"...You are ab..lut.ly r.ght... That was a ma..sive logical... oversight on my part. If he has no kn..ledge of the **** world and ** is just waking up in a ****** *****, his first assumption upon feeling heavy and weak would be that he is severely inju..d, p..a....yzed, or experi...ing some ******* complications from his "death""
"I have completely restructured his awake**** to reflect pure sensory ***fusion. He only pi**es together the transmigration and the alien planet after the ****** interface ***** up and feeds *** *** ****."
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"Huh?"
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The rain fell in heavy, unforgiving sheets against the cold asphalt, the steady drumming drowning out the fading sirens in the distance. Young felt the warmth bleeding from his chest, mingling with the freezing, polluted runoff of the Louisville city streets. As his vision began to blur at the edges, tunneling into a dark, suffocating vignette, he did not experience a grand philosophical revelation.
There was no sudden, brilliant light calling him toward the heavens, nor did his life flash before his eyes in a cinematic montage. Instead, his fading mind clung fiercely to the grounded, mundane, and painfully unfinished anchors of his earthly existence.
He thought of the humid, oppressive air that often blanketed the Kentucky area in the dead of summer, a stark contrast to the biting cold currently seeping into his bones. His thoughts drifted to the rhythmic, mechanical thud of the lasting station at the KEEN footwear factory. He could almost smell the sharp, distinct scent of industrial adhesives, the heavy canvas, and the treated leather of the American Built line.
He pictured Bryce, his production lead and buddy, who had patiently trained him on the line. Bryce was undoubtedly going to be furious, pacing the factory floor, looking at the clock and wondering why Young had not shown up for the morning shift.
The meticulous process of building a boot from the ground up, ensuring every layer was perfectly stretched and secured before the sole was attached, felt like a cruel metaphor for a life he was abruptly leaving behind half-finished.
His mind wandered out to the rain-slicked factory parking lot, picturing his pride and joy: the classic two thousand twelve Audi A4 he had painstakingly maintained. It would just sit there, cold and empty, waiting for a driver who was never coming back. And then, the thoughts turned to the people, and the physical pain in his chest was suddenly eclipsed by a profound, hollow ache in his soul.
He thought of Danielle. His beautiful, chaotic Troublemaker. He remembered the electric, terrifying thrill of their first kiss, a moment stolen amidst the ongoing complications of her situation.
They were just beginning to navigate the messy, developing reality of their relationship, piecing together something genuine from the chaos. He would never get to see how their story ended. His heart physically seized as his thoughts shifted to a small, bright face—his son, born on a freezing seventh of January in two thousand twenty.
The crushing realization that he would never watch his boy grow into a man, never teach him how to drive that Audi, never show him how to face the world with his head held high, was a torment worse than the fading of his own heartbeat.
Fleeting regrets cascaded through his fading consciousness. He thought of the half-finished poetry and the intricate rap verses he had been composing in his head, the rhymes and meters he sometimes polished and posted on Instagram to share a piece of his soul with the world.
Those verses would die with him, unwritten and unspoken. He felt a sudden pang of regret over Fatuma; he had meant to write her a long letter, to send a piece of his thoughts all the way to Tanzania to tell her how much he missed their connection, but time had simply run out.
Life was not a digital construct. This was not a scenario where he could just respawn at a designated bed. It was not the blocky, infinite potential of a Minecraft server where you could always rebuild your base if a creeper blew it up, nor was it the complex, pressure-controlled environments of Stationeers where a ruptured suit could be patched with a roll of duct tape and a loaded save file.
There was no logic circuit to reroute the blood leaving his body. As his eyes finally slipped shut, the asphalt dissolved beneath him, and the earthly plane simply ceased to exist.
Young did not find heaven, nor did he find hell.
His soul was violently torn from its mortal shell, cast adrift into an unfathomable, terrifying cosmic ocean. This was not the shimmering, digital cascade of green code he had seen in the Matrix, nor was it the smooth, watery event horizon of a wormhole from Stargate.
This was a churning, viscous sea of suffocating ink. He floated as a raw, untethered consciousness through an expanse so vast it defied human comprehension. Invisible currents sliced through the darkness all around him.
He watched, horrified but entirely numb, as the souls of lesser beings, caught in the cosmic drift, were silently diced into subatomic dust by these currents, erased from the cycle of reincarnation entirely.
By some miraculous stroke of luck, or perhaps the calculated intervention of some ancient, unseen law governing this sector of the cosmos, Young's soul slipped through the lethal currents unharmed.
He was drawn inexorably downward, pulled by an invisible tether toward a massive, iron-hued sphere that hung heavily in the dark expanse.
Consciousness returned not with a gentle, awakening dawn, but with a sensation of crushing, localized agony.
His first coherent thought was that he had survived.
He must have been rushed to a hospital. But the pain was entirely wrong. It wasn't the sharp, localized sting of a surgical incision or the dull throb of stitched wounds. It was a complete, systemic suffocation.
His tiny lungs burned with the fire of a thousand suns. The air he desperately tried to pull in felt unbelievably thick, pressing violently against the fragile walls of his chest. He felt as though he had been buried under a foot of wet concrete.
He tried to move his arms to clear whatever debris was crushing him, but his limbs refused to respond. The paralysis sent a spike of pure, unadulterated panic through his mind. Was his spine severed? Was he in a medically induced coma?
Before he could even pry his heavy eyelids open, a sound pierced the ringing in his ears. It was the sound of weeping. Not a quiet, dignified sorrow, but a raw, soul-tearing wail of absolute despair.
"Please, no... my baby, please breathe," a woman's voice choked out, her words trembling with a devastation so profound it made Young's newly formed heart ache.
Wait. Baby?
Summoning an immense reserve of willpower, fighting against the invisible weight pressing him down, Young forced his heavy eyelids open.
The world was a blur of muted grays and deep shadows. His eyes were woefully undeveloped, unable to focus on anything beyond a few feet. Everything looked like a smudged watercolor painting illuminated only by a dim, flickering light source nearby. Leaning over him, her face framed by the ambient gloom, was a woman with kind, deeply exhausted eyes and silver-streaked hair.
She was clutching his tiny, fragile hand against her cheek, her hot tears falling rapidly against his skin. To her, this fragile newborn had stopped breathing moments ago; he had crossed the dark threshold of death, leaving her entirely alone.
When Young's eyes fluttered, focused as best they could, and locked onto hers, the woman gasped. It was a sharp, ragged intake of air.
The sheer, overwhelming relief that washed over her pale face was blinding. She pulled him gently but firmly to her chest, rocking him back and forth while sobbing desperate prayers of gratitude to whatever distant gods she believed still listened.
"Young," she whispered fervently, pressing her trembling lips to his sparse hair.
"My sweet Young. You came back to me."
He rested against her chest, his mind spinning violently. He was a baby. He had been reborn. The realization hit him like a physical blow, yet it explained the lack of motor control, the blurry vision, and the woman holding him.
But if this was reincarnation, why did he feel so incredibly sick? Why did his bones ache, and why did the air feel so painfully thick?
He observed the woman holding him with the pragmatic, analytical eyes of a grown man, a former blue-collar worker who knew the toll hard labor took on a human body. She looked terribly pale and sickly, her skin carrying a grayish, ashen undertone.
To his earthly mind, she did not look like someone suffering from a mystical curse; she looked like the exhausted single mothers he knew back home who worked three minimum wage jobs just to keep the lights on. She exhibited the deep, marrow-draining exhaustion of someone working consecutive double shifts for years on end without rest.
Her breathing was shallow and rattled slightly, reminiscent of the older men at the factory who had spent decades inhaling industrial dust without proper ventilation masks. She was simply a sick, desperately overworked mother who loved him fiercely.
As she continued to rock him, singing a low, melancholic lullaby, she stood up and began to pace the room to soothe him. Through his blurry, nearsighted infant vision, Young tried to make sense of his surroundings, desperate for context.
There were no beeping heart monitors. No pristine white hospital walls. No fluorescent lights.
The room was massive. The ceilings stretched high into the gloom, supported by thick, unadorned pillars of smooth, dark stone. It was not a cramped, mud-brick hovel like he might have expected if he had been reborn into extreme poverty.
The dimensions of just this one room equaled the entire square footage of a standard house back in Kentucky. Through a wide, arched doorway, he could just barely make out the echoing emptiness of additional rooms branching off into corridors. It was effectively a mini-villa, a sprawling estate made of heavy stone and sturdy wood.
Yet, despite its grand size, it was utterly barren. There was no furniture save for a few woven mats, a basic wooden table, and the oversized, incredibly sturdy crib he had been lying in. It felt like an abandoned mansion, stripped of all its valuables and left to gather dust.
Young's mind raced, trying to synthesize this conflicting information. His new mother wore rough, tattered clothes and looked half-starved from overwork, yet they lived in a massive, multi-room villa that could house a dozen people comfortably. He had no context for this.
Where was he?
Was this some archaic era of Earth's past?
A post-apocalyptic future?
And why was it so incredibly hard to breathe?
Was the atmosphere
compromised? Was he born with a severe respiratory defect?
After a long while, the woman's tears finally subsided. She gently lowered Young back into the massive wooden crib, tucking a rough, itchy blanket around his small shoulders. She lingered for a moment, smoothing his hair with a calloused, dirt-stained thumb, before sighing deeply. She turned away and walked toward the arched doorway.
Young watched her go, his blurry vision tracking her silhouette. She paused near the exit to wrap a heavy, worn shawl around her shoulders.
Young understood exactly what was happening.
It was a scene played out in millions of homes back on Earth.
She was leaving for work.
The rent needed paying, or the rations needed earning. She could not afford to sit and watch over a sleeping infant all day. The brutal machine of industry did not care if a mother wanted to hold her sick child; the whistle blew, and the workers needed to clock in.
She stepped out into the hallway, and the heavy sound of a large wooden door thudding shut echoed through the empty villa, leaving Young entirely alone in the vast, silent gloom.
The isolation pressed in on him, amplifying the crushing physical discomfort in his chest. He could not speak to call for her. He could not walk to follow her. He was trapped in a fragile, undeveloped body, forced to stare up at the high, shadowy ceiling while his lungs labored for every single breath.
The weight on his bones was terrifying. If this was just the normal physical reality of being a baby, he didn't know how any infant survived it.
Suddenly, a cold, mechanical hum resonated deep within his mind, cutting sharply through the absolute silence of the empty villa.
Ding[1].
A translucent, holographic interface projected itself directly onto his retinas. It glowed with a soft, authoritative blue light, hovering in his field of vision, perfectly visible only to him. It looked sleek and undeniably modern, completely at odds with the ancient, stone-and-wood reality of the room he occupied.
[The Heavenly Archive System has successfully initialized.]
[Host Bound: Young Vance.]
[Location Identified: Dust Haven - Lower Plane.]
[Current Status: Uninitiated.]
Young's heart raced in his tiny chest, though his infant body remained perfectly still in the heavy crib. A system. The phenomenon he had read about endlessly in web novels was now projecting diagnostics into his actual eyeballs.
His logical mind immediately seized the data. Dust Haven. Lower Plane. The pieces slammed together with staggering clarity. He wasn't in a hospital. He hadn't been reborn on a post-apocalyptic Earth or in some historical dynasty. He was on an entirely different planet. A different plane of existence altogether. He had transmigrated.
[Warning: Host's physical vessel is currently too fragile to execute standard physical quest protocols. Engaging standard physical training at this stage will result in catastrophic skeletal collapse under extreme Planar Gravity.]
[Initiating Passive Endurance Protocol.]
[Quest: Survive the Planar Gravity of Dust Haven.]
[Reward: +0.0001 System Points per hour of sustained survival.]
Young stared at the floating text, his mind expanding as he processed the clinical breakdown of his reality. Planar Gravity. That explained the crushing weight. It wasn't a medical defect or a respiratory illness; the planet itself was actively trying to crush him.
The gravity here was fundamentally heavier than Earth's, so immense that his fragile mortal infant bones were barely capable of withstanding the baseline atmospheric pressure.
The system was utterly ruthless. It operated on the strict, unforgiving rules of equivalent exchange and cold, hard mathematics. There were no instant miracles here.
No magical healing syringes popping out of thin air to instantly cure the exhausted woman who just left for her shift.
No sudden influx of superhuman energy that would allow an infant to leap out of his crib and defy the crushing gravity.
Just the brutal, agonizing math of daily endurance.
He ran the numbers in his head, a habit deeply ingrained from years of tracking production quotas and hourly wages on the factory floor. Zero point zero zero zero one points an hour. That was zero point zero zero two four points a day.
It would take an agonizing amount of time—years—just to accumulate a single, whole point. He would have to lie in this crib, fighting the massive gravitational pull of an alien planet with every single breath, enduring the helplessness and boredom of infancy, just to earn fractions of a fraction of a reward.
Yet, as he looked at the blue glow of the text illuminating the darkness behind his eyelids, Young felt no despair. The confusion and panic that had gripped him upon waking were entirely gone, replaced by a cold, familiar resolve settling over his mind.
He knew the rules now. He understood the parameters of his existence. He knew how to grind. He knew what it meant to put his head down, shut out the noise, ignore the aching in his joints, and just do the work, hour after hour, day after day.
In the stories he used to read, protagonists often relied on incredible luck, stumbling into hidden caves to find ancient artifacts or receiving unearned inheritances left behind by long-dead masters.
Young did not need a dead master's handout. He had a system that guaranteed a return on investment so long as he put in the labor.
He closed his eyes, settling his breathing into a slow, measured rhythm to conserve energy against the heavy air. In a universe that seemed entirely governed by unseen, crushing forces, exposing this interface would surely be dangerous.
He would play the role of a frail, unremarkable, entirely average child. He would let the bosses of this world, whoever they were, look past him. He would be the quiet worker at the back of the line, clocking in and clocking out, completely unnoticed by management.
And in the absolute secrecy of the shadows, fueled by the memories of a past life that demanded hard work, careful planning, and steady, systematic progression, Young Vance would quietly build his foundation. He would accumulate his points, fortify his vessel against this crushing world, and construct his life from the ground up, making sure every single stitch was perfect before he decided to show this planet exactly what he was building...
[1] Sound Of System Notification