Johann Reth, aged 20, a citizen of the Lahelu Empire on the Indropa Continent, Südsea State, city of Selevia. He was a young infantryman conscripted to fight rebels in the north of this newly-born empire.
He had a younger sister whom he protected fiercely, and who was also the reason he joined the imperial infantry—by joining, his debts were absolved by the crown. Two older brothers had joined maritime expeditions and colonization efforts in the Gilgamesh archipelago.
His father was a merchant who perished during the unification of Lanitum while he was traveling to the former kingdom of Klassenberg.
His mother, who accompanied his father in trade, also died while traveling with him.
His family were devout followers of the Glaubenkirche but were not wealthy and had considerable debts due to a failed investment by one of his older brothers in a colonial company.
During his military career, Johann joined the Regular Infantry, and was soon assigned to guard duty at a Südsea fortress in the Thares mountains.
The information settled in his mind like a cold HR report. Alex tried to feel something—sadness, anger, sympathy for this wasted life. What surfaced was only analytical emptiness. Johann Reth was a case, a variable in the calamity equation he now had to solve. But beneath that emptiness, there was a vague unease. He had invaded a grave that was still warm. He was an illegal tenant of a life that hadn't truly finished grieving.
Regular Infantry? Alex's mind immediately moved toward an analytical conclusion, trying to process the military data he had just received. Common soldiers. Not elite troops. Assigned to a besieged mountain fortress. He glanced at the pile of corpses around him, most wearing the same eagle-emblazoned uniform. It seemed this guard mission was a suicide mission from the imperial military. His logic went to work, pushing aside the horror for a moment. A small garrison, regular infantry, deployed to hold an obviously indefensible position against likely larger rebel forces. They weren't meant to win. They were bait. To buy time. Or…
To effectively draw the rebels into a place and then perhaps surround them. Alex couldn't be sure. But the pattern was clear: expendable casualties. His body was one of those expendable casualties.
While he was thinking hard, trying to solve a military strategic puzzle that wasn't his business, he unconsciously looked down. To the spot he had occupied earlier. The stone floor there was dark, different from its surroundings. Its color was jet black, almost as if wet, but more viscous. And it was concentrated in an area, as if something had gushed from the body that had sat there and pooled. Blood. A lot of blood.
It wasn't just a puddle. It was a map of scattered death. At the thinner edges, the color was rusty brown like oxidized iron. In the deepest center, it was almost black, with an oily sheen under the dim moonlight. A few strands of fibers, perhaps from cloth or a torn jacket, were stuck in it like algae in a dark swamp. Alex could imagine Johann's body slumped there, life flowing out and seeping into the pores of the stone for… how many hours? The metallic smell was piercing, sharper than in other parts of the room.
Alex unconsciously stared at the body he now inhabited. He looked down at the dark blue wool jacket. Its original color was almost unrecognizable. From waist to neck, the fabric was saturated with rust-red and black, stiff with dried blood. On the chest, exactly where the sensation of a hole and burning had come from, the fabric was torn. A messy tear, as if struck by something blunt and hard from within, or torn by panicked hands. Through the tear, he could see… skin.
Carefully, his trembling fingers widened the opening a little more. The base of the fabric was stuck to the skin beneath. He peeled it away slowly, an unpleasant sticky sensation. And there, in the center of his chest, where Johann Reth's horrific, life-ending hole should have been, there was… skin.
Not whole, smooth skin. Its color was pink, very pink, like a newborn's skin or a freshly healed first-degree burn. Its texture was smooth, too smooth compared to the rough, scarred skin around it. And in the center of that pink area, like the epicenter of a flesh explosion, was a pattern. Not suture marks. Rather, very fine, thin lines, slightly darker than the surrounding pink skin. The lines radiated from a central point, like spokes, or like nail roots, or like nearly invisible cracks in glass.
There was no hole. No fresh blood. Only a strange scar that looked minutes old, yet the wound that left it should have been fatal and… how old? How long since the explosion? How long since Johann died?
Was I just killed? Alex stared at his wound, his analytical mind scrambling for an explanation. Of course. Johann clearly died. Chest wound, bled out on this floor. But I… He pressed the pink area with his finger. It felt warm, slightly pulsing, but not painful. The sensation was strange, both numb and hypersensitive. I woke up. And the wound… closed?
This made no scientific sense. No cellular regeneration was that fast. Not without leaving deeper marks. It was as if… as if his body had been reset. Restored to a stable state, but not perfectly. The scar remained. A reminder.
How? The question echoed in his head, empty of answers. Why? No divine voice, no system window blinking before his eyes. Only the corpse-filled silence of the fortress and the strange purple moonlight.
Alex immediately tried to see if other parts of his body had similarly bizarre marks, focusing on Johann's hands because, based on the memories, they might have been shot or broken.
Normal.
Alex examined his arms, rotating his wrists. No wounds. A scar on the elbow from a childhood fall—gone. A burn mark on the arm from a hot kettle—vanished. The right shoulder that should have been slightly lower from carrying loads was perfectly symmetrical. This body hadn't just been revived; it had been restored to an ideal state, a human prototype before life left its marks. Only on the chest was there a reminder that this perfection was bought at a price he didn't understand.
Alex quickly noticed that almost all the scars Johann had before Alex landed in his body had been magically forced into a healed state, and some parts like this hand looked as if they had no scars, like newborn baby flesh… it had healed perfectly, which gave Alex a thought.
It seems the reason this 'miraculous regeneration' has a visible scar on my stomach is because Johann's wound there was worse than the others. Most likely his internal organs were originally destroyed, hmm… I wonder if this body is still functioning properly.
He placed his palm on his chest, closed his eyes, and tried to feel. His heartbeat was rhythmic. Like a constant deep vibration, a low, steady hum, like a small living machine inside his chest cavity, proof that his organs had resumed functioning. His breathing was equally strange. He didn't need to take deep breaths. Air seemed to flow in and out on its own, an automatic process that was efficient and too quiet. He deliberately held his breath. His lungs didn't rebel. No tightness. Only after nearly a minute was there a faint pressure sensation in his diaphragm, a soft warning. This body was breathing, and likely his lungs were back to their previous condition.
He straightened up, leaving behind the dreadful examination of his body. Questions could wait. Surviving the present situation could not. With movements now more stable, he turned to survey the room. Corpses, weapons, darkness. He needed a weapon. He needed to know where he was, if there were any survivors, if the enemy was still outside.
Alex rotated his body, moved his arms, tried breathing regularly and irregularly, performed light movements and all sorts of experiments until he concluded everything was normal, nothing weird at all except for the fact that this body was previously a corpse… but there was one more thing he needed to test.
Alex took a small blade from one of the corpses and immediately made a cut on his hand, trying to see if it would regenerate like before. He watched closely to understand the true mechanism of this regeneration…
No.
The cut on his hand did not regenerate as before, filling Alex's mind with question marks. Why did it happen before but not now? He understood less and less about this bizarre, incoherent transmigration mechanism, making him wonder.
The cut was simple, about two inches long on his forearm. Normal red blood flowed out, not black like the pool on the floor. It hurt, sharp and clean. He watched carefully for one minute, two minutes. The blood clotted at a normal rate. No miraculous pink skin crept to close it. The conclusion was brutal: the miraculous repair mechanism only worked once, or only for fatal wounds. Or… his mind jumped to a grimmer possibility… this body would only 'heal itself' when its 'owner'—namely Alex, the tenant—was threatened with death. A terrifying, one-time-use safety system.
Is there a way back home?
His mind immediately went to that question. He never wanted to transmigrate like this and wanted to return to his real family, his job, his country, not be inside a corpse's body in a fortress full of corpses!
Although Alex's mind was filled with various questions, he still tried to calm down again and observe his surroundings carefully.
His eyes fell on a musket lying near a corpse's foot. Its iron barrel was long, its wood dark. Alex walked over, his steps heavy on the stone floor. He bent down, his unfamiliar hand reaching out and gripping the cold wood of the weapon. Heavy. Heavier than he expected.
As his fingers wrapped around the cold wood, something alien and certain flowed through his arm. Not a memory of images, but a kinesthetic instinct. His own hand moved, his thumb flicking open the powder pan cover with a practiced, fluid motion, his eyes checking the flint in a glance. It was Johann's skill, embedded deep in muscle and bone marrow. Alex felt an almost irresistible urge to shoulder the weapon, find a sight, adopt a low, ready stance. It was the ghost of a soldier demanding control. Alex bit his lip, forcing his rational mind to stay in charge. It's just a tool, he whispered to himself, to this rebellious body. A tool for survival, not for attack.
But there was a strange comfort in having something in his hands, something usable, something that wasn't part of his own strange body.
With the musket in his grip, Alex felt a little—very little—more prepared. He turned his face away from the pile of corpses, from Johann's memories like dead documents in his head. He looked toward a vertical window slit across the room, where the strange purple moonlight crept in.
Alex didn't stop at just taking the musket. He observed the positions of the corpses, most of which were scattered and some sitting against walls, forming positions as if they had tried to flee from the enemy's previous assault.
The pattern of death told a short, brutal story. The corpses were concentrated near the hall's entrance and the archer slits, indicating they died defending their positions. Some fell facing the corridor, others fell inward, as if fleeing from something that had entered. They didn't die slowly from disease or starvation. They were slaughtered quickly, likely by a charge or close-range cannon fire. The pungent smell of gunpowder still hung in the air, mixed with the scent of opened intestines. Alex forced himself to breathe through his mouth, the metallic taste of powder filling his tongue.
He tried squatting next to one of the corpses again, while filled with terrible disgust, he noticed a neatly folded paper in the deceased man's pocket. He immediately took it and tried to read it.
The paper used the Rethian language, commonly spoken by Rhein people before the kingdom fell apart, and the letter read…
"To
Lisa Müller,
Wherever the fortress of time hides you Lisa, I write this under old stones not yet fallen,while enemy cannons count the days more faithfully than an hourglass. This fortress still stands—not because of its strength, but because something has not yet been allowed to fall. Your name. The nights here are long and cold. Fire is kept only as needed,words are rationed more carefully than powder. I stand on the wall,gazing at fields that one day may become ordinary land again—and amidst the smoke,I remember how you said my name as if the world never intended to end. I do not know if this letter will reach you. I do not know if I myself will reach tomorrow. Therefore I write not of victory,but of guardianship— for there are things that must be guarded even if this city is lost.I have placed three Gulden in your name at the Compagnie maritime de Weimar, in colonial shares that sail furtherthan the steps I might take. The sum is small,but the intent is honest, and its future does not depend on the outcome of this siege. To claim it,you need only show the other letter— the one I hid not from the enemy, but from fate. If I return,I will retrieve it with you, and we shall laugh for ever thinking it important. If I do not,let that money bear witness that I once thought of tomorrow when everyone else was counting their last days. This fortress may fall. I may fall. But do not let our memory become ruins without a guardian. Stay alive,Lisa.That is enough for me. Written under a banner that still stands,by a man more faithful to your name than to the stones of this fortress.
—Robert Müller"
I observed the letter carefully and made sure there were no other words I could read, but I could only feel a tightness in my chest after finishing it. However, I understood that in the end its owner had become a corpse and he could do nothing, not even try to bury him properly.
The face of the corpse he looked at was still… quite young. He could guess the man was probably around 25. But his condition was terrible; there was a hole in his head.
And on his body was the metal cross-shaped necklace he had seen earlier. He tried to examine the emblem more closely. He clearly realized its cross had different proportions than crosses on Earth, and it also had a small sphere. He immediately remembered this was the cross of the Glaubenkirche faith, which worshipped the god Therion as its primary deity.
Alex felt there was actually a strange, nagging discomfort about this cross. Not about this world in general—somehow, things like crosses magically tended to resemble those from Earth. Even though he guessed this was the result of cultural evolution, that strange, uncomfortable feeling persisted.
This made Alex feel that his chest was beating irregularly and his previously steady fingers were trembling unsteadily, because out of all the people in this room, he was the only one alive and able to think like this.
As he carefully placed the letter back, a small breeze from somewhere carried another scent: a faint trace of cheap perfume, mixed with dried lavender. The smell did not come from the corpse before him. It drifted from somewhere, perhaps from another corpse's uniform, or from Johann's suddenly active memories. Along with the smell came an alien emotion: a poignant longing, followed by a piercing guilt. Alex groaned, clutching his head. It wasn't his. It was a trace of Johann's feelings, triggered by another man's love letter, a symphony of a dead man's emotions leaking into his mind. It quickly faded, leaving Alex panting and feeling even more estranged from himself.
Alex immediately stood up again and tried to look out through a small opening in the fortress. The strikingly vivid purple-grayish light immediately touched his skin.
But Alex soon realized that he seemed to be in the middle of the fortress, which most likely meant he was in a defensive position that would definitely be checked again!
Then, from a dark corridor at the far end of the hall leading to this room, a sound came.
Not an explosion. Not a scream.
But the sound of footsteps.Several pairs. Accompanied by the faint clinking of metal and wood—weapons and gear carried carelessly.
And the sound was followed by words.
The voice was not from the world he knew. A foreign language, coarse, and filled with dangerous exhaustion and indifference. But somehow, filtered through Johann's newly acquired memories, the meaning seeped into his consciousness.
"What the hell is the Captain thinking, making us check these disgusting imperial corpses?" the first voice grumbled, with an annoyed tone. "They're all clearly dead. It's time we celebrate, not sniff around this stench."
"Just shut up," replied the second voice, deeper and more authoritative, but equally weary. "Orders are orders. We have to make sure no one survived. Especially their officers. Take anything useful, then we torch this place."
Alex froze. His blood ran cold, then turned into lava of fear in his veins.
Rebels. They were the rebels. And they were here. In this fortress. Just a few dozen steps away, beyond the darkness of that corridor.
He fell back, pressing himself behind the nearest pile of corpses, using them as a horrifying camouflage. His hand gripped the musket until his knuckles turned white; the heart or whatever functioned like a heart in his strange chest pounded hard and painfully.
The footsteps grew closer. Torchlight began to dance on the corridor walls, illuminating the still-floating smoke and dust.
"Gods, it stinks. Like a slaughtered pigsty," the first voice complained again.
"That's because they are imperial pigs," retorted the second, cynically. "Hurry up and check. I don't want to linger here. This death smell is bad for victory."
Alex hunched down deeper. The stench he had previously found disgusting was now his protector. He tried not to move, not to breathe. But his stomach churned. The nausea he had held back since waking—a mix of horror, confusion, and pure fear—rose again with irresistible force.
He heard the sound of boots stepping on the stone floor, approaching. The torch now clearly illuminated the hall entrance.
"Look at this one.Jacket's still intact," said the first voice, now closer. Very close.
It was the final blow to Alex's control.
His stomach convulsed. His throat tightened. Everything—the explosion, death, rebirth, magical wound, purple moonlight, a stranger's memories, and now the tangible threat of death—pushed up from within.
He couldn't hold it back anymore.
From behind the pile of corpses came a choked, strangled sound, followed by a loud, wet retch. Bitter fluid splashed onto the stone floor, adding to the already existing filth.
Then, a deadly silence.
The torchlight stopped swaying. The footsteps froze.
"What was that?" whispered the first voice, suddenly alert and sharp.
"Listen…" said the second voice, low and dangerous. "Something's still alive in here."
And unconsciously, Johann Reth's finger—not Alex's—pulled the musket closer to his chest.