Lucien woke beneath a low, uneven ceiling of woven branches and mud-plastered wood.
For a heartbeat, he didn't know where—or who—he was.
His body felt like lead, his skull throbbed with a dull, relentless ache, and his thoughts tangled together like roots from two different soils forced into the same ground. One set belonged to a starving, grieving boy. The other to a man who had never seen mana in his life.
He lay on a thin pallet of dried ferns inside a crude hut. The air carried earth, old smoke, and the faint tang of boiled roots.
I… fell asleep?
The last thing he remembered was the flood—memories not his own crashing through his mind like a dam giving way. Towering steel structures. Roaring metal beasts in the sky. Lights that burned without flame. A world governed by cold, unbreakable laws instead of capricious gods.
The rough-hewn door creaked open on leather hinges.
An elderly goblin shuffled in, leaning heavily on a staff carved from dark root-wood. His ears were long, torn, and drooping with age; his green-gray skin mapped with scars and wrinkles. But his yellow eyes were sharp—ancient, weighing, seeing far too much.
"You're awake," the goblin said in his gravelly tongue. The words reached Lucien clearly, as if spoken in his own mind.
Lucien pushed himself up slowly, every muscle protesting.
"I am Grash'kar, chief of this village," the old goblin continued. "You wonder why we did not kill the human child who walked into our camp."
Lucien stayed silent, watching.
"We smelled nothing on you," Grash'kar said. "No god's blessing. No mana. No divine mark." His gaze softened, just a fraction. "To us, you are not human. So you are not prey."
Lucien's breath left him in a quiet rush. The knot in his chest loosened, but only slightly.
"…Thank you," he said, voice rough from disuse. "Truly."
The chief nodded once and slipped back out, leaving the door ajar.
One month later
Lucien stood at the edge of the small goblin village, watching mist drift between the ancient trees.
In the quiet of his mind, a realization settled like stone.
This place really is a paradise.
Not because it was gentle or safe.
But because no one here pretended to be.
He spent his days exploring the forest's edge, observing the goblins. They hunted with snares and spears, built shelters from mud and vine, treated wounds with herbs and boiled bark. No mana warmed their hands. No spells bent the world to their will.
They were the bottom of every chain—despised by humans, hunted by stronger monsters, forgotten by the gods.
Just like me.
The thought no longer stung. It felt like belonging.
The goblins weren't weak because they lacked magic.
They were weak because the world had decided magic was the only strength that mattered.
That truth burned steady and hot in Lucien's chest.
At night, when the village fires burned low, Lucien turned inward.
He sifted through the memories that weren't his.
A life unfolded in fragments: a man named Yard. Long days pouring concrete under a burning sun, muscles aching, dust in his lungs. A simple construction worker—no titles, no gifts, no miracles. Just callused hands and quiet endurance.
Then the betrayal.
Accused of theft he never committed. Fired. Abandoned by friends who feared guilt by association. No one listened. No one cared.
He died alone on a cold street, far from home.
Lucien's jaw tightened until it hurt.
Even a world without magic can be this cruel.
But the voice that had spoken in the clearing returned sometimes, quiet and certain.
I am you.
Was Yard reborn into his body?
Had their souls fused?
Or was this something stranger—two forsaken lives braided together by chance or fate?
Lucien didn't have answers. The memories were vast but broken, like shards of colored glass.
Yet among the shards gleamed something extraordinary.
A power not borrowed from gods.
It was called science.
The word tasted strange on his tongue, but it rang like a bell inside his chest.
Science did not pray.
It observed.
It tested.
It forced the world to obey predictable laws.
And in Yard's world, ordinary people—starting with nothing—had used it to split atoms, touch the moon, speak across oceans.
Lucien's heart beat faster.
Hope—dangerous, sharp, alive—stirred for the first time since the fire.
But reality followed close behind.
Yard knew this power existed… but he was no master of it.
Just a worker who poured foundations for others' dreams.
"So how do I wield it?" Lucien whispered into the dark.
He dug deeper into the fragments.
There were people called scientists. Researchers. Engineers.
None of them were born knowing.
They started ignorant—just like Yard.
Just like Lucien.
Yet together, they conquered night, sky, sickness, distance.
They reached beyond their world.
Lucien's eyes narrowed in the firelight.
"Then I will start the same way."
Magic had abandoned him.
The gods had turned away.
Humanity had burned his past to ash.
Fine.
Science would be his blade.
"I know almost nothing now," he admitted to the quiet hut. "But neither did they."
If a world without magic could touch the stars…
Then a world built on magic, mastered by science…
Lucien smiled—small, cold, and real—for the first time since the night his parents died.
"I will become greater than any king."
Not a hero.
Not a god.
But the architect of a new order.
One that would make the old world kneel.