"It hurts."
The scream tore out of him as he jolted upright, clutching his skull. White-hot pain pulsed behind his eyes, like someone driving nails through his brain. Cold stone pressed into his bare arms. Damp. Gritty. Reeking faintly of mold and metal.
He blinked hard.
Bars. A low ceiling. Peeling gray walls. A tiny, barred window leaking a strip of dirty light. He was in a cell.
"Where am I?" he muttered, voice hoarse.
A rough voice answered from the darkness beyond the bars.
"Subject 28. Get up. Stop playing dead."
Sol flinched and looked up.
A broad silhouette blocked the pale corridor light, the shape of a man standing on the other side of the iron bars. Heavy boots. Thick arms. The stink of sweat and old cigarettes drifted in.
A massive hand shot through the gap and buried itself in his blond hair.
"Ah—!" Sol's scalp burned as he was yanked upright. His vision wavered. His neck screamed in protest.
"Disgusting freak," the man muttered.
Clang!
A metal tray hit the floor hard, the sound ricocheting inside the cramped cell. A thin bowl of grayish soup sloshed, sending a wave over the edge. A piece of black, rock-hard bread bounced and rolled to his bare foot, smearing something sticky on the stone.
The sour, moldy stench of the food hit him.
Sol frowned, panting, one hand on the floor to steady himself. He stared at the tray, then at the fleck of spit floating on the surface of the soup, an oily bubble wobbling in the dim light.
Nice.
The man stepped closer, his features sharpening out of the gloom.
Black uniform, like a prison guard's—only dirtier. A square, mean face twisted with open disgust, as if just looking at Sol made him ill. Small, cold eyes. Jaw clenched hard enough to make the muscles jump.
Trash. That was how he was looking at him. Like trash that had dared to breathe.
"What are you staring at?" the man snarled. "Huh?"
His arm shot through the bars again. The iron rattled violently as he grabbed Sol by the front of his shirt and hauled him forward.
Sol's shoulder slammed into the bars first. Then his ribs. His teeth clacked together with a dull crack.
"Urgh—!"
The impact knocked the breath out of him. Pain exploded across his chest. He stumbled back, losing his balance, landing half on the tray. The bowl tipped. Lukewarm, slimy soup soaked through his thin pants and spread across the filthy floor.
The tag on the man's chest flashed in front of Sol's eyes.
Josh.
Josh sneered, clearly pleased with the mess and the wheezing coughing fit he had just caused.
He gave the cell a final, contemptuous sweep of his gaze, as if memorizing the misery, then turned away. Heavy boots thudded along the corridor, the sound fading slowly.
Sol lay there, cold soup seeping into his legs, lungs burning. He sucked in a breath, then another, pressing a trembling hand against his aching chest.
Anger burned hot and sudden in his gut.
Then confusion slid in right behind it, sharp and disorienting.
Wait.
I was at home just now.
The thought hit like a lightning bolt. And with it—
A flood.
Memories that weren't his slammed into his mind, jagged and overwhelming. Faces he'd never seen. Places he'd never stepped into. Screams in echoing halls. Needles. Restraints. The smell of antiseptic and blood. Cold lights above an operating table.
"Damn…" He groaned, clutching his head with both hands as the pain flared again.
He squeezed his eyes shut and forced himself to breathe, picking through the chaos one shard at a time. Threads of memory, feeling, habit—his and not his—twisted together.
After a while, the whirl settled just enough for him to see.
"…Did I just cross over?" he whispered. "Into a completely different world? And into the body of an ability user?"
It sounded insane, even in his own ears.
Last night, he had been dozing off in front of a YouTube video at home. A normal room. A normal life. Then darkness. Pain. This.
And not just into someone else's body.
Into the body of an ability user.
Ability users.
That was what they called people who had awakened some kind of supernatural power—superhuman abilities that bent the rules of the world.
On any other day, the idea of having superpowers would have made Sol ecstatic. Comics, movies, games—he'd dreamed about that kind of thing more than once.
But there was nothing exciting about this.
Because this wasn't just any ability user's body.
It was a criminal's.
A thief.
A kid who had been captured for stealing and for hurting someone. For killing someone.
And the pain he'd felt when he first woke up? That wasn't a headache. Not really. It was the aftermath of all the experiments they had run on this body.
The memories painted it clearly.
Ability users were rare. Precious. Dangerous.
Governments, terrified of losing control, labeled them threats to public order, weapons that might turn on their masters. Other people saw them as monsters that could kill without warning, ticking bombs in human skin. Between fear, greed, and envy, the ones who were caught often didn't make it to a normal prison.
Some—like Subject 28—were dragged into hidden research facilities.
Lab rats.
Dissected. Injected. Sliced open and stitched back together.
All in the name of "understanding" abilities. Of learning how to awaken them artificially—or how to suppress them if they threatened the wrong people.
Weapons tech could barely keep up with the horrors this world faced: alien invasions, creatures from beyond Earth's realm, all kinds of monstrosities that walked in from the dark. Ability users were valuable in the face of that.
But valuable didn't mean protected.
And not all of them were heroes.
Most, like the original owner of this body, used their powers to survive. To get what they wanted. To strike back when cornered.
"He stole jewelry and other things," Sol murmured as the memories clicked into place, "and when he was about to be captured, he used his ability and fought back…"
A blur of motion. A baton raised high. Panic. A desperate burst of power.
"He injured a couple of enforcers." Sol swallowed. "And accidentally killed one."
No wonder he was here.
No trial. No prison cell with a number and a sentence.
Instead, they'd thrown him into a research institute, locked him away as Subject 28, and dragged him to labs for a year to cut, inject, and study.
A year.
And from what Sol had seen in those memories, this kid wasn't the only one.
"This is going to be bad," Sol breathed, grimacing.
Jack.
That was the man's name—the one who died.
He saw him clearly in the inherited memories. A hard-eyed enforcer. The way he'd looked at the kid when he realized he was an ability user. The hatred. The fear.
Jack had been Josh's friend.
And that was a problem.
Many people already hated ability users. Some were jealous. Some were terrified of their power. Some just needed an excuse. They called them freaks, monsters, creatures that shouldn't exist. Something less than human, something it was easy to hurt.
Sol could understand where some of the fear came from.
But remembering what Josh had done to the previous host—what he enjoyed doing—made Sol's fingers curl into fists.
He wanted to kill him.
He forced himself to breathe through the anger.
"No matter how bad it was," Sol muttered, the words almost a growl, "this is only a sixteen-year-old kid. He stole to feed his starving family."
Images flickered behind his eyes. Thin faces. Hollow cheeks. A cramped, shabby apartment. A mother coughing in the dark. Little siblings dividing a crust of bread.
"He killed someone," Sol went on, voice low. "But Jack was going to kill him. Kept calling him a freak. Beating him over and over again with his baton."
The memory of that moment seared through him. The helpless panic. The taste of blood. The instinctive, blind flare of power.
"They didn't even bother to investigate," Sol said, jaw tight. "They just tossed him in here. A kid. Cut open. Beaten. Used to test their damned serums."
He closed his eyes and inhaled slowly, then exhaled, trying to smother the suffocating rage before it swallowed him whole.
The soup soaked into his pants clung to his skin, clammy and disgusting. The smell of moldy bread and rust clung to the air.
He pushed himself up, muscles protesting, and looked at the spilled food one last time. Whatever appetite he might have had was gone.
He turned away and moved to the back wall, to the small, high window. Cracked concrete scraped his palms as he braced himself and rose onto his tiptoes, reaching his hand through the bars to where a faint warmth brushed his fingertips.
Light.
The touch of it was weak, filtered through dirt-streaked glass and distance—but it was there.
[+1 Energy point]
A line of text flashed in front of his eyes.
Sol froze.
[+1 Energy point]
[+1 Energy point]
The notifications came one after another, appearing and fading in the air like faint blue afterimages.
…
He stared, his hand still stretched outside the window. As the seconds passed, the throbbing in his skull began to ease. The lingering ache in his ribs dulled. The small cut on his lip, split open when he'd hit the bars, tingled—and then slowly closed.
He ran his tongue over it, startled.
That's… definitely healing.
"From his memories, the kid never saw anything like this when he used his powers," Sol muttered, eyes narrowing. "So what the hell is this?"
His heart sped up.
He focused on the faint sensation of energy trickling into him, on the floating messages.
Another interface flickered into existence before him, clearer this time. Like something out of a game—except it was painfully, terrifyingly real.
[Name: Sol Walker]
[Age: 16 (Remaining Lifespan: 114 days)]
[Current Template: God of Light]
(Unlock Progress: 1%)
[Abilities: Energy Absorption, Energy Release]
[Energy Points: 6]
"A system…" Sol breathed. "Seriously?"
He stared at the panel, stunned, the words blurring at the edges.
His gaze locked on one line.
Remaining Lifespan: 114 days.
A chill ran down his spine, colder than the cell floor.
"One hundred and fourteen days?" His voice came out thin. "Was it because of those experiments?"
He didn't need the memories to answer that.
He saw the scalpels. The needles. The heavy restraints. The nights he—or rather, the kid—had lain awake shaking, clinging to scraps of consciousness between procedures. Organs pushed to their limit, cells forced to mutate again and again.
Of course it was because of the experiments.
Sol's expression darkened, hatred for the research base surging up, black and choking.
Clinging to something—anything—he tore his gaze away from the ticking death sentence and forced himself to look at the abilities section instead.
"Energy Absorption and Energy Release," he murmured. "Those are the abilities he awakened."
Memories surfaced, more coherent now.
The kid standing in sunlight, focusing. Feeling warmth soak into his skin, threads of something invisible being drawn in. The way small cuts closed a little faster. How exhaustion faded just enough to stagger through another day.
He could absorb certain forms of energy—solar energy being the easiest—and convert it to heal himself, to restore stamina, or store it inside his body. Then, with Energy Release, he could expel that gathered energy outward, using it to attack.
In theory, it sounded impressive.
In practice…
"Their grade is only level two," Sol muttered, recalling the numbers the researchers had sneered over. "Very weak."
The healing and regeneration were minimal—barely noticeable except for small wounds. The energy storage was tiny. And when he released it?
The effect was like a strong punch. That was all.
No blinding beams. No exploding walls.
Just one unlucky man.
"The guy he killed… that was just bad luck," Sol said quietly.
He saw it again from inside the kid's skin.
Jack's baton raining down. The desperate instinct to protect his head. Hands flying up. A panicked surge of all the stored energy slamming against cold metal.
The baton snapping backwards with brutal force.
The sickening crunch.
The way Jack had clutched his throat, eyes bulging, choking, collapsing in a heap on the alley floor as blood and broken cartilage turned his last breaths into wet, gurgling whispers.
He had died on the spot.
Murder, they had called it.
Sol's hand, still reaching out of the window, trembled slightly. The faint warmth of the distant sun continued to seep into his skin.
Notifications no longer popped up, but he could feel it—the gentle flow, like a thin stream of light threading into him.
As he watched the system panel hover in the air, the last lines burned brighter in his mind.
Current Template: God of Light.
Unlock Progress: 1%.
Energy Points: 6.
"So that's it," Sol whispered, heartbeat pounding in his ears. "I can use the energy points I absorb… to unlock this template… God of Light?"
The words felt unreal on his tongue.
God of Light.
In this hellish cell, soaked in soup and blood and fear, with only 114 days left to live, the idea sounded like a cruel joke.
But the interface didn't waver.
And neither did the faint, steady trickle of energy flowing into his hand from the dim, distant sun.