The first thing Matthew thought after stirring from sleep was that he was having one of those half-lucid dreams he sometimes got when he underslept. He could barely see anything and he couldn't feel his limbs, and his attempts to move felt like he was compressed into a ball instead of laying on the nice comfy mattress he remembered. He also felt like he was starving.

  5 minutes later and the situation not improving sent him panicking. What the hell? Did I suffer some accident I don't remember and am on life support?

  That train of though was interrupted when something bumped into the edge of his confines, and something in Matt's instinct screamed at him that whatever it was it wasn't friendly. He heaved at his constraints, and felt whatever it was distorting in an oblong shape. A few struggles later and he was rewarded with blinding light as his head poked free.

  He looked around in horror with his still poor eyesight and recognized what had been holding him.

  An egg. Are you fucking kidding me?!? Wait, are those scales as well?

  He was on the edge of hyperventilating when a couple of blue screens popped up to add to his confusion. They were clearly readable despite his own poor vision making it hard to see more than a few feet.

  What?

  There were so many questions Matthew didn't even know where to begin, but either he was having an incredibly realistic dream or some being had kidnapped him and forced him to be born as a snake. That should have angered him, but all he felt was the absurdity of it all. Operating on web novel logic, he thought [Status] and was rewarded with another blue screen.

  Before he could really consider the whole thing, he was distracted from his shock by the feeling of increasingly insistent hunger and the sounds of his 'siblings' breaking their shells. Matt was no snake expert, but he had heard some breeds of snakes eat their siblings due to lack of food. He didn't know if that was true for alien vipers, but it was time to get out of here.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  I can consider the implications of the mysterious blue screens later, after my stomach isn't cramping in on itself. What does a baby viper even eat? Rodents?

  That thought was repulsive, but a guy's gotta do what a guy's gotta do. The problem was the only thing he knew about hunting as a snake was learned from a half-forgotten documentary aired on Discovery Channel years ago.

  Sigh, let's get this over with.

  He found a burrow and settled in to wait, checking out his own body as he did so. He was currently about 6 inches in length, with his coloring warping oddly. He decided to play around with the status in order to see what extra information he could gain. [Assassin Viper]

  Ok, that was more informative. What about [Rapid Digestion].

  [Camouflage] , [Deadly Poison], [Deadly Poison Resistance], and [Infrared Vision] represented the racial skills of the Assassin Viper, and were not particularly different than expected. The shop on the other hand offered a truly dizzying amount of options. It would take hours to sort them all, but they all had one thing in common. It needed points, lots of them. If he was understanding correctly, points would determine is future survival, and to get points he just needed to eat a lot.

  His reverie was interrupted by the sounds of cracking wood. He turned to look at what caused the noise, and was rewarded with a sight that further trampled on his 27 years of common sense. A giant that might have best been described as a troll stood there, with green skin and tusks but still bipedal. His eyesight still wasn't good, but he would guess it was at least 10 meters and almost as tall as the nearby trees.

  Oh give me a fucking break. I was just trying to hype myself up for some 'king of the food chain' action here. What the hell kind of world is this?