I was bored. Turns out not a lot of fights happened close to the walls where I was hanging out on, biding my time. I apparently got pretty lucky with that fight I observed between the puma and the monkey. A whole plan was created on that chance encounter, and now I'm sitting here, attached to a cave wall, with way too much time on my hands.

And since my ways to spend time are extremely limited currently, I did the only thing I could do. Think about things. Mostly about how absurd my current situation was, and what it all meant. Which wasn't exactly doing good to my mental health.

Now that I really had some time to think about what was going on, I started to question everything. This was real, there was no doubt about that, but what exactly was going on here? I died and got reincarnated by something that calls itself 'The System'. I became a slug monster on a planet full of monsters whose only purpose was to fight and kill each other. But to what end?

I thought really hard about it, and it turns out that I actually already received some hints that could help me figure out what was what. The most obvious thing here being the Traveler Initiative. I was part of it. I was currently a tier zero traveler, since the slug I became was "too weak", but I was a traveler. I was offered a humongous list of planets that I could've gone to, in order to complete certain tasks.

But who were the travelers completing these tasks for? The system? Maybe, but who controlled the system? I couldn't be completely sure, but in the explanation for the planet Suigoss, there was mention of a group called 'The Administration'.

Suigoss was a poison jar planet, an experimental ground for the administration to run some kind of experiment. But what exactly were they trying to do?

I think the key to this is in the name. A poison jar. I heard about this concept back on earth. You put several different poisons in a jar, where they mixed and eventually formed a more potent poison. I think, in this case, the monsters on the planet were the poison. They must be observing the evolutionary path these monsters took on their way down, as they became the "strongest" poison.

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Were they looking for a way to mass-produce incredibly strong monsters? Were they just observing and cataloging the different possible ways a monster could evolve? Were they trying to create some sort of super monster? There was no real way to tell, but it was still an interesting thought to have.

It was possible that my final task on this planet would involve battling other highly evolved creatures for supremacy, so I should make sure that I took any and all opportunities I could get. If the bottommost layer was really filled with the most potent of poisons... well then I'd just have to make sure that my poison was the strongest.

Another thing I could deduce was how planets got added to the system. One of the very first messages I had seen mentioned the fact that the earth had reached an assimilation rate of ten percent. I didn't have to be a genius to figure out that the administration was somehow going around and implementing the system on the planets they found. What exactly that meant, I had no clue. But it would seem that Earth was well on its way to becoming a future traveler destination.

The system was very obviously some incredibly strong type of technology that we earthlings couldn't even begin to fathom. It was some form of invasive... something. It seemed to be infused in quite literally everything. At this point, I wasn't sure whether the system had made my body out of thin air, or if it overwrote some poor slug's entire existence in order to fit me.

And invasive it was. I couldn't help but notice just how okay I was with everything that was happening to me. How complicit to this entire spiel I was acting. The system somehow implemented the required knowledge on how to move my sluggy being, as well as how to use my skills. So who's to say that it didn't mess with how I perceived this entire situation?

If every traveler was just mindlessly agreeing to work for the system, wouldn't that be incredibly convenient? And seeing all the wondrous things the system could do, I honestly wouldn't even be surprised if I hit the nail on the head here.

Well, at least I wasn't immediately destroyed on the spot for thinking that way. Which either meant my thoughts weren't monitored, which I didn't believe for a second, or they just didn't care about me finding out. Maybe they only intervened once a traveler actively tried to harm their precious system.

My musings were disturbed by the vibrations of battle drawing closer. Finally, something to distract me from my existential crisis and conspiracy theories!