Modern life is, in essence, a relentless cycle of maintaining one's own misery.
The alarm went off at 05:45. That shrill, default smartphone ringtone, a sound that pierces the brain like a needle, signaled the start of yet another day. Fumbling blindly at the bedside table, he knocked over an empty glass before finally sliding a thumb across the cracked screen to silence the torment.
He sat up, his back emitting a series of audible cracks. He was twenty-seven years old, yet his spine felt sixty.
"October 1st..." he muttered to the dark, stuffy confines of his thirty-square-meter apartment in the heart of São Paulo.
His routine was purely mechanical: black coffee with no sugar to shock the nervous system, a freezing shower to shave a few cents off the electric bill, and a ninety-minute commute in a subway car so packed that "personal space" was nothing more than a discarded theory.
His title was "Junior Logistics Analyst." It sounded pompous, but the reality was soul-crushing: filling out Excel spreadsheets that no one ever read and fielding complaints from suppliers who treated deadlines as mere suggestions. It was ethereal, digital work, the kind that vanished the moment the monitor flickered off.
Perhaps that was why he wasn't just another corporate zombie. There was a hunger in him.
He thrived on challenging his mind with content that strayed far from the norm. While others binged viral clips or celebrity gossip, he fell down rabbit holes of technical manuals and material history. He craved the tangible.
On the subway, wedged between a sweaty commuter and the glass door, he balanced his phone at eye level. Noise-canceling headphones, undoubtedly the best investment of his life, blocked out the chaos. On the screen, a video played at 1.5x speed: "Hydraulic Engineering in Ancient Rome: Aqueducts and Sanitation."
He absorbed it like a sponge. Yesterday, it was "Japanese Forging Techniques." Last week, "Slash-and-Burn Agriculture vs. Crop Rotation." He couldn't quite explain his obsession with these subjects. Perhaps it was an escape valve, a way to imagine a world where labor yielded visible results, where things were built with purpose and hands, not just by moving digital digits across a glowing screen.
The day dragged on. His boss barked orders, the spreadsheets crashed, and the office coffee tasted like wet cardboard.
By the time he stumbled home at 8:30 PM, he was drained. He tossed a frozen lasagna into the microwave, not just for convenience, but as a hollow gesture of loyalty to hypothetical Italian ancestors who were likely spinning in their graves. He ate without tasting a thing, then collapsed onto the sofa.
"Just one more video before I pass out," he murmured, pulling up his feed.
The algorithm, ever-faithful to his peculiar tastes, suggested: "The First Inhabitants: An Ethnographic Glimpse into Pre-Columbian Amazonia."
"Sure, why not."
He hit play. The narrator's steady voice began detailing ceramics, rituals, and the social intricacies of the Tupi tribes. Lush forests and roaring rivers filled the screen. It was hypnotic.
The lasagna sat half-finished as his eyelids grew heavy. The dull hum of traffic and the neighbor's muffled music faded, replaced by the rhythmic thrum of tribal drums and the rustle of leaves from the documentary.
He drifted off.
"If only I could live in a simpler time..." was his last thought, laced with bitter irony, before the world went black.
The first thing he registered wasn't the light, but the scent.
It didn't smell like smog, or microwave pasta, or the faint mold of his apartment. It smelled of damp earth. It smelled of green wood, woodsmoke, and something cloyingly sweet, like overripe fruit fermenting on the forest floor.
Then came the heat. Not the stuffy warmth of a closed room, but a heavy, humid blanket that clung to his skin like a second layer of clothing.
"Ugh... did the AC die?" he croaked, his voice sounding uncomfortably raw.
Wait. He didn't have AC.
His eyes snapped open.
Above him sat no white ceiling, no water stain he'd been promising to fix for months. Instead, there was thatch. Palm leaves woven with staggering craftsmanship filtered beams of piercing sunlight.
He bolted upright. The movement was too fast, too effortless. His back didn't crack; his neck didn't stiffen.
"Where am I...?"
He scanned his surroundings. He was lying in a hammock. Not the flimsy synthetic one he'd bought on a trip once, but a masterpiece of thick, soft natural fibers, deep-dyed in crimson annatto.
The space was immense. A communal structure with no interior walls, supported by massive timber trunks that would make a master carpenter weep with envy. The floor was packed earth, swept clean.
He blinked hard and pinched his arm. It stung.
"A lucid dream?" he thought desperately. He tried the usual tricks to force a wake-up, but the world remained vividly, terrifyingly real. The texture of the fibers, the dust motes dancing in the light... the resolution was far too high for a dream.
Panic set in. Cold, rational terror. "Was I kidnapped? Is this some organ-harvesting farm?"
He looked down at himself.
The scream died in his throat.
Those were not his hands. His hands were pale and soft, calloused only at the fingertips from years of typing. These hands were bronzed and powerful, with short nails and a fine dusting of earth. His arms were lean and corded with muscle, the skin a deep copper.
He was nearly naked, save for a simple loincloth. Across his chest, intricate patterns of black and red ink slashed across his torso in complex geometric lines.
"It can't be..." he whispered.
But the words that left his lips weren't Portuguese.
"Nda'u pe."
He clapped a hand over his mouth. He had thought "It can't be," but his vocal cords had produced guttural, nasal tones he had never practiced in his life. The worst part? He understood exactly what he'd said. The meaning was hardwired into the sound, as natural as breathing.
Footsteps approached.
Terrified, he scrambled back into the hammock. A group entered the maloca, three men and two women. Their skin matched his; their hair was jet-black, straight, and cut into sharp fringes. Their bodies were living canvases of ink. They carried baskets of cassava and several large, silver-scaled fish.
They were laughing, their conversation fluid and light.
"The lazybones is finally awake," one of the men chuckled. A bone piercing glinted in his lower lip.
Ubirajara understood every word. It was a Tupi dialect. He knew it from his documentaries, but knowing about Tupi and speaking it with native fluency were two very different things. It felt as though a complete Tupi encyclopedia had been force-downloaded into his cerebral cortex.
"The fever must have broken," one of the women remarked, eyeing him with a mix of worry and disdain. "He slept for three suns. I thought Anhangá had claimed his soul."
Anhangá. Three suns.
The blood drained from his face. He looked out through the wide opening of the longhouse.
The trees were titans Araucarias and palms interwoven into a vibrant, suffocating green that screamed "Atlantic Forest." But this wasn't the thin, patchy woods found in modern ecological parks.
This was the primordial wild. The screech of cicadas was deafening. Macaws soared through a horizon of pure, untainted blue. No buildings. No cell towers. No power lines.
The realization hit him like a physical blow.
"Reincarnation," he muttered, testing the concept in this new tongue. There was no direct word for it, so his mind adapted: "Born again."
He stood up, his new center of gravity making him stumble slightly. He stepped out of the maloca and beheld the village. About ten massive houses were arranged in a wide circle, bordering a central plaza where children played and elders drew from long pipes.
It was primitive. Tribal. Purely... Neolithic.
A tidal wave of emotion surged in his chest. Was it gratitude? Wonder? The religious awe of knowing that life after death was real?
No.
It was rage. Pure, concentrated, incandescent fury.
"GOD DAMMIT!" he bellowed in Portuguese. The alien sound made several villagers freeze and stare.
He kicked the dirt, sending a cloud of dust into the air.
Of all the cosmic possibilities! Out of the infinite variations of the multiverse!
He'd read the webnovels. He knew the tropes. People were supposed to wake up as Dukes, or Princes of magical empires, or heirs to intergalactic conglomerates. At the very least, he should have landed in a fantasy world with elven girls and mana pools where he could lob fireballs at his problems.
But no. Destiny had looked at him a logistics analyst who hated camping because the ground was too hard and said: "You know what you need? A stone hoe and a dirt floor. Or a hammock, if you're lucky."
"I worked my entire life for this?" he hissed, pacing frantically. The locals watched him as if he were a caged animal having a breakdown. "I studied! I took crowded subways for ten years! I paid my taxes!"
He glared at the endless emerald horizon.
"If I had to be reborn, why not as an oil tycoon's brat? Why not as a pampered house cat? Why..." he stared at his calloused hands, built for spears, not keyboards. "...Why do I have to start from scratch? Where's the AC? Where are the damn antibiotics?"
He looked at the social structure around him. No power. No plumbing. No grocery stores. If he wanted meat, he had to kill it. If he wanted water, he had to trek to the river. If he got a toothache, his "medical plan" involved a shaman shaking a rattle and blowing smoke in his face.
It was a 21st-century man's literal nightmare.
"What is wrong with Ubirajara?" a nearby child asked, pointing.
Ubirajara.
The name echoed in his mind, not just as a sound, but as an identity trying to overwrite his soul. He knew its meaning instinctively: "Lord of the Spear." What a sick joke. The only spear he'd ever mastered was the mouse cursor.
He took a jagged breath, trying to steady the heart thumping in his new, athletic chest.
Okay. Think, you idiot. Think.
Is this the past? Or a parallel world that looks like pre-colonial Brazil?
He looked up at the sky. The Southern Cross was beginning to peek through the twilight. Between the stars and the fauna, there was no doubt: this was South America. The language was classic Tupi-Guarani. The tools were polished stone and bone. No trace of metal.
That meant... the Stone Age.
"Great. Just great," he huffed, crossing his arms.
His stomach gave an aggressive, predatory growl.
"Here." The woman from before held out a piece of beiju a thick manioc pancake.
Ubirajara caught it out of the air. His reflexes were startling. At least this new body was ten times healthier, built on a natural diet free of preservatives.
He took a bite. It was dry, unsalted, and tasted faintly of woodsmoke.
As he chewed on the bland meal, a plan began to take root an idea born from the sheer desperation for the comforts he'd lost.
He wasn't staying here.
There was no way in hell he was spending the rest of his life naked in the brush, gutting fish with piranha teeth and dying of a hangnail at thirty.
"Civilization," he whispered.
The world was vast. If he was in the Atlantic Forest, he was on the coast. And if he was on the coast, he wasn't alone.
"The Portuguese," he thought, a spark of hope flickering to life.
There had to be a trading post somewhere. São Vicente? Porto Seguro? Or maybe the Spanish were setting up further south.
If he found the Europeans, he could leverage his knowledge. He knew English, Portuguese, and basic Spanish. He had math, geography, and global history on his side. He could be an advisor, a translator, a nobleman. He could live in a house with stone walls and drink imported wine.
That was the move. Trade his modern intellect for immediate luxury.
He looked at the villagers. They seemed content, happy with their simple lot. Ubirajara felt a pang of envy but crushed it instantly. He was a modern man. He required sanitation, spices, and a mattress.
"I'm leaving," he decided, swallowing the last of the beiju.
Little did he know.
Ubirajara, in his 21st-century arrogance, had made a fatal calculation error. He assumed that because there were natives, there must be colonizers. He hadn't considered the terrifying possibility that he hadn't just traveled through space, but deeply through time.
There were no Portuguese on the coast. No Spaniards in the Andes. The caravels that would one day haunt these shores were still trees growing in European forests. The Black Death might not even have happened yet on the other side of the ocean.
He was alone. The most technologically advanced mind on the continent, trapped in a society that had no use for wheels because horses didn't exist here.
But at that moment, blissfully ignorant of his true predicament, Ubirajara smiled. It was the determined grin of a man who had finally worked up the courage to quit a dead-end job.
"Tomorrow," he said aloud in Tupi, catching the tribe's attention once more. "Tomorrow, I'm going to fix this life of mine."
The man with the lip piercing just shook his head.
"Ubirajara really did hit his head. He's talking to the spirits again."
Ubirajara ignored him. He climbed back into his hammock, his mind racing not with hunting strategies, but with mental maps of the coastline. He would find the sea. He would find a ship. He would claw his way back to civilization even if he had to swim to Europe.
He closed his eyes, dreaming of AC and hamburgers, unaware that destiny had much grander and far more exhausting plans for the first Morubixá of Tekoá.