Chicago. June 24, 2025. 12:11 a.m.
Kael Renard didn't remember reaching the car. He stood in an alley off Kedzie, his sister's voice still echoing in his ears. It was a call he never should have made.
Rain fell in icy torrents, stinging his face like broken glass.
Just let it go, Kael. Whatever it is, drop it.
He drove his Buick with one hand. The other pressed against the damp heat soaking through his shirt.
He'd uncovered exactly what the client had paid for. That was the problem. People rarely appreciated the truth once it landed in their hands. But those who received his knowledge rarely showed gratitude.
The muzzle flash had turned the alley white for half a second. He remembered that more clearly than starting the engine or the first three turns. Lower Wacker was a blur of sodium light and rain-streaked glass. Outside his windshield, a chaotic rush of water blurred everything. It washed away the blood on his hands and filled the gutters. Kael's vision shifted like a camera lens. It broadened and narrowed until he couldn't hold it steady anymore.
Stay awake. Stay awake, you idiot. The hospital's four minutes out.
Headlights bloomed in his mirror, too close, too fast. He never saw the car clearly enough to know whether it belonged to the people behind his latest case or someone else he had angered over nine years of investigations. It didn't matter in the end.
His leg stopped responding at the second curve. Before he realized it, his foot slipped off the brake and found the accelerator.
The guardrail came up fast and silver in the headlights. He had time to think that the rain made the metal resemble water, which seemed absurd.
Noise erupted everywhere: the windshield fractured into a thousand lines before shattering. The seatbelt pressed hard against his collarbone. He heard tearing steel ring through the Buick. The Buick left the road. It began to rotate through the freezing downpour.
Sirens wailed in the distance before he realized he could still hear at all. Somewhere distant, a woman was screaming through the storm for someone to call it in. He tried to move his hand and could not find his hand. When Kael tried to open his eyes, all he saw was a deep darkness. It felt patient and calm like it had waited for him forever. Now that he was finally here, it showed no rush.
I'm not done, he thought, with the stubborn, useless clarity of a man who has just run out of time to be right about anything. I'm not...
The thought didn't finish. Nothing did.
...
A headache woke Kael Renard in an unfamiliar place. Pain pulsed behind his eyes in steady waves, as if a steel bar had been driven through his skull.
It was neither alley pavement nor the diner's tile of the diner where he used to eat between stakeouts. It wasn't the crushed dashboard, either. This was all wrong, and Kael had spent nine years learning to trust his gut before anything else.
As his vision cleared, he took in the scene. He always did this before touching anything.
The ceiling had vanished. Above him stretched a starless sky. A strange feeling crept over Kael. It felt as if unseen eyes were watching his every move, making him uneasy.
Cold, uneven stone pressed against his back. Unlike the slick, chaotic rush of the Chicago storm, the air here was stagnant. The freezing rain was gone. A dry, numbing chill seeped into his bones. In his experience, silence from traffic, wind, or insects meant the area was either dead or closed off.
When he tried to move, his muscles didn't respond the way he told them to.
I'm alive... but how?
The question lodged in the empty corners of his mind. His last clear memory was of a bloody night. It was a case he shouldn't have taken, the one his sister had warned him about. Then came the collision. A guardrail. A windshield coming apart. He'd been sure, in his last conscious second, that he was dying. Now here he was, flat on cold stone, cataloging a crime scene with no other body in it but his own.
Have I transmigrated?
The term rose from a hidden part of his mind. He had always seen it as pulp fiction for the desperate. He learned about transmigration in comics and books as a kid. But he never thought he'd experience it himself.
The evidence was simple: he was no longer in Chicago.
He groaned and forced himself onto his side. His movements were jerky and out of sync, like a marionette worked by unfamiliar hands. Kael's palm found a wall, rough and uneven as volcanic glass or the remains of a mountain turned to stone. He used it to push himself upright, the sharp edges biting into his fingers.
The air no longer smelled like wet pavement and exhaust. It smelled old.
His heart raced. He reached for his chest, expecting to feel the mangled flesh and scars from the car accident. The moment his fingers made contact, Kael froze.
His muscles were gone. Arms and legs that had once been solid now felt lean and unfamiliar. Unfamiliar fabric draped over him. His hands traced a web of old, hard scars crisscrossing arms that felt far slimmer than his own.
He ran his palms across his face. His jawline was sharper now. His hair was short and coarse.
Whose body have I transmigrated into?
His fingers traced a geometric network of scars etched into his forearm.
How could someone with so many scars remain alive?
While he sat there shaking, a streak of light like a comet tore across the sky. For a single heartbeat, it illuminated the floor beneath him.
It was a vast plaza of black stone, cracked and broken. Sickly green light glowed through the sharp fissures like toxic veins. The floor was as large as a city block. The designers had intended for watchers above to look down, not for someone to walk across it.
Darkness returned, and then a new light replaced it. A bright blue flash erupted, bouncing off the polished obsidian. He pulled back and raised his arm. His left hand felt like it was on fire, as if someone had pressed a brand into his skin.
He cried out, clutching his wrist.
The brightness faded into a swirling rune on his hand. The pain turned into a faint ache. The rune moved beneath his skin like something alive.
He lifted his head, following the direction the light seemed to point. He spotted it in the distance, cutting through the dark sky: a huge skyscraper.
It was so big that he couldn't grasp how large it was. He imagined stacking ten Willis Towers atop one another. It still wouldn't have reached the tower's height. The Willis Tower was the highest structure he had ever stood beneath. The object glowed with the same blue light as the rune in his hand. Its surface twisted with changing runes as it stretched into the void.
He stared, his breath catching. Beside it, he was an insect before a tower that never needed to notice him.
A chorus of disembodied voices echoed through the tower's walls. The sound vibrated up through the floor beneath him. It was a low, haunting melody that crawled down his spine.
The voices spoke as one, a single command that settled into his bones.
"Climb or Perish."
His arms tingled; his heart kicked hard, and the threat became impossible to ignore.
"Who's there?"
He scanned the plaza, where black stone stretched into darkness. No answer. No movement. The tower behind him hummed with a gentle sound, as if it had heard his question too.
Years of investigations had taught him to locate every threat. This one had no source at all.
There was no clear source here. Even if he disliked the answer, the voices came from everywhere at once. They did not come from his left or right. That revealed something important: whatever had spoken did not follow the laws of physics he relied on for his work.
There could be multiple emitters, a single source nearby, or no source at all. He disliked every possibility.
If I am alone, who was that command meant for? If I am not alone, why is it so quiet?
He stood frozen, breath caught in his throat, and forced himself to think through it anyway. Whatever had spoken wanted him to move, to climb something. The alternative was simple: death. A second death, worse than the first.
He had woken up in a place that was not Chicago. He was no longer behind the wheel of a car that had ceased to exist. He could not find the Buick anywhere.
His left hand pulsed with sudden heat. A sharp pain shot through his temple. He groaned, clutching his head as his vision blurred.
At that moment, Kael Renard saw an obsidian gate. In front of it stood many beings dressed in strange, rune-etched garments. They seemed less like individuals and more like members of a class, order, or bloodline.
The darkness vanished.
He stood beneath a sky filled with auroras. Curtains of moving light draped over colorful, glowing islands. Yet something felt wrong at the edges. Rotten.
Thick vines, vital to an unknown society, sprawled over shining cities. They pulsed with a soft blue glow.
A person with jet-black hair stood among them. They had stunning silver eyes and skin marked with sigils. The figure reached out and touched one of the glowing vines with practiced grace.
It was the exact same build. The same hands he had been examining in the dark.
Marcus Reed.
The name came with the image, absolute and complete, the way names appear in dreams.
As the name surfaced in his mind, a swirling rune-like mark appeared on the stranger's palms. It mirrored the light burning into Kael's own flesh.
A figure moved like a shadow. A silver-haired person held a light-green staff. A rogue, which Kael did not believe existed, carried pouches of shimmering dust.
The memories came too quickly to grasp. Their faces were hidden behind a thick gray fog he could not push through. A cold, sharp pain gripped Marcus Reed's chest, like a blade piercing his lungs.
The vision faded before Kael could see anything more.
Kael gasped, his knees buckling as reality slammed back into place. He was alone again on the cold black stone. His heart raced as sweat dripped from his chin.
Am I Marcus Reed?
He forced himself to stand. His legs held this time. He touched the rough wall again, fingers tracing the jagged cracks. As he took his first steps toward the tower's base, the rune on his palm settled into a steady, watchful heat.
He wondered if he was the only one who had heard the instruction. Did anyone else wake up to it?
The ground trembled. From somewhere ahead came a deep, low wail that shook the floor like a living thing trying to find its footing. Kael hid under a broken arch.
Understanding settled over him with sudden clarity.
"Climb or perish," he murmured, his voice hardening into something unfamiliar.