Adam stood outside the shack, barefoot on the packed dirt.
The slum was alive around him—people walking, carts rolling, children running. But Adam wasn't watching any of it. He was standing still, processing the second wave of memories that had surfaced the moment he stepped into the daylight.
The original Adam hadn't just died of illness or weakness.
He had been beaten.
The memory was fragmented but clear enough. A group of boys. Three, maybe four. They came from the higher part of the city—not the slums, but the proper town. Middle-class families. Their clothes were cleaner. Their faces were fuller. They had shoes.
The original Adam didn't.
It wasn't the first time. These boys came into the slum district sometimes. They picked on whoever was easiest. The original Adam was easy. He was thin, quiet, and alone.
The memory played out in short bursts. A push from behind. A kick to the ribs. Laughter. Someone grabbed his collar and threw him into a wall. He hit the ground, curled up, and waited for it to end. It did. They left. He got up and walked home.
He didn't tell his parents.
His father had already left for the day. His mother was getting ready to go too—she washed clothes at a well near the market. She asked him if he was alright. He said yes. She left.
The original Adam sat down on the cot. The pain in his ribs was sharp, but he was used to it. He lay back, closed his eyes, and didn't open them again.
That's when the new Adam arrived.
Adam let out a slow breath. He looked down at the body he now inhabited. There were bruises on his forearms—faint yellow and purple marks, days old. He pressed one. It hurt.
*Beaten to death by some kids,* he thought. Not directly—maybe the internal damage had been worse than it looked. But the beating was the cause.
He turned and walked back inside. He sat down on the cot, placed his hand over his face, and leaned back against the wall.
He needed to think.
The memories he had received weren't detailed. They were more like impressions—images, feelings, sounds. He didn't have access to everything the original Adam knew. But certain things had come through clearly.
This world had no advanced technology. No electricity. No machines. The most complex thing he'd seen in the memories was a water mill at the edge of town. Everything else was manual. Wood, stone, iron, leather.
But something else had come through too.
There were people in this world who were not normal.
The original Adam didn't know much about it. He had never seen it with his own eyes. But his father had talked about it once. Adam remembered the conversation clearly—not because his father had said much, but because of the look on his face when he said it.
They had been sitting outside the shack, eating. His father looked tired after hauling timber all day. Someone in the slum had been talking about the Royal Knights—the kingdom's elite fighters who served directly under the king.
His father had said only one thing about them.
"One of them can swing a sword once and kill a hundred men."
The original Adam had thought it was just a story. The kind of thing men told each other after a long day. Adam—the new Adam—wasn't so sure.
A hundred men with one swing. That wasn't regular swordsmanship. That wasn't skill or technique. That was something else entirely.
Energy. Power. Something beyond physical limits.
Adam had read enough web novels in his previous life to know what that usually meant. In most of those stories, the world operated on some form of life energy—chi, mana, aura. The details changed, but the core idea was always the same. Certain people could access a force that made them extraordinary.
He didn't have proof. The original Adam's memories didn't contain any specific knowledge about magic or energy systems. There was no textbook on it, no school for it, no public discussion of it. But the existence of people like the Royal Knights—people who could do things that no normal human body should be able to do—told Adam enough.
Something existed here. Something beyond the ordinary.
Adam sat on the cot with his back against the wall. His hand was still resting over his mouth, his eyes fixed on the dirt floor.
In his previous life, he had always been interested in the idea of magic. Not in a childish way. In a serious, if-this-were-real-how-would-it-work way. He had read dozens of novels about people who gained powers, who studied systems of energy, who climbed from nothing to something in worlds governed by strength.
And now he was in one.
A small spark lit up in his chest. Not excitement—that would be premature. More like the first flicker of possibility. The idea that maybe, just maybe, this world had something he could reach for.
But he wasn't sure yet. He didn't know the rules. He didn't know if someone like him—a slum kid with nothing—could even access whatever power the Royal Knights had. He didn't know if it was something you were born with or something you could learn.
He didn't know anything, really.
Adam pulled his hand away from his face and looked at the cracked wooden ceiling above him.