Pain.

Echoes of pain.

The memory of pain.

Slowly, I came back to myself. I was floating in darkness, a bouncy, buoyant sort of darkness. I decided to start by opening my eyes. But they were already open. Huh. Did I have eyelids? I experimented, but the muscles of this body, whatever it was, didn't understand the command "blink." So no, then.

Next question. Where was I?

Tentatively, expecting another explosion of pain any second, I wriggled a little and found myself cocooned inside a cozy, translucent...bubble? Through its walls, I could see countless other bubbles everywhere around me, each containing a silvery, elongated teardrop curled around a large pillow.

All right. Most important question now. What was I?

Something long and skinny, inside an egg that swayed gently, sometimes side to side, sometimes up and down. That meant I was in...water? What creatures had Flicker said were Green Tier options? I couldn't close my eyes, but I could almost hear his voice droning, "Various types of sea creatures, reptiles, and amphibians." Unfortunately, so many of those hatched from translucent eggs laid in water that my current state didn't narrow it down at all. Well, I'd find out soon enough anyway. I could afford to be patient.

And so I waited and rested in my egg, watching the water grow lighter and darker and counting the passing days. Bit by bit, my soul forgot the agony of reincarnation until all that remained was the memory of the memory of pain, and the conviction that it had been worth it to keep my mind. At the same time, the pillow under me was shrinking and my body was growing larger and sprouting fins and tendrils near my mouth. Tendrils...tendrils.... Oh, whiskers! What kinds of fish had whiskers? Try as I might, the only one I could remember was the koi in the palace ponds. Providing visual pleasure was one way to benefit humans, I supposed, although nobles got bored so easily that I couldn't see them deriving sufficient enjoyment to win me much karma. If I were a koi, I'd have to learn some acrobatic tricks.

As I mulled over my options, seven dark-light cycles passed. One minute, I was bobbing up and down in my egg, trying to predict what color pattern I'd have when I grew up. The next, the water was seething with sleek, gleaming forms and I was plunging out to join them.

Swim! Swim!

We were in an underwater cave of some sort, waving our tails weakly and bumping into each other as we learned how to swim. Since fish skills seemed crucial to staying alive long enough to gain karma, I ceded control of my body to my fish brain. For another seven days, I stayed in the cave with my siblings, draining my yolk sac and building muscle strength and coordination.

Time to go! Swim!

My fish brain and my siblings were all saying that it was time to leave the cave. As they swarmed into open water, I trailed behind them, examining my surroundings. The water was a little murky, and the bottom was glittering black sand broken by rocks and water plants. None of them resembled seaweed, so we were probably in a river and not the sea. I had no idea whether my type of fish counted as an "ingeniator oecosystematis" like the oyster, which meant that I couldn't rely on living my life passively. I'd have to be proactive about getting caught by a human. Except...what if I weren't a beautiful koi? What if I'd reincarnated as an ugly fish?

Ugh.

Still, the answer was obvious: Get eaten. Offer up my mortal body on a human's dinner plate so that my soul could ascend.

A dinner plate....

Hungry! So hungry!

By now, my siblings and I had depleted our yolk sacs. We needed food – external food – now. A tiny, near-transparent bug floated by. On instinct, my head snapped around and I gulped it down. Mmmmm, tasty. All around me, my siblings were doing the same, snatching as many of the bugs as they could.

Hey! I yelled. Don't eat them all!

But of course none of them could understand me.

I dove into the fray, barreling into the others and slapping them away with my tail. They gave as good as they got, knocking me to and fro and churning the water until all the bugs were gone. Then one fish swung towards another and, instead of knocking it aside, tore a chunk out of its side. As I watched, horrified, the baby fish all dove at their injured sibling and devoured it to the bone. Only when its last shreds, too tiny to be worth chasing, were drifting to the bottom of the river did they resume their swim.

I watched them go, debating whether I'd be safer in a school or on my own. What was more likely to kill me: some unknown predator – or my own flesh and blood?

A wave crashed into me, tumbling me head over tail. When I'd righted myself and regained control of my fins, I screamed. Aaaaah!

A mountain had just erupted from the riverbed. It was muddy brown and had whiskers as long as a fishing boat. Slowly, it revolved until it could examine me out of one glassy eye the size of a shield.

I flinched back, trembling all over.

The monster opened its jaws in a silent laugh that revealed two rows of pointy white teeth. "What's the matter, little sibling?" it mocked. "Never knew you could grow so big?"

It could talk! Should I answer? I hesitated, wondering whether it was more likely to give me survival tips – or eat me itself. Without my realizing it, one of my fins had started to flap. An urgent, rhythmic clicking filled the water, and at the sound, my siblings jerked, panicked, and fled. My fish brain kicked in and sent me streaking after them.

As we zipped downstream, the monster called, "Come back and visit again sometime, little sibling."

Once we were a safe distance away, I edged to the outside of the school so I only had to monitor my cannibal siblings out of one eye. Then I returned to the karma problem. The most direct way to benefit humans as a fish, I decided, was to get eaten. Preferably by a starving peasant family. So then the crucial question was: Was I edible? How could I find out, short of swimming into a net, getting cooked, and either poisoning the humans or not? There had to be a better way.

Overhead, a dark form blocked the light, and I dove on instinct. Just in time too, because a giant, scissor-like beak stabbed through the surface of the water, snatched a mouthful of my siblings, and vanished again.

Forget identifying the maximally efficient way to gain karma! Staying alive long enough to gain any kind of karma was the challenge!

Giving up on long-term plans for now, I drifted back in my head and let my fish brain take over. Over the next period – of months? Years? I lost track of the days – my surviving siblings and I grew bigger and stronger. Little by little, our bodies widened and our backs darkened while our bellies stayed pale. The wispy tendrils thickened into long whiskers that trailed along the sides of our mouths.

One day, my Piri-self glanced out of my fish eyes and realized that I'd seen this kind of fish before. I'd eaten this kind of fish before. I was a catfish!

Naturally, such a common fish hadn't been nearly fancy enough to serve in the palace, but I'd eaten them earlier in my life as a fox. Mostly as leftovers that people tossed out their backdoors, but occasionally I'd run up to a fisherman's haul, snatched a fresh, flopping fish, and sprinted away with it. At the time, it had made a tremendous amount of sense – why bother catching dinner myself when someone else had already done it for me? But now that I knew how the karma system worked, I wanted to smack myself.

Oh wait, I could. I whacked my side with a fin, sending a click through the water and startling a pair of shrimp spirits on patrol. They tapped their legs, danced in place, and then sheepishly marched on. I ignored them.

As a catfish, what could I do to help humans?

Same answer as before: Get eaten.

Good. Okay. Fine. I could do that...or could I? The problem was that I had no idea which river I was in, or where the nearest village was – or even how to tell when I was swimming past a village.

Well, humans who lived near water tended to rely on fishing for their livelihoods, right? Although I hadn't interacted with them for centuries now, I assumed that modern-day Sericans still ate fish. Or, if they didn't, they might catch us for sport. Taking over my body from my fish brain, I started hunting for anything that resembled a fishhook or a net.

All of a sudden, a long, dark shape glided overhead, blocking the light. Shark! was my first thought. I dove for the riverbed – only to remember that I wasn't in the ocean and that while certain rivers did have sharks, I hadn't seen a single one here yet. So that dark shape was mostly likely a boat. A fishing boat, dared I hope...? Overriding my fish instincts, I swam back up as fast as I could and chased the shadow. I was so busy scanning the water for fishhooks that I never saw the net.

Rough ropes pressed against my sides and lifted me up. As they hauled me out of the water, I started to gasp and choke. Can't breathe! Can't breathe!

My fish brain panicked, thrashing my body in a wild attempt to escape.

It's okay, it's okay, panted my Piri-self, straining to suppress the fish brain before I flopped back into the water. This is what I want.

And indeed, as the net sailed through the air and dumped me onto something hard – Ow ow ow! – a blurry figure loomed overhead, raising a club.

My body convulsed. I felt it leap up and land, leap up and land, over and over, and I fought to hold it still. Dinner! Dinner! I chanted. I'll be dinner.

The club came down.

"That was an...interesting approach," commented Flicker, tapping a finger against my curriculum vitae.

I was back in his office in the Bureau of Reincarnation, conducting our usual post-mortem of my latest life. The stamp at the top of my document still read "Green." It was the first thing I'd checked.

"You swam straight into a fishing net so you could earn positive karma for providing nutrients to humans."

Did it work? Did it work? I bounced up and down.

He fixed me with a disapproving glare but admitted, "Yes. Unfortunately. Karma is awarded based on results, not intent. You're drawing the wrong lessons from the system, Piri. It's meant to help you improve and become a better person."

I am improving and becoming a better person. I sacrificed myself to feed a poor fisherman and his family. Would the Piri you knew before have done something that selfless?

He was too proper to snort. "About that. Next time, you might want to wait until you're bigger before you fling yourself into the net. You were too small to provide much in the way of sustenance. No one would buy you. The fisherman had to throw you in with a larger fish as part of a bargain."

I was stung. I was part of a bargain?

"Yes. Standard marketplace haggling technique. Customer wants lower price, seller resists lowering the price but throws in a bonus. In this case, you were the bonus."

I find that deeply offensive.

"Live with it. And I mean that, in fact. You're going to be a catfish again next life."

Really?

I was excited about getting a second try in the same form. This time, I could cut down the amount of time I'd wasted on figuring out what I was. This time, I'd keep careful track of the passage of days so I'd know exactly how old I was and when the optimum time to find a fishing boat was...except that I had no idea how fast catfish grew.

Hey, Flicker, how fast do catfish grow?

"I have no idea. I don't work in the Bureau of Academia."

Does it have a library? Can you look it up? Can you send a runner to look it up?

"Piri, do you think I have time? You've already taken up your appointment slot and the one after yours – and I haven't even started reincarnating you."

Oh. Sorry, I apologized automatically while wondering if I could convince him to look up the data before my next life. Assuming, of course, that the Bureau would reincarnate me as a catfish three times in a row. Maybe I should pretend that I hated being one.

"Now...." Flicker hesitated, looking between me and the Tea of Forgetfulness. "Did you want to use the Tea?" he asked, a note of hope in his voice.

My answer was immediate. No.

His jaw tightened. "Then don't fight me this time."

I won't, I promised. Last time, you caught me off guard. This time I'm prepared. I know what I'm getting into.

He just sighed.

It was true – I did know what to expect, from the starlight that shot from his fingertip, to the lacy skirt that wrapped around me, to the rending and the reshaping. I expected every last second of it.

But even so, it still went exactly as it had last time.