Transmigration

Chapter 1: Transmigration

This time it is a mage baby girl in a western fantasy game. The character skill setup refers to a game I played many years ago (obviously, if any baby played it, they should recognize it at a glance), but it is not completely identical.

It is still cats saving the world (sorry, cat owners are just like this)!

Character OOC is inevitable, I will try my best ∠(°ゝ°).

And, it is still Hawthorne (naming is hard, so another member is added to the Hawthorne family).

*

"Sigh--"

This is Aya's eighth sigh today. On the third day of wilderness survival, she still hasn't felt herself being controlled by a player.

On the morning three days ago, she originally thought she would wake up from the Black Forest where the players logged off yesterday. After moving about freely for a while, she would receive the system notification and welcome the players' control, just like in the previous two years. Instead, when she opened her eyes, she found herself in a completely unfamiliar place.

A huge and strange forest—the vegetation here is very dense. Unlike her original world, where players coming and going meant deliberate gaps were left between vegetation patches, and the ground wasn't covered in so much messy debris.

Aya tugged at the leaf of an unknown plant very close to her and sighed again.

In her original world, there are no fallen leaves, no countless varieties of vegetation, no little bugs on the ground, no crisp bird chirping... However, she liked falling asleep every day while listening to the different music resounding throughout the world. That made her feel like the players would think of her again tomorrow.

On the very first day she arrived, she thought the system had updated a new map. Just like many times before, they could create a new space for players to visit. Some spaces were pretty and picturesque, while others were terrifying and ghostly, but they were all new territories. Not only did the players like them, but Aya also liked visiting brand-new regions.

Yet, waiting in place quietly for several hours, Aya didn't wait for the players' notification to log online. She was genuinely curious about this brand-new world, so she took her summoned beast, Xiaohua—it is a gray-and-white tabby big cat, and this was even a skin paid for and changed by a player-to explore the surroundings.

She wouldn't have known without exploring, but once she explored, Aya discovered something was wrong—this place was too big.

There were no boundaries, no repeating flowers, grass, and trees, no identical stones... and no other people.

Aya guarantees that she walked in a straight line for a full three hours without feeling where the air wall was. At first, she was still rejoicing that this map would definitely be the most exquisite map ever, but then she walked in a straight line for another full day and still didn't touch the boundary.

She didn't even encounter a single fellow member of her kind along the way. Aya began to panic.

The fellow beings she could bump into anywhere before-Humans, Celestials, Dragons, the Spirit Clan—not only would they dress in flashy ways, but they would also fight tirelessly in such wild places. Often you could see a new figure every few steps. Now, they were all gone.

Aya felt like a peeled egg, protected only by a thin, barely-there inner membrane of eggshell. She felt that everything around her was beginning to feel wrong.

Opening the character interface, Aya saw the "Level 5" in the character level column and completely failed to calm down.

She almost relied on the instincts engraved in a feline Spirit Clan member's program to find a rotting tree hollow and crawl into it, avoiding the fear of being exposed at night.

Aya dared not imagine what kind of place she had reached-whether the system program had malfunctioned or something else—and she only prayed that the players' control would come quickly. This was the only action currently that could give her a sense of security.

Yet, after a full three days, she was still all alone with a cat.

That is, only the summoned beast molded by the players into the largest size could give her some peace of mind.

However, Xiaohua also had a new change. In this map, it could shrink, shrinking to about the size of one of Aya's arms, looking about the same size as ordinary cats she had met before. But she knew that at its largest, Xiaohua stood much taller than her.

Every night she had to hug the huge Xiaohua to sleep—or rather, Xiaohua hugged her. Xiaohua's as-ever dazed appearance allowed her to feel a trace of reassurance.

A rustling sound came from the bushes. Aya hunched her body and crawled into the tree hollow, looking outside—a huge cat was carrying a rabbit out of the bushes.

"Xiaohua!" Aya crawled out happily. She had changed into her most convenient set of sect uniform. Because of the system, clothing previously wouldn't break or get soiled. However, after coming here, the first day she walked in the forest for a day, she discovered that her white dress was soiled in the evening, and one of the bows on the skirt hem was even snagged off, so she had no choice but to put away the elaborate skirt and change into the martial arts practice outfit she previously felt was the most durable.

Xiaohua's eyes were bright, seemingly able to speak, but Aya knew it was merely a "weapon" bestowed by the system, lacking consciousness and thought. Everything about it was the result of commands from Aya or the players. Previously it was skills, but now besides skills she could also command some other matters, such as hunting.

"How truly complicated. I've never processed a rabbit?" Aya flicked her tail. She is a black feline Spirit Clan member. In the place where they came from-where nine-tailed foxes, dragons, and qilin run rampant-feline Spirit Clan members mostly came into being because of cuteness, just like her. The players liked her black hair, black ears, and black tail, and also liked her big, round black eyes.

However, after coming to this world, her own body also underwent some changes—her originally dainty cat feet turned into feet of other humanoid races, and her height also increased somewhat. The shoes of the sect uniform were sized for cat feet, causing her to currently have no shoes to wear and forcing her to step on the muddy ground with bare feet, which also taught her to ride Xiaohua to travel.

Xiaohua squatted in front of Aya, leisurely flicking its tail and licking its paws, giving no response.

"The system really should release a dissection skill, so that I could directly click the skill to get rabbit meat." Aya muttered to herself, cautiously holding a dagger and beginning to skin the rabbit—the dagger was an assassin weapon unboxed by a player running a dungeon on the night before coming to the new map. Its stats were fairly good, but Aya is a Summoner class. She uses a staff, and the dagger was only temporarily not destroyed and discarded, yet now it happened to be convenient for her.

The exquisite dagger blade was also extremely sharp, to the extent of being able to sever hairs blown against it, causing Aya to skin the rabbit unevenly, but it didn't matter since she wasn't eating the skin.

Finding a branch to insert into the rabbit, binding it and placing it on a rack, Aya took out the new staff usable at her current level from her backpack. Feeling the internal energy within her body, she placed her hand above the pile of firewood and used the Pollen Combustion skill to ignite the firewood.

These past few days whenever she needed to make a fire, this was how she got through it. This is the only skill among all her skills related to fire. Summoners are a unique class of the Spirit Clan because they are closer to nature, and most of their skills are also related to nature, belonging to a pentagonal class. However, at her current level, many skills cannot be used.

Isn't it magical?

Aya sighed-in the past, she always heard players and friends chatting about eating meat ribs, eating cake, drinking milk tea or other things, but she could never understand the meaning of the word "eat". She had never eaten anything.

Yet on the first night after arriving in this place, she felt an unfamiliar discomfort in her stomach—she was hungry.

It was a novel experience, but she had witnessed the lives of those NPCs set by the system. Through Xiaohua's help, she found a few fruits and, imitating the ways of those NPCs she saw before, shoved the fruits into her mouth-unripe, sour and bitter, the texture somewhat hard, but Aya liked it.

This was the first time she "tasted" a flavor.

Like those blind-box commodities in the system, Aya thought of her current state of searching the forest for edible fruits every day-perhaps resembling the feeling of players tirelessly opening blind boxes in the mall. Although she didn't know what flavor the next one would be, she always looked forward to eating a fruit she would like more.

When the sky was just turning bright today, Aya woke up from her sleep, and while staring blankly and listening to the calls of birds outside the tree hollow, she finally reacted—those NPCs ate meat!

She hurriedly let Xiaohua go out to hunt, just like commanding it to bring back fruits. It would find the correct, suitable "prey" and bring it back.

The ignited tongues of fire rose upward, contacting the rabbit meat. High-temperature roasting forced out the meager amount of grease in the rabbit meat, producing a slight sizzling sound, and the aroma of meat also permeated the air.

"This is definitely going to be delicious!" Aya's eyes sparkled, and she twirled it a few times with her hands to make the rabbit meat heat more evenly. Xiaohua licked its fur, stroke after stroke, ignoring her.

Aside from the time Xiaohua went outside to hunt, Aya would generally bring it to wander around this vicinity—she wasn't sure if she could find the next tree hollow, so she dared not stray too far-yet for any luminous points, Aya went up to touch every single one, but most were medicinal herbs she didn't recognize, along with a few scattered copper coins.

Never mind the map being different, even the copper coins were different.

The patterns of the copper coins touched out here were somewhat different from what was displayed on her backpack interface, but when she deposited them, the numbers would change in the gold coin column.

Aya took out copper, silver, and gold coins to compare, discovering they had all changed-at least they weren't quite the same as the three round, smooth portraits on the icon-yet previously Aya had never touched the money in her bag with her own hands. They were usually just jumping numbers in the gold coin column, requiring no need to actually fish a money pouch out of the backpack; players only needed to initiate a transaction, and the system would help them deduct the money.

"Let me have a taste-" Aya sliced off a piece of golden-brown roast rabbit with her dagger and put it in her mouth.

It was a little too hot for her sensitive cat's tongue, but she couldn't bear to spit it out—the aroma of meat! This was what she was meant to eat! Even the blood that hadn't been fully drained from the rabbit became a pleasantly salty seasoning.

This was her first time eating meat, so it was the best meat she had ever tasted!

Aya happily twitched her ears, spread a clean leaf on the ground, then carefully sliced meat from the rabbit and laid it on the leaf to cool. She ate it piece by piece. Xiaohua only watched her with its head tilted, making no other move.

"Xiaohua, do you think I ended up on this map because my player abandoned me?" Aya muttered. She was actually a little doubtful. After all, characters who had been abandoned for a long time might still be able to talk normally with Aya at first, but given enough time, they would disappear.

Being abandoned by their players meant a slow death for characters like them. Unless their players came back someday, they would simply vanish into the system's data stream, waiting for the next time their owners remembered them and woke them up-though they didn't know when that would be.

"But my player was online the day before I came here... She even bought me new clothes!" Aya argued with herself again. "She obviously likes me best. Whenever there are pretty new clothes after a system update, she's always the first to buy them for me..."

Xiaohua made no sound.

"But she really hasn't been online as much lately. I heard her talking with someone about another game." Aya felt a little down. She liked her player, and she didn't want to disappear, either.

"Have I disappeared from my own world now?" she asked Xiaohua softly.

Xiaohua made no sound.

"Ah..." Aya sighed for the ninth time. "Let's leave here today. We can't stay in the forest forever. First, let's see whether this place is just so big that we haven't found the invisible wall yet, or... Never mind. Let's look for a settlement. We can't stay here too long after all. We haven't run into any animals stronger than us so far, but forests are always dangerous. I don't know when I might disappear, either. Before that happens, though, I need to find a bed and try sleeping in one."

"It's safer where there are lots of NPCs!" Aya muttered for a while before finally making up her mind. She put the leftover rabbit meat back in her backpack, where it took up one slot, then put out the fire and swung herself onto Xiaohua's back. "Let's go! Straight ahead! Let's see if you can get us out of this forest before nightfall!"

Xiaohua turned around twice on the spot. Aya leaned forward and wrapped her arms around its neck. With a light leap, Xiaohua raced ahead.

The forest was full of low shrubs and branches. Aya had to bury herself in Xiaohua's fur to avoid getting scratched by them. After three hours of running at full speed, they came across a fairly sizable river.

"Follow the river and we'll find a village." Aya was delighted, though her face, controlled by the system for so long, didn't reflect it. "Downstream. Keep going!"

There were far fewer shrubs along the edge of the woods, perhaps because animals often came there to drink. There were barely any tall trees, either. They stopped along the way to eat the rabbit meat in her backpack, which was still exactly as warm as when she had put it in, and two sweet-and-sour berries. Then Aya continued directing Xiaohua onward.

The forest was too big. Gazing at the winding river, Aya could only watch helplessly as twilight spread across the sky and the stars gradually appeared. "We'll have to keep going tomorrow."

Unable to find a suitable place to hide, Aya would be exposed by the river, where there was no cover. She climbed with the now-smaller Xiaohua into a tree not far from the water.

The tree was thick, with plenty of branches and leaves, making it a good hiding place. Aya made do by lying across a branch and slept there for the night. Before falling asleep, she wondered if she could fish in the river the next day and find out just how delicious the fish that people said cats loved really was.

Listening to the sound of the flowing water and the insects chirping, Aya fell asleep. She dreamed of her player and the friends she used to play with.

"Coo-coo-"