I slowly wake to consciousness, feeling as if I had just slept for a million years.

It’s a strange feeling, a bit like the feeling of waking up with a hangover, but also a bit like waking up with a full pot of coffee already in my system. Like I simultaneously had and didn’t have energy.

Schrodinger's Energy, if you will.

Hehehe.

‘I wonder what an energy drink like that would do? How much would it sell for? Schrodinger's energy drink… Hmm.’

Random thoughts aside, it’s taking a lot longer for my body to wake up than it usually does…

Of course, that’s when my body seems to snap to attention, and my mind becomes hyper-focused on it out of nowhere.

‘What… What the fuck is this?’ I thought as I felt “my” body, which, for some odd reason, felt completely foreign to what I’m used to. 

Like my skin was hard as rock, my veins were so big I could feel them, and my organs were boiling hot. 

But most noticeably,

I was shaped like a triangle…

Well, vaguely like a triangle. If said triangle had bumps all over its surface, a tip that’s noticeably sunken in, and intersected on the left side with another, smaller triangle that also had bumps all over it.

Almost like a mountain.

…

…

…

Oh, is this what we’re doing? Really?

Either I’m having a fever dream, or I’ve been transmigrated into a literal mountain. 

Okay, this is fine, everything is fine. There is no need to worry about anything… Not even my skin, which is on fire…

‘OH MY GOD I’M ON FIRE!’ I thought calmly as I felt some sort of hot liquid move across my “skin“ and through my ”veins“.

Oddly enough, it didn’t really hurt that much, but obviously that didn’t stop my monkey brain from freaking the hell out.

‘FUCK FUCK FUCK! Go out! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!’

This continued for a while…

Many, many, many hours of screaming later—or I assume, at least, as my sense of time isn’t really working right, for some reason—I finally came to my senses again and realized that the fire wasn’t really doing anything to me.

I then spent a few minutes lamenting my stupidity, questioning the purpose of my existence, and cringing so hard at myself that I’m pretty sure one of my “veins” collapsed in on itself.

Also, it seems that whatever that fire is, it’s now become a part of my body. 

I think it’s a parasite of some sort…

I’m gonna die, aren’t I?

After all, there’s no way that having literal fire in your veins can be healthy, especially when it seems to have replaced my blood and is now transporting stuff around the rest of my body. I’m not sure what it’s transporting, exactly, but I can feel it moving something around, and I’m not sure I like it.

Though, I suppose that this is probably lava—or magma, for you word nazi’s listening in—and that’s probably not that unhealthy for a mountain…

Fuck I’m a mountain.

I try not to think about it, but that’s kind of hard when I can feel some magma moving massive chunks of stuff through my cave veins. The pain and panic made it easy to forget after I first came to that conclusion, but now both of those things are gone, and the idea has fully set in.

It’s fully hit me.

Now, most people like to think that—in these types of situations—they would react calmly and adapt to their new bodies within a matter of minutes, with no regard for having lost their physical humanity. 

That’s just it though, they like to think that. The fact of the matter is, something like that happening is entirely unpredictable as situations like it are unprecedented. Nobody knows how they will react to a situation they’ve never been in. 

People like to think that, in a street fight for example, they would react calmly, say a few bad-ass one-liners, then beat the shit out of everyone with a few well-placed attacks while simultaneously dodging every attack their opponent throws at them.

But… Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth.

Those people have never been in a fight before (obviously), so they think “How hard could it be?”.

Turns out? It’s pretty damn hard.

Nobody’s ever been moved to a body so foreign to their own that it’s barely recognizable. Fiction paints it as not that big a deal most of the time, but that’s just it, that’s fiction. All of that comes from the author's imagination. 

In truth, nobody knows how the average person would react to not being human anymore. There isn’t even some irl video of it online, like how there is for a street fight. With a street fight, we could see how others would react and use that to base our fantasies off of. But for this?

Well… I thought that I would take it calmly, and with dignity, like the protagonists from those animes I used to watch with my nephew. 

That’s not what’s happening.

I don’t like being a mountain. I don’t want a mountain. I want to be human. 

Because of this, I am now having a panic attack, heart attack, and existential crisis all at once. 

I don’t recommend it; it’s not very fun.

My magma blood is now pumping through my cavernous veins so quickly that it's starting to melt the cave walls through sheer friction alone. My body is shaking like crazy, almost like having a seizure. I can feel the air that’s touching my surface whipping up, moving with hurricane force and beyond.

All this is just a reaction to my stress and panic, and I’m too focused on the idea that I’m now a mountain to notice it.

A feel a power well up from beneath me. A pressure so strong that it carves hundreds of new caves into me as it moves up. 

Then the pressure enters my body, and the veins it created connect to mine. 

It feels as if I just connected to a web of some sort. Or a well. Whatever the case, it’s a massive collection of magma and rock so hot that it’s a gas.

Is that even possible? What kind of heat does that need? Is the center of the planet I’m on actually a miniature star?

I don’t know, and I don’t really care right now.

All that matters is that I’m no longer human, I will no longer get to see my nephew, or his wife and my grand-nephew, or any of my friends. I will no longer be able to eat, or drink, or breath. I won’t be able to read, or use the internet, or watch T.V.

None of that, it’s all gone. 

The pressure builds more as that gaseous rock enters my “bloodstream” and rapidly climbs through my system until it reaches the top.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Then it blows the tip of my body off, completely obliterating it and leaving nothing behind.

The pressure explodes from my body, raining down on whatever’s around me in an angry inferno so hot that anyone from the modern world nearby would think a nuke had gone off.

There was a flash from the sheer heat, an explosion resulting in a mushroom could as big as the Tsar Bomba’s, and a deep rumble that shook everything for hundreds of miles in every direction. Like a cry of pure rage and sorrow embedding itself into the land.

It was practically the embodiment of my loss, anger, sadness, panic, and stress. And with that being the case, as it left my body, I felt myself slowly calming down—cooling down, even, hehehe—and growing exhausted. Like how you just want to go to sleep after a long cry.

And as I slowly fell back into unconsciousness, I felt the magma and gaseous rock from the explosion begin to fall onto me, either re-entering my system or landing on my surface and cooling into rock, becoming a part of me one way or another, and making me bigger.

That was the last I felt, before sleep took me once again.

-o0o-

I awoke once more, this time much quicker than I did the first time.

The second I regained consciousness, my mind snapped into focus, and my body seemed to go into overdrive.

I felt better, funnily enough. Turns out, literally erupting could be a good stress killer.

Though, I’m still pretty peeved and sad, so let’s not think about that right now.

Instead, I decided to focus on my surroundings.

I could no longer see or hear anything. But, I could feel.

I felt everything that touched my body and wasn’t a part of it in great detail. I could feel temperature, texture, weight, shape, energy, and even I’m pretty sure that’s color that I’m feeling right now.

That’s right, I can feel color.

Trippy.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure that I’m mainly doing this through some sort of energy sense. It lets me feel anything with energy that interacts with me, and a bit of whatever said energy had interacted with before. Kind of like sonar, or radar, in a way. 

I could feel the vibrations of a rock that landed on the surface of a nearby mountain that wasn’t a part of me, and I could feel the mountain because the vibrations from the rock landing painted a picture of sorts—albeit a very muddled one.

It’s weird, because it’s slightly like echolocation, in that whenever I move a part of my body and it produces vibrations, I get a picture of wherever those vibrations hit and return to me, but it’s unlike it in that I get far more detail from these vibrations then should be possible.

It’s like whenever the vibrations run into something, that something leaves a record on them, and I can interpret that record. The light that I’m feeling—for example—is just a record of light that the vibrations interacted with on their way to my senses.

That shouldn’t be possible though, since I’m pretty sure energy doesn’t carry information. At least, not in that way.

Then again, I am a sapient mountain, so souls probably exist. And souls are meant to be a sort of energy right? And they contain the information of that person.

So maybe, wherever I may be right now, everything has that ability. All energy holds information like a soul does, and I have the ability to interpret it. Or, something like that, probably.

Anyway, what this effectively does is make me practically omniscient within a certain radius.

The second I had started focusing on my senses, it was like a floodgate had opened, and now I have a picture of everything around me for… I don’t know, a couple hundred miles? Thousand? It’s kind of hard to tell distance now that my size has been so drastically changed.

A mile is different for an ant than it is for a human. Apparently, the same applies to humans and mountains.

Who would’ve thought?

My maximum range doesn’t really matter much though, as things get more blurry the further away they are. Like it’s harder for me to interpret the information the older it is. Within a few miles of my body, I feel the movements of practically every grain of dust, but outside of that? It slowly gets harder and harder to make out details.

Logistics of my fancy new senses aside, they did give me some important information. 

One: I am surrounded by an ocean of lava in all directions with a few other mountains placed here and there like islands.

Two: That “air“ I felt earlier? When I was having my fit and accidentally created a hurricane? Yeah, that’s not air. At least, it’s not the air I’m used to. It’s black, and grey, and toxic beyond belief. Like, just pure poison. So I guess I technically created a hurricane of poison…

I’m glad that nobody was around, or that could have been bad.

Not to mention the explosion that I created…

Anyway, I think I might be in Hell. Not in the sense that I’m in pain or being tortured, but in the literal sense. I think I am literally in Hell. The Underworld. Tartarus. Oblivion. The Nether. Ohio. You know, hell.

So that’s a thing I should probably think about later…

And remember how I said it was like a floodgate was opened? Well, I guess that’s a permanent thing, since even when I decided to focus on the well of energy beneath me, my perception of the outside world stayed as sharp as ever.

It’s going to be hard to fall asleep now.

Speaking of the well beneath me though… Holy shit, there is a lot of energy down there.

I think my earlier theory of there being a small star at the center of wherever I am may hold some merit, because my God, trying to interpret the energy from the well is like trying to stare at the sun.

My “eyes” are hurting just from “looking“ at it for a few seconds.

Thankfully, whatever permanency triggered when I observed my surroundings the first time, didn’t seem to trigger again, since I was able to “look away” from the well before it hurt me.

Also, I guess I can still feel pain, it’s just very circumstantial and seems to only occur when it’s a form of mental pain.

Anyway, I guess it’s time to stop pussy-footing around it.

I turned my attention inward and focused on my new body. As much as I don’t want to, and tempting as it is to have another panic attack, I need to figure out my body now if I ever want to understand what happened to me.

Okay, so, first observation. I’m tall.

Really tall.

I’m pretty sure I wasn’t this tall before the explosion, but then again, I wasn’t really paying all that much attention before then.

I can’t really gouge how big I am, because again, the size change really screwed up my sense of scale. I only know that I’m tall because I can sense the other mountains around me, so I’m only tall relative to them.

Hell, I might not even be a mountain. I might just be a small mound of rock floating in the bubbling lava sea of an actual volcano, but I wouldn’t know, because there is nothing familiar nearby to use as a measuring stick.

I doubt that’s the case, but again, I can’t tell.

Moving on, I found that I’m vaguely shaped like Mount Rainier, so I guess the explosion changed my shape a little on top of making me bigger. 

More importantly, though, my insides were different.

Before, it was like a bunch of caves randomly running through a part of me here and there, with the occasional cavern thrown in. Now, because of the power from The Well carving new caves as it moved through me, there are hundreds of caves, and almost all of them are connected to each other. Just slightly left of my center is a large cavern with a particularly large cave leading up to my peak.

Well, what’s left of my peak. 

Anyway, all of those caves converge in on either that cavern or the large cave leading to my peak, which I suppose makes it a bit like my heart.

Throughout all of these caves and caverns, magma moves like my blood, moving chunks of material and masses of energy from one place to the other. The material gets deposited into random places and the energy gets expelled through the large cave, into the “air” outside.

I found it pretty cool at first, thinking it was like my body in a way. It helped me cope. But then I realized that it was vastly different from the circulatory system in my human body in that the moving of materials and energy didn’t really serve a purpose, and was all just empty movement. Useless activity.

This made finding comfort in it much more difficult, so I decided to change that.

First, I pulled on a bit of energy from the well beneath me.

It was difficult, and I nearly lost control and erupted again, but I managed to take only a slight amount in the end, and keep the rest buried beneath me. 

This slight amount of energy was used to make the cavern that acts as my heart bigger so that it encompassed my center completely and acted as a true heart.

Next, I slowly moved the location and shape of my caves to more resemble veins, making them narrower, but longer and more winding, and giving them a logical shape. Said shape was a sort of double spiral that was pressed into the vague shape of a triangle on three sides. One spiral connected to the right of my “heart”, and the other to my left.

The idea was to make it so that it worked like blood moving oxygen, one side would be outgoing magma with material and energy in it, and the other would be incoming magma, that had already dropped everything off wherever I wanted it to go.

In order to complete this though, I needed to make a divider in the heart, to separate and filter the Magma to make things as efficient as possible.

I did this by slowly directing the magma to drop off materials in certain places, which slowly built upon itself over time until the core had almost the same internal shape as a human heart, with a few adjustments here and there.

I made sure to use the most heat-resistant materials I could find for this part, since I planned to have energy from The Well move through my heart at some points, and didn’t want it to melt all my work whenever it did.

Anyway, after who knows how long, my internal structure had changed to mimic a human circulatory system pretty closely, only missing the lungs. 

There was the heart in my center, the veins running throughout my body, delivering materials wherever I needed them, and the blood which actually carried the materials and energy. There was also a couple hundred smaller caves that connected to The Well, slowly converging into a single channel that was shaped like a tesla valve and connected to my heart on the incoming side of it, allowing me to enrich my magma blood with materials and energy taken directly from The Well without actually using too much power from it and accidentally causing another eruption.

Finally, there was the cavern leading to my peak, which had also been reshaped to resemble a Tesla valve, so unless I wanted it to, another eruption like what happened before wouldn’t happen again, and I wouldn’t accidentally blow myself up.

There were also a few off-shooting caves that led to smaller openings to the outside which I would use to get rid of materials I didn’t want or get rid of excess energy if my tesla-valve caves couldn’t handle it.

I planned to add other functions to my body, aside from just transportation, recycled energy, and waste disposal, but by the time I had finished my circulatory system (or, mostly finished, anyway), I was exhausted again.

Maybe the next I’m awake I should look into what kind of energy I’m using to stay awake and work because getting tired like this in the middle of a project is a little annoying.

Though, I am satisfied with what I accomplished in the time that I was awake.

I was no longer just a mountain, or even just a volcano. I was more than that, physically anyway. I now took my first step to become a living mountain.

And with that last thought, I fell asleep once again.