Neb’s life was perfect.

  He was in his mid-twenties, worked as a manager in a small-town furniture shop and was as healthy as a horse.

  He was one of the few people he knew who actually enjoyed the monotony of small-town living.

  Waking up, going to work, coming home, eating and sleeping seemed like the perfect routine, and the days were littered with little surprises here and there were welcome alterations but were never too drastic or chaotic.

  It truly was perfect.

  Which is why Neb didn’t complain too much when he was struck by lightning one day on his way home from work.

  He was grateful that he survived and understood that such things were only natural.

  What wasn’t natural or fair was the fact that, as soon as he recovered and was released from the hospital, he was struck by lightning again!

  And this time, he died!

  So much had gone wrong, and he had endured so much pain in such a short span of time that his will to live faded just before everything went black.

  But at least he wouldn’t have to worry about all that anymore.

  Or so he thought because, after what felt like a brief eternity, he opened his eye to find that he was in the middle of a dark chamber made from slabs of dark rock and lined with markings he couldn’t read.

  This grand space, decked with statues that depicted a horrifying monster, was lit by a handful of torches that allowed him to see that the floor was littered with corpses of people who were clad in dark robes.

  Neb wanted to scream out in panic, but the noise he ended up making was like a mix between a gurgle and a hiss.

  He looked down at himself to find that he was no taller than a watermelon and had dark tentacles sticking out from beneath him.

  What frightened him the most was the fact that he had full control over each of them.

  He tried moving around and they complied, shifting his fairly light body left and right as he willed it but this wasn’t right!

  Was this a nightmare?

  What had happened after he died?

  He was sure this wasn’t a hallucination one experienced during a coma because he had been in a comatose state before, and whatever dreams he had didn’t feel real.

  Either way, all of this was too chaotic.

  He needed to take a step back and analyse the situation.

  He had died, yes, but what could this place possibly be then?

  It was scary, so maybe it was some sort of hell, but he wasn’t being actively punished, so he assumed it was a different world of some kind.

  How he got here and why were questions he didn’t have enough information to even begin answering, and so he turned to himself again.

  He could only see his tentacles, which led to him imagining that he had awakened as some sort of Cephalopod; only his legs were much thinner, appearing more like tendrils.

  As he moved himself across the bloodied floor, he felt a deep and agonising hunger.

  One that made his eye snap to the nearby corpses.

  He breathed in deeply, taking in the smell of blood.

  He let out a low, almost cat-like purr as he dreaded the very possibility of eating the bodies of the dead, but… in this dark place, in this strange body, it seemed almost natural.

  Any reservations he had were born from the part of him that was still his old self.

  He looked around and saw that the chamber had been sealed. Its large stone doors pressed shut.

  He even tried giving them a nudge with his tendrils, but they didn’t budge.

  Neb let out a sigh before wriggling towards one of the corpses.

  It belonged to a middle-aged man who bore no other notable features.

  However, across his neck was a deep cut and laying at his side was an ornate dagger that was lined with more symbols that Neb couldn’t read.

  The hunger from before rose again.

  It was a pain that was clear.

  It told him to feed.

  To eat.

  To devour.

  And so, he wrapped his tendrils around the man’s hand and, with a strength that surprised him, he tore the fingers from the hand and sucked them into his body via an opening at the bottom of his body where he seemingly absorbed the digit.

  Stolen story; please report.

  This motion, that of eating, felt as natural as that of a nursing baby.

  The finger he ate provided not only nourishment but something else.

  Suddenly, the world around him became clearer.

  As if his field of focus had widened a little.

  He ate another finger, and the same thing happened until he ate the whole hand.

  His Tendrils also grew longer and a little thicker.

  He chose not to question what was happening and instead focused on eating as much as possible.

  He eventually ate every corpse until his perspective spread to encompass all 360 degrees.

  He could even see his now significantly larger self, revealing that he looked exactly like the strange monster depicted on the pedestals of the chamber.

  He had a large, pale bony head that had four twisted horns sticking out of its sides and an eye at its centre.

  The eye had had a dim, purple glow and darted around independently as he looked at himself.

  Bizarre.

  This was all too bizarre, but he tried to piece some of it together.

  It seemed as though the cloaked figures had summoned him.

  It would be some time until he found the answers to all this, but one thing that was clear after his little feast was that he could now read the symbols.

  They were actually gibberish.

  He knew the letters via insight he had suddenly gained, but it was clear that whoever had dramatically etched them into the wall didn’t know what any of them meant.

  Kthanic Runes.

  That’s what he now knew they were called.

  As if, by feasting on the flesh of others and gaining strength, he was granted a greater understanding of the world around him.

  And as for the form he took, it seemed as though they were trying to summon a being from The Place Beyond Utterance and envisioned that this would be the form it would take.

  Since this world clearly had rules of its own, Neb shook his head at how reckless it was to go around trying to summon things you barely understood.

  He let out a deep purr like sigh before making his way to the door to try and open it again.

  He was now five meters tall; his tendrils were twenty meters long each and were as thick as lamp posts.

  He pressed some of them onto the door and, to his delight, he was able to force the stone slabs open, revealing a rocky tunnel that led upwards via a staircase.

  Neb ascended, keeping his unblinking eye ahead on the torchlit path.

  If he had a heart, he would have been nervous because he didn’t know what to expect.

  The chamber beneath was a small and quiet place that allowed him to slowly digest everything that was happening, but…

  Neb eventually arrived at a smaller, human sized door and while his standing self may have been too tall to enter, he opened the wooden door and slithered forward, one tendril at a time.

  He then found himself in a wine cellar that was filled with neatly stacked bottles which he ignored as he shimmied across the floor, one tendril after the other.

  He then made his way upstairs to find that he was in some kind of manor, only it was completely empty. He peeped out of one of the windows and saw that not a single soul walked its grounds or even the distant forest, which was definitely weird because everything looked clean and well-kept.

  Neb concluded that the residents were the ones who had most likely ritualistically killed themselves downstairs, meaning the house was vacant.

  This was good.

  Neb wasn’t looking forward to interacting with other people just yet and so he slithered around the manor until he arrived at the library where he roosted, extending his tendrils and grabbing any history and books on the occult he could find.

  Starting with the history, this world was called Gual and he was located in the third kingdom of Outsear which encompassed the world’s single continent.

  It was called the third kingdom because the previous two kingdoms that claimed the continent had suddenly and mysteriously vanished, leaving very little evidence of their existence behind.

  Neb didn’t need to read any further to conclude that the previous kingdoms had probably fallen because some people messed around with the other plane of existence.

  This made him wonder if he was going to be the third kingdom’s ruination.

  He didn’t feel particularly compelled to destroy—

  Ah…

  He realised that he had gotten stronger only after eating the corpses of humans.

  This made him wonder what would happen if he ate a normal fruit and so he slithered into the kitchen where he ate an apple.

  He waited for a minute but noticed no changed and so tried eating everything he could find to no avail.

  He even bravely slithered outside and made his way to the farm where he ate a few chickens and sheep which made him grow only marginally bigger but didn’t offer any Acumen.

  That was what he dubbed the essence of existence.

  All things seemed to possess Acumen, even grains of sand, but at that point, it amounted to very little.

  He made his way back to the library, where he continued to read.

  Apparently, the current ruler of Outsear was a man named Harold Plunkett XIV, who was said to be the true inheritor of the world since his family supposedly descended from nobility that went as far back as the first kingdom.

  Among the many who swore allegiance to the king’s family were the Blinded Knights, and they were interesting because they were an order created specifically to prevent the fall of the third kingdom.

  They were led by a Provost Bram who was rumoured to be a golem or automaton of some sort because, even though he was in his seventies, he was able tig fight along with even the youngest of recruits.

  This group would be the biggest threat to Neb’s squiggly life because even if he wasn’t the one destined to end the world, they might wrongly assume that he is and try and kill him.

  He was more than content with spending the rest of his new life cooped up in this manor, reading his days away and eating the occasional chicken, but it seemed as though a peaceful and orderly life was still far away as he heard the sounds of footsteps coming from the forest to the north,

  His expanded perspective allowed him to perceive things that were otherwise beyond mortal bounds.

  This allowed him to hear that three people were approaching and one of then sounded like they were wearing heavy armour.

  He wriggled his way upstairs and peered out into the forest, where his sharp eye caught the approaching intruders as they emerged from the forest.

  Leading them was a woman who stood almost three meters tall, was clad neck to toe in dark steel armour and brandished a great axe.

  She had deeply tanned skin, long blond hair that was held in a messy bun and sharp blue eyes.

  Behind her was a small, dainty man who wore finely tailored academic clothing. A plain white shirt and deep purple coat matched his pointed purple hat and his eyes that glowed a dull purple.

  His mouth was lined with scars and burn marks, but they were mostly healed and didn’t stop him from arguing with the woman in front of him.

  He had dark skin and dreads that hung from his head.

  The third was another woman who stood about the same height as the man. She was dressed in a dirty white jumpsuit that was yellowed with blood stains which was the same for the little white cap that sat atop her head.

  She had ghostly pale skin, one eye that was brown and another that was green and shortly cut red hair. She carried a worn leather bag in one hand and meat cleaver in the other.

  What frightened Neb most about the trio wasn’t their bizarre appearance or their weapons, no, what scared him was the insignia which they each bore.

  That of the Blinded Knights.

  A crest which depicted a woman holding up the scales of justice along with a falcon while brandishing a sword.

  Neb panicked.

  How order learnt of the cult's activities, and were three approaching humans here to kill him?

  Whatever the answer was, he was determined to resist until the end.

  He had gotten a second chance, after all.

  Even if it was as a tentacle monster.