My hand moved before my brain did.
I slowly pried my eyes open, arm sweeping blindly across the bed, searching for my phone. My fingers found nothing. I rubbed my eyes instead, forcing one eye open, then the other — blinking slowly against the dim light filtering into the room.
A wooden ceiling. That was the first thing I saw.
...That's a wooden ceiling.
My apartment ceiling was concrete — with a water stain shaped vaguely like a duck in the right corner that I'd memorised by accident. This wasn't that. The beams above me were thick, old, and darkened by age. I turned my head sideways. A wardrobe stood against the wall, rotting at the bottom edges, iron hinges rusted orange, carved with patterns that looked straight out of a medieval period drama.
I closed my eyes again and tried to go back to sleep.
This was a dream. It had to be a dream.
. . .
Five minutes passed.
I opened my eyes again. Still a wooden ceiling. Still the old wardrobe. Still the sound of wind slipping through a window with no glass — just wooden shutters hanging loosely on broken hinges.
Why am I still not waking up.
Ding!
A clear, bell-like sound rang once. A red panel materialised directly in front of my face — vivid and sharp, hovering in the air like a mirror that reflected nothing.
[ Congratulations! Host has successfully transmigrated. ]
Ha?
Transmigration. Another world.
Okay. Stay calm. Try to remember how any of this happened.
I pressed the side of my head and forced myself to trace back — back to the last thing I actually remembered. My room. My phone. The charger. Pulling the blanket up. And then...
A sound. Foreign and sharp, like a frequency that had no place in the natural world. I heard it right before I fell asleep, but I was too tired to care at the time.
And that floating sensation. I remembered it too — weightless, unmoored, the kind of thing I'd written off as one of those falling dreams people have.
Apparently not.
This wasn't a dream. This was real.
I looked around the room again, more carefully this time. Rough stone walls. Wooden floorboards that would creak under any real weight. The light coming through the window wasn't from a lamp — it was actual sunlight, warm and unfiltered.
I let out a long, slow breath.
The guy who spent half his nights reading transmigration novels just to feel something — and here I was, actually transmigrated, feeling everything at once and having no idea which of it was useful.
Right. I'd read enough stories to know what to do next.
"...Status." I said it quietly, feeling slightly ridiculous talking to no one.
The red panel blinked, then shifted:
[ STATUS ]
Name: Six
Rank: —
Skills: —
Points: 0
I stared at it for a moment.
"Ha." I let out a long exhale. "Figured as much."
Fine. A system meant there was a way forward. I just didn't know how to use it yet, didn't know what world this was, didn't know—
A burst of noise from outside the window cut through my thoughts.
Voices. The clang of metal. The sharp smell of wood smoke.
I got up from the bed, crossed the room, and peered out through the window.
A small town stretched out in front of me.
Stone buildings packed unevenly along muddy dirt roads. People moving through the streets in clothing I'd only ever seen in period films — robes, animal hides, wide-brimmed hats with feathers. Horse-drawn carts rolled slowly through narrow lanes. Wood smoke curled upward from chimneys nearby. And at the far edge of town, a thick stone wall rose high, separating the settlement from the dense, shadowed forest beyond it.
Above it all — a deep, dark blue sky, with two crescent moons still visible even as the sun climbed higher.
Two moons.
This is definitely not Earth.