In an old looking room with visibly deteriorated furniture, a boy lay on the ground with a streak of dried blood trailing down his cheek unto the floor. Why he was in that condition was unknown, but the television which remained switched on in that moment provided sufficient background ambience in place of silence in the dead of night. The late hour news anchor's voice droned on about things that carried no weight in that still, heavy room.
Like an electric shock, the boy's body jolted forward as his body sat up.
'Damn... This pain, this is more than just a headache, what happened?' He thought to himself as the midnight news continued in the background, the television providing the only light in the room. He pressed the heel of his palm against his temple as though that alone could push back whatever was splitting his skull from the inside. It didn't work. He groaned and stayed still for a moment, eyes half shut, waiting it the feeling to somehow subside.
After about three minutes passed, the unbearable headache faded quickly as if it was never there, and the boy gained enough composure to help himself to his feet. He swayed once, steadied himself against the wall, and stood there breathing for a moment before deciding his legs were trustworthy enough to carry him.
From his breast pocket hung an identity card that read Leon Carter . Leon walked slowly through the small cramped room towards the toilet. It took longer than it should have, since the room wasn't even that big.
Once he opened the toilet door, he bent his head above the basin, then he let open the tap for the water to rush over his head. The cold hit him immediately, sharp and clarifying. He remained like that for a while, probably a couple of minutes, letting the water do whatever work it could, before turning off the tap and looking at the mirror in front of him.
Unsurprisingly, the face staring back at him wasn't his at all.
'No way... Did I really crossover into another world?'
. . .
Leon, before a few moments ago, was a normal young man in the modern earth who worked night shifts at a café while studying computer science at a state university he only managed to get into. Not the most inspiring summary of a life, but it was his, and he hadn't exactly been fighting to change it either.
In his free time when there were no customers, he would make use of the computer in the café to watch movies and anime, and when he couldn't use them, he would be on his phone reading manga and web novels. There wasn't really much to his life than that. He was a pessimist who compelled himself with the belief that some people weren't just born lucky, and he put himself firmly in that category. It wasn't bitterness exactly, more like a quiet, settled acceptance he had made peace with a long time ago.
At the moment, he couldn't tell what had led to his death, as there was no 'floating in the void' stage for him, he simply went to sleep and woke up to a rude headache in another person's body. Not so much as a white light or a mysterious voice to ease him in, just unconsciousness and then this.
'I always knew that parking out of that shitty apartment was the right move, but I guess I delayed too much,' he thought to himself. Since it was raining heavily that night before he went to sleep, he speculated that he must have died in a building collapse. The walls of that place had never inspired confidence. He wasn't surprised.
"Heh, so unfortunate." He said it aloud to nobody. His voice came out hoarser than expected, and the sound of it in a stranger's throat was briefly unsettling. "Can't cry over spilled milk, though."
To his surprise, the body of the person he now inhabited was also named Leon, but the surname was quite fancy. Carter . He turned the identity card over in his fingers and looked at it again. "Leon Carter." He said it quietly under his breath once just to feel how it sat. It sat well, actually.
Apart from the name on the ID, Leon also noticed that he had dried blood on the side of his face that went down his right cheek, but it actually seemed to come from his mouth, as the metallic taste was becoming more present now that he noticed it. Like old copper left on the tongue. Because it had stayed there for a while, it didn't leave a good taste in his mouth at all, and the more aware of it he became, the worse it got.
'I wonder what happened? I feel so weak.'
The name on the ID nagged at him faintly, like a word sitting just at the edge of memory. He felt that something was familiar, but then nothing concrete came to mind after some quick seconds of thought, so he dismissed it and moved on to more immediate concerns.
After washing his face and rinsing his mouth, Leon stepped back and actually looked at himself properly, and then he couldn't help it. He laughed once, short and quiet, just a single exhale through his nose.
He was, without any question, quite handsome. The short snow white hair on his head did well to compliment a budding angular masculine face that appeared effortlessly striking. His eyes were golden, almost luminous, sitting sharp against his pale skin. The paleness concerned him a little, but he supposed blood loss would do that, and he figured once it was sorted his colour would return. Overall, he was a very attractive young lad, the kind that many ladies of all ages would willingly trip off a cliff for without even being pushed.
'Not a bad start,' he thought.
Exiting the toilet, he walked all the way to the front door where the light switch was. He was curious, so when he turned on the lights, the sight that greeted him made him go still.
'Damn, so this is why I look so pale and feel so weak?'
The blood on the floor was not a small amount. It was the kind of volume that made a person take a step back. Just what had caused it was staggering. 'Just how much blood would I have to cough to get this? It can't be from my mouth alone, this is just too much... Was I hit by someone?' He scanned the room from the doorway, trying to piece something together, but nothing came to mind. The regular inflow of memories that came with reincarnating into a new body hadn't arrived yet. He still believed it would come. He just needed to give it time.
After examining his head carefully with his fingers, Leon found nothing. No open cuts. No gash large enough to account for what was on the floor, which made the whole thing stranger.
Just when he wasn't expecting it, it happened.
When he tried to figure out more about who he was, to reach for some memory or anchor point, information broke into his head without warning. It wasn't painful the way he had expected it to be. It was more like being briefly submerged, a disorienting couple seconds where he wasn't quite sure whose thoughts were whose, before everything settled and became one. His previous life and this one blended together quietly and completely, like two rivers meeting. When it was done, his golden eyes lit up slowly, then fell back into something quieter. Heavier.
He had figured out what had happened to the Leon of this world.
He had swallowed an overdose of some kind of drug, he couldn't tell what it was from memory alone. The blood wasn't from a wound inflicted by someone else. It was from a single nail sticking out of the edge of the old wooden chair nearby, the kind of nail that didn't have any business being there but was, the way old furniture tended to produce such unpleasant surprises. He must have gone down and caught it on his way. That was what had caused the significant blood loss.
Whether it had truly been a suicide or something else entirely remained uncertain, even within the memories themselves. There was no clear answer. Just intention that was difficult to read.
That, however, was not what hit Leon the hardest.
According to his memories, he was actually from a rather notable background. So why was he living in a place like this? Looking around, it was a mess. The walls were peeling, the furniture looked like it had been given up on long ago, the studio apartment itself was the kind of space that apologised for existing. According to his memories, his father had been a very wealthy man. A respected one. His mother had died, yes, that was expected in stories like this, but his father had also died? Which meant his stepmother now held all the power within the family.
He looked around the apartment once more with fresh eyes.
"No wonder," he said simply.
He let that sit for exactly as long as it needed to, then moved on.
Because putting the tragedy aside, Leon was actually quite happy with what he was waking up to, the big picture of it, at least. For once in his life, he was not going to be poor! The family name alone was worth something, and even if it had been bruised and mishandled while he was absent from it, it still existed. That, at minimum, was a significant win, he counted it as one.
That wasn't even the best part, because this world was not like the one he had come from! Not at all! This world, with its peeling wallpaper and midnight news broadcasts and identity cards with fancy surnames, was straight out of the kind of novel he used to read hunched over his phone between shifts at the café.
This world was overrun with tears in space, called dungeons, from which monsters spilled endlessly into the world. Humanity's survival had become dependent on those rare individuals who could summon mythical and powerful creatures to fight against the threat. Summoners, bound to beasts of legend, standing at the line between the world and what came through those rifts.
Leon stood in the middle of that small, blood-stained studio apartment and felt something shift in his chest. Something that felt, embarrassingly, a lot like excitement.
'This is the life!'