The glow of the monitor painted Lark's face in shifting hues of arcane energy. His room was a comfortable mess, a testament to a life lived between the digital and the mundane. Stacks of textbooks leaned precariously against a tower of manga, and clothes formed a soft, lumpy geography on the floor. But none of that existed for him right now. His world was Elysian Echoes, a sprawling MMORPG that had consumed his nights for the better part of two years.
His main avatar, a paladin named 'Aurelian,' was one of the server-recognized champion, clad in radiant, level-capped gear. But tonight was not for Aurelian. Tonight was for… research. That's what he told himself.
On the screen, a creature that defied both biology and good taste stood in a digital training yard. It was his alt, a side-character he'd created when the developers introduced the 'Abyssal Shaper' class, a race and job combination so bizarrely open-ended that the player base had gone wild with it. Lark's creation was a masterpiece of deliberate absurdity, a creature designed to make other players log off in sheer confusion.
He had named it 'Alabaster Woe.'
It stood a towering eight feet tall, its skin a flawless, veinless marble white. Its limbs were stretched, unsettlingly long and thin, yet corded with a lean, powerful musculature that seemed sculpted rather than grown. Its torso was humanoid enough, but its head was a smooth, ovoid shape, devoid of a nose, ears, or a mouth in the traditional sense. Instead, its face, neck, and even the backs of its hands were studded with dozens of unblinking eyes. They were a startling sapphire blue, each one staring out with a placid, unnerving intensity. It was a biblically inaccurate angel conceived during a fever dream.
"Alright, you magnificent freak," Lark muttered, his voice a low hum barely audible over the clatter of his mechanical keyboard. "Let's see what this new 'Harmonic Resonance' skill is all about."
He'd poured his spare skill points into the new ability tree, intrigued by its vague description. The first skill was a defensive stance. He toggled it on. A low, thrumming hum, like a massive tuning fork, emanated from Alabaster Woe. The air around its digital form seemed to shimmer. He directed the avatar to stand before a high-level training dummy, a hulking iron golem, and initiated the attack sequence.
The golem's massive fist, wreathed in simulated fire, swung down. On impact, there was no crunch of bone or clang of armor. Instead, there was a deep, resonant GONG. The marble-white arm of Alabaster Woe had vibrated at an impossible speed, meeting the blow head-on. The golem's fist crumpled, its digital iron peeling back like tin foil. Damage numbers popped up above the golem's head, not Lark's.
"Holy crap," Lark breathed, leaning closer to the screen. "It's not damage reduction. It's kinetic transference. It turned my arm into a solid brick wall and reflected the force right back. That's… broken as hell."
He grinned. Next, the support ability. He guided Alabaster Woe over to a low-level NPC, a wounded city guard who was part of the training area's scenery. He activated the second skill in the tree. The avatar's long, multi-jointed fingers began to vibrate, glowing with a soft, golden light. He placed the hand on the NPC's shoulder. The effect was instantaneous. A wave of shimmering energy washed over the guard, his health bar shooting from red to full green. A small buff icon, 'Harmonic Vigor,' appeared above his head.
"So it's a full heal and a temporary strength buff. Man, this class is a joke, but the skills are top-tier. A support that can also act as an unkillable tank? People would lose their minds."
The final ability was the one that truly fascinated him. 'Resonant Sculpting.' The tooltip claimed the user could vibrate their hands to alter the molecular structure of non-magical materials, essentially treating them like clay. He had Alabaster Woe pick up a large, pixelated boulder from the ground. Activating the skill, the avatar's hands sank into the stone as if it were wet sand. The humming sound returned, deeper this time. Lark used his mouse to guide the movements. The rock softened, stretched, and reformed. Within a minute, the boulder was no longer a boulder. It was an intricate, perfectly rendered statue of a snarling wolf.
Lark sat back, a wide, satisfied smile on his face. "Okay, that is officially the coolest, most useless ability in the game. What am I gonna do, redecorate a dungeon? Build a nice patio for the final boss?"
He was about to log off when the world lurched.
It wasn't in the game. His entire room shook. The monitor wobbled, the neat stacks of manga surrendering to gravity and spilling across the floor. A deep, guttural roar came from the earth itself, a sound that vibrated not in his ears, but in his bones.
"Earthquake!" The thought was pure adrenaline. He shoved his chair back, scrambling to his feet to get to the relative safety of a doorway. He'd lived in California his whole life; this was drill-sergeant-level instinct.
He took one frantic step and was violently yanked backward. His headphones. He'd forgotten the damn cord. He tripped, his arms flailing as he pinwheeled for balance. His hand shot out, slamming against the tall, cheap particle board cabinet beside his desk.
On top of the cabinet sat his grandmother's relic. That's what she'd called it, anyway. To Lark, it had always just been a weird, heavy paperweight. It was a chunk of smoky quartz, but inside it, impossibly, was a spiraling galaxy of multi-colored crystals, a lattice of light and geometry that seemed to shift and writhe when you weren't looking directly at it.
His flailing hand sent the cabinet swaying. The relic, heavy and smooth, slid across the top. Time seemed to slow as he watched it tumble through the air in a graceful, horrifying arc. It hit the hardwood floor with a sound that was not a simple crack or a shatter. It was a sharp, crystalline chime that cut through the rumbling of the earth, a note so pure and high it made his teeth ache.
And then, light.
It wasn't a glow; it was a detonation of pure, white brilliance. It erupted from the fractured quartz, consuming his room, his vision, everything. The roar of the earthquake was silenced by an overwhelming, silent pressure. He felt a sensation of being pulled, of his very atoms being unraveled and re-spun like thread. He tried to scream, but he had no breath, no mouth. There was only the light, the pressure, and then, a blissful, terrifying nothing.
The first sense to return was smell.
It was a thick, humid perfume of decay and life, a potent cocktail of damp soil, rotting leaves, and the cloying sweetness of some unknown, night-blooming flower. The air was heavy, clinging to him like a wet shroud. Then came sound: the deafening, multi-layered chorus of a million insects, the distant hoot of some bird of prey, and the slither of something moving through the undergrowth nearby.
Lark's consciousness swam up from an abyss of disorientation. He felt… heavy. And wrong. He was lying face down, his cheek pressed into cool, damp mud.
The earthquake, he thought, his mind sluggish and thick. Did I hit my head? Knock myself out?
He tried to push himself up. He planted his hands in the mud and pushed. And immediately, he knew something was catastrophically wrong. His arms were too long. They weren't just a little off; they extended an impossible distance, the leverage all strange and alien. Still, he managed to raise his torso from the ground. The movement was clumsy, like a foal taking its first steps.
He looked down at his hands.
And his brain simply stopped working.
They were not his hands. They were huge, with fingers that seemed to have an extra joint, slender and elegant. The skin was not skin. It was a luminous, perfect white, like polished marble, and beneath its surface, faint, hair-thin veins of what looked like gold pulsed with a soft, inner light. His fingernails were not the short, slightly-bitten nails of a student. They were long, black, and tapered to a point, looking like shards of obsidian.
A strangled noise, a dry, rasping gasp, caught in his throat. He looked down at his body. He was naked. His chest was broad and sculpted, the same marble-and-gold flesh. His legs were ridiculously long, bent at an awkward angle beneath him. He was a spider-like configuration of limbs, a grotesque parody of the human form.
Panic, cold and sharp, pierced the fog in his mind. He needed to see his face. He scrambled, half-crawling, half-stumbling through the dense, alien foliage. Thorns and sharp leaves scraped against his strange skin, but he felt no pain, only a dull pressure. He found it a few yards away: a small, clear stream snaking its way through the jungle floor.
He dropped to his knees, his heart hammering in a chest that felt both familiar and foreign. He leaned over the water, his breath hitching.
The reflection that stared back was the stuff of nightmares.
It was the face of Alabaster Woe. A smooth, ovoid canvas of white, devoid of a nose. A thin, almost invisible slit where a mouth should be. And the eyes. Dozens of them. Two were in the normal position, but they were larger than a human's, a brilliant, piercing sapphire blue. More eyes dotted his forehead, his cheeks, the sides of his head. They all stared back at him, unblinking. A collective gaze of silent, alien horror.
Lark recoiled, falling backward onto the damp earth with a wet smack. He stared up at the thick canopy of the jungle, at the slivers of a double-mooned sky peeking through the leaves. He tried to scream, but the sound that came out was not human. It was a discordant, multi-toned shriek, as if several voices were trying to cry out at once from his single mouth-slit. The sound echoed through the jungle, silencing the insects for a brief, terrified moment.
This wasn't a dream. This wasn't a hallucination from a concussion. He could feel the mud on his back, the humidity in the air. He could feel the frantic, alien thumping of the heart in his new, monstrous chest.
The game. The relic. The light.
The thoughts clicked into place with the sickening finality of a tomb door sealing shut.
"No. No, no, no," he whispered, the words feeling strange and clumsy coming from his new mouth. The voice was his, but it was layered with a low, resonant hum, a faint echo of the Harmonic Resonance skill. "I got… isekai'd?"
The realization was a punch to the gut. The fantasy of every gamer, every reader of web novels. Transported to another world. A chance to be a hero, to wield magic, to live an adventure. He had dreamed of this, of becoming Aurelian, his paladin, a bastion of light and justice.
He looked down at his marble-white, grotesquely long body. At his hands that could crush stone. At his face that would make a demon weep.
"But… not like this," he choked out. "Not as the meme build. Not as the joke character!"
His gaze drifted lower, down his sculpted but inhuman torso, past a stomach that was a flat plane of marble, and then… he saw it. And the sheer, soul-crushing absurdity of his situation crashed down on him with the force of a physical blow. Hanging between his legs, in stark, unapologetic detail, was a penis of truly epic proportions. It was as pale and strangely sculpted as the rest of him, and easily a foot long even in its flaccid state. It was an anatomical feature befitting a creature of myth, and on him, Lark, a twenty-one-year-old student who still got nervous talking to girls, it was the most embarrassing, horrifying thing he had ever seen.
He did the only thing a sane person in his position could do. He raised one of his impossibly long, obsidian-tipped hands and slapped it over his multitude of eyes, the perfect, human gesture of a facepalm rendered utterly surreal on his monstrous visage.
"Oh, what the actual fuck?" he muttered into his own palm, his voice a mixture of despair and hysterical laughter. "Of all the things… Why? Why that? The character creator didn't even have a slider for that! Is this some kind of divine cosmic joke?"
He lay there for a long time, a naked, eight-foot-tall marble monster with too many eyes and an endowment that would make a porn star blush, staring up at an alien sky and contemplating the utter ruin of his life. The initial, heart-stopping panic began to subside, replaced by a slow, creeping dread, and beneath that, a flicker of something else. Pragmatism. The gamer's instinct.
Okay. Panicking won't solve this. Let's break it down. Problem-solving mode.
Fact one: I am Lark, but in the body of my joke avatar, Alabaster Woe. Fact two: I am in another world. A jungle. Probably dangerous. Fact three: I am naked and unarmed. Fact four: This is real. This is happening.
He sat up, the movement a little less clumsy this time. He was starting to get a feel for the strange proportions of his new body. He stood, his full eight-foot height making him tower over the surrounding ferns and bushes. The view was… better from up here.
A low growl rumbled through his stomach. Hunger. A real, physical need. His throat was also dry. Thirst. These were problems he could solve. These were quests.
Quest 1: Find Water. He was right next to a stream. Easy. He knelt, cupped his large hands, and scooped up the cool, clear water. He hesitated for a moment, then brought it to his mouth-slit. It parted slightly, and he drank. The water was clean, tasting of minerals and earth. It was the most real thing he'd felt since waking up.
Quest 2: Find Shelter. The moons were rising higher. This jungle was probably full of things that hunted in the dark, and as terrifying as he looked, he had a feeling he was currently at the bottom of the food chain. He needed to find a defensible position. A cave, a rock outcropping, anything.
Quest 3: Find Food. This was the tricky one. What did this body even eat? Was he a carnivore? Herbivore? Did he subsist on ambient magical energy like some kind of ethereal pixie? The growling in his stomach suggested a more conventional diet. He'd have to hunt.
His eyes, all of them, scanned the darkening jungle. His vision was incredible. He could see with a panoramic, almost 360-degree view. Details were sharp even in the low light. He could see the individual hairs on a beetle crawling up a tree fifty feet away. Another unexpected perk.
He took a step, then another. The thought of his ridiculous, naked state returned. He needed clothes. Or at least something to cover himself with. Just for a semblance of dignity.
His eyes fell upon a thick, broad-leafed plant nearby. An idea, born from his brief experimentation with his avatar's abilities, sparked in his mind. Resonant Sculpting. Could he? Was that a game mechanic, or was it a part of him now?
There was only one way to find out.
He walked over to a fallen log, its wood thick and fibrous. He placed his marble-white hands on it. He closed his primary eyes, trying to focus, trying to remember the feeling from the game. He imagined the low hum, the vibration. He willed it to happen.
At first, nothing. He felt foolish, a naked monster trying to use video game magic on a log. Then, he felt it. A faint tremor starting in his chest, traveling down his arms, and into his fingertips. A low hum vibrated in the air around him. His hands grew warm. He pushed, tentatively, and his fingers sank into the wood. It yielded like sculptor's clay.
A giddy, disbelieving laugh escaped him. It worked. It worked.
He pulled his hands back and began to work with a newfound purpose. He wasn't just shaping wood; he was shaping his new reality. He flattened sheets of wood fiber, molding them, pressing them together. The process was intuitive, as if the knowledge was ingrained in this new form. In minutes, he had fashioned a crude but functional pair of shorts and a sort of wrap for his torso, held together by woven vines. It wasn't pretty, but he was no longer completely naked. The small victory felt monumental.
Clad in his makeshift wood-fiber clothes, Lark stood tall in the alien jungle. The fear was still there, a cold knot in his gut. The despair hadn't vanished. But now, they were joined by a sliver of resolve. He was lost, monstrous, and utterly alone. But he was alive. And he had abilities.
He looked around, his multitude of sapphire eyes scanning the trees. He needed food. He needed shelter. He needed answers.
Lark took a deep breath of the humid, alien air.
"Right," he said, his multi-toned voice quiet but firm in the oppressive dark. "I guess this is my life now. Let's not get eaten on the first night."