Chapter 1021: Circle Of Life

Rowan could not recall the last time he had felt this weak, not even when he was transmigrated into the body of a child back in Trion. He hated this weakness, but it was something he was accustomed to once more. This world had done more than enough to showcase his weakness to him, time and time again.

'Now, where am I?'

He felt as if his entire body was squeezed into a cold and decaying sack that was filled with fluids that contained maggots and other vermin that crept and crawled.

He choked as it filled his mouth and nostrils, but his supernatural willpower held back his disgust, he had touched worse and felt worse, but this body he was in was now clearly mortal, and if he did not escape the cage that held him, he would drown in what felt like shit.

He had died in various unexpected ways since he entered Doom Star, but drowning in shit was not one he wanted added to his record. Rowan clawed his way through it, his new body seemed incredibly fragile and weak with an incredibly limited range of motion, but his eyes were closed and he could not see his body or surroundings.

Whatever he was pushing through must either be soft, or must decayed extensively judging by the smell he was perceiving, or he underestimated his strength for he pushed his way through it in a short while, and he gasped as air entered his lungs, and this triggered the urge for him to vomit.

Instincts born from many years of battle and enduring dangers silenced the further sounds that wanted to escape his throat, as his stomach and lungs filled with foul fluid strained to disgorge their content, but he kept still and analyzed his surroundings, starting with his body. 'Fuck!'

The reason he was so weak was simple, Rowan was a fetus. A fetus who just crawled out of the womb of a dead mother. From his size, he should not have come to term.

Rowan shrugged and opened his mouth, allowing the sludge to run out of it while pressing on his large stomach with his chubby arms. He could not make any loud noises, so he had to be patient, he needed to breathe, but any loud noise would draw the monster above him.

He did not need to look up to feel the pressure as it moved above. At first, he thought it was a single monster, but as his senses adjusted itself, he was now hearing others not far away. Rowan massaged his stomach, pushing out the last of the foul liquid he had swallowed, while he began pulling details of his surroundings. His now-dead mother had the top half of her body crushed, a bit lower and her stomach would have been crushed as well, and she had been laid on a pile of bodies that should number in the thousands.

He wished he could have seen her face, his rebirth was due to her influence after all.

It was unknown how long she had lain here, but she was already decaying, when Rowan touched the stomach he had crawled out from, it surprisingly still held a bit of warmth.

Was it possible that even in death, this woman had kept a spark of life inside her body to nurture her unborn child?

Rowan notices the bodies of those around him, and his own, and catalogs the alien nature of his current body and theirs. Although humanoid His skin was light green with various exotic tattoos stretched across it that he could not fully analyze because of his limited range of motion, and the other bodies around his own were black and he could not pick out any more details from their skin, but that was due to them being decayed.

He noticed that the bodies that had decayed extensively had signs of being devoured. It was a grim sight, for the bodies appeared to have been chewed and every moisture sucked out of them before they were discarded.

They were like dry balls of bones and brown withered muscles. Each ball must hold at least fifty dried bodies, and he could not count the number of balls in his vision, they must clearly stretch far.

Looking around him, he noticed that with the state of his now-dead host and those around, this mound of flesh would soon be next to be devoured and spat out.

'I seemed to have overstayed my welcome. I think it's time to leave.'

Slowly pushing himself out of the dead body, Rowan nearly stumbled when his birth cord wrapped around his legs.

His fragile body lacked fingernails or teeth, but the strength in his muscle was enough to pull hard enough to tear off the endings of his birth cord from the body of his host, her decaying body was the first to give and holding three feet of his placenta, Rowan slowly tied it around his waist and began to slowly crawl away from the mound.

This action was uncoordinated for the first few seconds, but he rapidly got the hang of it. All this while, the sounds above had been increasing in intensity, as waves of air that carried a dense smell of decay nearly blew his tiny body away, but the strength in his body was slowly increasing, and Rowan knew that this strength would make no difference if he could not find a place to shelter before he was noticed.

Among the mounds of the dead, he was the only moving thing, and although he was small, to the senses of the supernatural, he could be easily found.

This made his next series of decisions easy for him, and instead of crawling across the mounds of the dead, he began to dig himself into the bodies. Slowly shifting bodies to the side, and allowing his all frame to glide in between their decaying flesh.

All this seemed so familiar to him, but at that time in the past, he was digging his way out, but this time, he was digging his way in.

'circle of life, hahaha...'

He had barely made it more than eight feet into the pile of the dead when he froze, the sound above had quietened, and he barely had the time to curl around his limbs when he felt an ungodly pressure surrounding him and his body and those around were compressed and a sense of movement reached him through the pressure and he knew that he had just been carried from the ground alongside other dead bodies.

He should be inside the mouth of the beast, and that means... it may soon begin to chew.

Not caring if his movement may trigger the beast, Rowan began to claw his way out through the press of bodies, but it was too difficult, his growing power was not enough to push against the pressure and no matter how much he struggled, he could hardly move his body more than an inch.

'Not again!'

The pressure increased and perhaps more due to the fact of his tiny body than luck, he was sheltered between a dense knot of bones and escaped the height of the pressure, and then what followed was a gentle bobbing motion, and a sudden halt.

'Am I in the stomach of the beast?'