Reincarnated as a Land Shark???

Chapter 3: Questioning Reality

So... This is not a dream.

Honestly, thinking it was a dream may have been a bit of wishful thinking on my part. I had thought it might be real at first, but for some reason it all being a dream brought a strange sense of comfort and security. If this is real, then that means...

I really did die like that.

So I died and reincarnated as some kind of shark monster.

That means there is no waking up. This is my new reality.

And if this is real, that means I have things to get done. First off, I need to secure shelter. Water seems to be something I won't need to worry about, and food is clearly something there is plenty of on the reef. As it stands, though, I do not have a territory and there are other sharks around. Cannibalism in sharks of the same species isn't common, but there are instances of large sharks eating smaller sharks and I know for a fact that I'm one of the smaller sharks out there despite having grown a few inches.

It seems as though killing those two creatures just now, the strange octopus and the barracuda, had somehow grown me. Even though it seemed so obvious at the time I also wonder if I had just imagined it. Just growing out of the blue like that breaks the law of conservation of mass. I'd have to have eaten them, digested them, and then taken time for the nutrients to grow me. As it stands, I didn't eat them so I shouldn't have gained anything from either kill.

Yet not only did it grow me, the event also healed me. That is an undeniable fact.

Something isn't right here... well, that was obvious from the start. I'm a shark with legs - this creature didn't exist when I died.

Though it seems a very improbable course of evolution, perhaps sharks evolved like this after I died? If so, then I've been dead for at the very least thousands of years. I mean, it's good to know they didn't go extinct entirely with how things were going back in 2020 but still, this is all too strange.

I see no reason for any species of octopus to evolve into such a creature as the kind that bit me just a while ago, not to mention I don't think that even counted as an octopus. For that to evolve... more than just thousands of years would have been necessary. The barracuda is a bit easier to explain, but that walking shell thing from earlier is almost completely nonsensical.

Perhaps some sort of nuclear holocaust occurred sometime after I died to mutate the surviving life into these creatures? As unlikely as it may be, due to the high likelihood of the radiation poisoning that would result simply killing all larger life forms on the planet, the possibility does exist.

Another possible explanation is that I'm in a different world. If that is true, potential changes in the laws of physics and the rules that govern it could perhaps explain the strange healing and growth phenomena that I have already encountered. Not to mention... both times I killed something, I heard a strange noise. I think something appeared in the water, too, but I was too distracted to pay it much heed. That means I was somehow rewarded for killing those things...

A world where killing is something you're rewarded for. What a scary place.

But if that is the case, that means that cannibalism is going to be even more likely. I killed those two creatures easily, and if killing earns you rewards, then the bigger the kill, the more rewards you get. Just like one of those video games my brother played, actually. But what could be enforcing this?

There are many possible explanations, ranging from sci-fi to god mythology to the completely absurd. For now, I'm going to put the theory of nanomachine outbreak on the table. The possibilities of nanotechnology had not been fully explored while I was alive, but if something happened after I died it could easily have caused an acceleration of strange evolutionary traits. Biomass created by the nanomachines (perhaps stored up when I left my egg) were used in order to increase my size and nanomachines have been rumored to have potential in medicine as well. They may also have a part in the sounds I was hearing. Like using a clicker animal trainer it could be a way to train animals to attack each other in order to receive a reward, much like Pavlov's dogs associated the sound of footsteps with food.