity of course.

Intuition. Every ancient dragon is a seasoned warrior with an insane intuition developed over the course of numerous life and death battles they went through throughout their long lives.

Even if I use Mischief and stop moving completely, those guys can roughly detect my location! It was then that I finally realized, I was fucking cheated by D– again!

Sure, the skill can allow me to escape the physical and magical detection of the gods, but there are many other detection methods I can’t even fathom!

So yeah… Unless I pair it with some non-system stealth abilities that utilize my divinity field, escaping the sight of gods and beings with higher stats is just a distant dream.

It would’ve been great if that was the end of this, right? I came out with a valuable lesson, and tens of innocent dragon lives were saved.

Anyone would definitely be satisfied with such an ideal ending, right? Wrong!

Just like a piece of gum getting stuck to the bottom of your shoes, the dragons apparently swore an oath to end my existence no matter the cost.

As a result, instead of moving in a straight line in the direction where land supposedly is, I was forced to participate in a nearly month long gruesome game of hide and seek.

To make things worse, I’m the only one in the hiding team while the seeker team consists of pretty much every single dragon that can move unabated in an ocean environment.

Personally, I think lightning dragons were the worst, they fared better than even water dragons.

Those fuckers don’t even need to aim, they just kept on throwing lightning strikes in my general direction, turning my surroundings into a cheap version of an extraterrestrial invasion movie.

My Status Condition Resistance skill eventually evolved due to the ridiculous amount of time I was paralyzed by them.

… Definitely not an experience I ever want to repeat again.

The only reason it appears like I’m okay right now is because I’m underwater, otherwise you’d most likely see a rain of joyful tears streaming down my cheeks.

 

Mentally sealing away those traumatic memories, I violently flicked my tail as I sped up towards the source of the sound like an eagle swooping down on its prey.

Actually, I could just teleport there since it is already in my sphere’s range, but I opted not to.

I even went ahead and turned off my sphere alongside most of my system skills instead.

Call me sentimental or just purely silly, I wanna embrace the first time I go on land in this new world with whatever remains of my original Earth self.

Going ahead, I’ll probably be saying goodbye to the… humane mask I’ve been donning for years now.

It’s not like I was deceiving the people around me, I just didn’t feel like going through the trouble of being a social outcast.

A part of me is still human after all. It’s impossible for me to be totally unperturbed by outside factors like D was when she lived as Wakaba Hiiro.

Pretty sure my family and close friends already have some clues about my real self anyways.

I mean, it’s quite obvious if you think about how I had no qualms about beating half a dozen grown men to the point where they were half dead without any signs of mental trauma afterwards.

Molestors or not, modern humans have quite the fickle mentality when it comes to hurting others for some reason.

I’ve seen people develop serious trauma over what I see as very insignificant incidents.

But who am I to judge? Except for that time when I was almost kidnapped as a child, I never experienced anything close to what a trauma is.

And even that became irrelevant as soon as I confirmed that I’m already strong enough to protect myself.

Going forward, I might be hailed as the greatest uncrowned hero or the most vicious and feared demon king depending on my actions.

Though in reality, I’ll only be fulfilling my desires without a care for such trivial titles.

 

Leaving all that aside… Now that I think about it, if Wakaba was D all along, then who is Kumoko…? Is she even real?!

Her existence obviously has something to do with D considering how she’s basically her identical twin in appearance, but I know nothing past that.

I would ask D about it, but the chances of actually getting an answer are lower than that of me becoming a few seconds later.

Yup, literally impossible unless a third party interferes.

Halting my thoughts, I change directions once more, this time towards the water surface.

I rapidly ascend for a few seconds, my body soon breaking through a particularly high wave with a grand artistic splash.

Dramatically raising an arm in a celebratory gesture, a wide grin made its way onto my face as greedily taking in the view of the first piece of dry land I came upon in this new world.

However, just as I was about to follow up and let out an anime-like triumphant laughter while declaring myself the new Christopher Columbus, my body froze at what I saw.

A cliff. A towering cliff with no fucking end in sight.

Suddenly, all positive emotions were drained from my body, and some not so good ones immediately replaced them.

 

{Proficiency has reached the required level. Skill [Anger LV 9] has become [Anger LV 10].}

{Condition Satisfied. Skill [Anger LV 10] has evolved into skill [Rage LV 1].}

 

I’m not exactly sure how long it took, but by the time I stopped throwing curses at just about every single object/creature that ever caused me any minor inconvenience, the sun was already half below the ocean.

Uhhh… It seems that my mental fatigue is way higher than I thought it was. Guess it’s only natural after fleeing for my life for such a long time…

With that in mind, I made a snap decision to take a good break before actually leaving the waters.

Thankfully, I’m not facing any time constraint problems anymore. 

My contract with Sariel is already in effect, and I've been accessing the system database and analyzing Oka’s Student Roster for a few days now.

There’s not much I can do before that’s done.

I’ve already achieved half of my initial goals. D’s true identity turned out to be Wakaba and I already know where Katia’s supposed to be born.

Unfortunately, locating Aiko and Segawa on my own is very unrealistic, so I’m focusing my efforts on cracking Oka’s skill.

Diving underwater once more, I swam towards that abhorrent cliff, then used Burrow to dig myself a temporary shelter.

Now you might be wondering, why did I get angry at a mere cliff anyways?

My answer is that I’m not actually mad at the stupid rock itself, I’m mad at what it represents!

What I’ve been oh so desperately craving and putting in much painstaking efforts to get is just out of hands reach! 

Even if it can’t be considered an actual obstacle per se, it just inspires an incredibly irksome feeling in me, y’know?

While I do have numerous useful skills and abilities, I unfortunately still lack a means of flight.

My Telekinesis skill might have already evolved, but its MP consumption is just ridiculous at this point. It’s simply impossible to use it as a stable pseudo-flight skill.

So, I’ve decided to give up and just teleport up there after I rest for a bit. Who cares about emotional scenes anyways?

Nestling inside my makeshift dwelling, I entered a state of meditative sleep as I went over the last noteworthy incident that occurred in the dead zone.

 

After enveloping the entirety of the Kratinz ruins in a Dimensional Barrier, I was about to start preparing a Long-Range Teleport spell, but then I noticed a tiny problem.

The reason why I chose this specific barrier spell is due to a few particularly handy functions it has.

For example, 24/7 monitoring of the designated area and the ability to slightly alter the world permissions inside.

Those permissions include stuff like allowed magic, magical environmental conditions, etc… The specifics depend on the caster though, It doesn’t actually make you omnipotent in its range.

Disabling teleportation is a staple of course. Having a high level Dimensional Magic skill is a must if you wanna cast the barrier after all.

I’m getting side tracked here… Anyways, I noticed a problem when I was trying out the monitoring function.

There was a large void under the city square. It instantly realized that it’s probably the area where The Living Rose is.

Frankly, only a divine being or someone lacking a brain would attempt to teleport right into the residence of an unconscious gods’ will aggregation.

As such, it would’ve been fine if I just left it alone, but my OCD had to act up.

Or was it my OCD…? I don’t know, might be D messing around behind the scenes.

Anyways, the control freak inside just couldn’t stomach the void in the monitoring, leading me to waste a few more hours trying to include the rose in my barrier to no avail.

For some reason, the rose made it its life goal to foil all of my attempts. I soon got fed up with it and pumped my entire MP bar into a barrier in a final attempt to overcome its defense mechanism.

And surprisingly, it worked! It was like I broke through a limiter of sorts, and my MP started crazily leaking out of my body and getting input into the magic construction.

I had to use Satiation directly on my Spatial Storage, devouring pretty much the rest of my stock before the barrier finally stabilized.

That got me three more levels in the Demon Lord skill which was quite confusing actually.

But that was cleared up when I stopped thinking of the rose as a divine being and more of an item.

Honestly, this world is fucked. Even if Kumoko and I team up to fix it, we’d only be delaying its inevitable collapse by a few centuries at most.

However, if I throw the rose into some star in a dead system along with a few MA energy batteries a few times, I can eventually collect enough to fully replenish the planet’s stock.

So, I basically just seized this planet’s only lifeline without actually having any plans to use it for any such purposes.

Definitely something a demon lord would do. So, I acquired a stable source of proficiency for the Demon Lord skill by accident more or less…

Hey! That’s great, actually! Totally what I was aiming for from the very start!

Honest to D! Wahahaha~

For real though, I’m glad there was actually a silver lining to this stupid hide and seek game I was forced to participate in…

Well, I most likely won’t be returning to the ocean unless I need a quick boost in strength or decide to go for my next evolution.

Which is great, to be honest. Fooling around in the ocean would be quite stupid considering the solid number of dragons I killed while being chased. I'm a five star wanted criminal down there.

The stronger I become the scarier the ocean becomes for some reason...

I haven’t felt this relaxed in a long time, huh? The only urgent problem left is to come up with a cool name for my new persona.

Drawing lines between each different chapter of my life is one of the few tricks I came up with to deal with the emotional loss that comes with longevity.

Said line could be a clothing style change, developing speech tic, becoming a fish, or getting a new name… Anything’s fine as long as it’s a prominent change in my daily life.

Letting out a sigh of relief, I casually transfer the entirety of my mental processing power into cracking Oka’s skill as I willingly enter a state of deep sleep.

Next up gonna be a whole new chapter of my adventure, and I'd like to be in top shape for it! 

 

---