The ceiling was wrong.
Not a thought, exactly. More like the first thing his brain snagged on before the rest of the situation caught up. Dark wood, warped with age, split along a water-damage seam that ran diagonally from one corner toward the center. His ceiling — the real one, the last one — had been plaster. Off-white. He'd spent a lot of time looking at it. There'd been a crack shaped like a river delta in the upper left corner that he'd memorized the way other people memorize faces: not on purpose, just because it was there and he was there and neither of them was going anywhere.
This was not that ceiling.
He was lying on a mattress that felt like a sack of gravel someone had given up on. Everything ached. His shoulders ached in the specific way that comes from months of not using them. His spine ached in the specific way that comes from months of not eating enough. His throat ached worst — a thin hot line running across the front of it, ear to ear, like someone had drawn a razor across the skin and missed the important parts by a margin too thin to be an accident.
He raised a hand.
Wrong hand.
Too thin. Pale past "doesn't go outside" and into "hasn't seen sunlight in a meaningful way." The knuckles were scarred — not from fighting. From hitting walls. He knew the difference. The fingernails were bitten to the quick, a few of them scabbed over. The wrist was narrow enough that he could circle it with his thumb and forefinger and the fingers would overlap.
This was not his hand. This was not his body. And the fact that he was processing this information with something closer to mild curiosity than screaming panic told him something useful about the current state of his nervous system, which was: same as it ever was. Broken in a way that made emergencies feel like weather. Happening, sure. Worth reacting to, debatable.
He sat up and threw up over the side of the bed.
Nothing solid. Bile. Thin, yellow, burning his raw throat on the way out. The body hadn't eaten recently. The body hadn't done much of anything recently. The body had the general condition of an apartment where the tenant stopped caring six months ago — technically occupied, practically abandoned.
He wiped his mouth with the wrong hand and looked at the room.
Small. Stone walls, damp near the floor. One window, narrow, barred with iron, letting in light that was warmer and more golden than any light he'd ever seen, like the sun here was running on different settings. A desk with one short leg and a stack of papers. A wardrobe with the door hanging open. A locked chest at the foot of the bed. Something on the desk that might have been a phone if phones were designed by someone who'd only had them described to them.
The air smelled like ozone and rust and something underneath both that he couldn't name. Not unpleasant. Just wrong. The smell of a place that operated on rules he hadn't been briefed on.
He stood up. His knees almost gave. Not from weakness — from geometry. He was taller than he was supposed to be. Two, three centimeters. His center of gravity was off. His hips were narrower. The body moved in patterns he hadn't programmed: feet landing soft, ball-first, shoulders pulling inward, the whole frame compressing itself into the smallest possible version. A way of walking designed by years of practice at not being noticed.
He recognized the technique. He'd invented his own version of it in a different life.
The mirror was on the inside of the wardrobe door.
— ✦ —
Young. That was first. Late teens — eighteen, nineteen. Sharp face, too thin, cheekbones and jaw visible in a way that would've looked good if there'd been any weight on the frame. Black hair, long enough to cover the left eye, dirty. Skin that hadn't seen the outdoors in a while.
The eyes were what stopped him.
Gray. Not warm gray. Not interesting gray. The gray of a TV that's been switched off. They caught the light fine — the surface worked — but what came back was flat. Input without output. Eyes that received the world and gave nothing in return.
He'd seen that look before. On a different face, in a bathroom mirror, on the last day.
"Well," he said.
Wrong voice. Lower than his. Rougher, like the throat had been damaged — the scar, obviously — and hadn't fully recovered. It sounded like someone had taken a decent voice and dragged it across asphalt.
"Well," he said again, because repetition sometimes makes things make sense and this time it didn't.
Then something appeared in the corner of his vision.
Not in the room. In his vision — floating, translucent, blue-edged, hovering at about arm's length like a pop-up notification from a system he hadn't subscribed to. It moved when he moved his head. It didn't respond when he tried to touch it. It was, apparently, a feature of his eyeballs now.
He focused on it the way you focus on a word you're trying to read in low light — deliberately, with effort — and it expanded.
— ✦ —
[ STATUS PANEL ]
Name: Ren Ashford
Rank: F
Level: 7
Class: Shadow Swordsman
— CORE STATS —
STR: 18 AGI: 24
INT: 31 END: 15
CHA: 27 LCK: 3
HP: 340/340 MP: 280/280
— ETHER SIGNATURE —
Primary: Shadow
Vessel: [DORMANT — Insufficient Ether Integration]
Harmonic: None Detected
Dissonant: Light
Erosion: 2%
— SKILLS —
Shadow Step (F) — Short-range displacement via shadow. Max: 3m.
Ether Suppression (E) — Mask Ether signature. Duration: variable.
Cold Read (Passive) — Enhanced micro-expression detection.
Despair Edge (???) — [LOCKED — Requires Lament synchronization]
— TITLES —
The Abandoned Son — Ashford family standing: disowned.
Effect: -50% reputation with Ashford-affiliated entities.
Transmigrator — Soul origin: foreign.
Effect: Immune to memory-based Ether attacks.
Note: This body's original occupant is no longer present.
[TITLE PENDING — Narrative alignment in progress...]
— UNIQUE TRAIT —
Hollow Core — Ether Core damaged/incomplete.
Foreign Ether absorption at cost of instability.
WARNING: Core integrity 34%. Excessive strain may
cause Ether Cascade (fatal).
— ✦ —
He read it twice.
The first time was comprehension. The second time was because the words hadn't changed and he needed them to.
Ren Ashford. F-Rank. Shadow Swordsman. Hollow Core. Disowned. Transmigrator. A translucent rectangle floating in his field of vision, cataloging the vital statistics of a body he hadn't been born in, telling him — in the same flat font it used for hit points — that the person who used to live here was "no longer present."
No longer present. Like a hotel guest who'd checked out early. Like a library book that had been returned.
His roommate's game. The swords. The rankings. The glowing interfaces. The words he'd heard through a shared wall for nine months and retained none of because retaining things required caring and caring required being alive in a way he hadn't been.
He was inside it.
He was inside a game he'd never played, in a body he'd never seen, with a name he'd never heard, and the floating spreadsheet in his vision was politely informing him that his Luck was 3, his Core was broken, his family had disowned him, and his Ether — whatever that was — was fundamentally opposed to Light, which he assumed was bad the way a 3 was bad: self-evidently, without needing context.
So the universe has a filing system, he thought. And I'm in it. Good to know it's personal.
He sat on the edge of the bed. The springs made a sound that was way too loud for the weight they were supporting, which was another data point on the pile marked "this body has not been fed."
His hands — Ren Ashford's hands — were shaking. Not from shock or fear or any of the useful emergency responses that a functioning nervous system would produce in this situation. From low blood sugar. The body needed food. The body needed water. The body needed about eighteen months of someone giving a damn, and it had clearly not been getting that.
He looked at the Panel again.
Ren Ashford. The Abandoned Son. F-Rank in a world that, based on the letter grades, presumably went up to at least A. An Ether Core at 34% integrity, which didn't require a technical background to understand — thirty-four percent of anything was the part of a building that's still standing after the fire, and you wouldn't move back in.
A pending title. Narrative alignment in progress.
He didn't know what that meant. The word "narrative" was doing something uncomfortable in his chest — or in whatever passed for his chest in this body. Narrative meant story. Story meant someone had written one. And "alignment" meant the story was adjusting itself around him, like a script noticing that the wrong actor had walked onstage and rearranging the blocking to compensate.
He filed that. He'd come back to it.
The last line of the Panel — the one his eyes kept sliding back to — was the Hollow Core warning. Core integrity 34%. Excessive strain: fatal. It had the energy of a sign posted on a condemned building. Not a threat. A description. You can go in if you want. Here's what happens.
Something moved through the flat gray nothing that was his baseline emotional state. It took him a second to identify it because it had been a long time since anything had moved through there at all.
He laughed.
Not the good kind. The kind that sounds like coughing and comes from the place where panic and exhaustion and absurdity meet and discover they have a lot in common. He laughed until his ribs hurt, which took about ten seconds because the ribs were in terrible shape, and then he sat in the quiet and breathed and looked at the ceiling that wasn't his ceiling in the room that wasn't his room.
A dead man in a dying body in a world he didn't understand, with a stat sheet that read like a strongly worded apology from the universe and a Luck score that suggested the apology wasn't sincere.
He stood up.
Not because he wanted to. Not because something inside him had ignited — some ember of determination, some will to survive, some narrative-appropriate spark that would carry him forward into the story. Nothing had ignited. The pilot light was still out. It had been out for years and he wasn't expecting a relight.
He stood up because the bed smelled like bile and the room smelled like a person who'd stopped trying and the body needed water. Those were facts. Small, specific, manageable facts. And if there was one thing he'd learned from twenty-two years of being the way he was, it was this: you don't need a reason. You need a task. One task. Small enough that the weight of it doesn't pin you to the mattress.
Find water.
That was the task. Not "survive." Not "figure out what's happening." Not "escape the body" or "find a way home" or "become strong" or any of the things a protagonist was supposed to want in the first chapter of whatever this was. Just: find water. Because the throat was raw and the stomach was empty and water was a problem he could solve in the next five minutes, and five minutes was as far ahead as he was willing to look.
The grand questions — why am I here, what is this, am I losing my mind — those could wait. They required energy he didn't have and answers he couldn't reach and the kind of existential crisis that would either break him or bore him, and right now, in this body, in this room, with a Luck score of three and an organ in his chest that was apparently one bad afternoon away from killing him—
Right now, the task was water.
He walked to the door and opened it.
The hallway was stone and silence. Somewhere below, voices — low, routine, the sound of people who lived here and didn't care who else did. The body's feet moved quietly on the floor, ball-first, shoulders in, making itself small without being told.
He let it. For now, invisible was fine. Invisible was familiar. Invisible was the only thing he'd ever been good at, and in a world he didn't understand, you lead with what you have.
Even if what you have is nothing.
Especially then.