I hit the ground.
"Thump~"
"Ugh~"
Where... was this?
Staring at the towering tree before me, I didn't know what to do.
I slowly sat up. My ***, my butt, felt a little cold against the ground, and there was a very fishy smell all around me.
It smelled like... the place I'd just been.
It was fairly bright around me, but the enormous tree overhead blocked out the sky, so I couldn't see very far.
I glanced around. The air was unfamiliar, the things around me were unfamiliar... Everything felt so strange, yet somehow just as it should be.
I touched the ground. It seemed... I was sitting on a giant leaf.
My body felt sticky.
I tried to stand, wobbled twice, then steadied myself and looked around. Then I lowered my head and looked at myself... myself?
"This... is... me..."
What was that? A voice?
I looked around. It was so quiet...
After a long moment, I slowly raised my head and looked at the thing in front of me—the thing I'd just been inside.
"What... is this...?"
It was an unbelievably enormous body. No, rather than a body, it would be better to call it a corpse. It seemed to have dried out completely.
I touched its hard outer shell. Strangely, it felt familiar. With a gentle tug, I pulled off a piece of its hide.
"Rattle~"
"Ah!"
The unfamiliar sound frightened me, and I let out a startled cry without thinking. But nothing appeared. Some dust had simply fallen from the enormous body.
I slowly turned my gaze toward the gigantic creature.
It was so huge... Its body was covered in green moss, which looked a little slimy. Every so often, one or two tiny creatures scurried across it. And it... must have been two or