Jack was hiking back to his car after dispersing his adoptive mother's ashes in Lake Valhalla, a spot he and his adoptive family used to visit regularly. The trail he was on was well maintained, but there was one annoying section that required some care to traverse.
There were rhododendron bushes on the left and a steep decline on the right, and nothing to walk on but roots and bent rhododendron branches. Jack had just started navigating this section, clinging to rhododendron branches with both hands while side stepping from root to root, when his vision went black.
He instinctively clenched his hands tighter, only to discover he could feel … nothing. Not only could he not feel the rhododendron he had been clinging to, he couldn't feel his hands, his feet, or any other part of his body. When he tried to take a breath to say, "what the fuck?", he found there were no lungs to expand and no air to inhale. He was bodyless, floating in an endless expanse of nothingness.
Once the initial shock of finding himself bodyless in a void wore off, he found that he was calm. For some reason he found the void soothing, peaceful.
Am I dead? He wondered. Is this the start of my afterlife? As he contemplated the possibility that he had died, he wondered what would happen next. Was he awaiting judgement? Was he stuck in limbo? Was he about to be isekai'ed? Since he didn't have lungs or a mouth to yell, he tried mentally yelling into the void.
HELLO? ANYONE? GOD? TRUCK-KUN?
Nothing.
So, he waited. At first he thought about the future he had planned — go to college, finally get laid, maybe go into cancer research. He honestly wasn't certain what he wanted to do beyond college. Science interested him, and he thought he might want to go into research, but he also liked the idea of getting involved in the space industry, maybe go into space, or at least work on something that gets sent into space.
His thoughts eventually quieted, and he found himself just being. But as his mind drifted, he felt like he was expanding, becoming, not bigger but, somehow more. More what, he didn't know. It was a strange, but oddly pleasant, sensation. With no way to track the passage of time, he did not know if it had been minutes, hours, days, years, or centuries. Eventually his quiet contemplation was disturbed by a series of message in glowing gold text appearing. They were not so much visual messages as they were messages inserted directly into his mind, and the messages felt gold and glowy.
[Synchronization Initiated]
[WARNING: Soul strength below threshold]
[Synchronization Paused]
[Initiating emergency soul enhancement]
[Soul strength has reached minimum threshold]
[Synchronization Resumed]
What? Soul strength? Was this a System, like in the novels he'd read? The first few messages, the ones prior to [Soul strength has reached minimum threshold], felt distorted, like hearing voices under water or trying to read a sign through a heavy rainstorm. It also felt like they were old, like they had been generated a while ago, but he was only just now receiving them. He assumed this was because of his soul's weakness, preventing him from properly receiving them until it grew strong enough. Then, two more messages interrupted his thoughts.
[Synchronization Complete]
[Genesis Heart Installation Complete]
Genesis Heart? Before he could think further on the origin and meaning of the messages, his world exploded in light and pain.
He felt pain in his back, hips, his left elbow, his right wrist, and his left foot all throbbed in pain. The back of his head was also aching. His body probably went slack when the System started installing and his head was probably the first thing he hit as he fell backwards down the slope.
He blinked a few times, trying to make sense of what he was seeing, then he tried to move and realized he was half embedded in a rhododendron and through the branches he could see empty air, then trees in the distance. He was at the edge of a steep drop off. The rhododendron had probably saved his life. It was the circle of life. One rhododendron tries to kill you, the other rhododendron saves you.
After taking a minute to assess himself, he slowly rolled to his right and extricated himself from the rhododendron. As he rolled onto his back, the mountainside came into view. Fuck. That is one steep climb.
He gazed up the slope and started planning how he was going to get back to the trail. It was so steep that he'd just slide back down if he tried walking, so he would have to use the bushes and tries small tries and hand and foot holds.
As he slowly climbed his way back towards the trail, he reflected on how his life and the losses he'd experienced. His parents, both orphans, had died in a car crash when he was ten, killed by a drunk driver. Having no next of kin, he had found himself in the foster care system. Still reeling from the loss of his parents, he was bounced around from one foster home to another. In each case the family was not prepared to help a boy cope with devastating loss. It was sheer luck that was eventually placed with Fran and Jacob. Their practical, no-nonsense worldview was similar to that of his birth parents and provided him with the sense of familiarity, of family, he had thought lost. By the time they adopted him, he was already thinking of them as his second parents.
Disaster had struck his life a second time when Jacob, his adoptive father, had died in a car crash while delivering parts for his employer, a national auto-parts supplier. At first, the investigators had thought Jacob had just fallen asleep at the wheel. But when the toxicology report came back, showing signs of carbon monoxide poisoning, they realized he had succumbed to exhaust fumes. Fran, both distraught and enraged, had sued Jacob's employer. Jacob had complained about the exhaust fumes many times, but the company had ignored his complaints. Fran had won the legal battle and collected a large settlement, but the struggle had left her emotionally exhausted. Throughout the ordeal, Jack had tried to help as much as he could, doing all the household chores, but Fran insisted he focus on studying and maintaining his grades.
Disaster struck a third time when Fran was diagnosed with cancer. She had been suffering minor symptoms, like weakness, headaches, and nausea, that they had assumed were caused by the stress of the legal battle against Jacob's neglectful employer. But when the symptoms didn't abate after their victory, the doctors were forced to re-assess her condition. And, by the time they diagnosed her with cancer, it had reached stage 4 and her prognosis was bleak.
Throughout her battle, she had remained firm in her stance that Jack should stay focused on his academic future. She had been very pragmatic in her outlook, telling him, "No amount of wishful thinking is going to change the outcome. I will die. The best we can hope for is that I last a little longer. I will be happy if I live long enough to see you graduate with honors."
In the end, she got her wish and attended Jack's graduation ceremony, but died a week later. Her final wish was to be cremated and her ashes scatter on Lake Valhalla. She was a fighter, and it seemed fitting that her final resting place be Valhalla.
After what felt like forever, he finally made it back up to the trail and past the rhododendron that had nearly been his demise. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked the time. 6:42pm. It looked like he had lost about 2 hours and, being late August, meant the sun would set around 7:30pm. He had about one and a half hours before it would be too dark to see without a flashlight.
He looked at the battery charge indicator on his phone. 72%. Hopefully, that would be enough. The flashlight feature on his phone was power hungry, and he wasn't sure how long it would last.
He was worried that his left ankle was sprained but as he took his first few tentative steps down the trail he realized it wasn't sprained, just bruised. Instead, he had probably smacked it against a rock or tree trunk as he had tumbled down the slope like a rag doll. The pain of each step eventually faded into a dull throb as his attention was consumed with making it safely back to his car.
The sky, visible through the trees, was edging into purple when he reached the fork in the trail and turned right to head down to the tail head. And, about half-way down, he finally relented and turned on his phone flashlight.
It was with some relief that he stepped out onto the hard packed gravel road and made the short walk back to the trailhead parking area. He panned the light from his phone across the lot and saw that there were two other cars in the lot besides his gray Nissan Sentra. They probably belonged to people who were camped at Lake Janus, or were hiking part of the Pacific Crest Trail.
Throughout his trek back to his car, his focus had been on putting one foot in front of the other and hadn't given himself time to consider what had happened. But, as he slowly lowered himself into the seat of his car, his attention turned to what had happened. Did he really get a System? Or did he suffer some kind of head trauma induced hallucination? He didn't have any memory of falling down the slope so he wasn't sure if it was the System installation that had caused him to lose his grip on the rhododendron and fall, or if he had just slipped and the head trauma had erased his memory of the fall. And, after the [Genesis Heart Installation Complete] message, there had been nothing, no indication that he had a System.
In many LitRPG novels, the System only responded to certain words or gestures. Feeling embarrassed, even though he was alone in his car and there was probably no one for miles, he said, out loud, "Status".
Nothing.
"System Activate."
Nothing.
"Help, Tutorial, Information, Abracadabra, Shazam, Talk to me damn it!"
Nothing, Nothing, Nothing.
No response.
Was it all just a hallucination? He'd checked the back of his head and there was no blood. He had miraculously avoided getting cut or impaled during his tumble down the slope. And no blood implied that he didn't hit his head very hard. In fact, the earlier throbbing had already reduced to a dull ache. What had really happened? He didn't remember reading any novels that involved something named Genesis Heart, so he wasn't sure why he would hallucinate about one.
Why did systems need verbal interfaces, anyway? Why not have an intuitive mental connection directly to the System. Remembering the sensation he had when he'd first "blacked out". He focused on what it felt like before the messages appeared. As soon as he tried again to feel that calm floating in nothingness sensation, his vision went black and he, again, found himself floating in nothingness.
Does this prove I'm not suffering from brain trauma? He wondered. Thinking about returning to reality, his vision returned, and he found himself back in his car. Then he focused on the nothingness and again found himself back in the calm nothingness. He exited, then re-entered the nothingness. Then again. As he repeatedly transitioned into and out of the nothingness, he found that the nothingness gained tangibility in his mind. Like it was a separate space, he could enter and leave. When he entered the nothingness for the seventh time, a message appeared in his mind with the same sense of golden glowyness.
[Achievement: Solidified connection to Soul Space]
[Reward: White Room]
Before his mind fully registered the new messages, the nothingness was replaced by a plain white room, and he could again sense his body. The floor was slightly darker than the walls and the ceiling glowed a soft white light. And it was empty except for him.