A dull, persistent pain pulls me back to consciousness. It's a slow-burning fire consuming me from within, a reminder that against all odds, I'm still alive. Or something like it.
My eyelids weigh like tombstones. When I force them open, a stab of white light pierces my skull. On the second try, the world focuses into shadows.
I'm surrounded by darkness. A damp, gelid kind that seeps into my bones. The thick air carries the smell of rotten earth and the metallic aftertaste of blood. My blood?
I blink, trying to clear the fog in my mind. And then they come. Not memories, but shards.
Fragments of another life.
The ghostly glow of a screen. The emptiness of a dark room.
The obsessive sound of mechanical keys.
A feeling of emptiness...
Two realities crash inside my head, tearing me in half. One was of a person, a ghost before a screen, whose greatest achievement was completing an impossible video game. Hollow Exodus: Rebirth Protocol. The name resonates in my soul with the force of an absolute truth.
The other reality... is this body. This place.
"What... the hell...?" My voice is a thin thread of sound, higher and younger than it should be.
Moving my hand, my fingers sink into the cold mud. A visceral shiver runs down my spine. This is real.
I sit up with a groan, fighting a dizziness that threatens to throw me back into the void. Around me, a nightmare forest twists toward the sky. These aren't trees—they're gaunt, twisted creatures leaning their claw-like branches toward me. There's no sound. No wind. No life. Only a tomb-like silence that seems to swallow even the beat of my own heart.
And then, the last memory of my other self hits me like a sledgehammer.
The flickering screen. The final words: «You have cleared Hollow Exodus». A wave of hollow triumph. Then, the collapse. That young man's body—my former self—slumping lifelessly over the keyboard. Absolute emptiness. The fall... to here.
"This isn't possible..." I whisper to myself, staring at my hands.
They're small, slender hands, but marked by hard calluses and old scars. Hands that have labored. Hands that aren't mine. This body isn't mine. These memories of endless days under the sun, of heavy burdens and broken dreams... don't belong to me.
But they're here, tangled with mine, with his. Two souls, two lives, fused into a single, broken vessel.
Just as the confusion threatened to consume me, a faint blue glow flickered at the edge of my vision. It wasn't an intrusive menu. It wasn't a pompous voice. It was just a single line of text, simple and clear, superimposed over reality like a silent reminder.
[Status: Concussion. Memory Integration: 12%. Risk of Psychic Collapse: High.]
It wasn't an explanation. It was a diagnosis. A cold, impersonal confirmation of my madness.
The final memory of my other self crystallized—the triumphant, hollow moment of clearing the game, followed immediately by the darkness of death. That end was my beginning here.