Ray had always lived with purpose.
He was not remarkable in the ways the world usually celebrated. He did not shine upon athletic fields nor command attention in crowded halls. Yet his grades were steady, his habits disciplined, and his body maintained with quiet care. While others drifted through youth in laughter and distraction, Ray moved forward with an unspoken destination in mind — one only he seemed able to perceive.
He was not lonely.
But neither was he surrounded.
Friendships came rarely to him, and he did not seek them with urgency. Most days unfolded in familiar solitude: lectures, study sessions, part-time work, and the small comforts he allowed himself — films watched late into the night, stories devoured in glowing screens, imagined worlds more vivid than the one he inhabited.
It was, by all accounts, an ordinary life.
And so the day it ended was ordinary too.
He had been returning from class beneath the pale afternoon sky, thoughts drifting between assignments and the quiet anticipation of evening rest. Fatigue pressed upon him — gentle at first, then insistent. His steps slowed. The world softened at its edges.
He remembered thinking, vaguely, that he was not yet late.
Then darkness closed like a curtain.
—
When Ray opened his eyes again, the world had changed.
The scent struck him first — dry straw, old wood, faint smoke. Not the sterile air of dormitories or classrooms, but something raw, earthen, and ancient. His body lay upon a coarse bed of bundled reeds, the uneven texture pressing through thin cloth against unfamiliar skin.
He did not move at once.
The ceiling above him was low and timber-bound, its beams darkened by years of soot. Light filtered through a narrow window slit, falling in slanted gold across packed-earth flooring. The room was small, austere — a hut, unmistakably — containing little more than a wooden stool, a chipped basin, and the straw pallet upon which he lay.
Confusion rose slowly, like mist.
This was not his room.
This was not any place he had known.
As he tried to sit, pain exploded behind his temples.
It came without warning — a crushing pressure that drove a hoarse breath from his throat. His vision fractured into white, and with it came something far more terrifying than pain:
Memories.
Not his own.
They surged through him in broken torrents — images, sensations, fragments of a life he had never lived. A different childhood beneath tiled eaves. Calloused hands gripping farming tools. The smell of millet porridge, the sting of winter wind across plains, the bowed posture before stern elders. Names, faces, dialect, customs — all alien, yet carrying the intimate weight of lived experience.
Ray clutched his head as understanding dawned with dreadful clarity.
This… this was impossible.
And yet—
It was also familiar.
A thousand stories he had read. Endless dramas watched in midnight hours. Heroes reborn in foreign realms, souls cast into other bodies, destinies rewritten beneath ancient skies.
Transmigration.
The word formed in his mind with chilling precision.
When the storm of memories finally ebbed, he lay trembling in the straw, breath shallow, heart racing against ribs that were not the ones he had been born with.
He knew the truth now.
He was no longer Ray.
He had awakened within the body of another.
A young man named—
Zhu Shen.
Beyond the hut's thin walls stretched a world utterly unlike modern Earth: a feudal land divided into twelve vast prefectures beneath the rule of a distant imperial court — a realm of clans, hierarchies, and harsh survival where strength determined fate and obscurity swallowed the weak.
And he, once an ordinary college student with quiet ambitions…
…had been cast into it as someone else entirely.
Zhu Shen lay still, staring at the smoke-dark beams above him.
Shock had not yet faded.
But beneath it, something else stirred.
A realization both terrifying and strangely lucid:
The life he had known was gone.
And another — unknown, perilous, and vast — had begun.