Chapter 3 Slime Crowd

Slime A (named thusly of my own accord as he had no name) kept advancing more or less like a turtle and after following him, I finally arrived at a cave. And as you’d expect, within that cave I found ma.s.ses of his fellow slimy friends scrambling around in a swarm.

Frankly, one word that can describe that scene is disgusting. Nah, the scene is not THAT revolting, but with a scene where there are a lot of cloudy white jelly like monsters, it cannot be helped for that scene to induce physiological disgust to the great me who is inside the cave.

Well, I too was indeed every bit like those jellies over there but, let’s just overlook that for now.

Whether it was this slime or that slime all the slimes in this cave were just a normal white slime. With a glance I could see that not one of these guys were a different color like me or clearly unusual in appearance like me. It would appear that this here was the den of the common slime.

“Say, what are we gonna do after this?”

I tried to enquire of Slime A.

Being brought here was fine but all the slimes in this cave were just lazing around instead of telling me to do anything at all. Don’t tell me; was Slime A just gonna tell me to rest here too or something?

“Veerryy sooon, houur, offf, hunntiing.”

His broken speech was incomprehensible but did he say “hunting” just now? Were these dunces with such weak intellects even capable of something like “hunting” to begin with?

Well, they are slimes, be that as it may, since they are members of a monster family let’s believe that they are able to do it. Even these guys won’t do something that they are unable to do…… maybe.

Slime A had now gone into the cave he’d brought me to, but I didn’t end up going in after him. Trying to actually rest here would be way too difficult for me with the human consciousness I still retained. For now I decided I’d just stay at the entrance and observe how things were in there.

And then as I observed them carefully, I realized that while all the slimes in this cave were the same bright white in color there were indeed subtle but sure variations to their shapes. Some of them were an angular shape like Slime A, some of them brought to mind a triangle with how the top of their heads and the sides of their bodies had a bit of a pointiness to them, and finally some of them were slightly terraced in a way that made them look just a little like New Year’s mochi.

You could ultimately only tell by looking really closely though. If you just looked at them normally you’d have a hard time spotting all those things on their ever jiggling bodies.

For the moment, I decided I’d try talking to the big square-looking guy that was near me since it was a free time right now.

“Got a minute?”

“Aah?”

It’s a reply devoid of intelligence as obvious as usual. It appears that even though this guy has a different shape, this guy is also the same as Slime A.

But at least even with how much of a former human I was being, they weren’t picking up any human smells from me.

“Hey you, think you could tell me about Status and Skill?”

I wanted to confirm slime things with another slime like me for now, and I had to confirm if that [Potential of Unknown Evolution] skill was something only I had or not. If it was a blessing from being reincarnated to another world then I'd have to keep it a secret, and if it was something that everyone had then I’d want to ask them for info on just what it was exactly.

That’s what I thought, but...

“S,staaatus? Ski, iiill?”

From that answer he definitely had no clue about it. Opening the status page was looking to be a completely alien concept to these guys.

Wait, could it be possible that Status wasn’t even something that existed to them? At any rate I had to confirm it.

“Ah, then just try to call for it in your mind.”

“Ookayyy.”

I wondered if it was due to its low intelligence, but the way it was just doing whatever I said sure was being a great help in keeping the conversation simple. This was kinda a vague feeling for me too, so I really couldn’t have explained it; and as it kept thinking the word Status over and over again...

“Ahh, itt caame.”

At last, this Slime succeeded. It seems that whether the

shows up or not depends on the Intelligence effect, and that

exists on a monster no matter what kind of monster it is.

“Really?! What’s it saying?”

After hearing this guy give his sluggish response to that I started trying the same thing with several other slimes too. There was always the possibility that this slime was just special, after all.

And so after asking around ten other slimes for this kinda info, I figured out a bunch of things.

Firstly, it was apparent that the [Potential for Unknown Evolution] skill was something every single slime knew from the very moment they were born. While it was too bad that I wasn't the only one, this also meant that I could potentially learn more about it if I ever ended up meeting any other slimes that knew stuff to any extent.

I asked just to be safe, and of course found they'd never known about this. Well, I guess if they never knew about things like Status then they sure wouldn't have known about this either, huh?

The 2nd is, most of the guys that have different shape have their level raised up without exception. Level 2 to 5 is short to begin with so there is nothing unusual about it, but, when I compare the guys who have a higher numerical value with the ones that have lower numerical value, their shape is different.

From this I knew that if I were to level up, there was a very high chance my appearance would get transformed in some way or another even if I didn't end up getting some sort of species-changing evolution like last time. Let's keep that in mind for now.

Third was that at the very least you could say there was no one within this crowd who had anything similar to my human intelligence. I wondered if getting that impression from them meant that the species known as Slime just wasn’t a particularly wise species. They kinda were small fries after all.

As I kept at this, suddenly without any sort of signal whatsoever all the slimes started heading for the exit of the cave. This one and that one and everyone, no exception. Just where on Earth were they even going exactly?

As I then luckily managed to find the Slime A from before, I went towards him to try and hear what he had to say.

“Hey, where are we going?”

“Riiighht nooow, houur, offf, hunntiing.”

Oh yeah, he’d mentioned something like that before. However, there were a lot of them going out to hunt even if that was the case. There wasn’t a single one of them staying in the cave. Normally, wouldn’t it just be the males going hunting while the females stayed at the nest and raised the children?

Nah, in the first place, I wonder if it’s not wrong for the

, whether they are male or female, pursuing the common sense of hunting?

I hesitated for a little bit, but I ultimately decided to go with them to that “hunting” thing. Really, I had no clue what was happening and I can’t say the word wasn’t scaring me either, but if I just stayed here then nothing would change at all.

Since there was the possibility of a time limit, I’d have to prepare myself for a little risk. Besides, compared to heading out by myself, I’d have far more options when something happened if I was in among a crowd.

For now I just followed Slime A as I was closer to him than I was with the rest of them.