Erick woke with a sharp, panicked yelp.
He cried out, the sound slipping out before he understood why. His eyes flung open to a world of white and gloom. Overhead, a pale winter sky loomed, and all around him, an ancient forest stretched on and on, as if it could swallow everything.
He lay on his back in the shallow snow, the cold seeping through his thin clothes. His breath rose in pale clouds, drifting away. Dazed, he stared up at the towering trees... massive pines and snow-dusted firs, their gnarled trunks like giant bones. The air smelled of sap, frozen earth, and something wild and ancient.
This was no forest he knew. Not from California, not from anywhere he knew.
The silence of the ancient forest pressed in on him, heavy and watchful.
He pushed himself upright, snow sticking to his clothes. He shivered, not just from the cold but from the odd feeling that something was wrong with his body. He felt too small. His limbs were light, his balance off, and his center of gravity lower than normal.
He looked down at himself.
"Wt... f?"
His hands, once steady with scalpels, compressions, and stitches under hospital lights, were gone. Now, he had tiny, quivering fingers... a child's hands.
He stared at them, rotating them and flexing them, watching the small knuckles move under the skin. His breath caught in his throat.
"No… no…"
His voice was high. Much too high. It was a child's voice.
He scrambled up, almost slipping on the ice. The forest spun around him... endless trees, snow, and cold. He hugged himself, shaking.
"What… where…?"
His thoughts raced as pieces of memory slammed into him, one after another.
He remembered the hospital, the exhaustion, and collapsing in the parking lot.
And then… nothing.
He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to breathe. He had been a doctor, Erick Hayes, an emergency physician at the busiest hospital in Los Angeles. His days were full of chaos, adrenaline, and the constant fight to save lives. He lived alone, with no family, no partner, no one waiting for him at home. His life was his work.
He remembered wishing... sometimes joking, sometimes desperate... for a different life. A world of fantasy, adventure, and meaning. Worlds like the ones he escaped into during his rare moments of rest. A world like...
His eyes snapped open.
"Game of Thrones," Erick whispered to himself.
The thought hit him hard. The forest around him... the towering pines, the biting cold, the heavy silence... felt like it had come straight from the screen. From the North. From the lands ruled by the Starks.
From the Wolfswoods.
He swallowed hard and turned slowly in place. The trees stretched out in every direction, their shadows long and dark. Snow clung to every branch, muffling sound and hiding footsteps. The forest felt alive... not comforting, but like a predator watching from the darkness.
It was not a place for children.
A cold wind sliced through him. He hugged himself tighter, his teeth chattering. He needed shelter. He needed warmth.
His foot brushed against something half‑buried in the snow. He looked down.
A small footprint. His own... turned in ice. Leading back into the deeper woods.
Suddenly, memories that weren't his flooded in, as if a dam had burst... he remembered the boy whose body he now inhabited.
His father's voice was shouting for him to flee. Running. Hearing people screaming. The sound of steel, smell of blood, cold, dark... slow, creeping numbness of death.
Erick staggered, clutching his head as the two sets of memories crashed together... the doctor who died of exhaustion and the child who froze alone in the woods.
The truth settled over him, quiet and cold, like falling snow.
He had been reborn. Not as a hero, not as a noble, not as a warrior.
As a lost child in the most dangerous forest in the North.
He looked around again, this time with the clear eyes of a doctor and the instincts of a survivor. The Wolfswood's vastness was both a threat and a shield. Bandits could be anywhere. So could wolves.
He took a slow breath, steadying himself.
The cold gnawed at him, almost alive.
Erick hugged his thin arms tighter around his chest, his breath shuddering out in pale clouds as he forced himself to think. Panic was a luxury he couldn't afford... not here, not in a forest that felt older than memory, older than people, older than the idea of warmth itself.
He needed fire... shelter. He needed them now.
The sun hung high, but its warmth was weak, barely enough to keep him from slipping back into the same frozen sleep that had killed the boy whose body he now wore. He scanned the tree line for anything... anything at all... that could help him survive the next hour.
That was when he saw it.
A massive pine, toppled long ago, its roots torn from the earth like the ribs of some ancient beast. The trunk lay at an angle, half-suspended, half-buried in snow. Beneath it, the exposed roots formed a natural hollow... dark, cramped, but shielded from the wind.
A shelter.
Primitive, but sheltered all the same.
Erick stumbled toward it, his boots crunching through the crusted snow. The cold bit at his ankles, but he ignored it. He dropped to his knees beside the fallen tree and tore at the loose bark with numb fingers. The bark came away in thick, rough sheets, flexible enough to wedge into the gaps between the roots.
He worked fast, driven by instinct and desperation.
He stuffed bark into every opening he could reach, creating a crude wall to block the wind. Snowflakes drifted down from the branches above, but the hollow beneath the tree was already warmer than the open air. Not warm enough to live in, but enough to buy him time.
His breath fogged the air as he crawled inside to test the space. It was tight... barely enough room for a grown man to curl up... but for a child's body, it was almost comfortable. The roots arched overhead like twisted ribs, and the ground beneath him was cold but dry.
He could work with this.
He backed out again, forcing his stiff legs to move. Fire. He needed fire.
He scanned the forest floor, his eyes darting from shadow to shadow. The Wolfswood was full of fallen branches... some fresh, some rotting, some buried under snow. He grabbed the driest ones he could find, snapping them over his knee. The smaller twigs cracked easily, while he had to smash the larger ones against the trunk of the fallen pine until they broke.
His fingers burned with cold, but he kept going.
He gathered armfuls of branches, dragging them back to the shelter. He needed tinder... something dry enough to catch quickly. He scraped at the underside of the fallen tree, peeling away thin curls of bark, the inner layers dry and papery.
He piled the tinder into a small mound just outside the hollow, using his body to shield it from the wind. His breath came fast, fogging the air as he worked. He remembered watching survival videos back on Earth during bored nights in the break room, watching strangers build fires in forests much less dangerous than this one.
He took two hard stones from the ground and tested their edges. From what he knew, the harder the stone, the bigger the possibility it would produce sparks when hit. One was sharp, the other dull. He struck them together.
Sparks flew.
His heart leaped.
He struck again. And again. Tiny sparks danced over the tinder, dying too quickly. He adjusted the angle, cupping his hands around the pile to trap the heat. His fingers shook so badly he almost dropped the stones.
Then, a faint glow appeared.
A single ember caught on the bark shavings, smoldering like a dying star.
"Come on," he whispered.
He leaned close... breath warmed the ember, coaxing it to life. It spread, slowly at first, then faster, crawling across the tinder like a hungry insect.
A small, weak flame appeared, but it was real.
Erick fed the fire carefully, adding thin twigs first, then thicker ones. The fire crackled, smoke curling upward into the cold air. The warmth hit him hard, stinging his frozen skin. He held his hands out, letting the heat soak into his bones.
He wasn't safe. Not yet. But he wasn't dying anymore.
He moved quickly, dragging more branches from the forest floor. He built the fire larger, feeding it until the flames rose knee‑high, bright and hungry. The heat radiated outward, melting the snow in a small circle around him.
Only then did he notice the weight at his hip.
A dagger.
He stopped, staring down at it. The leather sheath was worn, and the handle was a simple wooden handle wrapped in cord. He pulled it free. The blade was about six inches long and pitted with age. It wouldn't win any contests, but it was sharp.
He slid it back into the sheath, feeling a strange comfort in its presence.
The fire burned strongly now, crackling and popping as the larger branches caught. Erick crouched beside it, letting the warmth seep into his small body. His fingers tingled painfully as feeling returned... a good sign, even if it hurt.
He had time now. Time to think.
He closed his eyes, letting the fire's warmth anchor him as he sifted through the tangled mess of memories in his mind.
A promise of work in Winterfell. A chance at a better life. A future that had been stolen before it began.
Erick opened his eyes, staring into the flames.
He looked at the footprints in the snow... small, scattered, leading deeper into the forest. His footprints. The boy's last desperate path.
Following them could lead him back to the road. Or straight into the arms of the bandits who had killed his family.
He weighed the options, heart pounding.
Then something flickered in the air before him.
A blue panel. Transparent. Glowing softly.
[System Online]
The words hung there for a heartbeat - then vanished.
Erick stared at the empty air, waiting. Hoping for more. A voice. A guide. A message.
Nothing came.
Only the crackle of the fire and the whisper of the wind through the ancient trees.
Erick stared at the empty air until the fire settled into a steady crackle. Ten minutes passed, maybe more. It was long enough for the warmth to reach his bones and for his panic to fade into a tight, controlled knot in his chest.
But nothing else appeared.
No second message. No tutorial. No voice. No explanation.
Just that single, floating line... System Online and then silence.
His mind raced, thoughts tripping over each other. He knew systems. He'd read enough novels, watched enough anime, and played enough games to recognize the pattern. A system meant menus, stats, skills, quests... something. Anything.
He swallowed... licked his dry lips, and tried the most obvious command.
"System."
Nothing.
Not even a flicker.
He frowned and moved closer to the fire. The flames cast long shadows across the snow, their light flickering over the fallen tree's roots. The warmth helped him think and breathe. He tried again, this time louder.
"System!"
Still nothing.. the forest didn't even echo his voice. The Wolfswood swallowed sound the way it swallowed everything else.
Erick rubbed his small hands together, frustration simmering beneath the fear. If this were a system, it would have to respond in some way.
A memory surfaced. A flicker of a thought, a feeling. A status screen. Something simple. Something basic.
Status.
He didn't speak it aloud. He just thought it.
And the world changed.
A chime rang in his mind... not a sound exactly... but a sensation, like a ripple through still water. A translucent blue panel blinked into existence before him, hovering in the air like a ghostly sheet of glass.
The letters glowed white and sharp against the forest's gloom.
The panel expanded, lines of text forming with smooth, fluid motion.
Erick leaned forward.
[STATUS]
Name: Darek (Erick Hayes)
Title: n/a
Affiliation: n/a
Race: Human
Age: 8
Status: Hunger, Freezing
Rank: F-
SP: 1000
He reached out instinctively, and his fingers passed through the panel like mist. The text rippled but didn't vanish. It hovered, steady and patient, as if waiting for him to understand.
He exhaled slowly... forcing himself to stay calm. Now he was a child... an eight-year-old. He didn't know exactly what "F-" meant, but he guessed it was an overall rating, and probably not a good one.
He sat back, letting the panel float before him as he processed everything. He closed the status screen with a thought, watching it fade into nothingness.
The wind howled faintly through the trees, but his crude shelter blocked most of it. The warmth wrapped around him like a blanket, but the fear remained.
He tried every command he could remember from novels, games, and anime... some half-whispered, some half-thought, some spoken aloud, some only in his mind. The Wolfswood swallowed his voice, the ancient trees offering no guidance.
An inventory, and then with a soft chime rippled through his mind.
A translucent blue panel blinked into existence before him.
[INVENTORY]
Slot 1: Dried Meat (500g) x10
Slot 2: Water (2L) x10
Slot 3: Gift Box
Slot 4: Note
Slot 5: Empty
Slot 6: Empty
Slot 7: Empty
Slot 8: Empty
Slot 9: Empty
Slot 10: Empty
Food... water... a gift box... and a note.
He didn't even have to think... his mind brushed against the idea of the note, and it appeared in his hand as if it had always been there.
A small folded paper. Cream‑colored. Edges slightly curled.
The handwriting caught his eye right away... smooth, steady, and deliberate. Someone had written this with patience and care. As a doctor, he had seen thousands of handwriting samples... rushed prescriptions, frantic notes, careful signatures. This was different. Calm. Warm. Almost affectionate.
The ink was dark, the letters flowing in elegant strokes.
[My dear Erick,
I hope you have found out how to operate the SYSTEM.
You made enough karma in your lifetime to be granted another chance at life.
You have probably already realized that you are in the world of Game of Thrones.
About the System: it has functions such as Status, Inventory, Map, and Shop. Over time or in certain situations, new system options can be unlocked.
I added something extra special from me. In the Shop, there are many things from other worlds. The first time you buy something from a specific world, you will receive something special from that world, be it a skill, knowledge, talent, or an something extra from that world.
I wish you all the best.
With love,
GOD
P.S. Best if you open the Gift Box after you get something from the other worlds.]
Erick stared at the letter for a long time, the words blurring as the firelight flickered across the page.
A letter. From a God. Handwritten.
He didn't know whether to laugh, cry, or scream.
His breath came out shaky. He folded the letter carefully... almost reverently... and placed it on his lap. The fire crackled beside him, casting warm light over the roots of the fallen tree and the snow beyond.
He read the letter again. And again.
Each time, the meaning sank deeper.
He had been judged worthy... he had been given a second life... he had been placed in the world he once watched from the safety of a couch... a world of war, betrayal, winter, and death.
A world where a child alone in the Wolfswood should not survive.
The mention of the Shop tugged at his thoughts.
"Okay," he whispered to himself. "One step at a time."
He looked at the letter again, tracing the elegant handwriting with a small finger.
The words felt strange in his mouth... comforting, but also terrifying.
He folded the letter neatly and returned it to the inventory. It vanished from his hand, reappearing in Slot 4.
Erick leaned back against the roots of the fallen tree, letting the fire warm his face. The wind howled beyond his crude shelter, but he barely noticed. His mind raced, faster than his small heart could keep up.
The letter had said nothing about destiny. Nothing about prophecy. Nothing about saving the world.
Just a chance.
A chance he intended to use.
He whispered into the cold air: "Thank you."
He focused on the gift box description in his inventory, willing the System to show him more. The panel shifted smoothly, text rearranging itself with a soft ripple.
[Gift Box]
Contains: Items most needed for the user's current situation.
He swallowed, pushing the thought aside. The gift box could wait. He needed to understand the shop first. God's letter had emphasized it... the shop was the heart of the System.
He closed the inventory with a thought and focused on the word:
Shop.
The air shimmered.
A massive panel unfolded before him, stretching wider than any screen he had ever seen. Rows upon rows of items scrolled downward, each one labeled with a name, a price, and a small colored tag indicating its world of origin.
The sheer number of items made his breath catch.
The list was endless.
And it was still growing.
In the upper corner, a small counter ticked every few seconds... item count increasing. Items were constantly being added, as if the shop were alive.
He scanned... the first few entries.
Bread - 1 SP
Cheese - 1 SP
Wool Cloak - 2 SP
Iron Knife - 3 SP
Then the list shifted... and his eyes widened.
Heavenly Thunder Blade - 1,200,000 SP
Armor of the Sunlit Emperor - 3,500,000 SP
Divine Phoenix Feather - 9,999,999 SP
There were other items that had price tags so large... that he didn't even know how to pronounce them.
They looked like something from a fantasy gacha game, not something meant for a freezing child in the middle of the forest.
He stared at the glowing digits, feeling a strange mix of awe and despair. He had 1000 SP.
But then he noticed the filter button in the corner. With a lot of filter options.
In the maximum SP box, he entered 1000.
The shop flickered... list reshaped itself. The divine weapons vanished. The legendary artifacts disappeared.
List condensed... into something more manageable... a list of items, he could actually afford.
Basic Survival Kit - 20 SP
Beginner's Herbal Manual - 15 SP
Lighter - 2 SP
Warm Fur Cloak - 10 SP
Minor Healing Salve - 10 SP
They were useful and practical, but none of them felt quite right.
He needed something... more.
Something that could help him survive not just the cold, but the world he was in. A world where a child alone in the Wolfswood was prey.
His mind drifted, unbidden, to a memory from his old life... a movie he had watched years ago, back when he still had time to enjoy things.
Naruto, still young, is traveling with his team to the Land of Snow.
He remembered the blizzards. The icy winds, and how the characters used chakra to warm themselves and endure the cold.
Chakra
Added a new condition to the filter, a world:
Naruto
Scrolls, kunai, training manuals, gear... an item caught his eye... immediately.
Chakra Seed - 1000 SP
World: Naruto
[Chakra Seed]
Once consumed, it imbues the user with the ability to generate chakra.
His heart hammered in his chest.
This was it... exactly what he needed.
He scanned the other Naruto items - just to be sure.
Basic Chakra Control Manual - 45 SP
Genin Starter Pack - 54 SP
Beginner Academy Taijutsu Scroll - 38 SP
All useful. All tempting.
But none of them mattered if he didn't have chakra in the first place.
He checked other worlds out of curiosity.
Nen Awakening Manual - 500 SP
World: Hunter x Hunter
Master Roshi's Body & Mind Training Manual - 400 SP
World: Dragon Ball
His breath caught again... these were powerful... dangerous... life-changing knowledge.
But something deep inside him... instinct, intuition, maybe fate—pulled him back to the chakra seed. It felt right. It felt necessary. It felt like the path he was meant to take.
He didn't hesitate... he selected Buy.
His SP counter dropped instantly.
SP: 1000 → 0
A soft chime echoed in his mind.
[Chakra Seed added to Inventory]
He opened the inventory with a thought.
There it was.
A small, plump fruit... pink, smooth, and almost glowing. It looked eerily similar to the fruit Kaguya plucked from the Divine Tree in the anime.
He focused on it.
[Chakra Seed]
A one-use fruit. Grants the consumer the ability to generate chakra.
His hands trembled as he summoned it into the real world. The fruit appeared in his palm, warm to the touch despite the cold air. It smelled faintly sweet, like peaches and something floral.
He stared at it for a long moment.
He lifted it to his lips and bit down.
The fruit burst with flavor... sweet, soft, almost melting on his tongue. But the taste was nothing compared to the sensation that followed.
A wave of energy surged through him.
It rushed through his veins like liquid fire, spreading from his mouth to his chest, then outward to every limb. His fingers tingled. His toes burned. His heart pounded so hard he thought it might burst.
He gasped, dropping to his knees as the warmth intensified. It wasn't painful... not exactly... but overwhelming. Like standing too close to a bonfire. Like being submerged in hot water after freezing for hours.
He took another bite... and another... and another.
Each mouthful sent another wave of energy through him, stronger than the last. His small body shook with the force, but he didn't stop. He couldn't. The warmth was intoxicating, comforting, and life-giving.
By the time he finished the fruit, he was panting, sweat beading on his forehead despite the freezing air.
Then the System chimed.
[Chakra Unlocked]
You have awakened a new energy within your body.
He exhaled shakily.
He felt… different.
Warmer. Stronger. More alive than he had ever felt in either of his lives.
The cold no longer bit at him.
The wind no longer chilled him.
His body felt wrapped in a gentle, inner heat, like a second fire burning beneath his skin.
He closed his eyes, focusing inward.
He could feel it. A small pool of energy in his center.
Chakra.
Real chakra.
He laughed... a breathless, disbelieving sound.
Then another chime echoed.
[First-Time Reward Granted]
For consuming an item from another world, you have been granted:
• Superior Chakra Control
• Uzumaki Bloodline
• Ability to grant chakra to others
It wasn't just a somthing extra. This wasn't just a boost. It was not just a foundation. But a legacy.
The Uzumaki were legendary... their vitality, their chakra reserves, their longevity.
And he had just been given their bloodline.
At the same time, his body tingled with new strength. He could feel his chakra growing stronger, thickening, and he knew how to control it as if he had always lived with it.
He looked down at his small hands, trembling slightly. He knew how to imprint a chakra in others.
He wasn't just a lost child in the Wolfswood anymore.
The fire crackled beside him, but he barely felt its warmth. His own body radiated heat now, chakra flowing through him like a gentle river.
He sat back, staring into the flames, heart pounding with excitement and awe.
With this, he could do more than just survive.