Weightless. Floating. No pain. Free.

Suddenly, I felt that all of the discomfort had been washed out of my mind. I felt at ease. I knew for sure that I was already dead. I allowed myself to float upwards, away from the cave and my limp body within. I could not quite see, but I could still observe. Higher and higher I soared, and the view was stunning. I felt happy. Happy that I'd finally know peace.

…

Something was wrong.

This world, it was not my own, and it had no place for me to rest. Everywhere I tried to become one with the stream, it pushed me away. Why? Why?! What was I supposed to do?!

The ocean moved again. I'd already gotten used to its summonings. I had decided to call this event spawnwaves, which I thought was an entertaining name. Every spawnwave, something slightly different came out. In the beginning, it was myself and the disfigured beasts, but entire trees and swarms of insects sometimes emerged, too. I looked over, out of curiosity.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Strange. The ocean was churning as if it was pushing something else, but nothing was happening. I wondered if it was a failed spawnwave, but then I felt it.

It was a shockwave of energy.

My incorporeal form was nearly torn apart by the blast, but I managed to endure it. I felt the surge ripping into my very soul, and change it fundamentally. It was more painful than anything else I had ever experienced.

Suddenly, my vision changed, and I saw it. It was like a wicked blue mist that swirled like a hurricane. My soul kept being battered, and it flung me down to the ground. I saw that my body was in the center of a different, smaller hurricane, and that the two hurricanes were about to fuse.

Then, they were one.

My soul and my body were reunited.

All of my body's old wounds, and the bloodloss, and the slight decay, as well as my soul's damage, made me black out once again from the pain.

When I came to my senses, it felt less intense. I put my hand to my neck and realized that the bleeding had stopped. It felt warm. Trying to sit up, I was shocked to find that grass had started to sprout on the ground around me. Strange, was it because of the bloodloss?

I looked over at the half-eaten beast corpse that had kept me alive. It was bloody as ever, but the ground beneath was still bare.

Dumbfounded, I looked up. It was then I realized that the entire room was covered in a thick blue mist. Reaching out as if to grab it, the mist swirled around my hand. It seeped into my wounds and dulled the pain like a drug. Then the pain stopped completely.

Before my very eyes, wounds were closing and new tissue was being created out of nowhere, closing my wounds without leaving a scar. Excitedly, I looked at my legs to see if they were coming back as well.

They weren’t. The bleeding was stopping, sure, and new cartilage and skin was forming over the wounds. But they weren’t growing back.