My eyes—no, my body—jolted.
I was no longer suspended in the cool, infinite white of the Junction. I was crushed. The air was thick, heavy with the stench of mildew, ash, and something metallic and sickly sweet—like rotted meat marinated in copper.
A coffin? Why a coffin?
Panic clawed at my throat. It was dark, a blackness far more oppressive than the Junction's void. I couldn't see anything. Every instinct screamed at me to get out. I pushed up—hard.
CRACK!
The wood above my head groaned and splintered. Dust and loose soil rained down on my face.
Too weak. The body I now occupied felt heavy, sluggish, and desperately weak. It was clearly not the same healthy body I had died in. This one was frail, bordering on starved.
The sudden, chaotic intrusion of emotion—despair, terror, and a primal, irrational hunger—threatened to overwhelm me. But then, the silent pressure returned.
The S-ranked boon asserted itself, not as a wall, but as an absence of noise. The raw, confusing emotions trying to flood my senses—the fear of the body, the horror of the coffin—were muted, filtered, and pushed to the periphery. I was afraid, but I could think.
Focus. Eternal Core. Mental Fortress. I have my boons.
I called on the Eternal Core. I didn't know what "Power" felt like, but I searched for that deep, cold certainty the Figure of Light had woven into me.
There. It was a boundless energy source, sitting calm and deep beneath the panic.
I slammed my palms against the lid above me. I didn't know a single martial art or power from this world, so I resorted to brute force, channeling the raw energy I knew was inexhaustible.
SHATTER!
The coffin lid exploded outward.
A rush of noxious, stale air hit me, along with the dull sound of shattering stone. I scrambled out of the broken box, gasping, coughing up soil.
I was in a shallow grave, or what had been a grave. Above me, the sky was not the pale blue of my old world, but a bruised, sulfurous orange, perpetually cloaked in haze. I was surrounded by cracked, uneven headstones and mounds of disturbed earth. A ruined cemetery.
I was alive. I was in Erebos.
I dragged myself completely free. My arms ached, and I glanced down at my new form. The clothes were rags—filthy, gray fabric that barely clung to a bony frame.
More disturbing than my weakness, however, was the sight next to the shattered coffin.
It was the original occupant of the grave.
The person I had just been reincarnated into lay beside the hole, partially unearthed. The face was gaunt, the eyes wide and fixed. A single, dark wound marred the chest, perfectly placed to end a life.
Did I replace him? Or did I possess him?
As the horrible realization sank in, the Figure of Light's power, the Omni-Mimicry, activated for the first time. It wasn't a screen or a voice, but a sudden, clean download of information.
[SKILL ACQUIRED: GHOST STEP (F-RANK)]
Source: The residual muscle memory of the deceased.
Description: A low-level mobility skill taught to scavengers in the Outer Wastes. Grants a brief burst of silent speed.
Mastery Level: 10%
I froze, staring at the corpse. I had just copied the final, desperate movement of the person whose body I now wore.
The faint, distant screams grew louder, closer. They were not sounds of simple pain, but of something frantic, desperate, and utterly doomed.
I glanced up at the broken cemetery gates. Beyond them lay the vast, ruined expanse of Erebos. I was Tier 0, weak, and standing over a corpse in a grave.
Somehow I completely remembered what the entity said.
"YOU MUST SURVIVE, DRIFTER"
I focused my Eternal Core, channeled the Ghost Step skill I had just stolen from the dead, and bolted toward the crumbling perimeter wall, the screams guiding me not to help, but to danger. I was a drifter in a shell world, and the game had just begun.
To be continued...