Filth.
Cold, wet grime clung to his face, carrying the sour stench of rotting fish.
"Cough… cough…"
His consciousness felt as if it had sunk into a dark ocean. He struggled to rise to the surface, yet every attempt felt smothered and heavy.
Lin Fan hacked violently, spitting out several mouthfuls of muddy water.
Where was he?
He tried to open his eyes, but his eyelids felt glued shut, as if they were weighed down by lead. He fought against the heaviness until he finally forced them apart by the smallest crack.
Nothing.
Pitch-black darkness swallowed everything around him. His entire body felt unbearably heavy, as though molten metal had been poured into his limbs. Even moving a single finger felt almost impossible.
Worse still, something heavy pressed down on him from every direction. The crushing pressure squeezed the air from his lungs, making it difficult to breathe.
"What… what is happening? Was I buried alive?"
The thought hit him like a bucket of ice water. Cold sweat trickled down his spine, snapping his fading awareness back into focus.
Lin Fan twisted desperately, clawing upward with frantic hands.
Wet earth packed itself beneath his fingernails, but he did not care. Survival drowned out every other instinct.
"Open… open up!"
He screamed in his mind, repeating the same digging motion again and again.
He had no idea how long he struggled. Time blurred into one long, suffocating nightmare. Then, suddenly, the weight above him loosened. A faint grayish light pierced through the soil, and a breath of icy air rushed in.
Saved.
Energy surged through him, and like a worm breaking through the surface, he dragged himself upward. Covered in mud from head to toe, he finally burst out of the shallow grave.
"Hah… hah…"
He collapsed beside the mound, sucking in the frigid air that stabbed at his lungs like tiny knives.
He drank the air as if it were the sweetest water on earth.
After several long moments, he pushed himself upright and glanced back at the place he had escaped from.
A crude dirt grave.
A slanted, rough wooden marker stuck crookedly beside it.
Lin Fan wiped the mud from his face and squinted at the carved characters.
"Grave of Yamcha."
"Yamcha?"
He blinked, confused. The name felt familiar.
Was it… that Yamcha? The tragic one from the manga?
A cold wind swept over the barren land, making him shiver. Only then did he notice that the clothes on his body were torn and rotting, barely better than burial cloth.
He lowered his gaze and saw his dirt-stained hands and… the harsh wounds carved across his chest.
Wait.
Something stirred in his memory. Slowly, almost fearfully, he raised a hand to touch his face.
His fingertips brushed against a long scar running down his left cheek, cutting straight over his eye.
His heart tightened.
An outrageous idea flashed across his mind.
He stumbled toward a nearby puddle, ignoring the filthy water, and looked down into it.
A face stared back, both familiar and foreign.
Black hair hung in tangled strands across strong, well-defined features. Two scars slashed across the left eye.
This was Yamcha. The Yamcha from Dragon Ball.
"Holy crap…"
Lin Fan couldn't stop himself from cursing.
Did he cross worlds? And become Yamcha?
The guy whose Scouter got blown up by a Saibaman? The guy who became almost a background character afterward?
You have got to be kidding me.
He slapped himself hard. The reflection did the same. It hurt. Really hurt.
Not a dream.
He had actually become Yamcha.
Calm down. Calm down.
He forced himself to breathe and surveyed the area.
What he saw instantly destroyed the fragile calm he managed to build.
This land… used to be a city.
Now only ruins remained.
Skyscrapers once towering toward the clouds lay broken and twisted, their steel frames exposed like the ribs of dead giants. Hollow, shattered windows stared out like empty skull sockets.
Massive craters scarred the ground. Burned-out cars littered the streets.
The world was nothing but ash-gray and silence.
In the distance, faint silhouettes of dome-shaped buildings still stood, even though they too were heavily damaged.
West City.
A chilling realization struck him like lightning.
West City was destroyed.
Yamcha was dead.
"No… no way…" His lips trembled.
A far worse thought rose in his mind. One even more terrifying than becoming Yamcha.
This was not the main Dragon Ball timeline.
This was Future Trunks' world.
The bleakest, darkest timeline.
The one where the Z Fighters were all wiped out, and humanity lived under the nightmare rule of Android 17 and Android 18.
In this world, Goku died of the heart virus.
Vegeta, Piccolo, Krillin… everyone was killed by the androids.
Yamcha included.
Which meant he had literally crawled out of Yamcha's grave.
A chill climbed from his feet all the way to the top of his head.
"What kind of cosmic joke is this…"
Lin Fan whispered, pale as a ghost.
Other transmigrators became Saiyans, Namekians, or at least someone with potential.
And him?
He crossed into an Earthling whose fighting power was obsolete even in the main timeline, dumped into the hell difficulty future world, resurrected from a grave, and not even given beginner equipment.
Just as despair settled in his chest, a piercing scream tore through the sky.
Boom!
A surviving building in the distance exploded into dust under a blazing energy blast.
The shockwave rattled his bones, and the ground trembled beneath his feet.
Lin Fan stiffened and slowly lifted his head toward the source.
The blast came from the direction of the city center.
His heart raced.
One name slipped out before he could stop it.
"The androids…"
They were close.