KAI CHEN POV
I'm dying at my keyboard, and all I can think about is how stupid this is.
My chest feels like someone's squeezing my heart with both hands. The pain shoots down my left arm, and my vision goes blurry around the edges. My horror game—Shadow's End—is still running on three monitors in front of me. Five years of work. Almost finished. Almost perfect.
"Not... yet..." I gasp, trying to reach for the mouse. "Just need to... fix the final boss..."
My hand won't move. The office spins. I'm Marcus Webb, thirty-four years old, and I'm going to die alone in my game studio at 3 AM because I forgot to eat for two days straight. Again.
This is so embarrassingly predictable.
The pain explodes in my chest like a bomb going off. I slam face-first into my keyboard. The last thing I hear is the game's creepy music still playing: You cannot escape the darkness...
Then everything goes black.
I wake up screaming.
My eyes snap open and I'm gasping like I've been drowning. But I'm not at my desk. I'm in a bed—a narrow, uncomfortable bed that smells weird. The room is small and dirty, with cracked walls and a flickering light that hurts my eyes.
What the hell?
I sit up fast, and my head spins. Wrong. Everything feels wrong. My body is too light, too small. My hands—I stare at my hands—they're not mine. These are younger hands. Smoother. No coffee stains on the fingers from years of all-nighters.
"Okay, this is a really weird dream," I say out loud. Except my voice sounds different too. Higher. Younger.
I stumble out of bed and crash into a dirty mirror hanging on the wall.
The face staring back at me is NOT Marcus Webb.
It's a kid. Maybe eighteen years old. Sharp cheekbones, messy black hair, and exhausted dark eyes that look way too old for that young face. There are silver streaks in the hair—like someone painted them there with mercury.
"What. The. Hell."
The instant I think that, memories that aren't mine explode into my brain like a bomb.
This body belongs—belonged—to Kai Chen. Eighteen years old. An E-rank Spirit Warrior who just died three hours ago from ghost possession while trying to hunt a low-level spirit for pocket money. He failed. The spirit invaded his mind and ate him from the inside out until there was nothing left but an empty shell.
And somehow, I'm wearing that shell now.
But that's not even the crazy part.
The crazy part is this world.
Forty years ago, something called the Veil broke. It was like a wall between Earth and the spirit world, and when it shattered, ghosts and monsters poured through. Millions died. Cities burned. Humanity almost went extinct.
Then people discovered something insane: they could fight back by eating emotions. Not regular emotions—negative ones. Fear. Anger. Grief. Despair. When you consume that energy, you get supernatural powers. Super strength. Speed. The ability to see and fight spirits.
They call these people Spirit Warriors.
The stronger the negative emotion you eat, the more powerful you become. There are ranks: E, D, C, B, A, S, SS, and the legendary SSS that only three people in the world have reached. Kai Chen was bottom-tier E-rank—basically useless.
And now that's me.
I stagger backward and sit on the bed hard. My heart—Kai's heart—is racing.
"I reincarnated," I whisper. "I died and got reincarnated into a dead kid's body in a world where people literally eat fear to survive."
This is like every weird anime I watched during college, except it's REAL and I'm living it and oh God, there are actual monsters outside that want to kill me.
A loud BANG on the door makes me jump.
"KAI!" A rough voice shouts. "Rent was due yesterday! Pay up or get out!"
Right. Kai's memories tell me that's Mr. Zhou, the landlord of this garbage apartment building in the Undercity—the poorest, most dangerous part of Neo-Requiem. Kai owed him three months of rent. He was trying to hunt that spirit to get money. Instead, he died.
"I need more time!" I yell back, my voice cracking.
"You got until tomorrow morning! Then I'm throwing your stuff in the street!"
His footsteps stomp away.
I drop my head into my hands. Okay. Okay. Think, Marcus—no, Kai now. I'm Kai now. I need to think like a game designer. Treat this like a really messed up survival game.
Current status: I'm an eighteen-year-old kid in massive debt, living in a slum, in a world full of ghosts, with the weakest possible rank and zero combat skills.
But—and here's where my brain starts working—I have something nobody else in this world has.
I have Marcus Webb's memories. Thirty-four years of designing horror games. I know EXACTLY how fear works. What makes people scared. How to build suspense, create dread, manipulate emotions through sound and visuals and pacing.
In my old world, that made me a successful game designer.
In THIS world, where fear is literally power...
"Holy crap," I breathe. "I can weaponize everything I know."
My mind starts racing. Spirit Warriors harvest fear by killing spirits or traumatizing humans—both violent, dangerous methods. But what if I could GENERATE fear artificially? Through games? Through experiences that scare people without actually hurting them?
Pure fear. Controlled fear. Industrial-grade terror on demand.
I jump up and start pacing the tiny room, thinking fast. Virtual reality exists here—Kai's memories show me that. If I could build a VR horror experience using my knowledge from designing games for fifteen years...
The idea hits me like lightning.
I could create a fear-generation machine.
"This could work," I mutter, grinning like a maniac. "This could actually work. I could go from bottom-tier trash to—"
Something moves in the corner of my eye.
I freeze.
The shadows in the corner of my room are moving wrong. Twisting. Growing darker even though nothing changed with the light. A smell fills the air—like rotting meat mixed with old blood.
Kai's instincts scream at me: SPIRIT.
A low, wet whisper echoes from the darkness: "Kaaaaiii... you look... tasty... this time..."
Ice shoots down my spine.
The spirit that killed Kai three hours ago didn't leave.
It's still here.
And it's coming back to finish eating what's left of him—which is now ME.
The shadows surge forward like a wave of black oil. I see hundreds of eyes opening in the darkness. Teeth. So many teeth.
I'm weaponless. Powerless. The weakest rank possible.
The spirit laughs—a sound like bones breaking—and lunges straight at my face.
I have exactly one second to realize that I survived a heart attack and reincarnation just to get eaten by a ghost in my first five minutes of my new life.
Then everything goes black again.
But this time, I hear something else.
A girl's cold voice cutting through the darkness like a knife: "How pathetic. You can't even handle a Class-E Shade?"
And the sound of something dying that isn't me.