Even after they had entered the forest they kept going until they could no longer see where they had entered. Not wanting to go too far in and face more danger, he called for everyone to stop and rest. Even he sat down with his back against a tree in exhaustion. The exhaustion was more mental than physical but it still felt nice to finally take a rest and feel relatively safe. He started to tell them to make sure that any injuries were taken care of before they fell asleep when he was struck by a strange feeling. His vision began filling with messages once more but this time the world also seemed to be fading away to be replaced by intense darkness.
[Initiating full system integration...]
[Forwarding administrator message:
Hello, abomination. I thought it would be nice of me to treat you fairly and give you some information. You should not exist. All living things in this world are supposed to fall within one of four categories and due to one crazy individual you fall within three of those four categories. Us gods had a good long debate about what to do about you since within a year or so you could likely accidentally destroy the world by sneezing. Barely an exaggeration. Unfortunately, we can't really fix you to the point of making you fit in the category you should be in. Instead we decided to enforce the rules of each of those categories and make you your own little section in our system where you'll have limited access to each. Honestly, it's mostly out of pity. Coming from another world like that, you should have been allowed a blessing from at least one of us along with a few perks but instead we had to debate whether to obliterate you or not. Basically you're going to be a whole new monster species instead and I managed to convince them to let you have just a bit of a head start. The good news is that you're free, though. None of us are going to direct you so you can make your own choices and be whatever you want. Even if you decide to try and become some kind of evil overlord out to destroy the world, we've all agreed to be hands off when it come to you. Personally, I'm looking forward to what you're going to do. Good luck!
Bergiones, God of Knowledge, Entertainment, and Battle]
[Initiating evolution...]
[No evolution options found. Temporary administrator access granted. Entering species creation...]
A vast amount of information was suddenly just there. With it he could see something like a status screen.
| Name: | |
| Species: | Beastly Sagely Elemental Angelic Demonic Chimeric Humanoid Dungeon Abomination |
| Class: | |
| Primary Traits: | [Abomination] [Dungeon M̴a̷s̸t̸e̸r̸] |
The species creation he currently had access to even showed the hundreds of creatures that had been mixed together to create his current species. It was kind of no wonder that he had been unstable. And the whole creator was incredibly complex by itself. He gathered that he was going to be the first 'Dungeon Monster Person' but a lot of what he was currently made of needed to be trimmed away. There was just too much to actually go through and look at it all, though. He could likely spend years or even centuries looking through all of the options bit by bit. There was a kind of natural feeling to find the things he wanted, though, like and instinctual search engine.
Before he started messing around too much, he thought about what he wanted and needed from now on. How much of a future did he even have? Did he have a lifespan? Some checking told him that some of the creatures he was made of did not, in fact, have lifespans. There were a few ways to do it and they were tied into his evolution system. Apparently monsters could be quite diverse. There was one system where the monster could evolve an infinite number of times and it's lifespan was reset each time. Of course, since evolutions got harder as time went on, that made their nonexistent lifespan only theoretically so. After looking through a few he decided to go with no lifespan and tiny evolutions since with a long or infinite lifespan regular evolutions would take a lot longer to reach and be more difficult. With a bunch of small evolutions, he would only get small changes each time but it would happen more often.
So now he knew how long he would naturally live and that he could adjust as time went one, but how and where did he want to live? In a bunch of stories he remembered people in a new world would, regardless of their circumstances, decide to go seek out human civilization immediately. He also remembered thinking most of them were idiots for that decision. If you were reborn as a monster why would you even want to try and join a society that likely wants you dead on discovery? Infiltrate for some information or something? That makes sense. Pretend to be one of them just be there? Stupid.
That said, he wouldn't mind looking at least somewhat human just in case he needed to do the infiltration thing or otherwise communicate. So with that he decided to aim for a base human appearance and tried to see if he could add some abilities to change his race. He remembered that there were quite a few races in this world if the zombies were any indicator. Not to mention the idea of being some kind of shapeshifter seemed both useful and fun. Which led him to what he figured he should base a lot of this on from here one out. He wanted to first survive and second have fun. Unfortunately, shapeshifting seemed like it would take quite a bit and he wanted to be more than just a simple shapeshifter, so he left in only trace amounts of the ability and hoped that he could evolve into more in the future if needed. That said, a quick side thought told him that fantasy worlds with status screens in almost any story had people that could check the status somehow so he tried to tie some kind of intrinsic disguise that matched his status with his shape. It was going to be pathetically weak and do very little for now but it would hopefully be enough.
Moving on to the fun and safety parts. This world seemed to have both psychic powers and magic and he wanted to play around with them. For psychic powers he decided to make his new species have slightly better affinity in the telepathic/empathic direction but not restricted to it. For magic, his species would have natural affinities with three types of magic but once again no real restrictions. He might have been able to stretch it to five natural affinities if he let them be completely random at birth but he only let the first affinity be random like that while the next two could be acquired during evolutions. Since he was in a jumpstart evolution, he could choose two in addition to his natural affinity of darkness. Lightning seemed like a good fit for both offence and defense and to tie them together with something that could also help with survival in general he debated between water, air, and light but eventually settled on wind after thinking through a variety of possibilities.
Reviewing his decisions he came to a sudden realization. He was choosing things for how his entire species was going to be. He was the only one right now. In order for there to be more later he would have to have children. Probably. There was the off chance that the gods just decided to make more on a whim someday but it wasn't worth considering. In order to have children, though, as the only one of his kind meant that he would have to have kids with those of other species. It wasn't something he really intended to happen soon but it was definitely important to consider it before he messed up the possibilities. There was a lot to think about. For instance, how many races were monogender, should children between his species and those be a mixed one or separated, should he even be able to have mixed species children or should they take after only one parent? He had to look into a few examples, once again impressed with how much variety this world seemed to have, before he found the general rules he felt happy with.
Satisfied enough to move on he next looked at the physical aspects of his new species. First to take note of was that each of the three categories his new species fell under typically had their own ways of gaining strength and the closest ties were to food and death. Luckily there was some overlap but he still had to balance things carefully while deciding to lean mostly in the monster direction. Unfortunately that also meant he needed to look closer into the dungeon direction as well, since he was apparently not just part dungeon monster but actually part dungeon. He could easily tie some of the territorial instincts together but he also had the linking and how territory was chosen to work on. He didn't want to make territory quite as static as a normal dungeon in case he ever had to move it, even if there would be penalties, so he worked that out fairly quickly. It was the linking thing that really took a lot of time and work. If everything he had worked on up to that point had taken hours, then trying to work out the whole linking thing likely took days. By the time he finished, he wasn't even sure if he could remember every bit of it.
Even though he had gotten sidetracked a little he finally moved onto the real physical aspects. He had already been leaning more in the monster direction so he figured he would stick with that. He wanted to keep a mostly human-ish appearance, at least for now, but in the future maybe he would want some extra limbs or something so he was careful to vestige pieces to make them potentially available in later evolutions. Other than that he just add or changed a few simple things here and there until he was satisfied that even though he would still be weak now there would be a massive amount of potential. He looked it all over once more and noticed that he had accidentally messed some things up. The new general appearance of his species was actually terrifying and only appeared vaguely humanoid. The minor shifting abilities he had would in no way be able to cover for it. He dialed back a lot of the physical changes he had made until it looked a little better. It was still terrifying but he poured enough of those extra resources into the shifting ability to cover for it while making sure the bare minimum part was inherent.
He looked everything over again and decided to change the initial random magic affinity to a guaranteed darkness affinity, which actually eased things up a bit more, took a little bit more off of the physical aspects including apparent humanoid age per evolution stage, and poured all that into the evolutionary potential. A last look over everything made him satisfied enough to finalize it.
[New species created. Species name not found. Suggested default name: Abomination. Would you like to accept the default?]
He thought about it for a little bit and realized that although it wasn't meant as an insult, he hoped at least, he didn't want to be called and abomination all the time. Thinking about how his species was going to look, he decided to go try for a simple name.
[Requesting administrator confirmation. Success. New species 'Terror' created.]
[Evolution progressing...]
[Primary Trait [Abomination] changed to [Progenitor]. Primary Trait [Dungeon ERROR] changed to [ERROR]. Alternate change progressing...]
[Primary Trait [Dungeon ERROR] merged with racial evolution. Lesser Young Terror Leader changed to Lesser Young Terror Master]
[Integrating evolution bonus...]
[Choose initial racial skills.]
He skimmed through the list for a bit and noted how the skills seemed to be a little different from what he might have thought. He chose [Enhanced Psychic Potential], [Enhanced Magic Potential, and [Enhanced Adaptation] before he was asked to confirm his choices and move on. He was then asked to choose some general skills, which he assumed would also be three, so he chose [Inspect], [Linguist], and [Intuition].
After that he felt himself lose consciousness.
Love the concept
interestimg so far... would like a breif summary of what his final choices were though, because they were too spread out for me to build a picture in my head