My eyes snapped open.
My suddenly awakened consciousness decided I needed to gather as much information as possible, so I looked around with my newly opened eyes. I did my best to understand the current situation, but my head wouldn’t move the way I wanted. As a result, I couldn’t really learn much, but I was at least able to grasp some essential things. Unfortunately, it seemed this reincarnation thing wasn’t a drunken dream. Well, I’d suspected as much. Any faint hope I’d had was now dashed.
I seemed to be inside a cave. Its rough, rocky surface showed no signs of human alteration, indicating it was probably formed naturally. The feel of the dirty, ragged cloth that covered me like a blanket was horrible. It was scratchy, lumpy, and frankly disgusting. The pungent smell was enough to make me want to hold my nose. The sensation of dirt against my back was also uncomfortable and irritating, and small stones painfully dug into my skin.
Honestly, all of that was trivial. What really mattered was that I was surrounded by numerous ugly little creatures with green skin, pointed ears, and beaklike noses, all snoring loudly and wearing only small rags. From what I could see, there were about thirty of them, with roughly twenty of them the size of human babies. Based on their appearance, I concluded that these small beings were goblins.
Now I was even more certain I had been reincarnated yesterday.
When I moved my hand and held it up, I saw a small, green-skinned arm like those of the goblins around me, with sharp, black claws extending from my five thin fingers. Clearly, I was no longer human. First of all, my arm looked like that, and second of all, I was surrounded by a group of goblins. If I were human, they would have attacked me, but that definitely wasn’t happening. On the contrary, I actually felt like I was being protected. This was irrefutable proof of what I had become.
It seemed I started as an ordinary human, evolved into an ESP user, was further upgraded to an Augmented man through surgery, and had now been downgraded to a less-than-human goblin.
I cried a little, genuinely.
The reason I couldn’t move as I wanted was probably because I was newly born. In other words, I was now a baby goblin. So today, like any other goblin infant, I spent the day sleeping. To clarify, this was definitely not an attempt to escape reality.