Chapter 1: Transmigration
It was raining heavily today, perhaps it hadn't rained this much in last few months.
"...effective immediately, your position as Senior Data Analyst has been terminated due to restructuring within the Analytics Division. We thank you for your contributions and wish you well in future endeavors..."
He stood on the edge of the pavement, clutching a damp cardboard box filled with five years of his life. Five years of eighty-hour workweeks, erased in a ten-minute meeting.
Not because of incompetence. But because he had seen something that he shouldn't have.
A discrepancy in the Q3 2019 revenue reports. Quite large — $4.2 million routed through a subsidiary that Rhain had never heard of.
He was naive enough to complain about that.
And now here he stood here with the termination letter in his hand.
The signal was red.
Rhain stepped off the curb.
I should have copied the files. I should have kept a backup on a personal drive, encrypted, hidden, untouchable. I should have gone to the SEC first and Hayne never. I should have —
The horn was enormous.
He didn't see the truck.
He didn't hear the screech of burning tires or the blare of the horn.
There was only the sudden, violent impact of steel shattering bone.
Then the darkness swallowed him.
.......
Pain.
It was the first thing that registered.
A deep, agonizing throb that radiated from the very marrow of his bones.
He gasped, his lungs screaming as they expanded against what felt like a shattered ribcage.
The air he pulled in was stale, thick with the stench of damp earth, and dried blood.
His blood.
He tried to open his eyes. The lids stuck. Crusted with something. He forced them apart, and the world arrived in fragments.
This isn't a hospital.
He turned his head, and the motion sent a spike of agony through his neck and he nearly blacked out.
When his vision cleared, he finally saw the room in which he was lying.
A cell.
That was the only word for it.
Four paces wide, three deep, with a straw mat beneath him that had rotted to the consistency of wet cardboard.
A cracked clay jug sat in the corner, a skin of grey water pooled around its base. No window. One door — warped wood with an iron latch, closed.
This isn't anywhere I've ever been.
His body was wrong — too light, too narrow, the proportions off in ways he couldn't articulate.
He looked down at his hands.
It was covered with many bruises and had turned purple in many areas.
But these were not his hands.
"AHHHH!"
All of a sudden, his body began to convulse violently, his back arching off the cold stone as agony tore through his mind.
It felt like someone had pried his skull open and poured hot magma inside.
Memories flooded in, crashing over him in an endless tide, making his limbs jerk and his breath come out in bloody gasps.
Eighteen years of a life that was not his own, delivered in the span of three breaths.
A boy. An orphan named Rhain Voss.
His parents died before he was even ten years old. Taken in by the Azure Cloud Sect—a struggling, bottom-tier faction in the remote Outer Frontier Territories.
The world was called Aethermere. A colossal, boundless planet saturated with a primordial energy known as Aetheric Essence.
It was a world of cultivators. Men and women who could shatter mountains, split rivers, and live for millennia. A world where the strong ruled as gods and the weak were trampled into the dirt.
And the boy whose body he now occupied had been the weakest of them all.
Although he was an outer disciple of the Azure Cloud Sect, it was only in name. He had been taken in as cheap, disposable labor, masked beneath the worthless title of an 'outer disciple.'
He possessed a pathetic wisp of cultivation talent. His Essence pathways were clogged, withered, and practically dead. He was barely capable of sensing the ambient energy of the world, let alone absorbing it.
No talent. No resources. No backing.
Because of that, he was prey.
Faces flashed before Rhain's eyes.
The sneering visage of Fennick Graves.
The heavy thud of boots kicking into his stomach.
The sound of his own ribs cracking.
Fennick Graves. Joss Hale. Terran Moor.
They had beaten him for hours.
Fennick had been drunk on cheap rice wine.
Joss and Terran had held the boy down.
Fennick had hit him until the hitting stopped being recreational and became methodical.
Ribs. Kidneys. Stomach. Jaw.
The boy had stopped making sounds after the fourth blow to the face. He'd stopped moving after the seventh. They'd left him on the stone floor in a posture no living body would choose.
Simply because he had looked at them wrong. Because they were Essence Awakening Level 3, and he was nothing.
The boy died sometime in the dark hours before dawn. His heart, damaged from years of malnutrition and the accumulated trauma of a body that had never been given enough to properly heal, simply stopped.
Rhain sat in the silence for a long time.
He sat with his back against the wall, his bruised body throbbing, and he thought.
I died on Earth after being kicked out of my company without any fault.
And now I'm here.
In a body that belonged to someone who was beaten to death for the crime of existing.
He looked at the thin hands again. The bruises. The evidence of a life spent as something less than furniture — at least furniture served a function people valued.
The original Rhain Voss had been kind, according to his memories. Gentle. He'd endured the beatings and the hunger and the humiliation with a quiet, exhausted hope that tomorrow might be different. That someone might notice. That some elder might intervene. That the world might, eventually, be fair.
He died hoping.
The thought struck Rhain like a thunder.
I won't make that mistake.
He understood, with the sudden and total certainty of a man standing at the edge of a cliff, that this world far worse than Earth.
There were people who could crush him like an insect.
People who would crush him like an insect if he gave them the slightest reason, or no reason at all.
The original Rhain Voss had died because he was weak and no one had protected him.
The new Rhain Voss would not make either of those conditions permanent.
Get strong. Get strong enough that no one can touch you. No one can hurt you. No one can decide whether you will live or die.
The voice came from nowhere and everywhere.
Suddenly, a crisp, mechanical voice echoed in his mind, devoid of any warmth or emotion.
Ding!
[Sign-In System initialized.]
Rhain flinched.
[Binding to Host... Complete.]
A translucent interface materialized at the edge of his vision.
A dark panel with thin silver borders containing exactly two elements: a status readout showing nothing but his name and the notation Mortal — Uncultivated, and a single pulsing notification.
[Transmigration Event detected. First Sign-In available. Sign In?]
Rhain stared at the notification.
A system. Like the novels. Like the web fiction I read on my phone during lunch breaks in a life that ended under the wheels of a truck.
Is this my golden finger?
Without a shred of hesitation, Rhain answered in his mind.
Yes.
[Sign-In Reward: Abyssal Sovereign Physique (Sovereign-Grade). Integrating with Host...]