1 Born from Blood

Yu Ling woke to the taste of blood in her mouth and the disgusting feeling of a sticky, viscous fluid clinging to her from head to toe.

She opened her eyes.

Both the skies and the earth were stained the color of blood, and a crimson fog seemed to cling to the ground as if the very earth were bleeding. It was both a beautiful and ominous sight, and Yu Ling stared at the sky for a long time in a daze as the sensations of her body slowly returned to her.

The last thing she remembered was that her colleague had asked her to help him with an experiment. Yu Ling sighed at the memory. She had known about his arrogant personality, so she had done her best to avoid him because of it. Unfortunately, they were in the same department and under the same PI, so she had no choice but to work with him when the project required it. She had thought she had made her avoidance quite clear....she hadn't expected him to suddenly confess. As expected, when she had refused him, they had gotten into an argument. She had tried to leave, but he had grabbed her and in the resulting scuffle they had knocked over some flasks. There had been an explosion, and then...what had happened after that?

Shaking her head to clear her muddled thoughts, she started to look around to figure out the situation. But what she saw cleared her head up completely.

At her feet lay the corpse of a woman, torn open so that her guts were splattered on the floor, a mix of vivid white and dark red. Her beautiful face was frozen in an expression of terror, vacant pale blue eyes forever fixed on her last moments.

Yu Ling screamed and staggered back, but she almost tripped when stepped on something soft. She looked down and realized with horror that she had stepped on a half-devoured human arm, much of its flesh torn off to reveal the bone within. She soon realized that the corpse of the woman was not the only one in the area—other bodies and body parts were scattered around her, similarly marred. A broken down wooden carriage that seemed to come from the medieval age was abandoned near the dirt road they were on, and to the sides of the road were a thick cover of trees. They seemed to be on a road that went through a forest.

Where was this?

What happened here?!

She ran towards the bushes to get away from the terrifying scene. She ran and kept on running until the scarlet tint on the world faded, crimson skies returning to the familiar blue. Only when the last of the red fog faded and she reached a clearing next to a stream did she fall onto her hands and knees and breathe heavily, trying to calm herself down.

How did she get here? If there had been an explosion, she should be in the hospital now, or perhaps even still inside the lab. Yet this place was definitely not a hospital, and there were no signs of any buildings or familiar roads around. In fact, she seemed to be in the middle of a forest, of all things.

Did someone move her into a forest while unconscious? But she was standing when she regained consciousness. Furthermore, there was that carriage made of wood. She had only seen such a thing in historical movies or documentaries about the medieval period. There shouldn't be anyone using such a thing in modern times.

And most importantly, those people...who killed them? Was the killer still in the area? They also looked as if they had been devoured by beasts after they had been killed as well...

Wait. Devoured by beasts?

A horrifying possibility came into her mind.

Yu Ling suddenly remembered the taste in her mouth. It was the taste of blood and...raw meat?

Her stomach seemed to churn and she gagged, trying to vomit, but nothing would come out. She crawled towards the stream and desperately drank the water in an attempt to wash out the taste, but the metallic taste of blood lingered like the remnant of a nightmare. When she put her hands in the stream once more to cup some more water, she suddenly stopped and stared blankly as the running water washed away the layers of blood on her claws.

Yes, they were CLAWS.

She still had five fingers, but they were gnarled and scaled, and the obsidian nails were sharp and curved, like an eagle's talons. These were deadly weapons of murder.

She felt at her face. Her cheeks still felt smooth and her features seemed to be that of a human, but as she reached her forehead, she could feel the rough protrusion of a horn there. Her ears were pointed and scaled. Feeling her teeth, she also realized that even her teeth had turned into weapons as well—they were sharp and hard, and her canines were pointed like fangs.

To make things worse, she also felt as if she had gained an extra limb behind her. She tried moving it, and, as expected, she soon saw her own scaled tail curled around her legs.

This...No matter how she thought about it, she was no longer human.

How was this possible?

She had never heard of anything that would make it possible for a human to suddenly mutate into a monster like this. Could it be that those flasks that exploded were some secret reagents capable of genetic modification? But no, that was impossible. The combination had caused an explosion, and it was impossible for genetic modification to occur simultaneously. Furthermore, she clearly remembered that burning pain when she had been caught up in it. They had been so close to the explosion that by all rights, she should have died.

Was that it? Did she really die? And now...she was reborn as a monster?

She had heard of reincarnation before, but wasn't reincarnation supposed to start with a blank slate? Why did she keep all her memories? And why, of all things, was she reborn as THIS monstrosity? Was this some kind of karmic retribution? How was she supposed to live like this?!

She supposed she should be glad she still had a somewhat human appearance, but it was a thin comfort. She could just imagine the chaos that would happen if she walked into a city like this. It would be best for her to avoid other people until she had a better grasp of the circumstances.

Suddenly, she could hear the sound of screams and roars coming closer. Yu Ling frowned and looked in the direction of the noise uncertainly. The roars sounded like that of demonic beasts and the screams sounded like that of humans. This was not good. Although she really wanted to find someone to explain everything to her. She had no confidence that she would be welcomed by humans with the way she looked now, and she had even less confidence that those beasts would not attack her. The safest option at this point would be to just run away, but...now that she was in a foreign world in the body of a monster, where should she run away to?