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Foreword

I seem to be sane again. Henceforth, "Chapter 1 - Hello World" will be a weird acid trip of a pilot and because not only did I have zero planning in it, I also had zero consideration on how unapologetically brazen Sammy would be. Got some flak from some friends that found it incredibly offensive.

Which meant it's time for a reboot. This time, I'd like to write with a bit less monke brain and a bit more monke soul, if that makes sense to you. Though in this case, would it better to call it hilichurl soul? Jokes aside, I meant to say that I'm gonna take a bit of a slower pace with these chapters, making them more of a monster-of-the-week in format. In any case, enjoy the chapter.

Valo!

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REAL Chapter 1 - Life Could Be Dream

Ever watch those "life could be a dream" videos online? Those compilations of clips featuring monkeys doing monkey stuff, or monkeys doing human stuff, or monkeys just being monkeys and enjoying themselves? I have. I loved those videos. Each and every second that a monkey did something no matter how mundane or amazing I would just feel an amazing sense of serenity that made all the troubles that I had in life feel petty and small. I'd watch a lot of those videos before and after exams, in the bed before I sleep, or even in the bathroom, though I'd usually just be listening to the background music in the last case.

What if we were just monkeys again? I knew it wasn't that simple, but the way that monkeys lived felt extremely simple compared to all the complications that happen in human society every day. There's a sense that a lot of our problems would disappear if we had just started to live like monkeys. Heck, at one point, I'd started to think how nice it would have been if in my next life—given reincarnation was a thing—I'd get to live my days as a simple monkey in the forest and not be bothered with all that human stuff like socializing.

I got my wish, somewhat, though I could do without the process. Dying was, admittedly, really fucking painful. Or at least, my case was. See, I'd once gotten it in my head that taking a shortcut through a back alley on the way home was a great idea. Usually, I'd wait for the bus on the usual spot maybe a block away from the campus, but the waits were like 30 minutes in between and I got there just as the fucking thing left. It was a convenient time to remember that there was another stop that was another block away that had a lot more buses going through it because it was in a shopping district. Kind of convenient too that I remembered a shortcut that a not-friend told me about as he was going back and forth to the computer shop to waste the rest of his free time on League. Stupid of me too to be walking around with my earphones on and listening to Frank Sinatra. Heck, I was even dancing around the sidewalk with an umbrella in hand.

Distracted and preoccupied with goofing off, a perfect target for a surprise mugging.

When the dude showed up, I had my hands up as I should. Heard nothing he was saying though, was kinda just waiting for him to get close enough for my Krav Maga instincts to kick in. Kick in, heh. I kicked his balls. The dude immediately keeled over so I sent another kick to his face, then I stole his pistol and dumped it in, well, the dumpster.

Never saw the other guy until he fuckin yelled something and shot me in the chest. Motherfucker hit my lung cause after I collapsed, I couldn't even yell or breathe without coughing up blood. Probably missed my heart too because after the two of them ran I had spent a good amount of time lying on the concrete, long enough to hear the sirens coming, but not enough to get to see the faces of the medivac taking me into the ambulance.

That was the story of my death. The story of my rebirth, though, was hella interesting.

Then the next thing I knew, I was coming out of the womb. I got passed around a few hands until I was finally given to my mother. When I saw her face, I screamed. There was no mouth; her face had been a smooth bone-white shell thing with creepy blood markings on it. She was covered in a copious amount of red fur, or at least, that was what I had seen at the time. Worst of all, she'd made me suck her tits.

Who wouldn't panic in that situation?

So I threw a fit and passed out. Then someone woke me up again and fed me faceless monkey milk, which caused me to have another panic attack and pass out. This happened maybe three or four more times before I'd finally gotten calm enough to not lose my shit immediately and got the chance to finally observe my surroundings. What I found out made me almost want to pass out again:

I was reincarnated as a hilichurl.

The situation was surreal enough that I had actually believed that I was drugged or something. Who would ever believe that they got reborn as one of the mooks from an adventure-heavy gambling game I'd played since launch? Yet, regrettably, acceptance came with time. It took me about five rude awakenings to realize that the whole situation wasn't because someone had spiked my water jug or something. The denial was hard to keep up when I have no idea what an acid trip felt like with the addition to my waking moments getting progressively longer. By the fifty-fourth feeding time, I could already stay awake as long as the sun was up. A bit past 200 and I could make stay up from sunrise to sunrise.

I passed out for the entire day afterward, sure, but hey; I proved I could do it.

All in all, yeah, I'm a hilichurl. Yeah, I used to be human. Yeah, my soul is from another universe. Watcha gonna do about it?

So with that in mind, I enthusiastically took in everything that I needed to know in order to live a long life as a good goody-churl, and very quickly, two things stood out.

One: It seems I wasn't a run-of-the-mill hilichurl. Sure, I could be talking psychologically, but I'm talking about different physically here. Was I super strong?

Haha. I wish.

No, it was something different. See how I mentioned how I saw what my mother looked like at birth? Yeah, hilichurls don't do that. We wear those masks because we don't primarily operate through sight. We have these antenna things on the tops of our heads that… uh, I don't actually know? All I could tell was that I basically had 360-degree vision but can only "see" far from the front. Oddly enough, we could also "see" colors provided that they're close enough…

Okay. Fine. We see perfectly fine. The point, though, was that we don't use eyes, or at least most of us don't. Eyes were reserved for the Samachurls, and they didn't have a pair; they had a single eye and their masks had eye windows that looked like mouths.

Basically, I had opened my eye at birth and it caused a stir in the tribe, or at least I think so. The adults had always taken me outside every night and placed a pyre in front of me, which they kept sacrificing food on and sent hilichurlian prayers to. Of course, I could be wrong and hilichurls actually just regularly sacrificed food to their gods in celebration of the successful birth of the young ones. No way in hell would I be able to really know what's up so long as I was still a baby.

Second: I wasn't alone. It was something that I'd actively ignored since I was born, but there was a second baby-churl suckling from my mother. The fellow little bugger slept in the same crib as I did, which meant that every minute spent there was a disaster of flailing limbs and crying. She was honestly one of the biggest reasons why the times I had spent awake had gotten longer as the days passed. It was a nightmare.

How I know it was a she? Soon as you can crawl, which was like, 100-something days—a bit more than three months, they take the baby blankets off you because at that point you would have begun growing the start of your mane. We may have the concept of loincloths, but not diapers.

It was through her that I got to know how gosh-darned ugly baby hilichurls were. Without the manes, we basically looked like naked, wood bark-skinned cyclopses. No seriously. Search up baby cyclops on the internet. Shit's cursed man, like kill it with fire cursed, especially when you try to associate it with the concept of being your progeny. Looking back at it now, I was glad I was a helpless little nugget because otherwise, I would have tried tossing the baby-churl into a river. For any humans out there, do not take off our masks for the sake of your sanity, unless that's what you're into. It's an acquired taste I had to grow into, and I don't think any sane humans out there would have too different a reaction.

With that out of the way, the rest of my infancy was just a boring montage of sleeping, trying to sleep, eating, and attempting to potty train both myself and my crib-sister, all of which I had found surprisingly easy to do. Give me a certificate of excellence in being a baby, cause I'm on a roll!

Then at the end of the sixth month, my sister opened her single green eye, and that was the end of thinking of myself as a hilichurl prodigy.

Like the selfish bastard that I was, I'd deluded myself into thinking that hers, too, was a fluke. That lasted for about five seconds as immediately after she opened her eye, the wind surrounding the crib picked up and spun around with enough force to lift up the blankets, throw around chairs, and last but most horrifyingly, the intricate collection of stone and iron weapons that had been placed nearby for our protection. The adults had burst in, caveman weapons blazing, only to find a baby going full Avatar State in the middle of the room. Poor little me was basically stuck there directly under the rampaging crib-mate the entire time, doing my best to stay in the center of the eye of the storm and not get sucked into the miniature tornado.

Thankfully, the entire outburst ended pretty quickly, mostly because the little powerhouse quickly ran out of little baby strength and passed out. She landed directly on top of me, perhaps breaking a few baby bones at the same time, but that kind of thing was forgivable compared to almost getting me killed. The elders quickly took her away, too, and did some elder things. They never brought her back.

I'm nothing special, I guess. Lesson learned.

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CH 1 END