Chapter 2
The Scholar's Skin
The universe exploded into being around him. Not a void, but a vast, shimmering expanse of countless points of light, each a world, a plane, a reality. It was a cosmic sea, and he was a single, conscious drop of water within it. Sensations—of heat, cold, life, decay, magic, and machine—washed over him in a wordless, formless tide. He was floating in the ocean of everything.
Instinct, a new and terrifying part of him, took over. His consciousness, his very soul, yearned toward one particular point of light. It felt… simpler than the grinding metallic ones or the roaring elemental ones. It felt of soil, sorrow, and simple struggles. He reached for it.
A sharp, piercing pain lanced through his non-existent form, like a thread being pulled taut until it snapped. It was brief, but unmistakable. A part of him—a small, vital fragment—had been severed and was now hurtling toward that world. The connection was made.
Back in his apartment on Aethelgard, Kaelen's body, which had been rigid with concentration, went limp. His breathing slowed to a shallow, mechanical rhythm. He had entered a deep, comatose state, a vacant vessel.
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The transition was not a step, but a shove. One moment he was a point of light in a cosmic sea, the next he was drowning in sensation.
Cold.
Wet.
Pain. A gnawing, hollow agony in his stomach.
The coppery taste of blood in a mouth that wasn't his.
The rough, soaked texture of burlap against skin.
He gasped, and the air was frigid and damp. He was lying in a mud-filled alley, water dripping from a thatched eave overhead. A pounding rain soaked him to the bone. Panic, pure and undiluted, seized him. He tried to move, but the body he inhabited was weak, trembling with fatigue and hunger. These weren't his limbs. This desolate, aching emptiness wasn't his stomach.
"Where am I? What is this?" he thought, the internal voice his own, screaming in a foreign skull.
He forced himself to sit up, his back scraping against a rough stone wall. He looked at his hands. They were calloused, dirty, and thin, the bones starkly visible under pale skin. This was not the body of a young man from a star-faring civilization. This was the body of someone broken.
Breathe. Just breathe, he commanded himself, using the same mental exercises he'd used to endure the orphanage. He closed his eyes, trying to block out the alien input. Instead, he found… memories. Not his own. They flooded into his consciousness like a ghostly echo.
His name—this body's name—was Elian. He had been a scholar, a humble man who transcribed scrolls in a local lord's library. He had dared to correct the arrogant young knight, Ser Valus, on a point of ancient history in a public forum. The humiliation had been a spark to the knight's pride. False accusations of theft followed. Elian's reputation was shattered, his position lost. No one would hire the man who had offended a knight. He had sold his books, then his robes, and had been reduced to this: a starving beggar, shivering in the rain, too proud to return to a family he had shamed and too weak to find a new path.
Kaelen opened his eyes, the panic receding, replaced by a profound, aching pity. He was wearing a dead man's life. "I'm sorry, Elian," he whispered, the voice a dry, unfamiliar rasp.
Over the next few days, Kaelen, as Elian, began to piece the world together. He stumbled to a public well, drinking deeply. He used the last of the beggar's few coppers to buy a hard loaf of bread from a suspicious baker.
"News from the capital, old man?" Kaelen asked, his voice rough from disuse, mimicking the local dialect from Elian's memories.
The baker, a stout woman with flour-dusted arms, snorted. "Nothing that changes the rain. Ser Valus rides to the north, they say. Hunting Shadow-Stalkers in the Blackwood. Good riddance." She looked him up and down. "You look worse than yesterday. The chill will take you before the hunger, if you sleep in these alleys. Be glad you've no Bloodline to tempt the beasts with."
Kaelen stored that strange term away. He learned the village was named Oakhaven, a small settlement on the edge of the Blackwood in the Kingdom of Lythos, on the continent of Valeria. The world was one of feudal lords, merchant alliances, and scattered tribes. From Elian's scholarly memories, he gleaned that some people possessed "Bloodlines"—ancient powers passed down from ancestors who had survived drinking potent, often lethal, beast-blood elixirs. These Bloodlines granted low-level abilities: a knight of the Frostwolf clan might withstand extreme cold, while a warrior of the Ember-Tail tribe could spit embers. They were revered, called Knights, Blademasters, or Wardens. Most commoners, however, merely practiced breathing techniques to slightly enhance their vitality, a pale shadow of true Bloodline power.
A week passed in this strange, dual existence—Kaelen's consciousness piloting a dying man through a simple, brutal life.
It was on the seventh night that the attack came. The first warning was not a sound, but a silence. The constant chirping of crickets died abruptly. Then came the screams—high-pitched, pure terror from the village's edge, followed by a guttural, chittering roar that froze the blood.
Kaelen scrambled from his hayloft, peering through a crack in the barn wall. Shadows moved with impossible speed between the huts. They were the size of wolves but built like insects, with glistening black chitin and multiple, glowing red eyes. Shadow-Stalkers.
Chaos erupted. Men with spears and torches rushed out, only to be swarmed and dragged down, their screams cut short. Kaelen's heart hammered in Elian's frail chest. He had to hide. But as he turned, the barn door splintered inward.
A Stalker stood there, mandibles clicking, dripping with something dark. It scented the air, its head tilting towards him. It wasn't just hunting for food. It was hunting for power. Elian's memories screamed: the beasts were drawn to those with strong life force, to those with Bloodlines. But even a starving scholar's latent vitality was a flickering candle in the dark.
Kaelen stumbled back, but Elian's body was too slow, too weak. There was no time for thought, only instinct. The creature lunged. A searing, unimaginable pain erupted in his chest as chitinous claws tore through flesh and bone. Elian's body hit the ground, the world fading to a bloody haze.
The last thing Kaelen felt was not Elian's death, but his own soul-fragment being violently torn from the dying world, the silver cord snapping back with the force of a whip.
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Back in his apartment on Aethelgard, Kaelen's body convulsed.
His eyes flew open, a silent scream trapped in his throat. He lurched upright, then immediately collapsed to the floor, retching. A soul-deep weakness gripped him, a thousand times worse than before. His muscles felt like water, his head pounded, and the phantom pain of the Stalker's claws still burned in his chest. He could still smell the hay and the blood.
He lay there for hours, trembling, as the memory of death echoed in his mind. This was the cost. The pain of the split was nothing compared to the agony of return from a "Death Recall." But as the worst of the weakness receded, he noticed it again—a subtle firmness in his limbs, a slight sharpening of his senses. He had absorbed a tiny spark of Elian's "Origin"—not the strength of a warrior, but the enduring resilience of a scholar who had suffered greatly and endured until the very end.
He had survived his first death. And he had learned a terrible, invaluable lesson.