The world of humanity is a constantly evolving, advancing place filled with various mysteries and strange happenings. Yet for all of the new technology and science of the ever-marching forward race of mankind, there remains one undeniable universal truth for all humans. The root of humanity has always stemmed from the salt and grime of Earth's harsh natural order.
While technology offers comfort by streamlining the necessities of survival, it provides little in terms of purpose. This has left many people unsatisfied with the direction of humanity as a whole, feeling disconnected from the very land they have lived on for their entire lives.
This phenomenon has led to people embracing the old pagan gods, discarding most modern conveniences, or leaving human society entirely. For if the world of mankind can not offer fulfillment, then why participate in their meaningless march that gives you nothing but dissatisfaction?
One such person is a young man named Danith Grit, who grew tired of the poorly paying jobs, the consistently terrible governance, the constant infighting, and the overall pathetic state of society. Humanity was weak as a whole, with its abstract thought a wasted effort on barely held-together people and their false peace.
To escape this suffocating world, Dan used what little money he had saved to gather resources for self-sustenance. He bought a boat to strand himself on a remote island left untouched and unused by others. This was where he would live his significant life, one not bound by a society that has forgotten its origins as a part of nature.
Here, Dan would farm, fish, and hunt far away from the old world using the knowledge and skills he had trained himself for years before leaving the rest of mankind behind to their endless march forward. No government to leer behind his back, no company to break his back working only to get scraps, no need for the broken society of tomorrow to exist in his life now.
A decade would pass by, Dan, the world beyond his island's shores slowly advancing in their march forward and quickly evolving to meet their draconian technological wants. Yet humans are a social kind, and ten years of solitude from the rest of his people, even for an introverted type like himself, was gnawing on his mind.
So, Danith would head back to the mainland only to find a world entirely alien to him now, technologically superior to the world he had left for him, even to comprehend the leap forward he had missed in his absence. His clothes were made from vines and animal skin, his body was covered in hair, and his face showed confusion as he looked at this unfamiliar place.
To any onlooker, he would seem like a prehistoric caveman who has just entered modern times and perceives it as magic—a modern barbarian ignorant of the world at large and fearful of its existence. Dan, in this strange new world, accidentally got too close to an automatic garbage chute, which mistook him for trash because of his attire and sucked him in.
The trash compactor that it sent him into the walls slowly pushed forward and crushed him to death, his bones crunched and pierced his flesh, his eyes popped out of their sockets and fell out, his organs were mashed into a mushy liquid, and his body folded into itself with sharp bone fragments jutting out of his corpse.
Dan cursed his weak body and wished for the strength and endurance not to be crushed by the compactor, desired for the power to break it like it broke his body, to have the vitality to not die in such a pitiful way, and longed for nature. Yet, more than anything else, he hoped beyond everything that if he were to be born anew, it would not be as a pathetic people like humanity.
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Hi! I'm the author, of course. This chapter is basically the prequel to the story of "Reborn as an Oger". It's not all that important for the story going forward; the primary purpose is to provide a bit of context for the main character and where he comes from. I wrote it to be more mythic and feel more like a written legend than an actual narrative chapter, as I don't really plan on making Danith Girt's reincarnation a significant plot point for most of the story.
Which is why this is an Auxiliary Chapter and not a "main" chapter, so if you're reading this, it's ultimately optional at least within my current plans of "Reborn as an Oger". Anyway thanks for reading, I'll see you when I get around making more (and actual) chapters later on.