Arthur stared at the monitor. The spreadsheet on his screen had ninety columns. It was two in the morning on a Tuesday. He rubbed his eyes. The office was quiet. He heard the hum of the air conditioning and the low buzz of the servers in the next room. Nothing else.
He worked in logistics for a massive shipping firm. The job was not glamorous. It was just moving heavy boxes from point A to point B on a global scale. But his boss demanded perfection. If a cargo ship was late arriving in Singapore, millions of dollars vanished. Arthur was the man who made sure the ships were never late.
He took a sip of cold coffee from a paper cup. It tasted like battery acid. He drank it anyway. He needed the caffeine to stay awake. He was thirty-two years old, but his body felt fifty. His lower back ached constantly. His eyes were dry and red. He had not seen his own apartment in daylight for three days.
People in the office called him a workaholic behind his back. Arthur just thought of himself as a pragmatist. You put in the hours, you get the paycheck, you buy financial security. That was the deal he made with life. There was no magic to it. No great passion. Just the daily grind. He had a heavy mortgage to pay off. He also had an ex-fiancée. She left him two years ago because he married his desk instead of her. He knew she made the right choice.
He typed another complex formula into a cell. The numbers crunched. A green highlight appeared on the screen. The shipment route was optimized.
He sighed and leaned back in his office chair. The cheap faux leather squeaked. He looked at a small photo frame on his desk. It was an old picture. His parents were dead. He had no siblings. He was alone. It was just him and the spreadsheets. He liked the spreadsheets. They made sense. If a number was wrong, you could find the error and fix it. Human beings were much messier.
He coughed. It was a dry, hacking sound that rattled his ribs. His chest felt tight. He figured it was just indigestion. He ate a stale sandwich from the breakroom vending machine at midnight. He reached into his desk drawer for his antacid pills. The plastic bottle was empty.
The tightness in his chest got worse. It did not feel like heartburn anymore. It felt like a heavy stone was sitting right on top of his lungs.
Arthur tried to stand up. His legs wobbled. He gripped the edge of the laminate desk to keep from falling. The harsh white glow of the monitor seemed to pulse in time with his erratic heartbeat. His left arm went completely numb. A cold, clammy sweat broke out on his forehead.
He knew what was happening. He was not a stupid man. He recognized the symptoms from the mandatory health and safety videos.
Heart attack.
He reached out for his desk phone. It was sitting right next to the keyboard. His fingers brushed the black plastic receiver. But he could not grab it. The pain spiked suddenly. It was a sharp, tearing sensation right behind his sternum.
He gasped for air. The air conditioning hummed loudly in his ears. The room tilted sideways.
He fell hard. He hit the thin office carpet. The impact knocked the remaining wind out of him. He stared up at the ceiling tiles. They were white and square with little grey dots. He opened his mouth to yell for help. Nothing came out. His throat felt locked shut.
It was a Tuesday night. He was going to die on a Tuesday night alone in a grey cubicle.
He felt a strange, cold sense of annoyance. He had not finished the quarterly projection report. His boss was going to be furious tomorrow morning. He wondered who would clean out his desk.
The pain reached its peak. It consumed his entire nervous system. The office faded to black. The hum of the servers stopped.
Arthur stopped breathing. His heart gave one last, pathetic flutter in his chest and quit. He was dead.
Far away from Earth, across the cold expanse of space, existed the Apex Empire. It was a civilization built entirely on flesh, bone, and mutation. The capital world of the empire was called Chimeria. It was not a planet made of steel skyscrapers and glass windows. It was a world grown from bio-engineered coral and towering bone-trees that scraped the atmosphere.
Power in the empire came from a system called the Gene-Dao. Volatile Aether-strands floated in the air like invisible radiation. Martial artists breathed these strands in. They used the energy to force their DNA to evolve. They hunted mutated beasts in the wild. They ripped out the genetic cores of those beasts and spliced the monster genetics into their own bodies.
The strong lived for thousands of years. They could crush boulders with bare hands and survive in the vacuum of space. The weak were slaughtered and turned into biological fertilizer.
At the very top of this brutal food chain sat the Emperor. He was an Earth Immortal. A being of terrifying, planet-shaking power. He ruled countless star systems with an iron fist.
But even immortals eventually fall. The Emperor was dying. A mysterious, incurable rot was eating his cells from the inside out.
His children were just waiting for him to take his last breath. The royal siblings were monsters in human skin. They were heavily spliced with dragon DNA, toxic plant matter, and thick insect carapaces. They each controlled massive bio-sects across the capital. As soon as the Emperor died, they would tear each other apart to claim the empty throne.
And then there was Jin. The seventh prince of the empire.
Jin was incredibly weak. He was stuck at Foundation Level 3. In a royal family of gods and monsters, he was basically just a regular human. His body had a strange defect. It violently rejected high-tier beast genetics. If he tried to absorb a mutant core, he coughed up blood. They called him the Trash Prince behind his back. He was a stain on the perfect royal bloodline.
Knowing the violent succession war was coming, the Second Princess, Vanya, decided to visit Jin. She brought him a gift. She handed him a small glass vial filled with swirling purple liquid. She called it a genetic stabilizer. She smiled warmly when she gave it to him and told him it would fix his broken body.
It was actually poison. It was a rare, untraceable neuro-toxin designed to slowly melt a person's soul while leaving their physical body perfectly intact.
Jin drank it. He trusted his older sister. He climbed into his medical bio-pod to rest and let the medicine work. As he slept, his soul quietly dissolved into nothing. The physical body was left behind in the gel. It was an empty, hollow vessel.
Arthur woke up.
He did not open his eyes immediately. He felt thick liquid pressing against his skin. It was warm and viscous. He tried to take a breath. Fluid rushed into his nose and down his throat.
Panic hit his brain. He was drowning.
His eyes snapped open. Everything was green. A luminescent, sickly green light surrounded him. He was floating suspended inside a tank. Small bubbles rose past his face. He thrashed his arms. His hands hit a curved surface right in front of him. It felt like thick glass.
He pounded his fists against it. The fluid in his lungs burned like fire. He needed oxygen. Where was his office? Where was the grey carpet?
He pushed harder against the glass. The material groaned under the pressure.
He realized he was not in his thirty-two-year-old body anymore. His arms felt different. They were thinner, but they were wired with a strange, latent physical energy he had never felt before. He kicked his legs hard. The bio-pod hissed loudly.
The glass cracked. A long seam split open down the middle. The green fluid rushed out in a heavy wave. Arthur spilled out onto the floor with it. He hit a hard, cold surface. He rolled onto his side and coughed violently. Globs of amniotic gel splattered against the floor.
He gasped. Real air filled his lungs. It smelled strange. It smelled like copper blood and static electricity.
Arthur pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. He shivered in the cold air.
He looked down at his hands. They were pale and smooth. There were no calluses from typing on a keyboard for ten years. These were the soft hands of royalty.
Before he could process the thought, his head split open in pain.
It was not a physical headache. It was a massive mental explosion. Decades of alien memories slammed into his brain all at once.
Chimeria. The Apex Empire. The Gene-Dao. He saw massive spires made of white bone. He saw men with jagged mantis blades growing directly out of their forearms. He felt the sharp humiliation of being beaten to the ground by his older brother during a sparring match.
I am Jin. Seventh Prince of the Apex Lineage. Arthur gripped his head tightly. He squeezed his eyes shut. The memories kept coming faster. They violently merged with his own mind. He was Arthur, the tired logistics manager from Earth. And he was also Jin, the trash prince of a dying empire.
Then came the final memory.
He saw a beautiful woman with bright emerald eyes. Vanya. She handed him a small vial of purple liquid. She smiled a sweet, caring smile. He drank it. He remembered the agonizing, silent burn as his soul was torn apart inside the bio-pod.
Arthur knelt on the bone floor, panting heavily. The memory download finished. The pain in his head faded to a dull ache.
He knew exactly where he was. He knew exactly who he was. And he knew his older sister had just murdered him.