He could tell that it wasn't.
For one, his bed was massive, easily three persons wide. The cushions were rather stiff, and the hefty duvet weighed down his body. Four posts held up a grand canopy overhead, giving him a sense of majesty. Streaks of sunlight slipped through half-drawn curtains and dimly illuminated the room's pale green walls.
The room gave Jack a noble vibe from the Middle Ages. It was different from the bright white and clean hospital room in every way possible. Though despite its grand appearance, the bedroom was surprisingly empty. In the far corner near the window, there was only a mahogany writing desk with a stack of crudely made paper and a golden pocket watch on its surface.
Jack froze as panic finally set in.
'I died. Edward killed me—the one person I thought I could trust in the world, my one and only friend, killed me. He had a knife and twisted it in my chest. I died. Is this the afterlife? Where am I?'
His senses and mind accelerated as he frantically looked around. He recognized this room and the pocket watch. A terrible thought crossed his mind as he looked at his arms.
'This isn't my body.'
Muscular, nothing like his own twig-like arms. Briefly removing the white gloves, he observed his hands, which ended with long black nails that shone in the sunlight, showing their dangerously sharp edges. He'd seen these hands before, but never in such detail.
"All of this belongs to Jack Winterfell, the villain character I had been playing before I died," he muttered under his breath as he inspected his new body.
His face… He needed to see his face to confirm his suspicions. His gaze landed on the gold-plated pocket watch, silently resting on the writing desk. Due to the habit of being bed-bound, the idea of standing up and walking over to the desk eluded him, and he instead squinted intensely at the pocket watch as if trying to glean any insights from it.
A warm feeling ran through his body toward his mind, and then it moved. The pocket watch wobbled slightly from side to side. Jack felt a connection with the pocket watch as if he wielded an invisible hand and could pick it up. His headache worsened, and his dry throat caused him to swallow his saliva, but he ignored his body's protests. Guided by the muscle memory his new body seemed to possess, he pressed forward. It wobbled across the table until it reached the edge. With a final push, it tumbled off the side.
Jack gritted his teeth as he didn't allow the pocket watch to fall and instead suspended it in the air with his mind. Something impossible on Earth, further confirming Jack's suspicions. The pocket watch slowly floated through the air.
Jack felt awful, sweat accumulating on his forehead, but his objective was complete. Jack Winterfell's signature pocket watch lay in his foreign hand—the cold, smooth surface of the metal and sensory information were too realistic to replicate in VR. Not to mention the lack of an interface such as health bars, inventory slots, or even the map that usually sat in the top right of his vision.
'Did I die and the game became my reality?'
Snapping open the pocket watch with a click, he looked at the small mirror nestled inside the lid. A devilishly handsome face stared back, with short white hair lightly falling over his fierce red eyes. He looked like a noble vampire with his defined jawline, elongated ears like an elf, and pale white skin. Far too realistic for VR graphics, he could even easily control every muscle in his face, something impossible with current VR technology. While pulling various faces, he inspected every detail with intense scrutiny and raised a brow as golden words suddenly appeared on the mirror's surface.
[Jack Winterfell]
[Noble Vampire]
Schools Of Magic: [Psychic Magic (D)]
Psychokinesis [D]
Pyrokinesis [E]
[Blood Magic (F)]
=Null Spells=
Mana Control [F]
Traits: [Germaphobe] Unable to learn melee skills / Increased control over ranged spells by 100%.
[Control Freak] Increased affinity to control skills by 10%.
[Lazy] Increased mana regeneration while resting by 20% / Increased EXP to learn new spells by 10%.
[Concentration] Increased affinity with mental spells by 5%.
[Noble Aura] Intimidation increased.
Jack read the text quickly, his heart rate threatening to go out of control from a mixture of anxiety and excitement. It was unbelievable, but he had somehow transmigrated into his favorite game, one he knew much about.
'Okay, calm down and think. The VR game has become real somehow, and it doesn't look like I can log out. Other than the words floating in this pocket watch and my earlier use of magic, it would be impossible to tell this was different from Earth.'
His mood quickly dampened as the implications of his situation set in. He was no longer on Earth but instead in a world set in the Middle Ages where monsters and magic ruled supreme and everyone else was mere food.
Jack Winterfell was a notoriously difficult character to complete the storyline with due to his pitifully weak start and death flags hiding around every corner—not to mention the hidden status effect "A Villain's Fate" that practically guaranteed his death.
Looking back at the majestically crafted pocket watch, Jack observed the lower half that displayed the date and time in an analog fashion.
9:10 am, January 1st, 1520
'From what I remember, the major plot points of the game's official storyline begin in 1521, a year from now.'
The bedroom door creaked open, and a fully naked woman with raven-black hair and ocean-blue eyes wandered in as if she owned the place. Jack looked up from the pocket watch, and when their gazes met, her eyes widened in surprise like a cat caught stealing food.
"M-Master, since when were you awake?! You've been sleeping for days like a c-corpse!"
'Master?'
Jack's eyes widened.
'Hold on, is that Melinda?'
He knew this character from the game. Melinda hastily walked over under his analyzing gaze, leaving a trail of water droplets on the stone floor. Lying down beside Jack, she skillfully curled her raven-black hair behind her ear—exposing her slender, pale neck.
"You must be thirsty… Please, drink."
Though Jack's throat burned with thirst, questions still crowded his mind. He parted his lips to speak—but the thirst twisted, deepening into something far more primal. Hunger, raw and all-consuming, surged through him. His stomach clenched with need, his thoughts dissolved into a haze, and strangest of all, he could smell the blood pulsing just beneath her fragile skin.
'A livestock is offering herself to you. Drink.'
A voice crawled through his mind, cold and insistent. A savage hunger erupted within him, drowning reason as his fangs slid down, tearing into his own lip. Melinda's eyes trembled, just for a moment—but she didn't move, her neck still exposed. Without being able to resist his body's urges, Jack's jaw unhinged like a snake.
Clamping down on her neck, his fangs skillfully pierced her vein as if he had done this every day of his life, and blood began pumping through his teeth and into his mouth. Like a dehydrated fool who discovered an oasis of spring water in the middle of the Saharan desert, Jack gulped down the delicious nectar of life. He kept going until Melinda fell limp in his embrace.
The sudden weight pressing against him broke his trance.
'What the hell am I doing?!'
He had never even felt the touch of another woman's neck, let alone bitten into it!
'Oh god, I'm so sorry.'
Jack quickly unlatched his fangs from Melinda and felt them retract into his gums. He then carefully lowered her beside him. Two small holes were left on her neck, which oozed blood, dyeing the white sheets below.
Jack subconsciously swallowed his saliva—then did it again. Something was wrong. His eyes widened as a foreign sense of utter disgust overcame him as if he had just bitten into a pig and drunk its shit. He could feel the foreign blood traveling through his body like slime, and it made him want to vomit. But he managed to ignore all that and focus on checking if the poor woman was still alive.
'Please be fine. I don't want to have killed someone minutes into my new life.'
She was deathly pale and breathing shallowly but seemed alive, just passed out.
'Okay, good. She's still alive. Thank the gods… assuming they exist. Who else could trap me in this hellish world otherwise?'
Despite the evidence that the woman had just showered, he still felt disgusted from touching her, so he subconsciously pulled out a white handkerchief and gracefully dusted off his shoulder where she had been leaning moments earlier. His hand paused, and he looked at the handkerchief in bafflement.
'Why am I doing this?'
Recalling the information displayed on the pocket watch, the answer became clear.
'It's that darn [Germaphobe] trait. Isn't it?'
He let out a sigh. While it seemed he had somehow won the battle with Jack Winterfell's soul to take primary control over the body, the hardcoded traits of the game character still remained.
'I'm going to have to get used to this. I refuse to let the freak whose body this was control me. Despite how doomed my situation seems, this is still a second chance at life.'
With the thirst, hunger, and headache gone, a sense of fatigue overtook his body. Was his body actually tired, or was his [Lazy] trait acting up?
Jack lay back down and cursed in his mind.
'In a game where the player can enjoy the storyline of any character, from the Emperor of Oshal to a street rat of Kassinki, I just had to transmigrate into the body of a pitiful third-rate villain fated to die.'
Yet he couldn't help but grin. After all, if this world followed the game Savage Awakening as he hoped, it meant he knew what the future had in store. Who to befriend, where rare items spawned, and, most importantly, how to turn this shitty character into one that could not only survive but perhaps even thrive.