'An unfamiliar ceiling...'
When Karl Ares awoke from a chaotic dream, the first thing he saw was a chitinous ceiling that looked like an insect shell.
His gaze gradually lowered, and he saw a series of pods, as well as a flower-bud-shaped pool in the center of the circular room.
Other people were unconscious inside the pods, spaced evenly along the walls of the room.
'Where is this? Wasn't I supposed to be on my way back to the academy?'
Karl's last memory before losing consciousness was finalizing an order for magical items in the Kingdom of Brynnland and preparing to set off for the Magic Academy.
But his memories ended there. When he opened his eyes again, he was already lying here.
He tried struggling, but the pod, also made of chitin, was unexpectedly sturdy.
Even after Karl used all his strength, he couldn't pry it open.
Just as Karl was trying to break free, a burly female Half-Orc opened her eyes inside a pod directly opposite the door.
"Don't waste your strength. This is a conversion pod made by Mind Flayers. Even I, a third-level Warrior, can't break free. As a spellcaster, you have even less chance."
"Mind Flayer?"
Karl repeated the term instinctively, and memories of what the Magic Academy's textbooks said about Mind Flayers began to surface in his mind.
Mind Flayers, also known as Illithids, had heads resembling octopuses and excelled at using psionic abilities.
The race usually acted in groups, but occasionally, a Mind Flayer would break free from the hive mind and establish an independent faction.
They were hermaphroditic and could only expand their population by using a certain parasite to transform other intelligent life forms into Mind Flayers.
For some reason, Karl felt that the scene before him was strangely familiar.
But just as he searched through his memories, the room's door suddenly opened, and a Mind Flayer floated in from outside, hovering in midair with psionic power.
"Excellent! You two have the best potential in this batch!"
Its voice was mixed with the strange sound of churning mucus. After praising Karl and the Half-Orc's physiques, the Mind Flayer floated toward the pool in the center of the room.
As it approached, the lid above the pool slowly opened like petals.
Dozens of tadpole-like creatures swam through the golden-glowing pool. The Mind Flayer reached out and scooped one out.
It was a bizarre worm with tentacles like those of a Mind Flayer.
When it opened its mouth, the three rings of sharp teeth surrounding its mouth made one's blood run cold.
"I can't wait to see what you look like after your transformation..."
Dragging the worm along, the Mind Flayer floated toward the Half-Orc Warrior who had spoken earlier.
The other woman seemed to know what was about to happen, and suddenly began struggling violently.
At that moment, a wave of psionic energy spread from around the Mind Flayer's head, and the struggling Half-Orc immediately went rigid.
The Mind Flayer gave another meaningless chuckle, then lifted the worm and placed it on the Half-Orc's face.
The vicious little creature seemed to know exactly what it was doing. The moment it steadied itself, it crawled toward the Half-Orc's wide-open eye.
It brazenly let out a shrill cry at the Half-Orc with its mouthparts, pried open her eyelid, and burrowed straight in along the edge of the eye.
"Ah—!"
As the Half-Orc's miserable scream rang out, Karl felt every hair on his back stand on end.
Clearly, everyone in this room would have to endure something similar.
Karl swallowed with difficulty and tried to make himself as inconspicuous as possible, hoping the Mind Flayer wouldn't notice him.
But at that moment, the Mind Flayer turned around and looked at Karl with an almost amused expression.
It scooped another worm from the pool and used its psionics to immobilize Karl again.
And so, Karl could only watch helplessly as the worm crawled into his own eye.
'It hurts! It hurts so much!'
At that moment, only this thought surfaced in Karl's mind.
Legend said that Mind Flayer tadpoles parasitized the area near the brainstem, gradually absorbing the host's brain and replacing it with their own.
Once the process was complete, the parasitized life form would become a new Mind Flayer.
Although the original host's memories would have some influence on the newborn Mind Flayer, the existence of psionics greatly weakened the original body's influence. As a result, very few people retained their former personalities after becoming Mind Flayers.
Watching the Half-Orc and Karl with satisfaction, the Mind Flayer made a gurgling sound before turning and leaving the conversion room.
The distance from the eye to the brainstem wasn't very far.
But to Karl and the other Half-Orc, those few centimeters crawled by the Mind Flayer tadpoles felt like a century of torment.
The intense pain stimulated the memories in Karl's brain to their fullest extent, and he immediately recalled where his sense of familiarity had come from.
Before he had transmigrated into this world, he had once followed the trend and played a game set in a DND world: Baldur's Gate 3.
The game's promotional animation had been at least eighty percent similar to what he was experiencing now.
'Wait, that's not right! The world I transmigrated into isn't Faerun. It doesn't have the Sword Coast or Baldur's Gate. Although the classes and races are almost the same, the game doesn't have the Artificer class I took...'
The thought had barely arisen when the pain forced Karl's brain into a state of unconsciousness as a form of self-protection.
But although Karl had passed out, the Mind Flayer worm in his brain continued working.
In fact, because Karl had fallen unconscious, it automatically crawled toward the most active area of his brain.
However, when it began attaching itself to that region and started feeding on and reading Karl's memories, the Mind Flayer worm's body suddenly stiffened.
Mind Flayers were extraplanar life forms from the Mad Nation. In the world they originally inhabited, cities made of fleshy tumors, oceans of protoplasm, purple shadows, and chitinous shores were what counted as "normal."
The memories of Karl's previous life came from a world without magic, one whose fundamental rules differed vastly from those of the current reality.
To the Mind Flayer worm, those memories were like garbled data in an incompatible format, requiring a tremendous amount of effort to interpret.
Thus, the memories of the information age from another world bombarded the poor Mind Flayer tadpole. Unable to process so much otherworldly information at once, it promptly entered a dormant state.
Meanwhile, outside the canyon where the Mind Flayer base was located, an Ogre Warlord bent down and asked a human:
"Is this where that traitor is hiding?"
This was a canyon in the Black Hat Mountains within the Kingdom of Brynnland. Because of its geography, it was also the preferred hiding place for fugitives and criminals from across the continent.
Legend had it that there had once been a rift leading to the Abyss beneath this place, but more than a decade ago, the various nations had joined forces to seal it.
"Yes, my lord. The Mind Flayer who tried to overthrow Graywall City is hiding deeper underground. A few days ago, he brought back a group of people from outside. It looks like he plans to convert them and increase his manpower!"
With a sycophantic smile on his face, the local fugitive, his teeth yellowed, looked at the Ogre Warlord expectantly.
The Ogre's eyes flicked toward the side. A Mind Flayer dressed in a style not much different from the Ogre's nodded, confirming that the man wasn't lying.
"Give him the money!"
The Ogre Warlord waved at the Gnoll and troll mercenaries behind him, straightened up, and pointed his club toward the front.
"That traitor from Graywall City is at his weakest right now! Men, follow me! Kill him! The city lord will reward us handsomely!"
At the Ogre Warlord's promise, the soldiers behind him immediately raised their heads and roared.
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