Darkness.
Not just the absence of light, but the kind of darkness that pressed against the eyeballs, as if the weight of the entire world was piled right onto his face. The air felt stale, smelling of wet earth, rotting wood, and something sharper—the scent of decaying frangipani flowers.
Adrian's consciousness returned not with a jolt, but with a slow, creeping pain. A searing heat crawled down his throat, tearing at his stomach, and spreading through his veins like liquid glass.
He tried to take a deep breath, but his lungs refused to fully expand.
Something was pressing against his chest. Wooden boards. No more than ten centimeters from his nose.
Adrian lifted a hand. His fingers collided with a rough wooden surface. He felt to the side. More wood. Narrow. Cold. Confining.
A coffin.
I've been buried, he thought. The thought emerged not with hysterical panic, but with an unnatural, cold calm.
Seconds before, he was Adrian, the CEO of a defense technology company staring down the barrel of a gun held by his business partner in a harbor warehouse in New York. There was a bang, a cold sensation in his chest, and then darkness.
Now, he woke up inside this narrow box with pain that felt as if it were melting his internal organs.
"Great," he hissed. His voice sounded raspy, weak—not his own. "Shot in the first life. Buried alive in the second. God has a twisted sense of humor."
Suddenly, a wave of foreign memories slammed into his head like a sledgehammer. Images flashed rapidly and painfully, forcing their way into Adrian's memory as if soldering themselves to his brain synapses.
A pale boy. Vaelen Blackwood. The disgusted face of a beautiful woman in a silk dress. Lady Elara, the stepmother. Deep purple wine offered with a fake smile. The 'Widow's Kiss' poison. And the mocking sneers of the servants dragging his convulsing body, assuming he was dead, then stuffing him into this cheap wooden box.
"Mother, is Vaelen dead?" a child's voice rang out in the memory. "Don't say that name again. That trash is finally rotting. His place is in the ground, as fertilizer for your sister's future."
Blood boiled in Adrian's veins—no, Vaelen's veins. Two different souls, united by a single common thread: Betrayal.
Adrian laughed softly in the pitch darkness. His laugh was dry, like the sound of crushed dead leaves. The emotions of the original owner, Vaelen, mixed with Adrian's ingrained cynicism.
"You died because you were weak, Kid," Adrian muttered to the fading remnants of Vaelen's consciousness. "You let them feed you. You let them smile at you. Kindness was the poison that killed you faster than that wine."
His stomach convulsed again. The poison was still working. His heart beat irregularly—thump... thump... a pause that lasted too long... thump.
He was dying. Again.
Oxygen in the coffin was running low. Carbon dioxide began to poison his brain, making his vision sparkle even in the total darkness. Despair started to creep into the corners of his mind, but Adrian rejected it. He gripped the rough shroud wrapping his body, his nails digging into his palms until they bled. The pain kept him conscious.
I will not die here. I will not let those bastards win twice. I will crawl out of this hell even if I have to claw my way through the earth with my teeth!
Just as the hatred reached its peak, the world seemed to stop. The sound of his own heartbeat vanished, replaced by a high-pitched ringing that hurt his ears. Not a cheerful digital ding, but a heavy sound like a rusty iron gate being forced open after a thousand years.
[ANOMALY DETECTED]
The text appeared directly on his retinas. It was blood-red, flickering unstably as if suffering from signal interference.
[HOST SOUL DENSITY: ABNORMAL]
[DETECTING HIGH CONCENTRATION OF HATRED & RESENTMENT...]
[INITIATING 'THE ENTROPY SYSTEM'...]
A transparent dialogue box floated in the darkness of the coffin, illuminating Vaelen's pale face with a gruesome red glow.
[SYSTEM ERROR: ENERGY SOURCE INSUFFICIENT]
[DETECTING LETHAL TOXIN: 'WIDOW'S KISS' IN BLOODSTREAM]
[ANALYZING...]
[ACTION: CONVERTING TOXIN TO ENTROPY FUEL]
"AAAAARGH!"
Adrian screamed. This time he couldn't hold it back. It didn't feel like healing. It felt as if his blood was being replaced with sulfuric acid. The system wasn't neutralizing the poison with gentle light magic; it was burning the poison, forcing his body to metabolize the lethal substance into raw energy.
The arteries in his neck bulged. His eyes widened until the capillaries burst. Vaelen's weak body convulsed violently in the narrow space, slamming his head and elbows against the wooden coffin walls.
Thud. Thud.
The pain lasted for ten seconds that felt like ten centuries. Then, it stopped abruptly.
Adrian gasped for air. Hot steam escaped his mouth in the confined space. He still felt sick, weak, and hungry. Very hungry. But he was alive.
[CONVERSION COMPLETE]
[STATUS: CRITICALLY STABLE]
[CURRENT RANK: MORTAL (INCOMPLETE)]
[NEW QUEST: GRAVEWALKER]
[Objective: Escape the coffin before oxygen runs out (Time remaining: 03:00 minutes).]
[Reward: Beginner Weapon & Survival.]
[Failure Penalty: Permanent Death (Soul Erasure).]
Adrian stared at the screen with a wild gaze. "Three minutes? You call that help?"
He didn't waste time complaining. He pressed his palms against the coffin lid. The coffin was narrow, giving him no room to wind up a punch. He had to push.
He rallied all the strength in his scrawny triceps. Push!
The wood creaked, but didn't budge.
"Damn this weak body," Adrian cursed. Vaelen never exercised. His body was just skin wrapped around bone.
But Adrian knew something about construction. The Blackwood family considered Vaelen trash. They certainly wouldn't have bought him a high-quality teak coffin. This had to be cheap wood. Maybe pine or cedar that hadn't fully dried.
Adrian felt along the sides of the coffin, looking for gaps where the boards met. Found it. In the top right corner, the nail wasn't driven in perfectly. Sloppy work from a coffin maker who didn't care about the corpse of a bastard child.
Adrian shifted his body, pressing his back against the bottom of the coffin and bending his knees as much as the narrow space allowed. He placed his feet right on that weak corner.
One... Two...
CRACK!
The wood splintered. Dust fell onto his face. Oxygen was thinning. His lungs started to burn again.
[Oxygen Level: Critical]
"Open... Damn it... OPEN!"
Adrian screamed silently, channeling every ounce of rage over the betrayals of two lifetimes into his legs.
KRAK!
The sound of snapping wood rang out like a gunshot in Adrian's ears. The coffin lid gave way at the corner. Cold, fresh air—though smelling of stone dust—rushed in.
Adrian inhaled greedily, choking, coughing, then laughing breathlessly.
He pushed the broken wood, widening the hole, then dragged his body out with difficulty. His clothes, a simple white shroud, were now soiled with dirt and wood splinters. Adrian's hands shook violently as he gripped the edge of the coffin to hoist himself up.
He tumbled onto the cold stone floor.
The world spun. As his vision focused, Adrian looked around. He was in a stone room. A family crypt. There were several beautifully carved stone sarcophagi surrounding him—the resting places of the esteemed Blackwood ancestors.
And in the darkest corner, on the dirt floor that hadn't been paved with stone tiles, lay his broken wooden coffin. They hadn't even placed it on a stone table. They had dumped it in the corner like garbage waiting to be collected.
[QUEST COMPLETE: GRAVEWALKER]
[REWARD RECEIVED: Rusty Iron Shard (Equipped automatically)]
Adrian's right hand felt heavy. He looked down. In his grip, he now held a piece of rusted iron about two spans long. The edges were sharp and jagged, stained with brown spots that might be rust, or perhaps the dried blood of who knows whom.
A pathetic weapon for a pathetic world.
"Fitting," Adrian muttered. He slowly rose to his feet, his legs wobbling like a newborn fawn, yet his eyes radiated a sharp, murderous intent.
Suddenly, the sound of footsteps echoed in the distance.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The sound of heavy boot soles hitting the stone floor. It came from the spiral staircase at the end of the room, the only exit from this underground crypt. The dim light of a torch began to dance on the corridor walls.
Adrian held his breath. He stared at the entrance with narrowed eyes. Who comes to a graveyard in the middle of the night during a storm?
Someone spoke. A man's voice, heavy and rough.
"I told Lady Elara this was a waste of time," the voice grumbled. "That poison could kill an elephant, let alone that skinny kid. Why do I have to bother coming down here just to retrieve that cheap ring?"
Adrian recognized the voice. Gareth. The Head Guard. The one who had dragged Vaelen's dying body.
Adrian's smile widened. Not a warm smile, but the grin of a predator finding prey trapped in a cage with it.
He looked at his broken coffin, then at the darkness behind Vaelen's great-grandfather's sarcophagus.
"Dinner has delivered itself," Adrian whispered to the darkness.
He moved silently, his bare feet making no sound on the cold stone, blending into the shadows behind a massive stone pillar. He gripped the rusty iron shard tight.
The entrance to the crypt was dark, but Gareth's fate tonight would be far darker.
Tonight, the dead would not sleep. Tonight, the dead would demand payment.