My hand moved before my brain could catch up.
I reached around blindly, searching for my phone, fingers sweeping across empty air before I even thought to open my eyes. Slowly, I forced one eyelid up, then the other — blinking against the dim light filtering into the room.
The wooden ceiling was the first thing I saw.
...That's a wooden ceiling.
My apartment ceiling was concrete. There was a water stain shaped like a duck in the upper right corner — I knew that stain well. But this wasn't that ceiling. The beams above me were thick, old, and dark with age. I turned my head. An ancient wardrobe stood against the wall — rotting at the base, its iron hinges rusted orange, carved with patterns that looked like unfinished medieval craftsmanship.
I closed my eyes again and tried to go back to sleep.
This is a dream. It has to be a dream.
. . .
Five minutes passed.
I opened my eyes again. Still a wooden ceiling. Still an old wardrobe. Still the sound of wind coming from a window with no glass — just a wooden shutter hanging loose on a broken hinge, swaying on its own.
Why won't I just wake up.
[####]
Ding.
Like a bell, but ringing from inside my skull — not from anywhere outside. A red panel materialized in front of my face, thin and translucent, like a mirror with no reflection.
[ Congratulations. Host has successfully transmigrated. ]
Ha?
I pressed two fingers to my temple and forced myself to trace back — all the way to the last thing I actually remembered.
My room, my phone. The charging cable. Pulling the blanket over myself.
But before that — a sundry shop at the corner of an alley. An old man whose face was half-swallowed by shadow. A heavy silver coin, the kind that felt too old to exist, with twin crescent moons carved into its surface — I could still feel the grooves against my fingertips.
Keep it. That's the fare to a place that doesn't need a full soul.
I'd thought he was senile.
Then the voice inside my head — alien, sharp, like a frequency that had no business existing in a normal world. Then the weightless feeling. Then light.
Turns out he wasn't senile at all.
I looked around the room again, more carefully this time. Rough stone walls. Wooden floorboards that would definitely creak underfoot. The light coming through the window — not electric light. Sunlight.
I let out a slow breath.
A man who'd spent half his nights reading transmigration novels just to feel something — and now here I was, actually transmigrated, feeling everything at once but not knowing which part was useful first.
Alright. I'd read enough of these stories to know what came next.
"...Status." I said it quietly, feeling slightly stupid talking to myself in someone else's room.
The red panel flickered, then shifted:
SIX
Rank — None
Skill — None
Points — 0
I stared at it for a moment.
"Ha." A long exhale. "Figured as much."
Okay. A system existed, which meant there was a way to progress. I just didn't know how to use it yet, didn't know what world this was, didn't know—
Noise from outside the window cut through my thoughts.
Voices. The clang of metal. The sharp smell of wood smoke.
I got up from the bed, walked to the window, and peered out.
A small town stretched out before me. Stone buildings, unevenly stacked, lined a road of muddy earth. People moved through the streets in clothing I'd only ever seen in movies — worn robes, animal hide, wide-brimmed feathered hats. A horse-drawn cart rolled slowly through a narrow lane. Smoke curled up from nearby chimneys. And at the far end of the town, a thick stone wall rose high, separating the settlement from the dense, darkened forest beyond it.
Above — a deep blue sky, with two crescent moons still visible even as the sun climbed higher.
Two moons.
This wasn't Earth.