Chapter 1: THE FIRST BREATH
Cold.
That was the first thing. Not the kind of cold from a winter morning or a refrigerator door left open too long. This cold had weight to it. Age. Like the air itself had been sitting in place for centuries, forgetting what warmth even meant.
Dead. I was dead.
The thought arrived without panic. More like reading a fact from a textbook. Car lost control on black ice. Eighteen-wheeler coming the other way. Physics doesn't negotiate.
But dead men don't feel cold.
Lungs expanded—first breath in what might have been years or decades or longer. Dust and staleness flooded my throat. I coughed, and the sound echoed off stone walls somewhere in the darkness above me. The cough became a spasm, my chest seizing with muscles that had apparently forgotten how to work.
[PRIMORDIAL HUNTER PROTOCOL INITIALIZING...]
Blue light flickered at the edge of my vision. Not a screen exactly—more like information burning itself directly into my brain.
[WELCOME, INHERITOR.]
[HOST BODY STATUS: CRITICAL ATROPHY]
[HYDRATION: 12%]
[MUSCULAR FUNCTION: 8%]
[RECOMMENDED ACTION: IMMEDIATE SURVIVAL PROTOCOL]
What the hell?
I tried to move my head. Neck muscles screamed. A half-inch rotation felt like bench-pressing a truck. My fingers twitched against stone—cold, smooth, covered in what felt like centuries of undisturbed dust.
The blue interface kept scrolling.
[SYSTEM DESIGNATION: PRIMORDIAL HUNTER]
[FUNCTION: BIOLOGICAL MONITORING AND ENHANCEMENT TRACKING]
[CURRENT PHASE: 0 (AWAKENING)]
[LEVEL: 1]
[HP: 45/250]
[SP: 30/120]
Numbers. Stats. Like a video game character sheet projected into my skull.
Either this is the strangest afterlife in human history, or something very interesting happened.
I couldn't laugh. Didn't have the lung capacity. But the absurdity registered somewhere in the back of my mind—former Army Ranger, former history teacher, dies in a snowstorm in Vermont, wakes up in a stone chamber with a heads-up display telling him his muscles don't work.
Focus. Assessment first. Panic later.
The training kicked in without conscious thought. Four years in the 75th Ranger Regiment doesn't leave you when you die, apparently. Situation assessment. Available resources. Immediate threats. Exit strategy.
Situation: Unknown body, unknown location, minimal physical capacity.
Resources: Whatever this system thing was. My own mind, which seemed to be working.
Threats: Dehydration. Starvation. Whatever else lived in this darkness.
Exit: Unknown.
My eyes were adjusting. No—more than adjusting. The darkness was peeling back layer by layer, details resolving like a night-vision scope warming up. Stone ceiling carved with symbols I didn't recognize. Alcoves in the walls, some holding objects I couldn't identify from this angle. And there, maybe fifteen feet away, a door. Massive. Ancient. Sealed with patterns that seemed to pulse with faint residual light.
[ENHANCED SENSES CALIBRATING...]
[NIGHT VISION: ACTIVE]
[WARNING: BRIGHT LIGHT SENSITIVITY UNTIL LEVEL 20]
Great. New eyes. Same useless body.
I tried to lift my arm. The limb rose about three inches before collapsing back to the stone like it weighed a hundred pounds. Fingers curled weakly, scraping dust.
Okay. Small goals. Don't think about the door. Think about the next inch.
I'd done this before. Not the waking-up-in-an-ancient-body part, obviously. But the breaking-down-an-impossible-task-into-manageable-steps part. Ranger School had that. Surviving Selection Week had that. Teaching freshmen about the Peloponnesian War for three hours straight had that.
One inch. Then another inch. Then another.
Left arm first. I pushed against the stone, and the muscles that responded felt like they were tearing themselves apart just to contract. Elbow bent. Shoulder screamed. Half a rotation, getting my chest off the ground by maybe two inches.
Pain shot through every fiber of my torso.
I collapsed. Breathing hard. Heart racing in a chest that didn't feel quite right—stronger than it should be, but rusty. Like an engine that hadn't run in too long.
[PHYSICAL EXERTION DETECTED]
[SP: 28/120]
[RECOMMENDATION: CONSERVE STAMINA UNTIL HYDRATION RESTORED]
Yeah, thanks. Got any water?
The system didn't respond to sarcasm. Good to know.
Who am I?
The question surfaced between gasps for breath. Cole Ashford. Twenty-four years old. Born in Portland, Maine. Enlisted at eighteen. Served four years, two deployments. Got out, went to college, became a history teacher because apparently understanding how civilizations collapse was his idea of a stable career choice.
All of that felt true. Real. Those memories were his—mine—solidly anchored in whatever consciousness was now driving this body.
But this body wasn't Cole Ashford's.
The proportions were different. Taller. Different muscle structure. And something else underneath—something that felt like an animal waiting to wake up, coiled in the base of the brain stem.
[HOST BODY INFORMATION AVAILABLE]
[DESIGNATION: THE FIRST BLADE]
[AGE: 837 YEARS (PRESERVED)]
[ORIGIN: ELDER BLOOD ERA EXPERIMENT]
[PURPOSE: CLASSIFIED UNTIL MEMORY ARCHIVE UNLOCK]
Eight hundred and thirty-seven years.
I stared at the ceiling. Let that number sit in my head for a moment.
Someone built this body before the Norman Conquest. Before Genghis Khan. Before the printing press. And now my consciousness is driving it.
Transmigration. Isekai. Whatever you wanted to call it. I'd read enough manga between deployments to recognize the concept. Soul drops into new body in fantasy world, usually with some kind of cheat system attached.
Well. At least the system part tracks.
But none of those stories mentioned the part where your new body felt like it was made of wet concrete and screaming nerve endings.
I tried again. This time, I aimed for my side. Rolling. Just rolling onto my stomach, so I could maybe crawl.
The muscles engaged. Barely. I made it halfway, gravity doing most of the work, and ended up face-down in dust that tasted like time itself.
Progress.
The door. I could see it better now. Massive stone slab with those pulsing symbols—they looked almost like runes, but not any alphabet I recognized from European medieval history. Something older. Something from before the languages I knew existed.
And beyond it, I could hear something. Water. The faintest sound of dripping.
Get to the water. Everything else comes after that.
Arms out. Fingers digging into the gaps between stones. I pulled. My body dragged forward maybe six inches. Everything burned.
[SP: 24/120]
[MOVEMENT DETECTED: 0.15 METERS]
[ESTIMATED DISTANCE TO SEALED EXIT: 4.57 METERS]
Four and a half meters. Fifteen feet. Thirty-two more pulls at six inches each.
Math. Concrete numbers. Something to focus on instead of the screaming muscles and the dust in my lungs and the absolute insanity of whatever was happening.
I pulled again. Six more inches.
[SP: 22/120]
Thirty-one.
Another pull. The stone scraped against my chest—this body was wearing something, I realized. Some kind of ancient clothing, preserved but brittle. It crackled with each movement.
[SP: 20/120]
Thirty.
My arms gave out on the fourth pull. I collapsed, cheek pressed against cold stone, lungs heaving, vision starting to narrow at the edges.
Not yet. Don't pass out yet.
I'd pushed through worse. Hadn't I? Ranger School, Day Four of swamp phase, ninety-six hours without sleep, carrying sixty pounds through chest-deep water that smelled like death.
This is just a floor. Just a floor you need to crawl across.
But the body didn't care about my memories. The body had been asleep for eight centuries, and it wasn't ready to run a marathon just because the new management had motivational techniques.
[WARNING: SP APPROACHING CRITICAL]
[UNCONSCIOUSNESS IMMINENT IF EXERTION CONTINUES]
Just a little more. Just a little—
One more pull. Maybe five inches this time. The sealed door seemed no closer.
I stopped. Let my forehead rest against the stone. Breath coming in ragged gasps that echoed through the chamber.
Alright. Rest. Then more.
The blue interface flickered again, patient as a machine.
[LOCATION IDENTIFIED: ELDER RUIN, SUBTERRANEAN LEVEL]
[NEAREST KNOWN LANDMARK: KAER MORHEN (SURFACE LEVEL)]
[CURRENT DATE: WINTER, POST-FALL OF CINTRA]
Kaer Morhen.
The name hit me like a brick. I knew that name. I knew exactly what it meant.
The Witcher. I'm in The Witcher.
Suddenly the system, the ancient body, the enhanced vision that worked like night-vision goggles—all of it made a different kind of sense. A horrifying kind of sense.
I'm in a world with monsters. Real monsters. And I just woke up in a body that can barely move.
The sealed door pulsed with its faint light. Beyond it, the sound of dripping water continued.
Get up. Move. Survive.
The body couldn't crawl anymore. But maybe—maybe I could rest for just a moment. Let the stamina regenerate. The system said stamina regenerated, right?
[SP REGENERATION: 0.5/SECOND (OUT OF COMBAT)]
Okay. Okay. Math again. I need maybe twenty more stamina points to try again. That's forty seconds. I can wait forty seconds.
I lay there. Counting breaths. Counting heartbeats. Trying not to think about everything I'd lost—everyone I'd never see again, the life that had ended in a snowstorm on a Vermont highway.
Later. Grief later. Survival now.
The dust settled around me. The symbols on the door continued their ancient pulse. Somewhere in the darkness beyond, water dripped.
My fingers twitched, scraping stone.
Three feet from where I'd started. Twelve more feet to go.
The Witcher world had monsters and magic and wars that burned continents. It had things that could kill a man in a heartbeat.
But right now, the only thing that mattered was reaching that door.
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