The last thing Jake Morrison remembered was crossing the street.
Well, not quite. The actual last thing was thinking, "Huh, those ice zombies look pretty cool."
He'd been walking home from work, phone in hand, finally giving in to all the hype. Game of Thrones. Everyone at the office wouldn't shut up about it. So he'd pulled up the first episode on his phone while walking. Bad idea, probably. But it was just a few blocks.
Fifteen minutes in. Some rangers in the snow. Ice zombies attacking. White Walkers. That's what the internet called them. Pretty cool effects for a TV show.
Then: Green light. He'd looked up from his phone just in time to see he was in the crosswalk. Stepped forward. Then not-green light. Then headlights. Then nothing.
And now: Everything.
Cold.
That was the first sensation. Not "forgot your jacket" cold. Not even "Chicago winter" cold. This was wrong cold. Cold that shouldn't exist. Cold that burned.
Jake's eyes snapped open.
Gray sky. Snowflakes falling in slow motion, each one visible in crystal clarity like his eyes had been upgraded to 8K. Everything was too sharp, too detailed, too real.
He tried to sit up.
Nothing happened.
He tried to move his arm.
Nothing.
Tried to wiggle his fingers.
Nothing.
"Okay," he thought. "Don't panic. Probably just in shock from the accident. Paramedics are coming. Just... wait."
But he wasn't breathing. He could feel that now. Or rather, not feel it. No chest movement. No air. No heartbeat.
"Oh. I'm dead. That's... that's not ideal."
Then he noticed the others.
Shapes shuffling through the snow around him. Humanoid figures with jerky, uncoordinated movements. Pale, frozen flesh. Tattered furs and ancient armor. Eyes glowing dim blue like dying LEDs.
Zombies.
No. Not zombies.
White Walkers.
The word came unbidden to his mind, along with a flood of fragments from that fifteen minutes of TV he'd watched on his phone. Ice zombies. Rangers in the snow. Something about a Wall.
"Oh no. Oh no. That show. Game of Thrones. I'm in Game of Thrones."
But wait. These weren't the White Walkers. Those were the tall scary ones. These were the zombies they made. What did the internet call them?
Wights.
"I'm a wight. I'm a wight. I'm a zombie in a TV show I barely started watching."
Jake tried to look down at himself. With agonizing slowness, like moving through cement, his head tilted forward.
Pale hands. Frozen, blue-tinged flesh. Ragged furs. And reflected in the ice beneath him: glowing blue eyes.
"This is really, really bad."
Then, as if the universe wanted to pile on, text appeared in his vision. Floating. Impossible. Like a video game HUD.
[WHITE WALKER EVOLUTION SYSTEM ACTIVATED]
[Host: Jake Morrison]
[Race: Wight (Tier 1)]
[Stats:]
[Strength: 5]
[Agility: 3]
[Endurance: 8]
[Intelligence: 45 (90% LOCKED)]
[Magic Power: 0]
[Cold Affinity: 10]
[Evolution Points: 0/1,000]
[Status: Bound to White Walker Lord - Kazhor the Silent]
"System? I get a system? Like an isekai light novel?"
At least he'd read enough of those during boring meetings to recognize the trope.
More text:
[WARNING: Host intelligence 90% LOCKED due to undead neural limitations]
[Current cognitive function: 10%]
"My brain is locked? I'm a stupid zombie?"
He tried to think through the implications. Tried to plan. Tried to...
Wait, what was he thinking about?
Right. Locked brain. Ten percent cognitive function.
"This is... this is really bad."
And he'd only watched fifteen minutes of the show. Fifteen minutes! He knew there were ice zombies and... and... a wall? Rangers? That was basically it. He didn't know the plot. Didn't know the characters. Didn't know anything useful.
"Great. Just great. Dead in a world I know nothing about."
Jake's scattered thoughts were interrupted by a sensation. Not physical. Something deeper. Primal. Like invisible strings attached to his dead limbs.
Move.
The command wasn't in words. Wasn't in his head. It just was.
His body obeyed.
Against his will, Jake's corpse lurched to its feet. The movement was jerky, uncoordinated, like a puppet with tangled strings. He shambled forward, joining the horde of other wights.
"No! Stop! I didn't..."
But his body didn't listen. Couldn't listen. Something else was driving it.
Then Jake saw him.
The figure stood twenty feet away, motionless as a statue. Tall. Eight feet at least. Impossibly thin, wrapped in ancient armor that seemed carved from ice itself. Skin like cracked porcelain, pale as death. Hair white and frost-touched. And those eyes. Burning blue, bright as stars, cold as the void between worlds.
A White Walker.
The real thing. Like the one from the show. The one that had killed those rangers in the cold open.
Every instinct Jake had screamed at him to run. Every survival reflex from twenty-eight years of being alive told him this thing was wrong. Unnatural. Death given form.
But his body didn't run. It shuffled forward with the other wights, following the White Walker's silent command like a dog on a leash.
"Okay. Okay. Think. Process. You're Jake Morrison. Software engineer. You died. You're in that TV show. You're a zombie. There's a system. You need... what was it? A thousand points?"
His thoughts felt like trying to grab smoke. Hard to hold onto. Ten percent cognitive function wasn't much.
"Ten percent. Need points. Get points... kill things? Absorb things?"
The White Walker raised one hand.
March.
The horde moved. Fifty wights, all shambling in the same direction. North. Deeper into the frozen wasteland.
Jake had no choice but to follow.
The landscape was endless. Ice stretched in every direction, broken only by frozen rock formations and the occasional skeletal tree. The wind howled, carrying snow that would've blinded him if he were alive. But he wasn't alive. He was dead. And his dead eyes saw everything with horrible clarity.
Hours passed. Or maybe days. Time felt wrong when you didn't need to sleep or eat or rest.
The White Walker led them in complete silence. Kazhor the Silent. The system had called him that. He never looked back. Never checked on his undead servants. They were tools. Nothing more.
And Jake was trapped inside one of those tools, screaming silently.
"Alright. Alright. Stay calm. You've debugged worse problems."
Had he?
"Okay, no, this is definitely worse. But still. Problem-solving. That's what you do."
He tried to focus on the system message. Tried to remember through the fog.
"Evolution Points. Need one thousand. Get them by... killing things? Absorbing things?"
The wight horde shambled past a frozen rabbit. It didn't move. Probably dead already, frozen solid.
"Can I... can I break away? Try to grab it?"
Jake tried to move his arm independently. Just a little. Just to see if...
His arm twitched. Barely. A fraction of an inch.
But it moved.
"Holy... I can move! A little! Just need to..."
The thought scattered like ash. What was he doing?
"Right. Moving. Arm. Points. One thousand points."
It was like thinking through molasses. Every thought took effort. Holding onto an idea was like holding water in his hands.
"This is going to be a long... long... what was I saying?"
The horde stopped.
Kazhor stood motionless, his ice-blue eyes scanning the horizon. Looking for something. Waiting for something.
Then Jake heard it: Howling. Wolves.
MOVE. KILL.
The command slammed into every wight simultaneously. The horde surged forward. A wave of shambling corpses. Jake's body moved with them, lurching toward the sound.
Three arctic wolves appeared over a ridge. Large, shaggy beasts with thick white fur and yellow eyes that went wide at the sight of the undead horde. They turned to flee, paws churning through snow.
Too slow.
The horde was already moving. A shambling avalanche of frozen flesh and grasping hands. The wolves tried to scatter. One went left, two went right. The wights split like water, following their targets with mindless determination.
Jake's body lurched after the rightmost wolf. His legs moved in that awful shambling gait, but he was faster than he should be. The wolf was fast, but the wight's endurance was infinite. No burning lungs. No exhausted muscles. Just relentless pursuit.
The wolf made it fifteen yards before three wights cut off its escape. It spun, snarling, cornered against an ice formation. Lips pulled back to reveal fangs meant for tearing flesh.
Jake's body didn't hesitate. Didn't feel fear. Just shambled forward with the others.
The wolf lunged.
Its jaws clamped around a wight's neck, tearing. The wight fell, throat ripped out, but it didn't die. Couldn't die, already dead. It kept crawling forward even as black blood leaked from the wound.
The wolf backed up, confused. It had just killed its attacker. Why was it still moving?
That moment of confusion cost it.
Jake's dead hands closed around fur. He felt coarse hair under his frozen fingers, felt the warmth of living flesh. The first warm thing he'd touched since dying. The wolf twisted, snapping at him, and its teeth sank into his forearm.
There was no pain. Just the sensation of meat tearing, bone crunching. The wolf pulled, and Jake's entire forearm came off in its mouth, severed at the elbow.
Jake's body didn't react. The other arm kept grabbing. Another wight piled on from behind, then another. The wolf thrashed, powerful muscles working, trying to shake them off.
One of the wights grabbed the wolf's hind leg and pulled. The one with the torn throat. The wolf yelped, went down. More wights swarmed it. Hands grabbed fur, grabbed limbs, grabbed anything they could hold.
The wolf fought. Oh, it fought. Teeth flashing, claws raking. It tore another wight's face clean off. Ripped open another's belly. But there were too many. Always too many.
Jake's remaining hand found purchase on the wolf's neck. He couldn't feel it, but he knew he was squeezing. Other hands joined his. The wolf's snarls turned to whines, then to choking gasps.
Then: Nothing. The wolf went limp.
The wights didn't stop. They kept tearing, kept pulling, until the wolf was in pieces scattered across the snow. Red blood steaming in the frozen air. The only color in a world of white and gray.
[+2 EP]
[Total: 2/1,000]
[Control: 0.2%]
The notification flashed in Jake's vision.
"Two points. TWO. I need one thousand. That's... that's..."
His foggy brain tried to do math.
"That's five hundred wolves. Five hundred. Are there even five hundred wolves in this entire frozen wasteland?"
But something else happened. Something more important than the points.
His thoughts were slightly clearer. Just a fraction. Like someone had wiped a smudge off a dirty window.
"Every ten points is one percent control. So two points means... point-two percent. So... one percent control equals..."
He could think a little better.
"Oh. OH. That's the carrot. Get points, think better. Think better, get more points. It's a progression system."
The fog was still there. Still thick. But now he could see a path forward.
The wights reassembled around Kazhor, leaving the wolf corpses behind. The ones who'd been torn apart were already regenerating. Flesh knitting back together, bones reforming. Jake watched his own arm slowly grow back from the stump over the course of the next hour. Bone first, then muscle, then frozen flesh. It was agonizing in a distant way, like remembering pain rather than feeling it.
Kazhor led them north again. Deeper into the ice.
And Jake Morrison, former software engineer, current undead zombie, involuntary isekai protagonist, began to plan.
"Okay. New life. New rules. I need one thousand points. That means killing things. Small things, probably. When I can slip away. When big boss over there isn't watching."
He tried to look at Kazhor without moving his head too obviously.
"Can't let him know I'm conscious. If he figures it out... he'll probably just destroy me. Right? That's what you do with defective tools."
The horde marched through snow. Jake's thoughts, slightly less foggy now, turned over the problem.
"Two points for a wolf kill. Probably less for smaller prey. Rabbits maybe? One point? Two? If I could hunt alone..."
But he couldn't. Not yet. Kazhor controlled him. The White Walker's will was absolute.
"Need more control. Need more points. Need to get strong enough to move independently."
Jake's dead body shambled through the snow, following the White Walker lord into the frozen north. Following orders he couldn't resist. Trapped in a corpse. Trapped in a nightmare.
But somewhere deep inside, in that tiny ten-point-two-percent of his functioning brain, Jake Morrison smiled.
Or would have, if his face could move.
"Alright, Westeros. Tutorial hell mode. Zombies. Ice zombies. White Walkers. Magic systems. Evolution mechanics."
His thoughts were already starting to fog again. Hard to maintain focus.
"But I've stayed up for seventy-two hours debugging production servers. I've dealt with clients who don't know what they want. I've survived performance reviews and corporate restructuring."
The frozen wasteland stretched endlessly before him.
"I can survive this."
Probably.
"Maybe."
A bitter thought cut through the fog: "At least I don't have to worry about that code review anymore. Jenkins is going to be pissed when I don't show up Monday."
The absurdity of it almost made him laugh. Almost.
"Really hope there are a lot of rabbits out here."
The horde marched on. The wind howled. The cold pressed in from all sides.
And Jake Morrison, trapped in a dead body in a frozen hell, took his first stumbling steps toward survival.