Chapter 1: Salt and Prophecy
The taste of salt woke him before anything else—bitter, overwhelming, coating his tongue like the memory of drowning. Paul's first conscious thought scraped against fragmented images: a television screen, the History Channel logo, Travis Fimmel's piercing blue eyes. Modern life. Comfort. Safety.
None of which existed anymore.
His eyes cracked open to the groan of wood under strain, the rhythmic slap of waves against a hull. Above him, rough-hewn planks formed a ceiling that had never seen power tools or mass production. The air tasted of brine, unwashed bodies, and something that might have been tar. His stomach lurched—not from seasickness, though that would come later—but from the bone-deep understanding that everything he'd known was gone.
"This isn't real. This can't be real."
But the splinter digging into his shoulder blade was real. The scratch of coarse wool against his skin was real. The voices speaking in accented English—archaic, guttural—were devastatingly real.
Paul tried to sit up. His body responded like a marionette with half its strings cut. Weak. Pathetically weak. His arms trembled with the effort of lifting his own weight, and his head spun as if someone had replaced his blood with lead.
"What happened to me? What—"
The voice cut through his skull like wind through a burial mound, ancient and inexorable:
[HOST ACKNOWLEDGED]
[THE NORNS HAVE MARKED YOU]
[ODIN WATCHES]
Paul's vision exploded into runes—not the Hollywood pseudo-Norse he'd seen in movies, but something older, carved from the bones of reality itself. They burned across his retinas in gold and crimson, shifting and writhing like living things.
[INITIALIZING HOST INTERFACE]
[LOADING PRECOGNITION SYSTEM v1.3.7]
[WARNING: HOST STATISTICS CRITICALLY LOW]
The merchant captain's voice drifted over the runes: "Stranger's finally awake. Thought you might not make it, the way you were breathing."
Paul blinked, and the runic display solidified into something his modern mind could parse—a translucent overlay that looked disturbingly like a video game interface. Stats appeared in the corner of his vision:
[HOST: PAUL]
[STRENGTH: 1.0]
[STAMINA: 1.2]
[AGILITY: 1.0]
[MAGIC: 2.0]
[HEALTH POINTS: 10/10]
[MANA POINTS: 12/12]
"Holy shit."
The numbers were pathetic. A baseline human would be somewhere around 5.0 in physical stats, if he had to guess. He was operating at one-fifth normal capacity, barely functional. Only his Magic stat showed any promise, and he had no idea what that even meant in this context.
[SKILLS AVAILABLE]
[ODIN'S WHISPER (DÉJÀ VU LEVEL 1) - UNLOCKED]
[DAILY VISION - UNLOCKED]
[SUCCESS RATE ANALYSIS - UNLOCKED]
[SYSTEM POINTS: 0]
"Odin's Whisper? Daily Vision?" The names sent ice through his veins. This wasn't just some transmigration fantasy—this was a system, and if the Viking theming was accurate...
"Where—" Paul's voice cracked like a teenager's. He cleared his throat, tried again. "Where are we sailing?"
The merchant captain, a grizzled man whose face looked carved from driftwood, glanced over. "Kattegat, stranger. Should make harbor by evening if the winds hold." He studied Paul with the calculating gaze of someone who dealt in human cargo as often as goods. "You paid silver for passage, but gave no name. Foreign accent. Soft hands." The man's expression suggested Paul's story better be convincing.
Kattegat.
The name hit Paul like a physical blow. Not just any Viking settlement—the settlement. Ragnar Lothbrok's home base, at least in the TV show. Which meant...
[DAILY VISION AUTOMATICALLY ACTIVATED]
[MANA COST: 15% - REMAINING MP: 10/12]
The world fractured.
Three images burned into Paul's mind with crystal clarity:
A beach. Sand stained dark with blood. Five men in leather and iron, axes glinting in morning sun.
An axe descending toward his own head, the blade close enough to count the nicks in the steel.
Ragnar Lothbrok's face, exactly as Travis Fimmel had portrayed him, pushing through a crowd with a dangerous smile that promised violence and opportunity in equal measure.
Paul gasped, the visions fading but leaving phantom sensations—the grit of sand under his knees, the weight of imminent death, the electric intensity of Ragnar's attention.
[VISION COMPLETE]
[PREDICTION ACCURACY: UNKNOWN]
[DAILY VISION WILL RESET AT DAWN]
"Tomorrow. Tomorrow I die on a beach unless I do something about it."
The certainty was absolute. Not a maybe, not a possibility—a fact carved in stone by whatever force had given him these abilities. Five warriors would corner him. He would face death. And somehow, impossibly, Ragnar Lothbrok would be involved.
Paul forced himself to focus on the present. The merchant ship was small but well-maintained, carrying what looked like furs, amber, and iron goods. Three other passengers huddled in the stern—farmers or traders by their worn clothes and weathered hands. None of them paid Paul any attention, which was both blessing and curse. No scrutiny, but no protection either.
The captain was still watching him with that merchant's calculation. Paul needed a story, and it needed to be believable.
"I'm a... traveler," Paul said, defaulting to the vaguest truth he could manage. "From lands far to the south."
"What manner of lands?"
Think. What would make sense in this time period? "The... the warm lands beyond the great sea. Where the sun never sets in summer and spices grow like weeds."
Not entirely inaccurate—he was from a warm climate, relatively speaking. The captain grunted, seemingly satisfied. Foreign traders weren't uncommon, and Paul's obvious weakness made him seem more merchant than threat.
The rest of the voyage passed in a haze of mounting dread. Paul tried to process what had happened to him—how he'd gone from watching Vikings reruns to actually living in the world. The memories of his previous life were there but felt distant, like scenes from a movie he'd watched years ago. Real, but not immediate.
What was immediate was the growing certainty that he was utterly unprepared for what was coming.
As the sun began its descent toward the horizon, the merchant captain called out: "Kattegat ahead!"
Paul hauled himself to the rail on shaking legs. The settlement sprawled along the fjord like something from a fever dream—wooden buildings with steep-pitched roofs, smoke rising from countless hearths, longships pulled up on the beach like sleeping dragons. Warriors moved along the docks, their casual competence a stark contrast to Paul's pathetic weakness.
And somewhere in that maze of buildings and people was Ragnar Lothbrok.
[ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: FIRST PREDICTION]
[REWARD: +0.2 MAGIC, 50 SYSTEM POINTS]
[STATS UPDATED]
[MAGIC: 2.2]
[SYSTEM POINTS: 50]
The ship bumped against the dock with practiced ease. Paul fumbled for the silver coins he'd somehow acquired—twenty pieces that the system had apparently converted from whatever currency he'd possessed in his previous life. Payment for passage, food, and hopefully a weapon before tomorrow's promised violence.
The dock workers who tied off the merchant ship moved with efficient brutality, their scarred hands and casual strength painting a vivid picture of life in Kattegat. This wasn't a place for the weak or indecisive. Paul was both.
"Shape up or die. Those are the options."
He disembarked on unsteady legs, the solid planks of the dock feeling surreal after hours at sea. The settlement pressed in around him—a cacophony of languages (mostly Old Norse, but he could understand it perfectly, another gift from whatever force had brought him here), the smell of wood smoke and cooking meat, the constant background presence of armed men and women who could break him without effort.
But it was the conversations that made his blood freeze:
"—second raid on England, Ragnar says the Christians have gold enough to build new ships—"
"—soft monks with their cross-god, they fall like wheat before the scythe—"
"—King Horik promises his support, but I trust his promises like I trust calm seas—"
They were preparing for the raids he'd seen on television. The historical raids that had shaped the Viking Age were about to unfold around him, and somehow he was supposed to survive it.
Paul found a quiet corner near a blacksmith's forge and activated Daily Vision again, burning another chunk of his limited mana.
[DAILY VISION ACTIVATED]
[MANA COST: 15% - REMAINING MP: 8/12]
The same three images flooded his mind: the beach, the blood, the descending axe, Ragnar's dangerous smile. But this time he caught details—the position of the sun, the specific coloring of one warrior's beard, the way Ragnar would emerge from the left side of the gathering crowd.
"I have maybe eighteen hours to prepare for a fight I can't win. Unless..."
Unless he could see every move they made before they made it.
Paul spent his remaining silver with desperate efficiency. A borrowed seax from a suspicious merchant cost him fifteen pieces—hardly a warrior's weapon, but it would have to do. Basic leather armor, more patches than protection, took another four coins. His remaining silver bought him a night's shelter in the corner of a longhouse and a bowl of stew that tasted like salted boot leather.
But it was food, and it was warm, and it kept him alive for one more day.
As evening settled over Kattegat, Paul huddled in his borrowed corner and watched the warriors drink and boast. They spoke of battles won and enemies slain, of ships taken and treasures divided. Their easy confidence was a foreign language he couldn't speak.
"Tomorrow I face men who could break me in half," he thought, fingers tracing the worn handle of his borrowed blade. "If I didn't see every move before they made it."
[HOST STATUS: STABLE]
[MISSION: SURVIVE FIRST CHALLENGE]
[SECONDARY OBJECTIVE: ESTABLISH CREDIBILITY]
[RECOMMENDED ACTION: REST AND PREPARATION]
The system's cold assessment was almost comforting in its clinical detachment. Paul closed his eyes, trying to memorize every detail of his vision. The angle of the sun would tell him timing. The warriors' positions would show him where to move. Ragnar's approach from the left meant Paul needed to face slightly right to catch his attention.
"I can do this. I have to do this."
Because the alternative was death on a foreign beach, forgotten and unmourned.
Paul drifted off to sleep with the taste of salt still on his tongue and the weight of tomorrow's violence pressing down like a physical thing. His last conscious thought was a prayer to whatever force had given him these visions:
"Let me be fast enough. Let me be smart enough. Let me live long enough to understand why I'm here."
The wind through the longhouse timbers sounded almost like laughter—ancient, knowing, and utterly without mercy.
[DAILY RESET IN 6 HOURS, 23 MINUTES]
[SWEET DREAMS, HOST]
[TOMORROW, THE REAL GAME BEGINS]
+1 CHAPTER AFTER EVERY 3 REVIEWS
MORE POWER STONES == MORE CHAPTERS
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