Dr. Patrick Graham had rehearsed this moment a thousand times.
The laboratory's mirror-lined test chamber hummed with electricity, every reflective surface catching the cold glow of the equipment he had built with his own hands. Years of theory, simulations, and sleepless nights had culminated in a single machine—his miniature particle accelerator. Compact, elegant, and dangerous.
But what made it revolutionary was not the device itself.
It was the fuel.
Hydrogen would have been safe. Predictable. Boring. Tachyons, however… tachyons were the forbidden frontier—unstable, theoretical, and according to every reputable physicist on Earth, impossible to control.
"Patrick, if you activate that thing with tachyons, you might as well climb into a coffin," Dr. Lee warned earlier that morning, her voice trembling with anger and fear. "Spacetime reacts violently to tachyonic compression. You can't contain it with magnetic fields alone. This is suicide."
He had felt guilty ignoring her, but only for a moment.
Progress demanded risks.
"Computer," he murmured, "begin energy cycling for tachyon injection."
The accelerator responded with a soft whir. Lights flickered to life around the circular frame. A small breeze stirred his coat as the containment field stabilized.
Patrick wiped the sweat from his palms and stepped inside the chamber. He wanted to be here—wanted to witness the birth of something new.
A faint blue glow began to radiate from the accelerator core. The air vibrated with growing energy, a rising hum that felt more alive than mechanical. Tachyons, if his calculations were correct, should have been phasing partially out of spacetime… and yet here they were, held by force and mathematics—and his sheer stubbornness.
The machine stabilized.
One minute passed.
Then two.
Patrick grinned, heart hammering. Three minutes—three whole minutes of containment. His equations were right. His theory was—
The hum stuttered.
A single alarm chirped.
Patrick's smile faded. He glanced at the readout. The numbers were wrong—too high, accelerating too rapidly.
"No… stay stable. Come on," he whispered, rushing toward the console.
Another alarm shrieked, louder this time.
Energy levels spiked into the red. The frame shook violently. Mirrors vibrated, rattling like teeth.
"Damn it!" He sprinted toward the core housing, tools clattering at his side. "Manual shutoff!"
But the tachyons had already slipped beyond control.
The accelerator convulsed, spewing arcs of blue-violet lightning. Reality itself seemed to stretch and quiver around it—like the air was fabric being pulled apart.
Patrick froze.
He had studied tachyonic instability his whole life. He knew exactly what he was looking at.
Critical mass.
"Nonononono—!"
A blinding pulse erupted outward, slamming into him like a tidal wave. The blast didn't explode outward—it exploded everywhere. The mirrors warped. The chamber folded inward and outward at the same time.
A swirling vortex of dark matter tore through the room, collapsing onto Patrick with impossible force. The universe around him blurred, stretched, snapped—
And then there was only light.
Blue. Purple. Endless.
His body felt weightless, like dissolving into static.
And then he felt nothing at all.
---
Patrick woke with a sharp, broken gasp.
The world around him was wrong—soft, dim, quiet. No alarms. No machinery. No smell of burning metal or ozone. Instead, he lay on a bed, sheets damp with sweat. His heart hammered painfully against his ribs, as if trying to break free.
He tried to sit up.
Pain flooded him instantly, tearing through every nerve. His limbs trembled, useless and numb, as though they belonged to someone who hadn't moved in weeks. His lips cracked painfully when he tried to lick them. His throat felt like it had been scraped raw.
Where… where am I?
He forced his eyes to focus. The room was small, wooden, with old-fashioned décor. A table with a bowl of wilted herbs sat near the window. Curtains fluttered gently in a breeze that carried the scent of pine and distant rain.
This wasn't his lab. Not even close.
Patrick exhaled shakily, bracing one hand against the mattress. His arm quivered under his weight.
"Move," he whispered to his useless limbs. "Come on. Move."
Slowly, agonizingly, he pushed himself upright. His vision swam. The floor looked impossibly far away, but he slid his feet over the edge of the bed anyway. His bones felt brittle, and his muscles screamed in protest.
He staggered to his feet.
His legs nearly buckled instantly, and he caught himself on the wall. Cold wood met his feverish palms. He clung to it like a lifeline, inching his way along the edge of the room.
After what felt like hours, he reached a tall silver mirror.
He lifted his head.
And froze.
The man staring back was not him.
Gone were his dark curls, his sharp jawline, the faint laugh lines by his eyes. The reflection showed a much younger face—pale, thin, almost ethereal. Cheekbones jutted out sharply. Lashes trembled above tired, hollow eyes. His shoulders were narrow. His body—frail, starved—looked like it might collapse under the weight of a breath.
His chest tightened.
That wasn't his body.
That wasn't Patrick Graham.
"Transmigration…" he whispered hoarsely, the word scraping out of his throat like broken glass.
Theoretical. Laughable. A concept debated more by philosophers than scientists. No proof. No evidence.
Impossible.
Except… here he was.
He stared into the mirror for what felt like forever, mind blank and roaring with questions he couldn't even form yet. The air felt heavy, as if the room itself were holding its breath around him.
He was so lost in the shock that he didn't hear the door open behind him.
A soft gasp snapped him out of his trance.
He turned sharply—and nearly fell.
A maid stood frozen in the doorway, a wooden bucket slipping from her hands and crashing onto the floor. Water splashed across the woodboards, but she didn't even glance at it. Her eyes shimmered with disbelief.
"You're awake, young master," she whispered, bowing deeply. Her voice trembled. "We… we feared you would never open your eyes again."
Young master?
Patrick opened his mouth—but his body chose that moment to betray him entirely.
His vision darkened. His legs folded beneath him.
The last thing he saw was the maid's face twisting into alarm as she rushed forward.
Then everything fell away.
Darkness swallowed him whole.