He died doing something truly unremarkable.
Not storming a castle. Not slaying a dragon. Not even choking on glory.
Just standing behind the counter of a 24/7 convenience store, beneath flickering fluorescent lights, scanning expired energy drinks while a half-naked conspiracy theorist argued with a rack of potato chips.
"I'm telling you, man... they live in the moon. Not on it. In it. Hollow moon. Moon reptiles. NASA's just a puppet show."
Zephyr Mayhem nodded absently, not because he agreed, but because it made the lunatic leave faster. That was his real superpower: the ability to shut down nonsense with passive encouragement.
He was halfway through pretending to mop the floor when the aneurysm hit. No light. No warning. Just an instant white-hot spike behind his left eye, then darkness.
And silence.
Until the silence started whispering.
He opened his eyes.
But they weren't his eyes.
A chandelier twisted like melted glass above him, swaying gently as if in water. The ceiling pulsed faintly, breathing in slow intervals. Everything felt... wrong. The bed beneath him was soft, but it was the kind of softness that suggested it had eaten people before.
The air reeked of dust, secrets, and something metallic. Like blood pretending to be perfume.
Zephyr sat up. His fingers trembled—not with fear, but with the kind of awareness one gets when waking up somewhere very, very expensive and very, very cursed.
"Alright," he muttered, voice raspy. "This isn't Kansas. And I'm not Zephyr Mayhem anymore."
He reached up to touch his face. Same nose. Same stubble. But... no glasses. No name tag. No pain in his lower back from standing twelve hours.
Then, a knock. No, a pulse—on the edge of his mind.
[LEGACY INITIALIZING...]
[CALIBRATING: ANOMALOUS PARAMETERS DETECTED]
[WARNING: THIS SYSTEM RUNS ON FRAGMENTED IMPOSSIBILITIES]
Zephyr blinked.
A floating text box. Transparent. Flickering like a bad hallucination. And the font was Comic Sans.
He exhaled slowly. "This is hell. I died and went to ironic hell."
But deep down, he knew better. This wasn't punishment. This wasn't reward. This was wrong. Deeply, fundamentally wrong.
Which meant...
He smiled.
"Let's see how much sense I can break before breakfast."
The room around him stretched like warm wax, shifting subtly as he moved. The walls had veins. Real, twitching veins. One of the paintings—a crow-faced nobleman—tilted its head when Zephyr looked at it. Not the frame. The man inside.
"Cool," he muttered. "Haunted LSD mansion. Nice upgrade."
His feet hit the floor with a soft thump. It was carpet, but it shimmered like feathers, iridescent and alive. Zephyr didn't trust it. He tiptoed, like walking on something that might scream.
A mirror waited near the door. In it, he saw himself—but not. The same scruffy dark hair, the same tired eyes, but the clothes were wrong: regal, embroidered, black-on-black robes that shimmered when he moved. His reflection smirked a split second before he did.
"Yup," he said. "Definitely cursed."
[SYSTEM SYNC: 34%]
[WARNING: CONSCIOUSNESS AND REALITY IN DESYNC]
[USER MAY EXPERIENCE TEMPORAL FLICKERING, LOGIC BLEED, AND META-COLLAPSE]
He opened the door. The hallway beyond curved in on itself, like a Möbius strip drawn by a drunk architect. Doors shifted positions when he blinked. Stairs twisted upward, sideways, inward.
Zephyr stepped through, only mildly surprised when gravity disagreed with him halfway across the hall.
He landed on a ceiling—or maybe it was the floor now—with a grunt. "Okay. So the laws of physics are on break."
Somewhere in the distance, something giggled.
Not a child.
Not a woman.
Something.
[SYSTEM SYNC: 47%]
[NEW SKILL ACQUIRED: PARADOX RESISTANCE (Lv. 1)]
[DESCRIPTION: The less sense it makes, the more it works. Do not question it. Seriously.]
Zephyr grinned. "Oh, I'm gonna love this place."
Somewhere, deep inside the mansion's foundation, something ancient shifted. It felt the awakening of the legacy—the wrong legacy. The one never meant to be inherited.
It stirred.
And it laughed.
Not out of joy.
Out of anticipation.
Because for the first time in a thousand years...
...a heretic had entered the narrative.