I felt stiff.
And very, very short of breath, as though a crowd of people had been piled on top of me. I also felt warm. Way too warm, like I was buried under a dozen blankets…
"Gaaa— Ahh!"
I jolted awake with a gasp. My eyelids flew open, and my blown-out pupils frantically swept around to study my surroundings, desperately trying to make sense of where the hell I was.
I was in a… room?
Everything around me — the bed, the walls, even the roof — was made of crude, unpolished wood.
There was no mattress beneath me, only some coarse cloth serving as a bedsheet, and even that felt unpleasantly rough against my bare skin.
Because the so-called bed was nothing more than a rigid platform of saplings lashed together over thick wooden logs. Uneven knots pressed straight into my spine through the thin, scratchy fabric.
To make matters worse, it didn't seem like I was wearing anything except my underwear shorts.
