Reincarnated as a Land Shark???

Chapter 31: The Spider's Web

Hoooly F it's been a long time since my last update. This chapter is looooong overdue. Sorry for making you all wait so long and if a lot of people have forgotten about this story by now I don't really mind because it's my fault in the first place.

Anyways, a lot's happened, and a lot has been shifted around and changed in regards to the future of this story so I now have a better roadmap and a better idea of where I'm going to go with this, and with any luck I won't be going back to being such a snail when it comes to updates. To all of those who had to wait too long for this chapter, I hope you enjoy it.

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The trip back to the lake is, thankfully, a shorter one than I'd anticipated now that I'm not constantly watching those slimes from over my shoulder. The feeling of my skin getting rehydrated is as relaxing as always, and I meander back towards my little house on the lakebed with no real sense of urgency.

Those slimes are really weird. I mean, it's not impossible for organisms like that to exist on earth, but not quite like them. They're just really, really primitive forms of life. The thing that sets them apart from other really really primitive forms of life is their intelligence. Since I can see through them, I can tell they don't have brains, so how is information being processed? They can't be single-cellular, because at that size I'd be able to see the nucleus with my naked eye but it's all just mainly see through gelatinous material. Not to mention how they communicate is also really complex, far more so than human speech and sign language combined. To be able to manipulate their insides to make light reflect off of them at just the right angle to communicate with others of their kind should take some huge amount of brainpower.

Maybe instead of having a centralized intelligence, a Slime's mind is composed of communication between all the cells in the organism? They're mostly fluid creatures, so it is feasible for them to communicate using hormones sending signals from one cell to another. It's strange and completely alien, but I guess that's just life in another world for you. Slimes would be true aliens to my world.

I lazily sim the last few meters to the entrance of my little lair and settle down on the floor. Things about ME are pretty alien, too. A normal shark wouldn't be able to breathe without moving their tail, yet I'm able to do so just fine. It's probably because I'm an amphibious creature more than I'm a fish; I do a lot of my breathing through my skin, not my lungs or gills. Not to mention a shark's skeleton is mostly cartilage and not bone, yet I have bones. That doesn't even touch on the magic bit.

I bet whatever's leaving behind those webs is also pretty strange in its own way.

The source of the webs is probably something I'm going to have to look into sometime soon. Since I got the 'thief' title from my pilfered meal earlier, it means that those webs are definitely inhabited and being used. It can't be very appreciative of the fact that I've been taking down its webs and even going so far as to steal my meals from them, and from what I've seen most monsters are far more intelligent than one would assume from a first glance. Even the Nanaue, which should for all I've seen be killing each other off faster than they can reproduce due to the overcrowding of the reefs by this point, are capable of acting in a social manner that everything about them screams that they shouldn't be able to stand. Though some sharks are more social than others and they often swim in small groups, they're still large predators ultimately in competition with one another for food. Not to mention they don't touch the plentiful food in the reef for the most part, instead always heading up to the shore to hunt by night. The slimes, which by the logic of Earth should be trailing piles of goo, are highly intelligent. They're capable of far more rapid movement and coordination than they should be, and are able to communicate through signals of light passed through their bodies.