Thud!
It wasn't just a thud. It was a colossal hammer blow that shattered the air, leaving echoes that reverberated in his very bones. The world trembled. From the epicenter, thick white smoke billowed and then spread voraciously, devouring sight, transforming everything into an unfriendly, milky fog.
Then… silence.
And a realization more terrifying than the explosion itself.
There was no pain.
That was the first wrong thing. There should have been a wave of panic, rending agony, screams from every nerve. But there wasn't. There was only a freezing emptiness. An absence of sensation where there should have been hellfire.
There was only cold. Cold that seeped from within. An unnatural weight, as if this body had become its own tombstone. In his chest, a strange pressure, not sharp, but dull and hollow. As if the space behind his ribs had collapsed, and his lungs had forgotten how to work. He wasn't breathing. He couldn't. The air refused to enter or leave. Only stagnation.
Darkness behind his eyelids.
Then,slowly, the keeper of the grave made itself known: smell.
Not one, but an orchestral symphony of rot. The iron tang of blood dried to a crust. Stale sweat fermented in fear. Earth salted by rain and something else. And the most piercing: the intimate, sweet-putrid scent of human flesh that had surrendered and begun its return to the earth.
Alex felt something pressing against his right cheek. Pushing it with unnatural weight against something damp and cold beneath him. The texture was soft, lifeless.
Skin.Human skin that had lost its warmth!
Consciousness crawled up from a deep well. Not as a wave, but as a thin, leaking mist, filling the shadowy gaps in his mind. His thoughts were fragmented. This body did not move. It couldn't. Commands from his brain were severed somewhere, lost in the void.
Then, a visceral knowledge deeper than sight slammed into him:
There was a hole in his chest.
He didn't see it—his eyes were too hard to open—but his body knew.Cells, muscles, his physiological memory screamed about an absence in a vital place. His heart… his heart should no longer be beating there. An impossible fact. Because if true, then what was he experiencing? What was this?
What… had happened?
Alex's mind, still half-conscious and feeling drunken, struggled to form words. He commanded his neck to turn, his eyes to open, his hands to push the weight off him.
No response.
Only the static hiss of a dead nervous system.The pressure around him was solid, unmoving. He was buried. Not by earth, but by them. By these skins that smelled of dried blood and death.
This stench was truly disgusting! Alex wanted to turn, to see, to rise. But his body offered no reply. Like a statue of frozen meat, with severed nerve cables. He was trapped in this living grave, a consciousness imprisoned in a ruined vessel.
A consciousness imprisoned in a ruined vessel. Then, something twitched. Not a command, more like an echo of an internal scream bouncing in the vacuum. The thumb of his right hand—or what used to be it—contracted, pressing against something damp and cold. That alien sensation exploded in his mind.
Good god, I really need to wake up! I have a schedule to negotiate with my client later, but it seems I'm still dreaming, he thought, trying to grasp for logical footing amidst the chaos of sensations. But this was too real. The bone-biting cold, the nose-stabbing stench, the dead weight pressing on him—all were too detailed, too brutal for just a nightmare. Heh, a cynical thought slipped in. If this is virtual reality, I'm suing the game company. The rating is way too mature. User experience: zero stars.
Alex, unaccustomed to dreams this vivid, struggled to free himself from the shackles of darkness and confusion. But even in his stupor, a burning sensation in his chest made it feel as if his body was forcibly repairing itself. The pain was no longer ordinary pain. It was like a raging fire yet simultaneously a piercing cold, a contradiction that made every nerve scream. He found his mind immediately difficult to control for introspection. No matter how hard he tried to concentrate, he kept losing focus when he attempted to steady his thoughts. His mind was split, tossed between horrific pain and desperate attempts to understand the situation.
Why am I feeling such immense, torturous tightness in the middle of the night?
This was more painful than if "painful" itself could be described! As if invisible hands were kneading his insides, twisting his intestines into knots, while a large, blunt nail was slowly being pushed into his chest cavity. Every failed attempt to draw breath felt like inhaling shards of glass.
Could this be some sort of heart attack? But a heart attack doesn't feel like this. Nothing feels like this. This is a total violation of the body.
Damn it! Looks like I'm going to die young. In my own bedroom, surrounded by... by what? Smell of earth and rotting flesh? His panicking mind tried to piece together reality. This isn't my room.
Wake up now, you stupid body! His internal command erupted, filled with a sudden fury at the incapability of this new body of his. I have a meeting! A PowerPoint presentation I prepared for a week! A client from Zurich! The anger was odd, irrelevant, but it provided a sliver of energy, a bit of resolve to fight the pain.
Wait… this pain is starting to feel more manageable than before. The fire burning in his chest began to recede, changing from a wild blaze to glowing embers. Yet the burn was still potent, a deep and strange sensation of heat, like a hot iron brand applied to the flesh from the inside. Hey, that's a good development! At least he no longer felt like he would explode every second.
But a cold realization followed: shouldn't a person not feel pain while asleep? Not pain like this. This pain is primitive, absolute. It is a message from the body saying something is very, very wrong.
What about my plans to meet the client later? Doesn't all my practice for this go to waste? His mind returned to its old routine, to the stable, predictable world where the biggest problem was negotiating a contract. Those memories felt hazy now, like an old movie playing in the background.
Why am I still thinking about work? I just had a heart attack! Of course I don't have to work for a while and listen to what the client wants! Heh, even in the worst condition everything can turn out fine! The thought sounded insane in his own head. Trying to find a silver lining in a clearly horrific situation. A coping mechanism. His old brain was still trying to process this as a manageable problem, not an existential disaster.
But reality kept assaulting him. A throbbing pain pounded in Alex's head, because he couldn't bear the pain anymore, making his head ache too. The pain was like a sledgehammer striking his temples from within, synchronized with the strange pulsation in his chest. Each blow seemed to say: this is real, this is real, this is real.
But along with the pain came a kind of strength. Not a sudden surge, but a slackening. Like a cable pulled too tight finally snapping, or a rusted lock suddenly opening. Slowly, with a struggle that made cold sweat bead on his alien skin, he could muster that imaginary strength. He felt the muscles in his back—alien muscles, hard and scarred—begin to tense. He pushed. Nothing happened at first. Then, the pressure above him shifted, just a little. A long creak, the sound of wet cloth and stiff flesh moving against him.
Again, he commanded himself, teeth (teeth that felt larger, more uneven) clenched tight. Push!
This time, the pressure rolled. The weight above him shifted, and suddenly there was space. Cold, foul, but still air flowed more freely around him. And with a final effort, one that drained the last of his energy, he commanded the muscles of his lead-weighted eyelids to open.
His first vision was total blur. Only dark shapes and faint light. Then, the world slowly filtered in. Dust motes danced in pale light filtering from somewhere above. His eyes watered, squinted, adjusting. The first thing he saw clearly was texture. The texture of coarse wool cloth, dark blue nearly blackened by something wet and glossy. A rusty metal button. Then, inches from his face, a face.
The face belonged to a young man, perhaps the age of his new body. Its skin was waxen pale, eyes wide open staring at an unseen stone ceiling, mouth agape in an eternal expression of shock. At its temple, a dark, messy hole, surrounded by a black crust of blood and something lighter.
Alex didn't breathe. He just stared.
Then, his eyes, unbidden, began to see wider. That face wasn't alone. There was another behind it. And beside it. Outstretched arms, twisted legs, a pile of forms wearing the same uniform. The uniform jacket was straight and stiff, identically cut to the other soldiers around him. There was no pride. Only an embroidered eagle emblem on the chest, now half-obscured by a stain. The thick wool absorbed blood, making it heavy and stiff, and his plain, functional metal helmet—made for utility, not style—lay rolled nearby.
The corpses lay in a stone chamber. The architecture was reminiscent of an authentic Renaissance-style fortress, but dirtier, more functional. Rough-hewn large stones held together by cracked mortar. Scattered among the lifeless bodies were weapons. Long-barreled iron muskets, some still wisping thin smoke, the sharp scent of gunpowder mingling with the rot. Spears with broken wooden shafts, their steel heads gleaming dully in the pale light. A torn flag, with colors he couldn't recognize, trampled on the floor.
Corpses? No… a pile… of corpses? Alex was utterly shocked. His eyes immediately widened, trying to swallow this impossible reality. The things within his visual range were utterly impossible for his room or any modern place! No electrical wires, no lights, no plastic furniture. Only stone, iron, wood, and rotting flesh. It was a scene from a museum, from an ancient war film, not from his life.
Feeling shocked and confused, Alex immediately, with a jerky, uncontrolled movement, pushed one of the corpses off his lap. The corpse was heavy, limp, falling with an unhealthy thud. Around its neck, he saw a necklace with a metal pendant. Alex, with a trembling hand, grabbed it. It was cold. A cross, but oddly it had a longer lower crossbar than the ones he was used to, with a small round emblem almost at its tip. The symbol felt ancient, alien, and laden with meaning he didn't understand.
This… Alex felt horror. A pure, primal fear finally broke through his coping mechanisms and mental sarcasm. This is not a joke. This is not a simulation. This is too consistent, too dirty, too detailed in its brutality.
He immediately began dragging his body—this alien, heavy, scar-laden body—to stand, turning his back to the corpses. His rubbery legs refused to support him properly. But before he could get far enough, his brain protested with pain that surged and throbbed again. A hot nail seemed driven deep inside his skull. It made him lose his balance, lose strength, and fall uncontrollably backward. His rear slammed back onto the stones, sending new vibrations of pain up his spine.
"Ghk…!" A choked sound escaped his throat. Not a language he knew, but a hoarse, rough noise.
He sat there, panting, for a moment that felt like an eternity. The pain, strangely, didn't increase much. As if this body was already too accustomed to impacts and falls. Or as if its pain threshold had been permanently raised.
With more careful movement, Alex stood again, this time using his hands to support himself against the cold stone wall. He turned and nervously began scanning his surroundings, the place he was in.
It was a fairly large room, a guard hall perhaps. The ceiling was high and vaulted, darkened by soot and shadow. In the tall stone walls were rows of narrow vertical slit windows for archers, or for light. They provided the pale light, the only source besides a few torches extinguished in their sconces.
And from one of those high slits, light was reflected. Not sunlight. It was too soft, too cold. Moonlight. But a pale, almost grey moonlight. Yet as his eyes adjusted, he saw a color that shouldn't be there. At the edges of the light, in the floating dust motes, there was a hint of purple. Soft, almost imperceptible, but present. A purple moonlight. A thing completely nonsensical in physics, at least the physics of his old world.
All of this… Alex sighed, or tried to. He felt nauseous again, but there was nothing left to vomit. Confusion, fear, and overwhelming bewilderment finally solidified in his mind, forming an impossible mosaic.
A war scene. A fortress. Uniformed corpses. An impossibly different colored moon. All pointing to the only most unscientific, most clichéd answer he could think of.
"How could this happen?" Alex unconsciously uttered softly. His voice was alien, heavy, and oddly accented. The language itself was the same, the language of his thoughts. A small anomaly amidst a colossal one.
The hole in his chest.
That visceral knowledge returned, sharper now that he was fully aware. He had died. His body had died. Torn, bleeding, his heart… Alex drew a short, ragged breath. His right hand—a hand scarred on the knuckles—hurriedly felt his chest, tracing the stiff, damp uniform cloth, searching for a tear, for the hole that must be there.
What he found made his breath catch.
Behind the torn jacket, where there should have been a gaping void, there was flesh. Intact. Warm. As his fingertips pressed, he felt ribs beneath, whole and solid. No hole. No open wound. Only strange skin, pink and smooth like a miraculously healed deep burn, surrounded by a pattern of thin lines like frozen root veins.
It was impossible.
But here he was. Breathing. Standing in his own dried blood.
A cold that didn't come from the air crept up his spine. This wasn't the transmigration he read about in novels. No system, no humorously smug explaining deity. Only a body that had been emptied and then refilled, with a mortal wound somehow rejected, healed in a way that defied reason. Was this a blessing? Or a deeper curse? The only clear fact: the mechanism that revived him was not friendly. He had been discarded here like returned trash, in a body that remembered how to die.
Alex's mind spun, trying to find a handhold, but what surfaced were shards of instinct not his own. Stand. Take a weapon. Find high ground. Those short commands rose from his tense muscles, from the memory of a body trained for war.
He had no time to panic or question reality. Reality had already answered loudly: survive, or die a second time.
"Calm. Calm. Calm!" he said aloud to himself, his voice cracking mid-word. After taking a deep breath—a breath he could finally draw, though his chest felt stiff and strange—Alex immediately worked hard to stop his mind from panicking. He needed procedure. Protocol. Something to do.
At that moment, he began to realize the pain he had experienced earlier had truly, gradually faded. What remained was only soreness, deep fatigue, and discomfort in his chest. A strange silence within his body, as if its machinery had just been shut down and rebooted.
And then, not like a dramatic flashback, not like watching a film, but like a data file suddenly unzipped in his head, the memories came. All at once, dense, and stiff. No accompanying emotions. Just raw facts.
The information arranged itself neatly in his mind, like an employee profile or negotiation target data. Alex understood it intellectually, but there was no emotional attachment. This was this body's history, not his.