The predawn air was crisp and biting as I stepped out onto the damp wooden porch of the secluded cottage, the steady, thunderous roar of the waterfall drowning out the waking calls of forest birds.
Behind me, the cottage door clicked shut with a soft latch. My muscles felt pleasantly loose, my mind clear, and my body thoroughly revitalized after a passionate, exhausting night. That was my first time with this worlds version of a succubus, so I wonder if that makes me a monster fucker. Which would make me a freak as well.
I then shoved the thought out of my easily.
It doesn't matter, in any life I will always love a beautiful woman. Especially if she has a little bush going down there.
I thought it felt weird. I had my steel sword but not my silver one anymore. I mean I still had my moon frost sword but I feel like that is only for special uses. And now I'm finally by myself, which feels weird, but oh well this is the adventure I always wanted. And I have plenty of money for the Path ahead.
Speaking of ahead lets see how my potion digestion went yesterday.
A soft, pale-blue holographic screen flickered into focus in my peripheral vision.
Status Window:
Name: Cain
Age: 15
Race: Half-Elf Half-Human (Mutant)
Bloodline Trait: Elder Blood (Legendary)
Class: Wolf School Witcher (Common)
Title: Sequence 8: Provoker (20%)
Twenty percent.
A faint, satisfied smirk touched the corners of my mouth.
Orchestrating the psychological destruction of Baroness Helena and Lord Harry, manipulating the crowd into demanding blood, and driving Baron Hector to personally sever their heads in the castle courtyard had provided a massive leap in my potion digestion. The Provoker pathway wasn't merely about shouting petty insults; it was about psychological leverage, orchestrating emotional collapse, and bending the wills of those in power until they danced to the tune you played. In less than a day, I had digested a full fifth of the potion.
Yet even with that progress, Hillstead had left behind a tangle of unresolved mysteries that kept my mind turning.
First was the Chaos Nexus buried beneath Hector's vineyard.
When I stood at the precipice of that glowing emerald rift, the system had presented me with a distinct binary choice: Absorb or Travel. I had chosen to absorb it to fuel my own growth, and the immediate dividends were undeniable. Prior to drawing on that raw elemental wellspring, my Warp ability had been limited to short-range blinks, a matter of a few feet, enough to dodge a lethal claw or slip behind an opponent's guard.
After digesting the nexus's primal Chaos, however, the stamina strain had plummeted drastically. Now, I could fold space across dozen-yard increments with minimal mana taxation.
If absorbing a nexus provided that much spatial resonance, what would happen if I actually chose to travel through one? Could I return? Where would it take me? I needed to locate another rift and systematically test the boundaries of inter-world traversal.
Then there was the lingering shadow of Helena and Callidea.
The sealed letter resting safely in my dimensional inventory felt heavier than its parchment suggested. Callidea and her covert elven cabal were clearly playing a generational game, grooming me toward some ancient, unicorn-prophesied restoration of the Aen Undod. But the detail that nagged at me wasn't their lofty imperial delusions, it was the specific, calculated promise to remedy Witcher sterility.
Why would an ancient order of elven Sages care whether a half-breed mutant could father children?
Because bloodlines require heirs, I thought grimly. They don't just want an elven warlord; they want a dynasty they could control.
Well good thing I wasn't in any rush to become a breeding stud for a bunge of sorceresses, but having the option to reverse the biological trade-offs of the Trial of the Grasses was far from useless. For now, it was a card in my back pocket. I would remain cautious, keep the letter sealed, and take their game one step at a time.
"Long road to Cintra," I muttered to myself, shaking the cold morning mist from my white bangs. "Let's see how much ground we can cover."
With no horses to slow me down and no caravan to babysit, I decided to test the limits of my enhanced spatial traversal.
I focused on the dirt trade road winding southward through the foothills, picked a focal point fifty yards down the path, and activated Warp.
Space bent around me like a compressed spring. The rocky clearing vanished, and I reappeared instantly fifty yards ahead, my boots landing without a sound on the packed dirt. The air displaced with a faint, imperceptible hiss.
Again.
Another fifty yards melted away in a microsecond.
I fell into a rapid, rhythmic cadence, running at full sprint, triggering Warp to swallow vast stretches of the road, and chaining the transitions seamlessly. The spatial folding didn't exhaust my mana pool immediately, but chaining ten high-speed jumps in rapid succession generated a dull, resonant thrum in my temples, a subtle reminder that folding reality still carried a cognitive cost.
By late afternoon, the pine forests of the mountain passes had begun to give way to rolling lowland hills and broad river valleys. According to standard travel times, the distance I had covered in a few hours would have taken a merchant wagon nearly three days.
I slowed to a comfortable jog, spotting a moss-covered fallen oak beside a bubbling brook off the main trail.
"Time for a break," I said, rolling my shoulders.
I sat down on the fallen timber, accessed my inventory, and materialized a bundle of wrapped rations alongside my Limitless Waterskin.
I unwrapped several cold roasted meat skewers, thick cuts of spiced venison I had prepped during the Hillstead feast, and unstoppered the enchanted waterskin, taking a deep, restorative pull of cool spring water.
I raised a skewer, parting my lips to take the first bite, when my silver Wolf medallion suddenly jerked against my chest.
The heavy metal disc began to vibrate with violent, rhythmic intensity, the wolf's fangs clicking sharply against the steel rivets of my armor harness.
I froze.
My enhanced Witcher senses flared outward instantaneously. My golden pupils narrowed into razor-thin slits as I swept the treeline, sampling the breeze.
Nothing.
No sulfurous or metallic smell. No necrophage decay or insectoid musk. Whatever was triggering the medallion wasn't enough for my system codex to identify. So if it wasn't a beast; it was probably some pure, unadulterated magical fluctuation.
I stood up, stowing the skewer and waterskin back into my inventory with a flicker of thought, and rested my right hand on the pommel of my steel sword.
The vibration grew stronger as I turned toward the deep timber to the west, away from the road. The hum resonated through my body, a deep, harmonic frequency that pulled at my mutated Elder Blood like a magnetic tether.
I moved through the underbrush with absolute, silent grace, stepping over roots and ducking beneath low-hanging oak boughs. The roar of a distant river grew louder, but beneath the sound of rushing water, my ears picked up a faint, crackling hum, the distinct sound of tearing spatial fabric.
After ten minutes of weaving through the dense foliage, I parted a cluster of thick elderberry bushes and stepped into a hidden clearing nestled beside a curving riverbank.
There, hovering three feet above the mossy earth behind the trunk of a massive weeping willow, was a tear in the air.
It was a swirling vortex roughly five feet tall, its edges crackling with crimson and violet primordial energy. Unlike the malevolent, corrupting aura of the void rift on Blue Mountain, this anomaly felt ancient, natural, and overflowing with raw, untamed Chaos.
A familiar crystalline chime echoed through my consciousness.
System Notification: Chaos Nexus Found
A localized rift in the fabric of space-time has been detected. Would you like to absorb the Chaos Nexus or travel to the connecting world?
[Absorb / Travel]
I stared at the glowing prompt, a wry, bemused smile spreading across my face.
"Well," I murmured under my breath. "I didn't expect to find another one this quickly. If I didn't know any better, I'd say that absurd, hidden luck stat is finally putting in work."
I circled the nexus slowly, inspecting the swirling crimson ribbons. The energy was stable, rhythmic, and fundamentally different from the Hillstead nexus. It felt like an open doorway, a cosmic threshold waiting for a key.
My finger hovered over the system interface.
I had absorbed the last one to boost my baseline strength and expand my Warp capacity. But as a Sequence 8 Provoker with Elder Blood, mastery over spatial travel was my ultimate birthright. If I kept avoiding the threshold, I would never understand how dimensional transit functioned.
Just don't drop me into an undead apocalypse, I thought, letting out a dry breath. Or a world where people still think boiling leeches cures the plague. I get enough of that here.
I steeled my resolve, grounded my stance, and selected the second option.
[Travel]
The crimson vortex flared with blinding, incandescent radiance.
Before I could even blink, a terrifying gravitational pull seized my entire physical form. The forest, the river, and the sky twisted into violently smeared streaks of color as reality itself inverted. The sensation wasn't like Warp, which was instantaneous displacement; this felt like being dragged through an endless, frictionless tunnel of sheer, compressing force.
My boots struck solid, uneven stone with bone-jarring impact.
Instinct took over before my conscious mind even registered the transition. I dropped into a low, three-point combat crouch, my left hand bracing against the floor while my right hand snapped backward. In a flash of pure moonlight, Eirael materialized in my grip, its frost-rimed silver blade hissing as it cut through the still air, ready to decapitate whatever was waiting on the other side.
But only silence answered.
I held my breath, slowly rising from my crouch while keeping my center of gravity low.
I was standing inside a massive, pitch-black subterranean cavern. The air was somewhat dry, and noticeably hot, easily thirty degrees warmer than the temperate forests of the Continent. carrying an arid, mineral-heavy dryness that scraped the back of my throat. My mutated eyes adjusted to the darkness instantly, the cat-like pupils widening to drink in the absolute minimum of light.
I turned around, sweeping the rear of the cavern with my blade.
The crimson Chaos Nexus was gone. The wall behind me was solid, completely unblemished by any arcane tear or lingering spatial rift.
Oh, that's just fantastic.
My heart gave a brief, instinctive spike before my Cold-Blooded trait took hold, washing through my nervous system like a bucket of ice water. My pulse flattened into a slow, rhythmic baseline, suppressing any surge of panic before it could cloud my tactical judgment.
"No return portal. No system warning or quest notification," I whispered dryly to the empty dark. "Just a one-way ticket into the unknown. Thats just wonderful. Absolutely fucking brilliant."
I shook my head, exhaling a quiet, sarcastic chuckle. "Well... let's see where we are. If I'm lucky, maybe I landed near Agrabah and I can convince a blue Genie to wish me back to Kaer Morhen at least."
I dematerialized Eirael back into my inventory space and began making my way upward along the sloping cavern floor.
As I climbed, my enhanced senses picked up a faint scent drifting down from the cavern mouth. It was an aroma that felt maddeningly familiar yet buried under years of Witcher training, something earthy, pungent, and sharp, like crushed dry bark carrying a faint undercurrent of bitter cinnamon.
The slope steepened, leading toward a wide, natural fissure in the rock.
A blinding shaft of golden sunlight pierced the gloom ahead. I reached the fissure, climbed through the narrow opening, and stepped out onto an elevated stone ledge overlooking the world beyond.
The sheer scale of what greeted me knocked the breath from my lungs.
As far as the eye could see, beneath a colossal, cloudless sky of blinding, pale-yellow radiance, lay an ocean of endless, wind-sculpted sand dunes. Massive, jagged rock formations, ancient geological bones of a scorched world,thrust upward from the desert floor like petrified leviathans. Massive heatwaves danced violently across the horizon, shimmering like liquid glass in the suffocating, merciless furnace of the day.
The dry, scorching wind hit me like a physical wall, immediately pulling the moisture from my lips and skin.
"Great," I muttered, shielding my eyes against the ferocious glare. "A desert. An actual, honest-to-god endless desert."
While my Witcher mutations provided superior thermal regulation compared to a normal human, walking into a blazing furnace with leather armor, and steel plates was a textbook recipe for heatstroke. I wasn't going to take unnecessary chances.
I focused on my system inventory and selected an item I had kept stored since completing the trials on the mountain.
I equipped the Wanderer's Midnight Shroud.
A faint, shadowy distortion wrapped around my shoulders as a magnificent charcoal-grey cloak materialized over my armor. Woven from ultra-fine elven wool and interwoven with threads of raw shadow-essence, the fabric settled over my back with weightless perfection, the deep cowl casting a cool, impenetrable shadow over my face and bangs of snow-white hair.
The moment the cloak fastened around my throat, its enchantments engaged.
A soothing, ambient coolness washed through my body as Climate Harmonization activated, completely neutralizing the oppressive external furnace and stabilizing my body temperature at an optimal, comfortable baseline. Simultaneously, the passive enchantment The Tireless March took hold, infusing my legs and core with steady vigor.
The shroud doubled the distance I could march before physical fatigue began to set in, and increased my stamina recovery rate by fifty percent during short rests. Combined with my inhuman Witcher endurance, mutant metabolism, and the physical enhancements from the beyonder potion, I was effectively a biological engine that could march through an arid wasteland for days on end without stopping.
"Much better," I said, adjusting the deep hood.
I stepped to the edge of the rocky ledge, judged the twenty-foot drop, and leaped downward.
My boots struck the soft, shifting sand with a muted crunch. I absorbed the impact effortlessly, rolling my shoulders, and began marching straight out into the desert. Staying near the cave entrance wouldn't give me answers. If I wanted to figure out what world I had landed on, I needed to find signs of life.
I marched on for hours.
The landscape was brutal, desolate, and entirely devoid of standard civilization. There were no wooden signposts, no wagon ruts, no distant smoke from village hearths, and not a single bird in the sky. There was only the endless, rhythmic hiss of windblown sand drifting across massive, rolling ridges.
After covering what must have been nearly fifteen miles, I came to an abrupt halt at the crest of a massive dune.
I knelt down, resting one knee against the scorching earth, and scooped up a handful of the fine, powdery sand.
Mixed within the pale, bleached grains were tiny, microscopic flecks of dark, reddish-brown residue. I brought the handful to my nose, inhaling deeply.
The scent hit me instantly.
Bitter cinnamon.
It was pungent, dry, and slightly metallic, tingling against the roof of my mouth like crushed peppercorns soaked in ancient ozone. I had smelled cinnamon before in my past life on Earth, but this was different, it carried an intoxicating, chemical sharpness that stimulated the nervous system, a subtle, primal potency that felt both sacred and profoundly alien.
Why does the sand smell like bitter cinnamon?
Before the thought could fully develop, the desert wind shifted, kicking up a gust from behind me.
My golden cat-like pupils snapped wide.
Carried on the hot, dry breeze was an unmistakable, repulsive odor: the sharp, unwashed stench of concentrated human sweat, bodily fluids, and stale and other scents. The most recognizable one was blood.
I didn't turn around. I didn't break my posture.
My Witcher senses mapped the surroundings in real-time. The footsteps were practically nonexistent, whoever was tracking me possessed an unnatural, terrifying mastery of desert movement, their footfalls matching the shifting rhythm of the wind-blown dunes so perfectly that a normal man would have never noticed them.
But they couldn't mask their biological scent.
Six distinct sources. Two women, four men, their pheromones and elevated heartbeats faintly registering through the heat haze roughly two hundred yards behind me.
Where they Bandits? Mercenaries? Local scavengers?
A cold, razor-sharp smirk tugged at the corner of my lips beneath the deep cowl of my cloak.
If you think a lone traveler in a fancy cloak is easy prey, you're about to have a very bad day.
I stood up casually, letting the sand slip through my fingers, and resumed walking at an unhurried, measured pace. I didn't accelerate or draw my blades; I kept my posture relaxed, projecting the illusion of an oblivious, fatigued traveler wandering aimlessly through the wasteland.
Up ahead, a massive formation of jagged stone outcroppings rose from the sand, casting deep, cool shadows across a narrow, winding canyon passage.
Thatd the perfect location for a trap. And my Hunter mind was already working.
I altered my path toward the rock formation, entered the shaded corridor, and navigated deeper into the stone maze until I reached a natural, three-sided cul-de-sac surrounded by towering rock walls.
I turned around, getting into a kneeling meditative pose against the cool stone. I pulled the deep cowl of the Midnight Shroud down over my eyes, cloaking my features in complete darkness, rested my hands on my knees, and waited.
Three minutes passed in absolute silence.
Then, the air in the canyon shifted.
The faint, rhythmic vibrations in the rock reached my senses first, followed by the slight intensifying stench.
I opened my golden eyes beneath the shadow of the hood.
They had executed a textbook tactical encirclement.
Three figures emerged from the canyon entrance directly in front of me, stepping out of the glaring sunlight into the shadows with eerie, fluid grace. Two more stood perched along the high rocky ridge to my upper right, long, hook-shaped polearms resting in their grips. A sixth figure was silently scaling the sheer stone face directly behind me, moving with the agility of a desert lizard.
Six possible hostile targets all moved with zero wasted motion. They guys are good.
The three in front of me were draped head-to-toe in heavily weathered, sand-colored fabric over intricate, tight-fitting suits of dark, segmented material and flexible alloy plates. What looked like futuristic filtration mask covered their lower faces, two of them had no mask but instead had a tub like thing plugging directly into their noses.
They moved without making a single sound, their hands resting lightly on the hilts of curved, milky-white daggers. They didnt look like it was made of metal, but bone maybe?
The central figure, a tall, broad-shouldered man, stepped forward.
He raised one hand in a sharp, authoritative gesture, his voice muffled slightly by the filtration mask as he barked a short, guttural command.
"Bi-la kaifa! Ya hyat chouhada, af'al!"
The words were sharp, rhythmic, and foreign, but the cadences echoed against a buried chamber in my mind. It sounded like an archaic, heavily drifted derivative of ancient Arabic, a language I hadn't heard since my previous life on modern Earth.
The man reached up with a gloved hand, pulling down his sand-scarf and filtration mask to expose his weathered, sun-baked face.
The moment my eyes locked onto his face, my breath caught in my throat.
His eyes, no not just his but everyone of their eyes.
There was no white in the sclera. There was no distinct black pupil.
His eyes were an unbroken, terrifyingly vivid void of total, a deep, luminous blue within blue that burned with the intensity of an open flame.
My mind froze as every piece of the puzzle violently snapped together in a fraction of a second.
The endless, unforgiving ocean of dunes.
The sand saturated with the bitter cinnamon.
The intricate suits they wore, and how they moved in the dessert.
The bone like knifes.
The Arabic like tongue he spoke.
I'm not in a generic fantasy wasteland. I'm not in some forgotten corner of the Continent.
My God, this is the planet Arrakis. And these are Fremen.
I clenched my fist in pure frustration at the realization of where I ended up.
I'm in the world of Dune!
Before my brain could fully process the cosmic absurdity of a Witcher standing on the sands of the most dangerous planet in the known sci-fi universe, a sharp, crystalline chime resonated directly behind my eyes.
A brilliant, blue translucent notification panel materialized across my vision.
System Notification: New Quest Received!
Rare Quest: Welcome to Dune
Objective: Convince the Fremen hunting party to escort you peacefully to their sietch without killing any of them.
Rewards: 1 Rare Equipment Chest
I stared at the glowing blue-in blue eyes of the Fremen leader as he drew his glistening crysknife from its sheath.
Well, I thought, letting out a long, silent sigh beneath my hood. My life just got considerably more troublesome.
End of Vol. 1