An eternity seemed to pass while Lysander was dying in that cave — collapsed due to hunger. He was not dreaming.
He was remembering.
The sound came first — not the drip of water, but a slow, electronic pulse. Dull. Repetitive. It had once measured something important, though he could no longer remember what.
His mouth was dry.
He remembered thinking that. Not fearing death. Not praying. Just the dryness, and the absurd frustration that he could not swallow properly. That even breathing felt like an effort wasted on a body that had already decided to stop listening.
Someone had spoken to him then. He never remembered the words — only that he had wanted them to stop talking so he could rest.
His chances of surviving cancer this heavy— are almost negligible, someone had said. He has eight hours left.
He remembered thinking that eight hours was generous.
Now, the pulse was gone. Replaced by pain.
Not the clean pain of injury, but the slow, corrosive kind — the kind that eats at the idea of movement itself. Hunger clawed through him, sharp enough to tear thought apart.
Not again. Lysander half-thought in his reverie. The thought was not a defiant one, but one filled with tiredness.
He had already lain still once and waited for it to end.
He would not do it a second time.
Gasping, Lysander woke up.
The pain was on the verge of consuming him. It was no longer the dull pressure that had pushed him forward for hours, the thing he could ignore by walking faster or thinking less. This was now infinitely sharper, almost articulate, as if his body had finally decided to speak plainly.
EAT!
He didn't open his eyes at first. The sudden heavy feeling in his facial muscles when he mustered the strength to open his eye was like lead weights. Breathing already was.
The ground beneath him was cold and damp — more so than stone. His cheek pressed slightly when he moved, skin peeling free with a soft sound. Mud, then.
Memories were slowly returning to him, fragments drifting back into his mind. He finally remembered what he had left off with his sleep.
I found a water source. There was water nearby. He could hear it now — a small drip from a stalagmite, seeping and bleeding out of the earth. Good. Water meant he wouldn't die immediately.
A pulse of pain.
He rolled onto his side and vomited nothing. His stomach contracted anyway, furious at the absence. The motion sent a sharp pulse through his ribs and down his spine. He lay still after that, counting breaths unconsciously.
He gasped; the pain pulse seemed to make the hunger worse — draining even more of his already hollow reserve of energy.
Water... Lysander thought, panicking and in turmoil now, water means there might be food nearby. His hand moved before he could tell it to. It pressed into the soil, fingers sinking slightly.
The ground here was softer than the path he had followed — darker, looser. He dragged his palm back toward himself, smearing mud across his sleeve. He continued, digging holes about a palm deep into the mud where he lay, each hole separated by a small distance.
He was digging, partly to find food and partly seeking comfort in the act of struggle, to convince himself that his fate was now in his own hands, finding solace in the effort to keep going until his very last breath.
Suddenly, something resisted his fingers.
It was not a stone.
Still crouched, his fingers closed again, weaker this time. Lysander's hand pulled on the object that was half-buried near the edge of the damp ground — a shape that did not belong to stone or fungus.
He reached for it, fingers numb, brushing away the dirt. A shape emerged with a wet sound. It was round, small, uneven — brown skin crusted with dirt. A root trailed from it, thin and torn. He stared at it for a long moment without understanding.
Then hunger supplied the word.
Food. EAT!
The realisation did not feel triumphant; it felt accusing. Why had he not seen this before? Why had his body let him pass out on top of it? He dug again, clumsily now, using both hands. His nails split, unnoticed until blood mingled with the soil.
More shapes emerged, clustered beneath the surface, pale where the dirt broke away.
A potato. Small, misshapen, pale.
He stared at it for several seconds, unsure if hunger had finally crossed into hallucination. Then he found another. And another.
A tiny patch, stubbornly clinging to the cave's fringe where water seeped barely enough to sustain them. Lysander exhaled, the sound shaky and quiet. He did not laugh, nor pray. He dug them up with his hands — every one he could find.
He let out a laugh once, a short, broken sound that hurt his throat. It stopped immediately when dizziness washed over him again. He pressed his forehead into the mud, waiting for the world to steady.
When he ate, there was no ceremony. He scraped the dirt off with his sleeve and bit down. The skin was bitter, the inside hard and cold. His jaw ached as he chewed, muscles protesting, but he did not stop.
He ate too quickly and paid the price, retching once more before forcing himself to go slower. Each mouthful seemed to vanish before reaching his stomach.
But the pain changed again, not gone — never gone — but it loosened. The sharp edge dulled into something survivable. He lay back afterwards, clutching the remaining potatoes to his chest as if they might escape if he let go. The drip continued beside him — indifferent.
Tomorrow was again within reach. That was all the miracle amounted to.
Slumping back, he finally found the space to think and reflect on the experiences he had ignored for the sake of survival. The voices in his head felt more vivid than ever, screaming at him to take action. In the heat of survival, he had only complied with these demands, but now, with time to contemplate, Lysander considered everything he had endured.
A full stomach did not silence the voices. If anything, they grew clearer.
At first, he thought it was just because he was no longer shaking. Hunger had a way of blurring everything into one long scream. Now the pain had retreated to a dull, livable ache, and in the space it left behind, something else moved.
He sat with his back against a tree, knees pulled in, mud drying stiff on his clothes. The stream was close enough now that he could hear individual breaks in the current, water slipping around stone. He chewed the last of the raw potato slowly, forcing it down even though his mouth protested the texture.
Too slow, a voice said. He froze.
The voice weighted it. Not loud, but reverent and real, as if a phone was pressed in his ear. As if it had been sitting there the whole time, waiting for him to notice.
"No," he muttered. His throat felt wrong around the word. "I'm not—"
Too careful, another voice layered over the first, sharper, amused. He'll die again like that.
There was no direction to them. No left or right. They didn't echo the way sound should. They existed inside him, but not as thoughts. Thoughts felt like they belonged to him.
These didn't.
He pressed his fingers into the ground to ground himself, feeling the grit bite into his skin. Pain helped. Pain was real.
"Shut up," he said, louder this time, and immediately hated how desperate it sounded.
Laughter followed. Not one laugh, but several, overlapping and ethereal, out of rhythm.
He thinks we're noise. Laughed the voices. He thinks the pain was the problem.
His stomach twisted again, but not with hunger this time.
He stood unsteadily and nearly fell, catching himself on the tree. The bark scraped his palm. He hissed and pulled back, staring at the shallow cut. It wasn't bad. It barely bled.
And yet—
There, one of the voices murmured, suddenly intent. That spot. Weak.
His vision flickered.
For half a second — no longer than that — he felt the tree differently. Not just saw it, but felt it. The scrape of the bark wasn't merely texture; it represented resistance, density, and grain. It was a spot where force would penetrate deeper if applied the right way.
His body moved on it's own, the Voices possessing him. Without thinking, he slammed his fist into the trunk.
The impact shot up his arm and into his shoulder. Pain bloomed, sharp and bright — and the bark split. Regaining control over his body and mouth slightly agape, Lysander stared at the broken tree trunk, then at his fist, and back at the trunk again. It wasn't just shattered; it wasn't a random crack. It split along a narrow line, clean and ugly, deeper than a blow like that should have achieved.
He staggered back, clutching his hand.
Was this a strange ability, he wondered, a byproduct of my transmigration? This ability wasn't just super strength. Was it more about discerning a weak point?
In that moment, when the voices took control of his body with their suggestion, he had instinctively felt a weak point in the tree trunk. A point where, when struck, will cause the most pain. Lysander was still confused about how the tree trunk could feel pain, but the information was instinctively sent to his brain, as if it had been ingrained in him for a long time.
"What the — "
Again, AGAIN, a voice urged eagerly. Punch it harder! Kill it!
His heart pounded too fast, and his breath became shallow. He looked at his hand. It hurt more now that he was paying attention, skin raw and swelling.
And yet, the pain felt… manageable.
Not gone immediately, but merely becoming distant. Like it had been pushed back a step. He pressed his thumb into the bruise experimentally.
Nothing changed. He pressed harder. Still nothing.
Slowly, deliberately, he let go of whatever reflex had tightened inside him when he'd struck the tree. The pain rushed back all at once, white and nauseating. He swore and nearly dropped to his knees.
There it is, a voice crooned. He can turn it down.He can turn it up.
His breathing steadied as fear gave way to something colder. This wasn't hunger, whatever the voice was. Hunger didn't teach in such a palpable manner. Hunger didn't argue with itself.
The voices were still talking, overlapping, contradicting—
Strike it so it screams.
No, strike so it doesn't.
Pain tells you everything. Pain is the map.
Most of it was useless. Insane and manic. They argued about things he didn't understand, about methods that contradicted themselves, about solutions that assumed knowledge he didn't have.
But beneath the noise, there was a pattern.
Pain wasn't just something to endure.
It was something he could… touch.
"I don't know what you are," he said quietly, more to himself than to them. His voice didn't shake this time. "But you're not leaving, are you?"
The laughter softened, almost fond. Then mad once again, insane and manic.