Evan staggered to his feet, legs shaking, eyes fixed on the translucent screen floating in the air before him. His chest rose and fell sharply, each breath shallow and strained. Disbelief was stamped over his entire face — not the confused kind, but the kind that came from a mind refusing to accept what its eyes were seeing.
"What the heck!? What kind of joke is this!?"
His voice cracked, raw and unsteady. He whipped his gaze around the room, frantic, desperate, eyes darting into every corner as if expecting someone to burst out laughing, pointing at him, calling him gullible.
"Come out! Whoever it is—I know you're hiding somewhere! This isn't funny!" he snapped, voice trembling. "You're taking this way too far!"
The fear under his anger was unmistakable.
This wasn't excitement.
This wasn't awe.
This was the terrified reaction of someone who had nothing left — and knew better than to hope.
As an orphan with no one in the world, Evan never had friends, never had family, never had anyone to lean on. The only warmth he ever felt came from pages. From the fantasy novels he read whenever loneliness got too heavy to hold. Novels filled with systems, transmigration, cheats, godly powers — impossible things he clung to because they were the only escape from a life that refused to give him anything.
He knew those stories by heart.
He knew how they went.
He knew what a "System" was supposed to be.
How it could transform even a nobody loser into something that was feared the world.
It could grant strength, power, love, whatever one desired for.
And precisely because he knew… he couldn't believe any of this.
He knew how to seperate the line between the real and imaginations.
Fantasy stayed in books.
Reality stayed cruel.
He understood that better than anyone.
He clenched his fists so tightly his knuckles whitened. "Come out, damn it! Stop hiding! I'm not giving you people a show here!"
But the second time he said it, something had changed.
The bite in his voice faded. The anger drained. He didn't sound furious anymore; he sounded tired. Emotionless. Broken. Like someone who had lost the strength to keep screaming into a world that never listened.
His shoulders dropped.
His head lowered.
His voice came out barely above a whisper. "Just… stop already…"
He didn't even know who he was talking to anymore. Whoever was doing this. Whatever was doing this. He just wanted out. Away. Anywhere far from this twisted joke that people called society. After years of suffering this was afterall his final straw.
He parted his lips to speak again—
And then the voice returned—same softness, same unnatural calm, but carrying a weight that felt more like a command than information.
Which made the hairs on his neck stand again.
[Spatial barrier activated.]
A faint shudder rippled through the air. Barely visible, just enough to warp the edges of the room for a fraction of a second and a barrier invisible to the eyes covered the entire room. But Evan felt it—like the atmosphere tightening, like the walls exhaling around him. Something had changed. Something unseen. Something wrong.
He spun around, scanning the room again, trying to catch even the slightest hint of what just happened. Nothing. The furniture was the same. The light was the same. The silence was the same.
But the world didn't feel the same anymore.
His breathing picked up. Panic rising again, burning beneath his ribs. He turned toward the door, moving on instinct, wanting to run from whatever madness had swallowed him whole—
The screen flickered.
The voice returned.
[Starting personality separation. Please brace for the pain.]
And then silence.
Evan froze.
The words sank in slowly, like cold water filling his lungs.
Personality… separation?
His pulse hammered against his skull. His body locked stiff, waiting for something he didn't understand but instinctively feared. One second passed. Then another. Nothing happened.
He let out a trembling sigh of relief. "I… I was corre—!!"
The words ripped out of him, unfinished.
His mouth fell open in a silent scream as agony exploded through him—not in his limbs, not in his bones, but somewhere deeper. Somewhere no human hands could reach. Somewhere no injury had ever touched before.
A place inside him that wasn't meant to be touched.
The pain burned through his nerves like molten metal, shredding thought, ripping breath from his lungs. His knees buckled and he collapsed onto the floor, curling in on himself as instinct overtook everything else.
"AAARGHHHH—!!!"
The scream tore out of him uncontrollably, raw enough to make his throat bleed. His fingers dug into his scalp, nails scraping skin as if he could claw the pain out of his head by force.
"URGHH— IT HURTS! IT HURTS! DAMMIT!!"
Another scream — hoarse, broken.
"ARGHH!"
Time lost meaning. Seconds or minutes or hours—he couldn't tell, it felt like eternity. The agony swallowed everything. His mind blurred, drowning in a storm of white-hot torment that felt like it was splitting him open from the inside, cutting at memories, tugging at pieces of himself he didn't know existed.
He begged in his mind for it to stop. For someone to help.
For someone to kill him.
Anything to end it.
And then—slowly, painfully—the storm receded. The sharpness dulled. The tearing sensation eased. His breath returned to him in ragged gasps.
"Huff… huff… huff…"
He lay there trembling, one hand covering his eyes, tears leaking through his fingers. His whole body shook from the aftershocks, each breath dragging through a throat scraped raw.
The room around him was silent.
Only his broken, uneven breathing filled the space.
[Secondary personality extraction successful.]
The metallic voice filled the room once again.
[The Adam And Eve Syetm has been awakened to the optimized level.]
[System greets the host Evan/Eve. For any query, you may think about it and I will respond.]
[Host may change avatar between male/female at will to access the corresponding personality.]
[Memories of this body shall be revealed in fragments over time so the host can adjust accordingly.]
Evan breathed heavily as one after another translucent blue screen flickered into existence before him, filling all of his vision. Even with his eyes squeezed shut, he could still see them—floating in the darkness behind his eyelids, as if the screens weren't projected into the room but carved straight into his mind. Each glow pulsed faintly, almost syncing with his heartbeat.
He slowly forced his eyes open, fighting through the dizziness and the echoing ache left behind by the soul-tearing agony he had just survived. His gaze settled on the screens. This time, he didn't flinch. He didn't recoil. His eyes weren't darting around the room anymore, searching for a hidden prankster waiting to jump out and laugh at him.
No.
This wasn't a prank.
Not after that pain.
A pain no human could cause, no machine could simulate, no prank could ever replicate.
The screen remained before him, clear and cold and unmistakably real. Something alive. Something intelligent. Something powerful.
There was no doubt left in his eyes. The last strands of disbelief had been burned away, leaving behind only a strange, sharp clarity—as if his mind had been forcibly ironed flat, made cleaner, made faster.
He had transmigrated.
Into another world.
Or perhaps a different version of his own.
He didn't know.
But one thing was clear:
He had a System.
A legendary thing he had only ever read about, dreamed about, wished for during the loneliest nights of his life—something impossible, fantastical, something people in stories would kill for.
And somehow, impossibly, it was his.
Evan felt it again—that odd, unsettling awareness that his thoughts were moving too smoothly, too quickly. He knew his own mind. He knew his limits. And this wasn't them. The pain had done something to him—changed something deep, something fundamental.
He let out a long breath. "Sigh…"
He pushed himself upright, sitting on the floor with trembling arms. His eyes never left the screen. He studied every word, every detail, absorbing information faster than he ever could before.
But even with everything laid out before him, one final sliver of doubt clung to him. Fragile. Quiet. Human.
And he needed to hear the answer.
"Have I… really transmigrated into another world?"
His voice came out calm—almost too calm—with only a faint, lingering tremor of uncertainty woven through it.
[Affirmative]
The reply echoed in his mind—flat, calm, undeniable. A truth spoken as simply as one might state the time of day.
For a moment, Evan couldn't breathe.
Relief crashed over him so suddenly it nearly knocked him backward. His entire body loosened all at once, tension melting out of muscles he hadn't even realized were clenched. It felt like someone had lifted years of weight off his shoulders. Years of loneliness. Years of exhaustion. Years of fighting a world that never once fought for him.
"I-it's real… It's real! I'm out of that hell hole! I have a system! A SYSTEM!!"
His voice cracked on the last word, emotions squeezing his throat tight. He clenched his fists, trying to hold himself together—
But the dam broke.
"Haha… HhahahhaHAHAHAAHA—!"
Laughter tore out of him, wild and uneven, the sound of someone who had been drowning their entire life and suddenly felt air rush into their lungs. It wasn't happy. It wasn't sane. It was relief—pure, raw relief.
This was everything he had ever wished for. Everything he had ever fantasized about while alone in his cramped apartment, delivering food in the rain, wondering why life refused to give him even a small break.
Transmigration.
A new world.
A system.
It was like stepping into the pages of the very stories that had kept him alive through years of loneliness.
A dream come true.
A dream he never wanted to wake from again.