Reincarnated as a Sea Emperor hybrid

Prologue

1 trillion credits. That broke Ryley. Not the Aurora crashing, not the dozens of leviathans that tried to eat him, not even the tragic death of the Sea Emperor he had grown fond of. It was the fact he owed 1 trillion credits just for the fact he didn't want to die. For a long time after that revelation, he was just left sitting there, slowly disassociating while the Neptune idly drifted to conserve fuel. Fuel he wouldn't need because he couldn't land. Ever. He was broken from his thoughts (or lack thereof) by the Neptune's AI. "Detecting incoming projectile. Safe flight trajectory calculated." The glass in front of him flashed with a direction for him to pilot the ship in while he could see through the blue projection in order to catch sight of the asteroid about to hit him. But he couldn't really bring himself to care. He couldn't land, so why delay the inevitable and slowly starve in space when he could just get it over with? 
He leans his head back on this pilot's chair, missing the life he had made for himself. 'I should have stayed on the planet.' 
The last thing he hears before everything goes dark is the Neptune's artificial voice. "Collision imminent."

Surprisingly, Ryley opens his eyes. His brain slowly catches up with his surroundings. 'Was that just a nightmare?' When his brain decides to work at full capacity, he realises something. He's in the Lava Zone. Underwater. He flails around, panicking about how much oxygen he might have left after his unknown amount of time napping, as well as any Sea Dragon that might be nearby, but that's when he notices something else. His body lacks the familiar weight of an oxygen tank, and he can't feel the tightness of his dive suit. But he's completely fine. Slowing down, putting his hands to his face, he's not even wearing a rebreather. 'Why do my hands feel weird?' Taking them from his face, he uses the light from the lava to see. What he finds is... shocking to say the least. Instead of bare human hands, or even gloves like he was half expecting. It was clawed, scaly hands with webbed fingers. "..." Ryley screams in horror at what he's seeing, but despite that, only a couple of very small bubbles leave his mouth, as if he wasn't breathing air, and the sound is oddly clear. Ryley's hands roam his body, finding similar textures all over before they reach his waist. He freezes, eyes looking straight ahead, afraid of what he'll find if he looks down. Forcing the lump in his throat to go down, he stiffly tilts his neck downward. Tentacles. His waist down, is tentacles. 

Ryley can't bring himself to examine himself beyond that. He just needed to think. For a while, he just sits on the cooled lava that the cave is made out of, lava lizards, magmarangs and now evidently passive warpers float by. Sea dragon calls sound in the distance. It was oddly soothing, despite being a source of fear mere... hours? Days? Weeks? How long ago was it? Ignoring all that, he mulls over what he knows. First, he's pretty sure he launched the Neptune. Second, he's a weird tentacle creature like Ursula from The Little Mermaid. So, since a person can't magically wake up miles away from where they just were looking like a Disney villain, naturally, this is a dream. A very, very weird dream that he should probably tell a therapist about. He pinches his scaled arm with a clawed hand and closes his eyes, waiting to wake up as a human being. Opening them, he's still in the lava zone, still covered in scales, still breathing water. 'Ok, getting concerned now.' He pinches himself harder. Nothing. With a primal animalistic growl that he actively ignores in favour of masochism, he pinches himself hard enough to draw blood. Yellow blood. Ryley stops and stares at the liquid staining the water in front of him in horror.