Luki had forgotten what it felt like to want something.
Twenty-two years. Eight thousand days. All of them in the same bed, staring at the same ceiling, listening to the same mechanical beep of monitors that measured a life he wasn't really living.
The illness had no name, or rather, it had too many names, none of them helpful. His bones were glass. His muscles, paper. At five years old, he'd tried to walk and shattered his femur in three places. After that, no one suggested trying again.
His family visited less each year. First weekly, then monthly, then... not at all. He didn't blame them. What could they say to the son-shaped obligation in Room 447? What comfort could they offer the boy whose body had become his prison before he'd ever had the chance to escape it?
So Luki built other worlds.
Fantasy audiobooks played on loop stories of heroes who swung swords and climbed mountains, who felt the sun on their faces and the wind in their hair. He memorized every detail, lived vicariously through every protagonist, and pretended the beeping machines were distant war drums.
Strategy games kept his mind sharp. If his body was useless, at least his mind could be a blade.
And there was the window.
God, that window.
Through it, he watched seasons change. Snow became rain became blossoms became falling leaves became snow again. He watched people walk by students with backpacks, couples holding hands, children chasing each other with the kind of thoughtless joy that comes from bodies that work.
He envied them so deeply it became a physical ache worse than any his illness caused.
'Just once' he'd think, watching a jogger pass by. 'Just once, I want to know what that feels like'
But wishes were just exhaust from a dying engine. Pretty. Useless. Gone.
And.
When Luki died, it wasn't dramatic or unique.
No flatline alarm and no desperate doctors. Just a quiet afternoon, sunlight streaming through that damned window, an audiobook narrator describing a hero's triumphant march into a liberated city.
His heart simply... stopped trying.
'So this is it' he thought, feeling himself slip away like water through cupped hands. 'Twenty-two years of waiting for life to start, and it just... ends'
The injustice of it burned.
Not the dying—he'd made peace with that years ago. But the waste. The sheer cosmic waste of a consciousness that had spent two decades watching life happen to other people through a rectangle of glass.
'I wish this was like the books' he thought bitterly as darkness closed in. 'I wish I could be reborn. I'd take anything. An innkeeper. A farmer. A beggar in the street. Just... just one chance to feel the sun. To walk. To be someone other than the boy who never left Room 447'
Then..
Darkness.
Silence.
Nothing.
Except....
Wait.
'Why am I still thinking?'
Luki's consciousness jolted like touching a live wire. Death was supposed to be nothing. Void. Absence. Not this... this awareness suspended in....
He could see.
Not with eyes—he didn't have eyes—but he could perceive. A river stretched before him, golden and viscous, flowing through a space that hurt to look at. The current pulled at him, and he had no body to resist with.
Time stopped meaning anything. He drifted for centuries. For seconds. Both. Neither.
Then, pressure.
Attention.
Vast, terrible, infinite attention settled on him like a mountain deciding to notice an ant. Luki's soul tried to scream, but he had no throat, no lungs, no voice....
"A pitiful soul."
The words weren't spoken. They simply were, vibrating through the fabric of whatever this place was.
"Filled with anger and hatred for the unfairness of the world."
'No' Luki wanted to protest. 'I'm not angry, I'm just...'
"Why hide your bitterness behind futile dreams?"
And oh, God, they were right. Beneath every fantasy audiobook, beneath every imagined adventure, there was rage. White-hot, poisonous rage at a universe that had given him a functioning mind in a body made of kindling.
"How will you fare, a soul chained by its body?"
The presence leaned closer. Luki felt himself being measured, weighed against some cosmic scale he couldn't comprehend.
"Interesting. You will do well as the Candidate. Go!"
The river shattered.
Reality folded.
And Luki fell...
....and gasped, pulling air into lungs that worked.
His eyes snapped open. Not the slow, groggy awakening of consciousness returning, but the instant alertness of prey sensing a predator.
His hands, his hands moved, clutched at something solid. A chest. His chest. Rising and falling with breath that came effortlessly, without the wheeze and rattle that had been his constant companion.
Galthor's heart hammered against his ribs. His vision swam, unfocused, but even blurry he could tell: this wasn't Room 447.
"Wha—what—"
The words came out wrong. Too deep. Too rough. His voice shouldn't sound like gravel grinding against stone.
"Shut up, you useless son of a whore!"
Galthor's head whipped toward the voice, his head moved, oh God it moved without pain and saw a silhouette in the darkness. Big. Armed. Radiating barely-contained violence.
"I thought you were dead!"
"The hospital," Galthor heard himself say, his new voice making the words absurd. "Where's the—the nurses? I need—"
Wait.
His tongue worked. No slurring. No struggling to form sounds around a mouth that barely functioned. He was speaking clearly for the first time in his life.
"I can—" Wonder cracked through his confusion. "I can speak?"
Something massive slammed into his jaw.
The world tilted. Pain exploded across his face, real, sharp, immediate pain, not the constant dull ache he'd known and his body flew backward. His skull cracked against stone. His vision went white.
And in that moment of impact, something broke inside his mind.
Not his mind. The barrier in his mind.
Memories flooded in like a dam bursting. Not his memories. Someone else's memories, mixing with his own, bleeding together until he couldn't tell where Luki ended and....
Galthor Stronghide. Chief's youngest son. Traitor. Coward. Useless.
Divine World. Eros. Gods walking among mortals. Barbarians enslaved. Father rebelled. Family slaughtered.
I am—
I AM A GOD.
The knowledge settled into him like a key sliding into a lock. Not a metaphor. Literal truth. His soul, Luki's soul, had been mixed...given and turned into that of a barbarian god.
His heartbeat thundered in his ears. Isekai some distant part of his mind recognized. 'This is isekai. Reincarnation. Fantasy world. I read, listened to, hundreds of these'
A hysterical laugh tried to claw its way up his throat.
'Where's my system? Where's my cheat ability? Where's the helpful tutorial explaining...'
Nothing. Just divine power locked behind doors he couldn't open, and a body with twenty-two years of muscle memory for war that Luki had absolutely no idea how to use.
The danger crashed into his awareness like a physical blow.
He wasn't in a hospital. He was in a tunnel, carved from raw stone. The air reeked of copper and rot and something acidic that made his new lungs burn. Bodies littered the ground, barbarians and monsters both, torn apart with visceral efficiency.
And standing over him, radiating disappointed fury, was the man who'd struck him.
The name surfaced from the borrowed memories: "Brakthar?"
The warrior's eyes narrowed. His grip tightened on a sword that looked like it weighed as much as Luki, as much as Galthor, did. "The poison in the air didn't kill you."
It wasn't a question. It was an accusation.
Galthor's mind raced, sorting through the memories crashing through his skull. The host body, his body now, had died from the poison. It should have. But Luki's soul had arrived just in time to fill the vacancy, and divine biology didn't work like mortal biology.
He'd been resurrected by accident into the corpse of a traitor.
'My last life was a prison' Galthor thought, something cold and sharp hardening in his chest. 'And now I'm reborn as a slave race's failed god, in the body of their greatest betrayer, about to die in a tunnel full of corpses'
The universe's sense of irony was exquisite.
But then...
He flexed his fingers. They moved. Easily. Powerfully.
He pushed himself upright. His muscles obeyed, flowing like water, no pain, no weakness, just pure functional strength.
For twenty-two years, Luki had dreamed of a body that worked. Now he had one that could break stone.
A smile crept across Galthor's face. It felt wrong on these features, the host had never smiled like this, but he couldn't help it.
'I can move'
Footsteps echoed through the tunnel. Heavy. Multiple. Accompanied by growls that didn't come from human throats.
Brakthar tensed, his attention snapping away from Galthor toward the approaching sounds. "Get up, you worthless...."
They emerged from the darkness: eight figures, half barbarian, half monster. The barbarians wore mismatched armor and carried weapons still wet with blood. The hound-beasts slunk between their legs, all wrong angles and too many teeth, venom dripping from their maws.
At their head stood a barbarian built like a siege engine, short red hair, arms thick as tree trunks, and around his neck...
Galthor's gaze locked onto the necklace. Severed heads. Fresh ones. The faces frozen in expressions of terror and pain.
And he knew those faces.
The memories weren't just information anymore. They were emotion, crashing through him with the force of a tidal wave. These were Galthor Stronghide's family. His father. His brothers. His sisters.
Dead. Butchered. Turned into jewelry.
"Brakthar," the red-haired barbarian said, his voice a lazy growl. "You have real skill. Leave that useless bastard and join us. New ChainLord rules now. You don't have to die here."
Brakthar's teeth ground together like millstones. "He might not be worth it, but I swore to his father, the chief, that I would fight for him. And you killed the chief."
His voice dropped into something murderous.
"By my blood, I'll kill you."
The red-haired warrior laughed and stepped forward, the severed heads swaying with his movement.
And Galthor felt something ignite in his chest.
Not Luki's careful, calculated emotions—he'd learned to keep those small, manageable, trapped like everything else in his life. This was something else. Something vast and ancient and furious, waking up after sleeping for millennia.
The Barbarian God's rage, bleeding into Luki's soul.
Or maybe Luki's rage, finally given teeth.
His hands stopped shaking. His breath steadied. The confusion and fear burned away, leaving something cold and sharp behind.
He'd spent twenty-two years unable to change anything. Unable to fight back against the universe's cruelty. Unable to even stand
Not anymore.
Galthor pushed himself to his feet, feeling his new muscles coil like springs, and looked at the man wearing his family's severed heads like trophies.
"Tell me," he heard himself say, his voice steady despite the fury building behind his ribs. "What's your name? I want to know what to carve on your grave."