The first thing I felt when sensations came back to me was that I seemed to be surrounded by some sort of liquid. I was instantly reminded of the reincarnation stories that started with the main character being born, but I soon realized that I wasn’t constrained in any way, and I could open my eyes just fine to see myself in some sort of reddish liquid, a sun visibly shining through it up above me.

    The sensation of breathing liquid was quite disturbing, but I before I even got used to it, the changes began happening. At first, it was just me knowing things I didn’t know before, an unknown language seemingly slithering into my mind, a concept I’d never heard of before, geography of a world unknown to me. I wasn’t sure how long I floated in that red liquid, but eventually the knowledge came to stop, and I noticed my body had gone from the childish one it was to much larger. I wouldn’t be able to guess what my age would be was without a mirror, but I was clearly as developed as my late teens rather than the childish body I’d had at the beginning.

    I would be wondering what the hell had happened if the new knowledge hadn’t provided an answer. I was an unwanted child, thrown in the spawning pool. Spawning pools were an interesting system the Ruk had developed to deal with children whose parents didn’t want to raise them. In a matter of weeks, a newborn would not only grow to a late teen, they would also be imparted all the knowledge they would need to be a productive member of society through information hundreds of Ruk had poured into the pools.

    It was strange, understanding things I never had, but I supposed that it wouldn’t be as odd for a blank slate, I simply had memories of my own. I was terribly thankful that the pool had only imparted knowledge, if it had placed memories or god forbid, a full lifetime, I wasn’t sure I would have been me anymore.

    It wasn’t long after that I saw what seemed to be a net approaching, and then I was fished out of the red fluid. The first thing I did when I was dragged onto the boat was cough my lungs out, getting rid of the reddish fluid that had permeated them, and took my first breath of the air in a different world. Once I was done with my imitation of an asthmatic smoker, I looked around the boat that had fished me out. It was very wide and long, seeming more like a large raft rather than an actual boat, and there were quite a few others who were coated in the fluid from the spawning pool, none of them looking confused about what was happening.

    We sat there in silence as the boat finished collecting its passengers, and I looked around to see a bunch of other spawning pools, each with their own boat collecting the abandoned.

    Looking down, I saw that I didn’t match the rest of the Ruk on the boat. Where they had red skin, mine was a pale, almost alabaster white. Reaching up, I noticed that I still had the horns of the Ruk, I just lacked the skin color, and running my mind through my new knowledge quickly supplied an answer, I wasn’t a full Ruk, I was half human. I grimaced, half breeds tended to be looked down upon in Ruk society, treated merely as tools.

    They tended to be referred to by what my brain instantly translated to as incubi and succubi. We could breed with both humanity and demons, the race of the children taking the race of the other parent, and our children would be born in less than three months rather than the normal nine for humanity or fourteen for Ruk. Aside from that, we had a serious reputation for sleeping around, though I wasn’t sure if the stereotype was particularly accurate. The Ruk tended to treat us as nothing more than tools to be used to repopulate their limited population, and I quickly made up my mind to run away before they decided to throw me in one of the breeding houses.

    Deciding that it would be better to mentally refer to the Ruk with the same term humanity on this world used to describe them, demons, at least mentally, I combed through my brain on what was going to happen to us.

    We were going to be trained for a while, to get our stats up to the point they would be at if we weren’t raised through the spawning pool, then leveled up for a while so we wouldn’t be completely useless.

    I smacked my forehead, getting some odd looks from the other passengers. My stats! I instantly focused my mind on pulling up my stat sheet, and it appeared before me in all it’s misery.

Name: N/A

Titles: Otherworlder

Level: 1

Strength: 13

Dexterity: 10

Wisdom: 22

Constitution: 12

Skills

Mana Constructs - Master

Light Magic - Early Journeyman

Swordsmanship - Early Master

Illusion Magic - Journeyman

I let out a sigh, my prided level ninety-nine was gone. Not only that, my stats were horribly low for an incubus, even though we tended to be a bit weaker than a full blooded demon. It was an unfortunate side effect from being raised with a spawning pool, a problem would be fixed by our trainer soon enough.

    At least I got to keep my skills, and even got a new one, an instinctive knowledge of illusion magic that came with being a halfblood. Plus, my wisdom was far higher than it should be, considering that the average wisdom for a demon was seven. Incubi and succubi tended to be a bit higher, around fifteen, but I was still well above that.

    Contrary to its name, the wisdom stat affected only mana pool and to a lesser extent mana regeneration. I’d held out hope that I would become smarter when I put points into it when the System had been activated on earth, but had been horribly disappointed.

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    The boat ride soon ended, and we were shepherded to a large clearing. I finally looked properly at the people who had been getting us out of the spawning pools, and recoiled a bit. They were all muscle monsters. I’d heard the phrase “had muscles on their muscles”, but I’d never seen anyone that actually fit that description before. These demons instantly overturned my lack of knowledge, and I shivered as I realized through my new knowledge that this was normal for demons. And they were going to try and train us to be the same!

    I gulped, and realized I had to get out of here even sooner than I’d expected. I refused to be a muscle monster! I looked around, and saw yet another muscle monster waiting for all of us as our guides had us line up before it. It was definitely an it. While I’d thought the muscle monsters around us were bad, this thing had to be well over seven feet tall, and made bodybuilders on earth look like anorexic coke addicts.

    It shouted out a loud “Salute!”, and I raised my left hand formed into a fist over my chest as my mind said was the correct response before nearly falling down. I took a closer look at the new muscle monster and paled. That voice had been terribly high pitched, and my closer look terrified me. The new muscle monster was female. Running through my mind, I realized that this was normal for the demons. They were strength obsessed nutjobs, both male and female, and thus would build up their bodies to ridiculous proportions.

    I paled as a realization hit me. They were going to throw me into a breeding house to mate with those… things. Escape had quickly gone from a need, to a NEED. I wasn’t going to get any chance to escape for now at least, so for now I would bide my time, praying that these horrors would let me save my new bodies chastity until I could get away.

    Looking around at the people who had guided us here, I saw that around seventy percent of them were “female”. The muscle monster was droning on about how strength is everything as my thought drowned her out until she turned to me, the only incubus in the group.

    “And you, you need to grow quite a bit stronger if you want to survive the breeding house, so I’ll be sure to give you plenty of ‘special’ attention.”

I may have whimpered a bit. We were then herded along a path, and we ended up at a large field filled with logs. “What you’re going to do here is simple. We don’t have enough time to build you up to what a proper demon should be, but we can get you started. NOW START DRAGGING.”

All of us freshly grown demons listened to her, and each grabbed a log, dragging it from one side of the field, to the other, then back. Looking over, I saw the prime muscle monster carrying for or five of them, running back and forth on the field while she watched us. She didn’t bother berating us, simply watched us to make sure none of us went past the point of exhaustion, expecting that the relatively fresh slates that the rest of the group were to simply work until we collapsed.

After a while, the first person collapsed, and surprisingly, it wasn’t me. At that point, prime muscle monster, whose name I hadn’t been paying attention to when she introduced herself, practically, and in one case literally forced us to take a break and eat a ton of food.

The days continued in a similar manner, until most of us had around twenty points in strength, with me sitting at a “measly” seventeen. Considering that the average baseline in my old world had been around nine in every stat, I was doing quite well for myself. We weren’t at bodybuilder status, and wouldn’t be until our base strength stat showed us about thirty five, but we weren’t emaciated looking anymore, all of us having solid definition in our muscles. I’d been worried the entire time for my chastity, but aside from quite a few slaps on the ass by the other pool spawned, I was safe for now.

The prime muscle monster, who I could now refer to as Sienna, gathered us all up once we got to that point. “Now that you are slightly less disappointing demons, we can give you names.” She quickly went through us, and gave me the name Ten. I winced a bit, it wasn’t an uncommon name for demons, but considering it was a number in my native tongue, I was a bit annoyed. Seeing as how we were abandoned, none of us had any surname, and would only be given one if we managed to do something to impress someone powerful.

After our very short naming ceremony, Sienna stuffed all of us on carts, and brought us to a forest. Once we arrived, we were given rudimentary weapons, and told to go into the forest to hunt. No training, no explanation on how to use them, just let go and told to hunt and not come back unless we hit level ten. I must have had a confused face on, because prime muscle monster turned to me and yelled at me to get going. I quickly obliged, trying to hide a grin as we were left completely unsupervised. Escaping was going to be way easier than I had expected.

As I wandered through the forest, I wondered for a bit at why they would just let us go like that, but realized that I would be the only one to even consider escaping, seeing as how I was the only one who wasn’t simply a pure product of the breeding pools.

As I wandered the beginners forest, I idly chopped any of the really, really weak monsters that decided they wanted to bug me, my high stats and skills with a sword making short work of the small green humanoids and rabbits with horns, which were probably intentionally raised here for new demons to level with.

As I continued, I noted that there were others here, but they all seemed to be children, and they would group up and mob any the small green humanoids I mentally referred to as goblins they came across. I was even able to bribe one of them with some rabbit I’d cooked up to get information on where I was in Delfin, the country of demons.

This forest was almost smack dab in the center of the country, and it was a good five hundred miles to the nearest border. I shrugged, I’d had enough experience after earth went to hell in surviving off the land, so I would be fine getting away.

    Once I was in an area that didn’t have anyone nearby, at least not that I noticed, I decided to try out my illusion magic. It was easy, far easier than it should have been, feeling like it was simply another limb that I hadn’t used before, and I soon looked like one of the children who were hunting in the forest. Towards the end of the day, I followed the rest of the children out, and to a town built on the outskirts which was there to make sure the goblin population stayed within a healthy amount to train kids and those of us from the spawning pool.

    Arriving at the town, there was no checkpoint of any kind, the only wall being a pitiful little palisade, and I simply walked in, found a deserted alley, changed my illusion to an average looking adult demon, and walked out, leaving the town with a different look than I had entered.

    The days passed in a relaxing manner, hunting monsters on a regular basis, and with the constant rain which apparently was common for this time of year, water was no issue. I collected any monster hides and furs that would be worth something, and whenever I would stop by a town I would sell them. In this manner I managed to collect a bit of change, a few changes of clothing, and necessities for travel by doing so. The monetary system made me groan with how stereotypical it was, ten copper to a large copper, ten large copper to a silver, and ten silvers to a gold. The coins themselves were quite nice though, they had a hole in the center, and would be hung on a string to be carried around easily. They had a beautiful magic circle on them which would glow with a multicolored light when exposed to these sticks people would use to confirm they were real.

    As I got closer to the border, the human population increased, which I thought was interesting considering that they were supposedly at war with Delfin. There would be large caravans of human traders coming from Eln, completely ignoring the fact that there were constant skirmishes between Eln and Delfin.

    I quickly realized that the demons seemed to treat the skirmishes as a sport rather than an actual war after hanging around a few taverns. People would bet on how each skirmish would go, and on how many people this or that demon would kill this time.

    With all the monsters I’d hunted for food along the way, I managed to hit level fourteen by the time I got to the border, and I’d put one point into every stat except wisdom per level, which had gotten two. I was planning on getting that up to fifty before I switched to putting the extra point into dexterity, as I needed a decent mana pool to be able to make a proper weapon with my mana construct skill. Illusion magic on the other hand took practically no mana to maintain once it was cast, and I literally had it kept up of all hours of the day.

    I got to the border, which only had a checkpoint, as the demons didn’t bother killing defenseless people or raiding, they didn’t find any fun in fighting people who weren’t there to fight. They would never invade, just sent armies out to fight those sent into their territory because they liked the contest of strength.

    Shaking my head at how odd it was that the so called demons were the peaceful ones, I passed through the checkpoint with a simple illusion making me seem human, and then had a thought. ‘What the fuck do I do now?’