Kai opened his eyes.
Something was wrong.
His bed — his beloved, seven-year-old memory foam mattress that had faithfully cushioned his back through countless all-nighters and the occasional intimate workout* with whatever girl had wandered into his life — was gone. Replaced by something that felt like a wooden plank wrapped in burlap. Cold, stiff, and utterly offensive to every nerve in his spine.
He would have screamed about it immediately, but then the smell hit him.
God, the smell.
It punched through his nostrils like a living thing, thick and hot and absolutely vile. Like someone had collected the worst contributions from every barnyard animal in existence and sealed them into one small room specifically to assault him.
My neighbor's apartment never smelled like this, he thought dazedly. Even her cats weren't this bad.
He tried to sit up.
Every single part of his body instantly filed a formal complaint.
"What the—" he hissed through clenched teeth, pain exploding across his ribs, his back, his arms. It felt like he'd been used as a practice dummy by someone who really, genuinely hated him.
He lay there breathing through the agony, staring upward at a ceiling made of rough clay tiles, cracked in three places, with a suspicious dark stain spreading from the corner.
Okay, he thought. Okay. Think.
He was wearing clothes. That was the first strange thing. Kai had a strict personal policy — bed meant naked, no exceptions, no debate. But not only was he fully dressed, the clothes themselves were deeply wrong. Coarse fabric, dull earth tones, the kind of stitching that suggested someone had made them entirely by hand in a dim room with no mirrors nearby.
They looked, frankly, ancient.
From somewhere beyond the thin wall to his right came a sound.
"Hnnk. Hnnk. Hnnk."
Kai stared at the wall.
"...Is that a pig?"
He didn't say it out loud. He simply lay there, completely motionless, staring at the cracked ceiling with the expression of a man whose entire understanding of reality had just been quietly escorted out of the building.
Because he knew exactly what this was.
He'd read about it. Hundreds of times. Thousands, probably, across every novel and manga and light novel he'd burned through during his years as a dedicated, unapologetic shut-in. The late nights, the instant noodles, the zero social life, the online game grinding that passed for a career — all of it spent in worlds where this exact thing happened to someone else.
Transmigration.
The soul yanked from one body and dropped into another, in another world entirely.
He had laughed at those stories. Not cruelly — he'd loved them, devoured every chapter — but he'd always laughed at the premise. Sure. Right. A guy just wakes up in a fantasy world. Totally normal.
And yet.
The BOSS, he remembered suddenly.
Just last night — or what had been last night in his old life — he'd been grinding in his usual hunting zone when a field BOSS had spawned where no field BOSS had any business spawning. He hadn't thought twice. He'd attacked immediately, because that was what you did.
Then the BOSS had spoken.
"Please — stop — I have something important to tell you—"
"Tell it to someone who cares," Kai had replied cheerfully, continuing to spam his damage rotation. "I need the drop."
The BOSS had died. It had looked at him with those last few frames of animation, eyes full of what he could only describe as genuine resentment, and whispered: *"You will regret this."*
It had dropped nothing. No experience. No loot. Just a single mysterious scroll lying on the ground where the corpse had been, covered in strange ancient markings that pulsed faintly gold.
Kai had clicked it open without a second thought.
His monitor had blazed white.
Then nothing.
Then this.
He forced himself upright despite his body's loud protests, and finally got a proper look at the room around him.
It was tiny. Bare walls, packed dirt floor, one rickety table pushed against the corner. On that table sat a small clay bowl containing a dark greenish liquid that was, beyond any shadow of a doubt, not something anyone had ever intended to drink.
The smell was coming from everywhere at once.
"This is a place where human beings are supposed to live?" Kai said aloud, to no one.
A loud clatter came from next door — something heavy being knocked over — followed immediately by a voice, eager and slightly breathless:
"Leo! Young Master, are you awake?"
"...Yeah," Kai called back automatically.
Then he frowned at the wall.
*Young Master?*
He looked around the room again. The cracked ceiling. The dirt floor. The mystery bowl of what was almost certainly pig waste sitting casually on the furniture.
"What kind of Young Master," he said slowly, to himself, "lives in a pigsty?"
The answer arrived thirty seconds later in the form of footsteps that shook the floor — heavy, deliberate, thundering — before the door swung open and a mountain of a person ducked through the frame.
Leo was enormous. Two meters tall at minimum, broad enough to fill the doorway, carrying somewhere around 150 kilograms on a frame that somehow managed to look both round and densely solid at the same time. His face was open and honest, currently arranged into an expression of profound relief.
"You're actually awake," Leo breathed. "I was — you really scared me, Young Master. You weren't moving and I kept checking and—"
"I'm fine," Kai said, studying him.
He wasn't fine. His entire body was one continuous bruise. But that wasn't what he was focused on.
The memories were surfacing slowly, like debris floating up through murky water. The previous owner of this body — also named Kai, which was either a remarkable coincidence or the universe's way of being lazy — had lived a life that made his old otaku existence look charmed by comparison.
Dead parents. Damaged Dantian — the energy center that every cultivator in this world needed to store and channel their Qigong. Discarded by his clan. Working as the lowest-ranked servant in a restaurant owned by the very people who'd thrown him away. Beaten unconscious yesterday by a clan bully named Rex because a table hadn't been clean enough.
Rank 1 Warrior. The absolute bottom of the cultivation ladder. Worse than most children half his age.
Fifteen years old. Alone except for the enormous loyal man currently looking at him with worried eyes.
Kai sat with all of this for a long moment.
Of course, he thought. Of course I transmigrate and land in the worst possible starting position. Of course.
Every transmigration story he'd ever read had given the protagonist something — a cheat system, a legendary technique hidden in the body, ancient memories of a past grandmaster, something. A reason to believe things would turn around.
He had a broken Dantian, no family, no money, and a room next to a pig.
"Did the beating knock something loose?" Leo asked carefully, watching him stare at nothing. "You have a strange look on your face."
"You have a strange face," Kai said reflexively.
Leo blinked. Then slowly broke into a grin. "You're fine."
Kai almost smiled back. Almost.
He could feel it though — the thing that made him take a second look at Leo — underneath all that bulk and warmth, the man had a Rank 3 Warrior's cultivation. In a world where strength was everything, that wasn't much. But it was infinitely more than Kai currently had, and Leo had chosen to stay. When the clan had cast this broken, useless, nobody kid out into the street, Leo had followed voluntarily.
That meant something. Kai filed it away carefully.
He was just getting to his feet, testing his weight against the pain, when the second visitor arrived.
The restaurant manager, Dan, walked in without knocking, saw Kai standing, and looked momentarily annoyed — as though someone surviving a severe beating was an inconvenience to him personally.
"So you're up," Dan said flatly. He was a stocky man with a perpetual scowl carved into his face, a former clan disciple whose cultivation had plateaued years ago, sentenced by the clan to manage a restaurant for the rest of his life and clearly furious about it every single day. "What are you standing around for? Get to work."
"He just woke up," Leo said quietly. "His injuries—"
"Are his problem." Dan looked Kai up and down with open contempt. "You know what your problem is? You're useless. You've always been useless. The clan raised you for fifteen years and you can't even reach Rank 2. If it were up to me, I'd have thrown you into Kunlun Mountain Range years ago to let the demon beasts deal with you."
Kai looked at him.
He knew about Kunlun Mountain Range from the inherited memories — one of the ten most dangerous places on the entire continent, forty kilometers north of the city, a vast wilderness teeming with demon beasts of every variety. The kind of place where even powerful cultivators died regularly. For a Rank 1 with a broken Dantian, it would be a death sentence measured in minutes.
Dan had just casually suggested it as waste disposal.
"Your own uselessness is embarrassing to look at," Dan continued, working himself up now, spit flying. "I don't know why you're still breathing. Get to the kitchen before I dock your meals for the week."
He turned and walked out. His departing spit landed on the floor near Kai's foot.
Kai stared at the door for a long moment after it closed.
Beside him, Leo's enormous hands were balled into fists at his sides, knuckles white, jaw tight, breathing carefully through his nose.
"Leo," Kai said quietly.
"I'm fine," Leo said, in a tone that indicated he was not remotely fine.
Kai looked down at his hands. Thin. Scarred from years of work. Trembling slightly from the beating that still hadn't fully registered in his nervous system.
A broken Dantian. The world's most humiliating starting position. A manager who viewed him as something less than furniture. A clan that had used him and discarded him.
And a gamer's brain.
*Killing monsters. Leveling up. Completing quests.*
*I've started from nothing before,* Kai thought. *Every game I ever played, I started with nothing.*
The difference was that this wasn't a game.
The difference was that every condescending word Dan had just aimed at him was going to have to be repaid. Every bruise Rex had put on this body. Every year the clan had spent treating this kid like a burden rather than a person.
He was going to pay it all back.
With interest.
"Come on," Kai said, moving toward the door. "Let's go to work."
Leo fell into step behind him, still fuming quietly.
Neither of them spoke again. But for the first time since waking up in a pigsty next to a pig, something had shifted behind Kai's eyes.
Not hope, exactly.
Something colder than hope. Something more patient.
Something that, in a different world, had once looked at a talking BOSS, heard it beg for mercy, and clicked *attack* anyway.
The lowest point is still a point. And every level starts at zero.