He could recall laying in a meadow as a child, enjoying the smells and sounds of nature mostly because of the lack of people nearby, but what he was feeling now seemed a bit different. He began musing curiously about that, but was rudely interrupted by the alarm clock going off again. *Thunk* *Thunk* *Thunk*. That was curious too though, he didn’t think that his alarm should sound like that at all, it was more of a shrieking *Buzz* *Buzz* *Buzz*. The noise continued to repeat, paused, then continued again. With a groan escaping his timbers, Xander stirred more and tried opening his eyes, but they felt welded shut.
That concerned him a little, the trickle of fear waking him even more. As his mind sharpened and he began to become aware of his surroundings, he could feel the cool earth around his roots and sense some vibrations heading towards him. Confusion mixed with his mild fear since he was somehow ‘feeling’ in every direction at once as he stood there in the forest. It wasn’t sight exactly, but he had a sense of something approaching. The oddity of the sensations in his body distracted him again, but at least the alarm had seemed to turn itself off since he could no longer hear the rhythmic noise.
When pain slammed through him low on his trunk, that fear blossomed into terror, and he awoke fully in a panic. Not only was he unable to see, but the sensations he could feel were totally alien and just plain wrong. Another jolt of agony crashed through him, even deeper this time somehow, and he tried to scream, but his mouth was just as immobile as his eyelids. Xander’s mind strained against his unmoving body, his mind trying to force himself to move so he could escape whatever was attacking him. *THUNK*. The pain intensified, and Xander willed himself to MOVE with every fiber of his being. He was rewarded by his senses splitting in two, but didn’t have the time to stop and consider the strangeness as he pushed himself out of his trunk. His eyes were finally able to open and see the world, and he came face to face with a scraggly bearded man with a mop of unruly salt and pepper hair holding an axe.
Xander’s panic ratcheted up even higher at the sight of the axe held up in preparation for another chop by what he took as a homeless man, so when a circular blue window popped into existence in front of him, his startlement caused him to shriek in terror.
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It had been a long day for Rorth as he trudged to the next oak in the forest where he was making his new home, but he figured he had enough time and energy to fell another tree or two before calling it quits. The trees here were mature and straight, neither saplings nor gnarled giants. In other words, they were the perfect trees to become the timbers of the cabin he was building for himself. He'd let the trunks sit for a few weeks to dry, strip the branches, chop them up, and then finally drag them to where he was making his new home. His thoughts travelled the well worn grooves of his tasks in his mind as he approached the next tree.
Hefting his trusty axe, he expertly sized up the trunk, looking at the very slight angle it was leaning at compared to the gently sloping ground, quickly determining which side to begin chopping so that it wouldn’t crush him when it fell. Moving into position, he swung with smooth power, the experience of a lifetime guiding his unhurried strike. The axe bit into the tree, but not nearly as far as it should have even for the hardwood of an oak. That was okay, sometimes there was a hidden burl that was tougher to get through. He pulled his axe back and swung again, the solid hit causing the tree to shudder slightly. The resistance was still more than he would have expected, but he was making progress. His third chop caused the tree to shudder again, but this time as he lifted his axe to continue his rhythm the bark in front of him rippled unnaturally, causing him to freeze.
The mottled brown bark bulged outwards, a green woman’s face and voluptuous body starting to emerge. Shock kept him unmoving as her eyes opened and she froze at the sight of him. A long moment passed, both of them seeming unable to cope with the developing situation. Axes are heavy though, and his arms tensed under the weight, hands gripping the haft. Her eyes flicked to the blade at the subtle movement before she opened her mouth and screamed. “Holy fuckkk!!” Rorth cursed, nearly jumping out of his skin at the sudden shriek. He was a survivor though, so he did what he always did. He turned and ran away as fast as his legs could take him.
No one had told him that this forest had such creatures in it! It was supposed to be a low magic area with only a few packs of dire wolves and maybe an ursa minor or two as the worst threats. It was the whole reason he had come here in the first place. All he wanted to do was live a quiet life by himself away from the cities and villages, but now he had likely pissed off a witch or a tree spirit or some such thing, and those entities often held grudges. He grimaced with fear and a touch of anger as he fled through the woods heading towards the lean-to he was currently sleeping under. He would have to pick up what little he had and leave the area, but he was sure as shit going to give the local village elder a piece of his mind about leaving out such an important detail.
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Watching the hobo flee into the woods, Xander’s panic began to fade quickly, but his confusion only grew in inverse proportion to it. The blue window hung in the air in front of him as if he were wearing one of those AR glasses that were starting to be a bit more common these days. He lifted a hand to his face to test for them, before realizing that if was wearing a pair of glasses he would be able to see the rims. His mind was still disorganized even if he was finally fully awake, and there was just too much strangeness about his current situation to process. The blue disk of the window that had startled him just hung there in his vision, unrecognizable characters spiralling around from its edges into its interior.
He blinked a bit at it, instinctively trying to make out what language the characters were from, but they didn’t look like Egyptian hieroglyphs or Japanese kanji or any other language he had ever seen. Even as he pondered though, the characters blurred for a moment before coming back into focus in regular English. What they said was its own shock.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
“Welcome to Gaellus. As you had no sponsor for your reincarnation, your species (Dryad) was randomly selected according to your Soul Affinity, and your starting perk (Memories of a Past Life) was randomly selected from the available options (371).”
As he read, the blue disk of the window slowly turned in time with his reading pace so that he didn’t have to turn his head awkwardly. The whole thing looked like a digital game system screen except for the odd shape. The words may have been in English now, but he was still having a hard time understanding what they meant. It took him a solid minute or two, but a chill went down his back when he finally accepted what they were saying. Reincarnation could only mean one thing. Memories flooded back into him when he tried to think back to what had happened. Being booted from his dorm room, walking to the art studio, and then shaking the stupid machine to try to get the snacks that his fellow student was owed.
Xander’s incredulity and anger grew, and he threw up his hands. “You’re saying I fucking died to a goddamned vending machine?” he said angrily in a high pitched feminine tone, before freezing again at the sound of his voice. “Wait, what the fuck?” he said, again in the same tone. He might not have had a deep gravelly rumble like some action star, but he certainly didn’t have the voice of a girl either. Strange sensations and feelings started nagging at him again, and he looked down at himself with dawning horror. His skin wasn’t pale white anymore, but a light almost minty green. Long grass green hair tumbled down his shoulders and over the mounds of his breasts, falling as far as his curvy hips where they were fused into the tree, though not covering the pair of firm and erect– “NOPEEE” he half shouted, turning his gaze away from his chest with a blush. Anxiety and embarrassment warred, with anger taking a back seat but still kicking him like an annoying kid in a movie theater.
His mind raced, but he couldn’t feel his heart thumping wildly like it normally would have when he was in a panic. He started to put a hand to his chest to feel for it, but then froze again when he remembered what he had seen there. “Fuck, this isn’t the time for that Xander…” he reproached himself. He was clearly alive so his heart had to be beating, right? But before all that, what he assumed were his legs were still stuck in a damned tree! He would have expected to feel cramped or crushed or… something… but instead he just felt like he was wearing some comfortable hip hugging jeans. Desperately trying to ignore the rest of his situation, he tried to see if he could wiggle them at all, and to his surprise, they came free of the tree without much more effort than wading through hip deep water.
His unexpected success caused him to stumble, but instead of falling on his face like he normally would, his short green arms shot forward and intercepted the ground so that he ended up on his hands and one knee. He half knelt there like that for a minute, trying to feel what his body was telling him, but he didn’t feel any pain or discomfort, just the soft floor of the forest against his palms, kneecap, and feet. Xander breathed in deeply a few times, trying to calm himself as a light breeze blew gently over his naked skin. The illuminated blue disk of information that now looked like it was resting on the soil beneath him didn’t help, but it did grab his attention again. He found himself reading more of it out of a compulsive need for a distraction.
“Dryad Species Features:
Oaken Bond: You are bound to an oak tree. You can freely merge with or exit your bound tree and sense through it. While merged with your bound tree, you both gain bonuses to your resilience and regeneration based on your own resilience and regeneration. If your bound tree dies, you will suffer immediate backlash and will die shortly afterwards unless you bind to another oak tree.
Voice of the Woods: You can speak with plants telepathically.
Dryadic Magic: You gain access to the following spells.
Nurture Vegetation: You can expend mana to cause a plant to grow or to heal a damaged plant.
Control Plants: You can establish control over certain species of trees, bushes, and vines. The link’s initial cost is based on the size of the plant, and requires a moderate amount of mana regeneration to maintain..”
“Well that’s just... just… fucking weird.” he said, wincing at the feminine sound of his voice again. He wasn’t sure he should or could believe any of what was going on, his awakening had been one shock after another so far, and none of it seemed like it should be real. He had watched a few Isekai with his friends and played a few RPGs here and there, but most of them weren’t his style. And yet here he was, seemingly in a forest somewhere after having a damned recalcitrant machine fall on him if his memories were as accurate as he thought they were. If his situation could be believed, and that was a truly preponderous ‘if’, then there were a couple of options that he could think of. This could be some crazy VR setup, which in some ways might make the most sense. Maybe he was paralyzed in a hospital somewhere, and they had rigged up a digital world for his mind to inhabit while his broken body withered away? That tech seemed a bit beyond what he knew was available, but who knew what the government did or didn’t have hidden away. The bastards.
The next option was that he was actually in another world like the screen said. His eyes reread the introduction, the disk winding itself back smoothly to where he sought.
“Welcome to Gaellus. As you had no sponsor for your reincarnation, your species (Dryad) was randomly selected according to your Soul Affinity, and your starting perk (Memories of a Past Life) was randomly selected from the available options (371).”
A spike of fear went through him again. If he took it as truth and not a game intro, there were several truly scary aspects. First, reincarnating meant he had truly died. That was bad enough, but he was here now and thinking, so that could be… handled. He didn’t know what it meant about a patron, but he did know some basic mythology, including that dryads were tree spirits who guarded forests. What had really scared him though was the mention of his ‘Starting Perk’. He wasn’t great at mental math, but if there were 371 options or more like it seemed to indicate, then he had had less than a half a percent chance to retain his memories. The experiences and thoughts that made him who he was had only remained with him by the absolute slimmest of margins. Existential dread roiled in him at that thought, so strong that he would have thrown up if there had been anything in his stomach.
Xander knew in that moment, hunched over and panting, that he hadn’t been nearly as ambivalent about his life as he thought he had. He had always been drawn to skulls, skeletons, and bones; drawing them, painting them, and even creating some sculptures with them for his traditional art classes. He had known that he would die eventually, and had been morbidly fascinated with the trappings of darkness and death, wearing symbols of such on his clothes and decorating his room with posters of reapers and gory movies and the like. But now, he also knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that he wanted to live, and would do anything it took to do so.
Shoving away those thoughts, he stood up shakily. He didn’t know what had actually happened, but he needed to treat his situation as if it were real just to be safe. If that meant playing along with the game, then that's what he would do. Gritting his teeth, he accepted that there were some… things about himself that he needed to look at more closely.