Chapter 1: Nen Ability
Pain!
Such pain!
My head... my heart hurts so much!
Ray gradually awakened from unconsciousness, feeling as if he were soaking in a weightless mass of water. It should have felt warm and comfortable, yet his heart was pounding wildly, as if about to burst. Ray numbly sensed strange streams of aura—feeling scalding hot like boiling water, yet also bone-chillingly cold—trying to drill into the deepest part of his heart...
Stop drilling! My heart really is going to explode...
After who knows how long, Ray snapped his eyes open. Waking as if from a dream, there was a sense of disillusionment. Then came the suffocating feeling of being bound by something, pressed down by layers of heavy weight... He struggled violently, dim light filtering through gaps in the heavy objects. Ray thrashed even harder, pushing all the weight off himself, finally free from restraint, no longer forced into that awkward position. Though exhausted, he could at least lie sprawled out comfortably.
Evening glow filled the sky, and tall, tangled wild grass filled Ray's vision. Only then did it dawn on him—when had he ended up lying in such a desolate wilderness?
If he remembered correctly, he'd been stuck at home due to the pandemic, bored out of his mind, having just fried some rice, planning to find something to watch, killing time... He really hadn't bothered anyone or caused trouble, just a law-abiding citizen. How did he close his eyes one moment and open them here the next?
Ray let out a long breath, then inhaled deeply, his expression slowly changing—why was there such a thick smell of blood?
He sat up abruptly but slipped, his limbs weak, and fell flat on his face.
A male corpse in a suit appeared before his eyes, the man's dilated, unfocused pupils meeting his gaze.
Ray's scalp went numb instantly, a chill shooting up his spine to his skull.
He looked around. As far as he could see, among these towering wild grass thickets, corpses lay everywhere, and he himself had just been buried under a pile of dead bodies! Scattered around these suited corpses were shell casings, pistols, and the like... A gang shootout? No way! What era was this—did gangs still get this wild?
Ray looked down again. Beneath the jumbled corpses lay another body—a woman in an ordinary gray coat, eyes half-open as if she'd died with grievances unresolved. He wasn't a forensic expert and couldn't tell how long the woman and these other suited men had been dead, but he could see that the dead woman's rigid hand was clutching an empty, disheveled swaddling cloth...
Ray's breathing quickened. He looked at his own palm in disbelief, then traced his gaze upward...
Just like his palm, his arms and torso had become incredibly thin and small. The skin was tender—nothing like what a man pushing thirty should have. At most, this body looked three or four years old!
Had he transmigrated?
And just crawled out from the swaddling cloth beneath these corpses?
Ray's mind was in chaos. He just wanted to escape this pile of bodies as fast as possible. Using both hands and feet, slipping several times, his legs weak, he pushed through the towering tangled grass, trying to crawl out.
When he parted another clump of wild grass, he inadvertently glimpsed a high slope not far away. At its crest, silhouetted against the setting sun, stood a beast—its outline blurry, but its beast-eyes glowed with an eerie light, meeting his gaze from afar.
Ray felt as if a bucket of ice water had been dumped over his head. He was completely awake now.
Shit!
Ray's heart filled with despair. He quietly let go of the parted grass and collapsed weakly to the ground, hoping the beast on the slope hadn't actually spotted him...
Then Ray turned his head and saw a gray wolf's tail poking out from the grass, less than half a meter from his face.
Ray held his breath and followed the tail forward, his heart sinking bit by bit. A Wild Wolf weighing at least two hundred pounds was gnawing on another black-suited corpse in the grass, making sounds of flesh and bone being chewed... Ray could hardly believe it. Had he been deaf before? How had he not heard this?
Ray carefully inched backward, eyes fixed on the feeding Wild Wolf's back.
Suddenly, the Wild Wolf stopped moving. Ray froze, not daring to move.
The Wild Wolf raised a hind leg to scratch its neck, then continued tearing at its meal. Ray suppressed his breathing and carefully inched back again... Then he heard the sound he least wanted to hear: from his left and right came the rustling of grass being parted. Before long, two blood-mouthed Wild Wolves emerged, their green eyes fixed on Ray.
Could things get any worse?
The first Wild Wolf that had been eating also stopped at some point and turned its head, licking its fangs, seemingly grinning at Ray.
...Yes, they could!
Ray suddenly understood. These three natural hunters had known about his living presence all along!
Damn dogs, were they toying with their prey, or saving the tender fresh meat for last?
The three Wild Wolves formed a pincer formation, pushing through the grass, stalking toward Ray on all fours, growling in warning.
Ray kept backing up until he hit the original pile of corpses. Nowhere left to retreat.
Watching the three savage man-eating wolves close in, in this moment of mortal crisis, Ray felt his brain cells dying and regenerating at unprecedented speed, racking his brain for a way to survive. But no matter how wild his imagination, nothing seemed practical. He hadn't even figured out if this was really transmigration, and he was about to die in a wolf's belly again—served family style...
A soft strand of infant hair drifted past Ray's peripheral vision.
At some point, Ray had gradually calmed down. Sitting with his back against the pile of stones and corpses, he stared at the three Wild Wolves right in front of him. The meat scraps between their teeth, the nauseating stench of blood—all crystal clear...
The soft hair strand, barely noticeable, moved on its own without wind, slowly drifting toward the middle wolf.
On a level invisible to the naked eye, a mass of white life energy wrapped around the hair, gradually bending it into a Pentagram shape, then quietly landing inside the middle wolf's ear.
White light flashed and vanished. The hair silently dispersed and fell away, but on the skin inside the wolf's ear remained a rose-gold Pentagram pattern.
Ray stared at "himself" in shock!
And stared in shock at the middle wolf opposite him. This wolf's eyes showed a human-like expression of shock—this is also "me"?!
Had he taken over this wolf's body?
A string of questions flashed through his mind like lightning, but Ray knew there was no time. He immediately controlled the middle wolf's body, unhesitatingly slamming into the wolf on the left, then snarling, pouncing on the wolf on the right. Ambush! Ray howled and bit down hard on the struggling wolf's throat. Fresh blood gushed into his mouth.
Ray couldn't afford psychological barriers now, because the wolf he'd knocked aside was already counterattacking from behind. A claw slammed into the back of the wolf Ray was controlling, leaving bloody wounds that soaked the fur. Ray gritted his teeth—this pain was way too real!
Ray wrenched at the wolf beneath him, tearing out its throat with a shake of his head. Blood droplets flying, he turned to fight the backstabbing wolf.
But Ray, this amateur wolf, was no match for a professional in close combat. Besides, he wasn't familiar with how a four-legged beast moved. The enemy wolf howled while wrestling, biting, and pouncing with Ray, gradually gaining the upper hand... Meanwhile, Ray's main body, sitting nearby, watched anxiously. If he lost this fight, the next to be eaten would be his own tender meat!
One wolf with a torn-out throat gradually stopped struggling, while the other two continued to fight. Ray took a deep breath of blood-tinged air, endured his heart's stabbing pain, and forced himself to calm down. Even if he didn't understand the full situation yet, he absolutely couldn't make a mistake now...
If he remembered correctly, before controlling this wolf and successfully killing one while pinning down another, he'd felt... as if his whole body was soaking in invisible water, and this water had wrapped around one of his hairs, then... right, bent it into a Pentagram shape...
As Ray thought this, a drop of dark red blood on his skin floated away, slowly drifting and wobbling before his eyes. When his thoughts wavered, the blood string nearly fell to the ground. Ray quickly focused, controlling the blood string to float toward the two rolling, fighting wolves. In midair, the blood string gradually bent into a Pentagram shape under the control of a white light.
As the Pentagram blood string got closer and closer, the wolf Ray controlled—intentionally defending and conserving strength—let out a fierce howl, exploding with all the power in this wolf body, reversing the situation and pinning the opponent to the ground. The enemy wolf thrashed desperately, trying not to expose its soft belly. Ray's wolf pressed down with its full body, both front paws working—one pinning the enemy's head, the other claw acting like a thumbtack. Seizing the opportunity, he yanked out the enemy's tongue. At the same moment, the thin Pentagram blood string Ray's main body controlled, under the manipulation of the white light mass, landed precisely on the pulled-out tongue.
White light flashed and passed. Ray's main body suddenly saw stars, his whole body going limp with exhaustion.
Wolf-Ray's pupils contracted. The Pentagram blood string quickly dissolved on the enemy wolf's tongue, failing to leave the expected rose-gold Pentagram pattern—failed!
Ray's main body secretly gritted his teeth. This strange ability apparently only consumed "mana" at the moment of activation! And with his thin arms and legs, having enough MP to successfully control one wolf was already incredibly lucky. He really didn't have the strength to control a second wolf... Thinking this, the enemy wolf made a desperate struggle. Ray had no time to think more—he went red-eyed too, controlling the wolf to bite down. Fangs pierced through the enemy wolf's windpipe, and fresh blood gushed out with each of its twitches.
Looks like the defensive counterattack strategy was correct after all... The struggling enemy wolf beneath his fangs and claws grew weaker. Ray secretly breathed a sigh of relief. Good thing he'd at least controlled one wolf for his own use. Otherwise, with his transmigrated body's tiny arms and legs, forget counterattacking—the forensic team would have a puzzle on their hands, his corpse scattered everywhere!
Soon, this wolf also stopped struggling. Ray felt another stream of strange aura drill into his heart, hot yet cold. His heart spasmed. He'd barely managed to stand when he fell back on his rear.
A congenital heart condition? Ray's face was pale. Or was it... He clutched his chest, looking at the wolf corpse that had stopped moving. Was that strange aura drilling into his heart because of this wolf's death?
Recalling the intense heart pain he'd thought was just a dream before waking, Ray looked around at the corpses hidden among the towering grass and suddenly understood why.
He sat dazed for a moment, then slowly exhaled.
No matter what, he'd survived!
Ray spat out a mouthful of wolf fur and stepped on the wolf corpse to declare victory. But suddenly his expression changed drastically. When his main body fell back into the pile of corpses, he accidentally saw again the swaddling cloth the gray-coated woman refused to release even in death... Ray had assumed this woman was probably his transmigrated self's birth mother or something similar, and that he'd most likely been reborn from this swaddling cloth before crawling out...
But this small swaddling cloth was clearly meant for a newborn infant.
And his current body, though thin and small, was clearly at least three or four years old!
Had he transmigrated?
And just crawled out of the swaddling cloth under these corpses?
The wolf Ray controlled padded over to his side, turning its head to view—from a third-person perspective—his completely new appearance. The toddler who'd just learned to walk was actually shorter than this adult wolf. He also looked at the swaddling cloth the long-dead woman refused to release... The infant originally in this swaddling cloth—who was it, and where had it crawled off to?
"Awooo————"
From all directions came the rising howls of more wolves.
(End of Chapter)