Chapter 1: Waking in the Woods
Cold.
The sensation hit before anything else—damp earth pressing against my cheek, the sharp bite of spring air filling lungs that felt too small. My fingers clawed into mud and dead leaves. The smell of pine needles and rotting vegetation flooded my nostrils.
"What the—"
I pushed myself up. My arms trembled. Not from weakness, but from wrongness. These weren't my arms. Too thin. Too pale. The hands that gripped a exposed tree root were calloused in unfamiliar places.
A blue rectangle materialized in my vision.
[WELCOME, GUILD MASTER]
[TRANSMIGRATION COMPLETE]
[SYSTEM INITIALIZING...]
My breath caught. The words floated there, translucent, overlaying the grey morning forest like a video game HUD. I blinked. Rubbed my eyes with those strange hands. The text remained, patient and unmoving.
The last thing I remembered was headlights. The screech of tires on wet asphalt. Sarah's scream from the passenger seat—
"No. No, no, no."
I scrambled to my feet. My center of gravity was wrong. I was shorter. My clothes—rough wool, scratchy against skin—hung on a frame that felt half-grown. A teenager's body.
The interface expanded without my consent.
[HOST PROFILE]
Name: Finn Colen
Age: 15
Title: Guild Master (Unestablished)
Phase: 1 - Foundation
Guild Points (GP): 0
Members: 0
Outposts: 0
Reputation: Unknown
[CURRENT INVENTORY]
- Iron Knife (Poor Quality)
- Medieval Clothing (Worn)
- 0 Crowns
I patted my hip. Found a leather sheath. Drew a knife that looked like it had been forged by someone's drunk uncle. The blade had more chips than edge.
"Twenty-eight years old. Marketing director. Had a 401k and a mortgage. Now I'm fifteen with a butter knife."
The absurdity of it punched a laugh out of me. It echoed through the trees, startling a bird into flight.
[SYSTEM TUTORIAL INITIATED]
[The Covenant of Blades System enables the Guild Master to build and manage an adventure guild. Core functions include:]
- Guild Point (GP) Acquisition: Earned through completed contracts, recruitment, and reputation building
- Member Management: Recruit, train, and organize guild members
- Commission: Guild Master receives 15% of all transactions
- Phase Progression: Unlock new abilities by meeting growth thresholds
[CURRENT PHASE 1 RESTRICTIONS]
- Maximum Members: 5
- Maximum Outposts: 1
- Abilities: 25% available
- Teleportation: Self only, to headquarters (once established)
[AVAILABLE ABILITIES]
- Auto-Translation (Active)
- Danger Sense (Active - 50m radius)
- Perfect Memory (Guild-related only)
- Resource Scanner (Locked - requires activation trigger)
- Optimal Path (Basic)
"An RPG system. In my brain. After dying in a car crash."
I closed my eyes. Opened them. The interface remained, semi-transparent, hovering at the edge of my peripheral vision like a persistent notification I couldn't dismiss.
The memories were there if I reached for them. Not just my own—Marcus Webb, twenty-eight, Seattle native, dead on Interstate 5 during a rainstorm—but others. Foreign knowledge pressing against the inside of my skull. Names. Places. A world I recognized from—
"The Witcher. I'm in The Witcher universe."
Oxenfurt. Redania. The Northern Kingdoms. Geralt of Rivia and Cirilla of Cintra and the Wild Hunt. Knowledge I'd absorbed from games and shows in another life, now feeling less like entertainment and more like a survival manual.
[GEOGRAPHIC ASSESSMENT]
Current Location: Forest, approximately 12km northwest of Oxenfurt
Nearest Settlement: Oxenfurt (Academic City)
Recommended Action: Proceed to settlement for resource acquisition
A ghostly line appeared on the ground—the Optimal Path function, I realized—leading through the trees in a direction that meant nothing to my human eyes but apparently meant "civilization" to the system.
I started walking.
The body moved wrong at first. My stride was off, legs shorter than muscle memory expected. I tripped over roots twice in the first ten minutes. But youth had its advantages. No aching knees. No lower back pain from years of desk work. Just raw, unrefined energy that burned for use.
"Fifteen. I'm fifteen again. In a world with drowners and vampires and mages who could turn me inside out for looking at them wrong."
The forest pressed close. Birch and oak, underbrush thick with new spring growth. No paths that I could see, but the system's line guided me around the worst of the terrain.
A stream cut across my route an hour into the walk. I knelt on mossy stones and cupped water to my face. Cold enough to shock, clean enough to taste like nothing at all. I drank until my stomach cramped, then sat back and actually looked at myself in the rippled reflection.
Young. Sharp-featured, with dark hair that needed cutting and grey eyes that seemed too old for the face they sat in. A stranger's face wearing my expressions.
"Finn Colen. That's who I am now."
[SURVIVAL MILESTONE ACHIEVED]
[+1 GP AWARDED]
[Note: Initial transmigration survival bonus. Further GP earned through guild-related activities.]
[TOTAL GP: 1]
I laughed again. Louder this time. A single guild point for not dying immediately after dimensional transfer. The cosmic irony wasn't lost on me—my marketing career had better metrics than this.
The system wasn't a tyrant. That much I understood from the interface's structure. It presented options, tracked progress, offered rewards. But it didn't compel. No flashing "ACCEPT QUEST" buttons demanding obedience. Just information, laid out like a very detailed spreadsheet.
"I can work with spreadsheets."
I stood. Checked the knife at my hip—still terrible, but better than nothing. The path stretched ahead, guiding me through gaps in the undergrowth.
[OPTIMAL PATH UPDATE]
Estimated time to Oxenfurt: 3 days (walking pace)
Recommended stops: 2 (water sources marked)
Warning: Main roads may contain bandit activity. Alternative forest routes calculated.
Three days. In a strange body, with no money, no connections, and knowledge of a world that existed as fiction in my old life. The sensible response was probably panic.
Instead, I started cataloging.
"Timeline. If this is 1268, then Geralt's been wounded at Rivia. Ciri's... somewhere. The Second Northern War just ended. Nilfgaard's licking its wounds. The Wild Hunt is coming but not yet."
The information felt solid. Real. As if someone had downloaded a wiki directly into my temporal lobe.
"I know what's coming. That's an advantage. Now I just need to survive long enough to use it."
Gregor's Perspective
Three days later, when the strange boy walked into my stable looking half-starved and fully determined, I almost turned him away. Oxenfurt gets plenty of wanderers—students who've run out of coin, dreamers chasing academy glory, the occasional deserter hiding from someone else's war.
But this one was different.
He moved with purpose despite the exhaustion in his eyes. Offered his knife—a poor blade, barely worth the leather wrapped around its handle—in exchange for bread and a spot in the hay. Most boys his age would have begged or threatened. He negotiated.
"Fair trade," I told him, testing the knife's edge. Dull as church conversation. "Sleep where you like. Don't spook the horses."
He didn't thank me. Just nodded, found a corner, and collapsed into the straw like his strings had been cut. Out cold in seconds.
I watched him sleep for a while. Couldn't help it. Sixty years running stables, you learn to read people by how they rest. The peaceful ones sprawl. The guilty ones twitch. The dangerous ones sleep light, waking at every creak.
This boy? He slept like the dead. But his hands—even unconscious—curled into loose fists near his chest. Ready to fight. Ready to run.
"What are you running from, lad? Or toward?"
The question would answer itself eventually. Oxenfurt had a way of revealing secrets. For now, I let him rest and went back to brushing down the horses.
Something told me he'd be interesting.