If reincarnation was supposed to be exciting, then someone had lied.
Badly.
I didn't know how long it had been. Time blurred when your entire existence boiled down to the same three actions on loop.
Eat.Hunt.Divide.
Eat. Hunt. Divide.
Again.And again.And again.
If my old job had been soul-crushing, this was soul-grinding. At least back then I'd had coworkers to complain about. Here, it was just me—multiplied into the thousands—doing the exact same thing with the exact same outcome.
Survive.
That was it.
I stopped counting individual divisions somewhere early on. Eventually, I switched to rough estimates. Tens of thousands. Then more. When I finally bothered to check again, the number settled somewhere around a hundred thousand.
One hundred thousand of me.
A hive, spread thin across the pond, coordinated perfectly, thinking in unison, bored out of its collective mind.
I was good at this now. Too good.
I'd learned the pattern: divide until variation appeared, evaluate, discard the rest. Rinse. Repeat. Evolution without patience. Darwinism on fast-forward, with a very opinionated selector.
Honestly? It was efficient. It was also mind-numbing.
I wanted something new.
Something that wasn't just drifting, reacting, consuming. Something with shape. Direction. Complexity. A real body. Becoming multicellular had to be more interesting than this.
Please let it be more interesting than this.
That was when I noticed it.
One of me—just one—was… different.
The change was subtle at first. A damaged membrane sealed faster than expected. Internal structures stabilized sooner. Where others would linger, this one recovered almost instantly.
Faster healing.
I didn't hesitate.
I never did anymore.
All attention shifted to that cell. The rest of the hive stopped dividing. Then, one by one, they died—membranes collapsing, structures dissolving, their biomass left behind like spilled resources.
The chosen cell divided.
Then again.
And again.
It consumed the dead without ceremony. Recycled matter flowed back into growth. Within what felt like moments, I was whole again—back to my previous numbers, plus a few extra.
Same size. Better quality.
It really was that simple.
Find a mutation I liked.Erase everything else.Build back stronger.
Easy. Almost too easy.
With that settled, I turned my attention outward again.
Hunting.
An amoeba drifted into range—larger than most, its movements sluggish but confident. I moved to surround it, the maneuver so familiar it barely registered as thought.
Acid secretion followed. A slow burn. Controlled. Enough to weaken without wasting energy.
The amoeba writhed.
Then something unexpected happened.
It burst.
Not dissolved. Not collapsed.
Burst.
Columns of microscopic shapes spilled out into the surrounding water—countless, fast, chaotic.
Viruses.
Panic flared across the hive.
I reacted instantly, flooding the area with acid, saturating everything. The solution ate through membranes indiscriminately, but it didn't matter.
I was immune to my own weapon.
The viruses weren't.
They ruptured by the thousands, disintegrating before they could reach anything else. The battlefield went still again, filled with debris and drifting genetic fragments.
I paused.
That had been… new.
Carefully, I analyzed the remains.
The viruses were simple, brutal things—but elegant in their own way. Their entire existence revolved around one function: inject genetic material into another cell and hijack it.
Efficient. Ruthless.
Useful.
I sifted through the genetic wreckage, searching for what mattered, ignoring the rest. When I found the sequence—the mechanism for insertion and integration—I knew immediately.
Yes.
That would do.
I incorporated it.
Then, as always, I cleaned house.
Every cell that didn't express the new trait was culled. Their biomass fed the survivors. The improved lineage multiplied, over and over, faster now, smoother, more controlled.
I grew back to my previous scale. Then past it.
A few hundred extra this time.
I didn't bother counting precisely.
There was no point anymore.
Floating there, surrounded by my own presence, I felt something shift—not physically, but mentally.
This phase was ending.
The repetition had taught me what I needed to know. The tools were coming together. Healing. Acid. Genetic insertion.
The groundwork was done.
I drifted forward, already thinking past the pond, past the cell.
Next, I decided, I get a real body.
And for the first time since I'd woken up here, I wasn't bored.