Life is a series of coincidences. Sometimes they're random, and sometimes they're part of something far grander than anyone can see. Many people call that fate, destiny, or luck — whether it actually is any of those things is a different question entirely. But for Shiva, even those words would feel small, because the situation he found himself in at this particular moment was cosmically absurd.
Shiva — or rather, the person who had previously gone by the name Rupson — suddenly found himself in a bed that was absurd in size compared to anything he was used to. It was easily double king-size, sprawling out beneath him like a small continent of sheets and pillows. He gasped for air heavily, eyes half-closed, as though he'd been yanked out of a trance or a deep sleep by some invisible hand. The room around him was empty. There was no one there except him.
He forced his eyes fully open and found himself staring at a luxurious room filled with furniture that seemed carved by something divine rather than mortal. Every surface, every curve of wood and metal, screamed expense in a way that made his stomach tighten. Panic set in immediately — he was in an unfamiliar room, in an unfamiliar body, and nothing about this situation made any sense. His hands, which he'd raised in front of his face in that first burst of alarm, were far paler than they had any right to be, and they looked significantly more muscular than the hands he remembered. The panic doubled. Unfamiliar room, impossibly expensive surroundings, and now his own body was wrong.
He spotted a large mirror embedded in the far wall and stumbled toward it, driven by the desperate need of a person whose entire worldview had just been shattered. He needed to see his reflection, needed to confirm that things weren't as bad as they felt.
What stared back at him wasn't his face.
The reflection showed a face that looked carved rather than born — a sharp jawline, perfectly defined proportions, pale skin that seemed almost luminous. It was handsome, undeniably, but calling it handsome felt incomplete. There was something otherworldly about it, a tint of something that wasn't normal and yet somehow was, like a bizarre contradiction that his brain refused to resolve. But it wasn't the face itself that stopped his breath. It was the eyes.
Heterochromia existed, sure. Two different eye colors were rare but not impossible. What made his stomach drop were the details within those eyes, because no human eyes he'd ever seen — or ever heard of — had features like these.
One eye glowed with the warmth of a sun, pale orange and yellow swirling together, and deep within the retina there was a shape that resembled the horn of a bull or some similar creature. The other eye was pale blue with hints of white, cool and gentle like moonlight, and its pupil was split vertically like the eye of a serpent. The combination was striking in a way that went beyond unusual and straight into territory his brain didn't have categories for.
"Whose face is this? Why am I here? Is this a particularly detailed dream? Is this some kind of prank? Where is this place?" The thoughts crashed through his mind in a chaotic flood, each one louder than the last. "This has to be a dream. A very specific type of nightmare. If I pinch myself, I'll wake up." He pinched his arm hard enough that a small bruise began to form under his fingers. The pain was sharp, immediate, and entirely real. "So this isn't a dream. Then it has to be a prank. If you've finished your prank, you can come out now. Please. I'm getting scared." His voice echoed in the empty room. No one answered. The silence was absolute.
Shiva's thoughts were spiraling, tumbling over each other in a mess of panic and disbelief, until he forced a kind of rough calm onto himself. "Okay. This is too absurd to keep panicking about." He tried to remember where he had been before this — tried to reach back to the last thing he could recall — and a sharp pain split through his skull like a crack of lightning.
Memories came rushing in, fragmented and incomplete. He caught flashes: walking home after a particularly long class session at college, the familiar streets, the weight of his bag on his shoulder. Then a gap. A blank hole where something should have been, and his body was in pain during that gap, a pain that didn't make any logical sense. He was still standing in front of the mirror, still in this impossible room, but his body was screaming at him. It wasn't any kind of pain he could categorize — it was worse than being burned alive, and he knew what burns felt like because he'd scorched his hand badly enough once to know. This was beyond that, a pain that seemed to exist in layers his body wasn't built to process.
Then his head split open with a different kind of agony as new memories — memories that were not his — began flooding into his brain. Fragments of another life, another person, another Shiva. The pain in his skull lasted roughly twenty minutes before it finally subsided to a dull throb, though the residue of the body pain lingered longer, humming under his skin like a fading echo. He sat on the edge of that enormous bed for another thirty minutes after that, slowly trying to piece together the memories he'd received, which felt more like the plot of a story than anything that could have actually happened to a real person.
He was currently in the capital city of a landmass called Zhepores. The capital was named Ashorkoat, and the ruler of this entire landmass was the father of the body Shiva now inhabited — one of the fifty-five Lords. Shiva tried to recall the man's name and immediately his head erupted in pain so intense his vision blurred. He tried again, pushing harder, and the pain doubled, a white-hot spike behind his eyes that made his knees buckle. It wasn't that he'd forgotten the name. He could think around it perfectly well — "my father," "the Lord," "the ruler of Zhepores" — those concepts sat in his mind without any issue. But the actual name itself, the specific sound and shape of it, refused to form. It was like trying to grab smoke with his bare hands. Every time his brain reached for it, the information slipped away and left nothing but agony in its place. He tried to picture the man's face and got the same result: a sharp, blinding pain and an image that wouldn't resolve, as though his mind was trying to hold something far too large for the space available. He didn't know why this was happening. He didn't know if it was some kind of protection, some kind of curse, or something else entirely, and the not-knowing was almost worse than the pain itself. He filed it away as another impossible thing in a morning that was already overflowing with them and forced himself to move on.
As for the fifty-five Lords themselves: they ruled the fifty-five landmasses that currently existed on Earth after the original continents and oceans had been destroyed roughly a thousand years ago in a brutal, century-long war. That war had pushed humanity backward by hundreds, if not thousands, of years across nearly every field of knowledge and civilization. What exactly the war had been fought against, or what had caused it, was a hole in the memories Shiva had inherited — a blank space that the original Shiva apparently hadn't known much about either. It was a supernatural world, that much was clear. Great abilities of every conceivable kind existed, powers that had apparently emerged in the aftermath of that ancient war. How exactly they worked or where they came from, Shiva didn't know, and honestly, he wasn't thinking about that right now. The "how" and "why" could wait. The "what do I do right now" was far more pressing.
He forced himself to calm down and felt a faint smile settle onto his face — a smile that wasn't exactly fake but wasn't exactly genuine either. It felt more like a habit, a reflex of his past self. But which past self? That was the question that kept circling back. Two different lifetimes and two different sets of memories were currently integrating inside his skull, and the boundaries between them were blurry. Was he the person he'd been before transmigration? Had he simply awakened memories he'd always had? Was he the original Shiva with new memories layered on top, or was he an entirely new person formed from the collision of two different consciousnesses? It was genuinely difficult to tell, and for the moment, Shiva decided it didn't matter. His thought process was already overwhelmed by the sheer impossibility of his situation and the far more practical question of what to do next.
He had transmigrated into the body of an important person. For anyone who'd consumed a normal amount of isekai novels, fantasy anime, or transmigration stories, this would be the dream — the beautiful, fate-woven fantasy where you wake up as the chosen one and get to live the life you always imagined. Shiva wasn't thinking that way. In his previous life on Earth, he'd consumed a staggering amount of that media, everything from third-rate web novels to genuinely well-crafted stories, and while part of him had once fantasized about living that kind of life, he knew he wasn't special. He wasn't a chosen one, and he wasn't going to become one. He would realize much later just how right he was about that, because the true nature of this world wasn't a fantasy where you defeat everyone, gain overwhelming power, and build a harem along the way. You could theoretically do those things, but it wasn't easy, and the reasons why would become clear much later.
For now, Shiva needed to figure out how to act. He was here against all odds, inhabiting the body of someone important, which meant he was surrounded by people who controlled the Earth itself in ways both obvious and subtle. These were not stupid people — no one reached that level of power through nepotism alone without also having the intellect to back it up. If he slipped up, if anyone caught even a hint that something was wrong, Shiva didn't want to imagine what would happen to him. Death would probably be the merciful option, and given that he couldn't even think his own father's name without his brain trying to tear itself apart, he had a fairly vivid sense of how outmatched he was.
After filtering through the more coherent fragments of the original Shiva's memories, he'd pieced together a decent picture of the person whose body he now wore. The original Shiva had been absurdly powerful in nearly every regard and had convinced himself of his own superiority — a conviction that, from his perspective, was simply a statement of fact. He was a legitimate heir of a Lord, which placed him at the absolute pinnacle of this world's hierarchy in terms of authority, control, and raw power. He was in favor at court by position, though not by character, because the original Shiva seemed to view everyone around him as fundamentally beneath his notice. This wasn't the cartoonish villainy of someone who went around bullying people for fun. It was something quieter and more absolute: in the original Shiva's eyes, he was inherently superior, and he simply didn't care what anyone else thought or said. Trying to get a reaction out of him was like an ant trying to negotiate with a human — at most, the human might glance down out of boredom, and that was the absolute ceiling of attention the ant could hope to receive.
Because of this, the original Shiva had never performed for anyone except himself. He was theatrical in a very specific way — a jester, but not the kind of jester you laughed at. He was a jester for whom the entire world was a stage, and he was simultaneously the audience and the only actor that mattered. He could be casually cruel one moment and boundlessly kind the next, with no apparent reason for either, and no one around him had ever been able to predict which version they'd get. The original Shiva was, in a very real sense, aloof from reality itself.
So now the new Shiva — whoever he was — had to perform one of the simplest yet most complex acts of a lifetime: being himself, in front of people who could see through almost anything, while wearing a face and a reputation that didn't quite belong to him. It was an enormous hassle, and the stakes were high enough that failure wasn't really an option he could afford to contemplate.
Based on the memories and the position of the moon through the window, Shiva estimated he'd transmigrated sometime around midnight, and roughly two to two and a half hours had passed since then, putting the current time at around four in the morning. The butlers and servants of the household would be waking up and beginning their routines soon. It was pure luck that his room was soundproofed — a standard privacy measure for the children of Lords — because if it hadn't been, his earlier gasping and panicked muttering would have already brought guards running, and he'd be in a medical ward or somewhere far worse by now.
He spent the next two to three hours standing in front of the mirror, practicing. He worked on his expressions, his posture, the cadence of his voice, trying to build a confident demeanor that matched the original Shiva's reputation. By around seven in the morning, a knock came at his door. The soundproofing worked in one direction — his voice didn't leak out, but he could hear the voices from the hallway clearly. A male voice, sounding like it belonged to someone around twenty-three years old, called out through the wood. Shiva knew from the memories that this was Apriouses, the head butler, and that the youthful voice was misleading — the man was actually closer to seventy.
"Young Master, are you awake? Should I tell the maids to fetch hot water and new clothes?"
It was his daily routine. Apriouses had been head butler of this household since before Shiva was even born. Shiva walked to the door, opened it, and replied in the voice he'd been practicing for the last few hours: "I'll be ready and come down in a few minutes."
It sounded normal to Shiva. Apparently, it didn't sound normal to Apriouses.
"Very well, Young Master, but is everything all right? Your voice is a few frequencies off and the pace is slightly rushed, as though you're hiding something or feeling anxious. And even though your face looks normal, your body muscles seem tense, almost clenched."
For a normal person, Shiva's acting would have been more than enough to deflect suspicion. But Apriouses was not a normal person. He had served in a Lord's household for over twenty-five years, and he was an Awakened — one of the people in this world who possessed supernatural abilities. More than that, he was a powerful one, capable of sensing a person's presence, the depth of their heart and soul, and things that went even beyond that. For someone like Apriouses, noticing physical anomalies in a person's body was about as difficult as noticing that someone was wearing a different shirt.
The only reason he hadn't immediately attacked or restrained Shiva was that the DNA was identical to the bloodline of the Lord he'd served for decades, and the soul — while seeming somehow more resilient than before — was fundamentally the same soul he'd known since the boy was born. It was Shiva. Of that much, Apriouses was certain. But something was off. The original Shiva, known throughout the household and beyond by the nickname "Prince of Cold" for how distant and unreachable he seemed to everyone around him despite being the most theatrical person in any room, would never have shown even the faintest trace of anxiety. It was entirely out of character, and that discrepancy was what had prompted Apriouses to speak up.
Shiva's face didn't change. His breathing didn't quicken. He didn't hold his breath or shift his weight. He simply breathed the way he'd been breathing and said, in a theatrical tone that could be interpreted as arrogance, indifference, or a dozen other things depending on the listener — which was exactly the baseline the original Shiva operated from — "It was somewhat cold for me yesterday, so this is the result of that. Otherwise, it isn't something that warrants my attention."
The response was consistent with the original Shiva's body and personality, which were themselves a kind of anomaly. When he'd been born, there had been a bright red mark near his navel, just above the belly button, shaped like a crescent moon but colored like the sun. His eyes — one the color of a decently hot star, the other the pale cool of a moon — were another layer of that strangeness. And scattered across his body were faint marks that looked almost like scratches or hairline fractures in the skin, patterns too regular to be scars and too strange to be birthmarks. No one knew what kind of omen all of this added up to, or whether it was an omen at all.
Even his name was unusual. "Shiva" was rare enough that Apriouses, who in his younger years had traveled through the territories of at least twenty-five different Lords, had never once encountered it before. It was an entirely new kind of name in this world, which was deeply ironic for the person currently wearing it, because in his previous life on Earth, Shiva had been born in a small but culturally rich country called Nepal, where "Shiva" was the name of one of the principal deities of his religion. For him, it wasn't rare at all. For everyone else in this world, it was a mystery — no one knew why the Lord had chosen that particular name for his son, and the reasons behind it were a story for much later.
Apriouses studied him for a moment longer, then nodded. "Very well, Young Master. Please inform me if it gets worse or if I need to fetch the doctors." With that, he turned and walked down the hall toward the staircase leading to the lower floors.
The moment Apriouses was out of sight, Shiva closed the door, leaned against it, and let out a long, fast breath. He had almost been caught before the day had even properly started. And now, with this new information about just how perceptive the people around him were, he understood something critical: practicing his face and his voice wasn't going to be enough. He needed to train every muscle in his body to act the part, because in this household, even the tension in his shoulders could give him away.