The sword felt right in his hands.
Ren Ashveil stood in the center of his quarters, going through the Seventh Form of the Ashveil blade sequence. His body moved with precision that had nothing to do with Takumi Hayashi's memories of a software engineer's sedentary life. Muscle memory was a peculiar thing—the original Ren had been an idiot in most respects, but he'd trained like a man possessed.
Compensation mechanism, Takumi's mind supplied. Social isolation plus family disgrace equals obsessive weapon practice. Classic psychology.
The blade whispered through air. Step, pivot, rising cut. His reflection caught in the darkened window: lean frame, black hair still uneven from where they'd shaved it to treat the head wound, eyes that held something the old Ren's never had.
Intent.
He sheathed the sword and checked the equipment laid out on his bed. Whoever had delivered the supplies—some servant too low-ranking to fear family politics—had been thorough. Spatial ring, low-grade but functional. Basic healing potions, six vials. Dried rations, two weeks' worth. A jade token with the Ashveil crest that supposedly identified him to family agents in "aligned territories," whatever that meant.
No information about World 1. No tactical briefings. No maps.
Just resources and silence.
Typical, he thought, turning the jade token over. Give the embarrassment his heir's portion and hope he dies productively.
Three hours until midnight.
Ren sat on the edge of his bed and pulled up his status screen with a thought. The translucent blue interface materialized, visible only to him—one of Earth's Will's little gifts, granted to everyone on their eighteenth birthday.
---
STATUS
Name: Ren Ashveil
Age: 18
Rank: Unranked (Pending World 1 Entry)
Cultivation: Foundation Establishment (Peak)
Skills:
- Ashveil Sword Art (Master)
- Mana Circulation (Advanced)
- Combat Awareness (Intermediate)
- Survival Training (Basic)
Titles: None
World Essence Absorbed: 0
---
Foundation Establishment at eighteen was actually impressive. The original Ren had poured everything into training, probably imagining that enough skill with a blade could earn his father's acknowledgment.
It hadn't.
Takumi understood the logic now, three weeks after waking up in this body with a splitting headache and two sets of memories fragmenting his sense of self. House Ashveil's reputation was built on monster suppression and military contracts. A son who killed his mother—never mind that he was literally a newborn at the time—was a political liability. Didn't matter how talented he was with a sword. The optics were poison.
Better to keep him isolated, give him the resources his rank technically demanded, and hope World 1 killed him before he became a more complicated problem.
Ren dismissed the status screen and stood, rolling his shoulders. The assassination attempt had been amateurish—three hired thugs, probably paid by a rival family hoping to weaken Ashveil's position before the New Year rankings. They'd jumped him in the outer courtyard, thinking the disgrace of House Ashveil would be an easy target.
They'd been half right. The original Ren had killed two of them before the third cracked his skull with a mana-reinforced club.
Then Takumi Hayashi had woken up in a medical room, head wrapped in bandages, possessed by memories of skyscrapers and smartphones and a death he barely remembered—something about staying late at the office, chest pain, the smell of burnt coffee.
He cut the thought off. That life was gone. This one had different problems.
The door to his quarters opened without knocking.
Ren didn't reach for his sword, though his hand twitched. Only a few people could bypass his locks, and none of them meant him physical harm. Not yet, anyway.
The woman who entered wore the formal robes of House Ashveil's administrative corps, her hair pulled back severely, her expression professional and utterly devoid of warmth. Ren recognized her—Senior Attendant Lysandra, one of his father's direct subordinates.
"Young Master," she said, the title perfunctory. "Your final allocation."
She set a small box on his desk without ceremony.
Ren opened it. Inside, cushioned in black velvet, sat a ring—silver, set with a small red stone that pulsed faintly with contained energy.
"Emberstone ring," Lysandra said. "Emergency use only. Crush the stone for a burst of fire-attribute mana. Single use, but it might save your life."
"Generous," Ren said.
Her expression didn't change. "Your rank as heir demands certain provisions. Don't read more into it than that."
He smiled slightly. "Wouldn't dream of it."
She turned to leave, paused at the door. "The family expects adequate performance. Don't embarrass House Ashveil more than you already have."
Then she was gone.
Ren looked at the ring for a long moment, then slipped it onto his finger beside the spatial ring. Two bands of metal that represented everything his family was willing to invest in keeping him alive.
Adequate performance, he thought. Not success. Not glory. Just don't be an embarrassment.
He could work with that.
The next two hours passed in methodical preparation. Ren packed the spatial ring according to a mental checklist formed from both lives' knowledge—original Ren's survival training plus Takumi's systematic approach to problem-solving. Healing potions in quick-access position. Rations distributed to prevent total loss if the ring was damaged. Rope, fire-starting materials, basic tools.
He kept the sword at his hip. Some things shouldn't be stored away.
At one hour to midnight, he opened the window and looked out over the Ashveil compound. Lights blazed in the main house where his father and half-siblings would be spending the evening—probably a formal dinner, maybe toasting the family's prospects in the coming year.
Ren's quarters were in the outer wing, isolated from the family proper. Close enough to claim association, far enough to pretend he didn't exist.
The city beyond the compound walls glowed with mana-lamps and celebration. New Year's Eve was a festival everywhere on Earth, but it had taken on religious significance since the System arrived two hundred years ago. The night when eighteen-year-olds stepped into the grinder and either came back stronger or didn't come back at all.
Ren wondered how many of them understood what they were really doing.
Earth's Will. Planetary consciousness. Sentient world-entity using human beings as invasive agents to consume other realities and grow stronger. It didn't hide this, exactly—the System's prompts were clear about "harvesting essence" and "expanding Earth's influence"—but people didn't think about the implications.
They were colonizers. Parasites. Humanity had become Earth's immune system turned outward, infecting other worlds to feed their home planet's growth.
And in exchange, they got power.
Ren found he didn't have strong feelings about the morality of it. Takumi Hayashi had worked for a tech corporation that strip-mined user data and called it "engagement metrics." Original Ren had trained to kill monsters for money. Neither life had left him with illusions about ethical purity.
If Earth's Will wanted to eat other worlds, and gave him the power to survive in return, he'd take the deal.
He just wouldn't pretend it was heroic.
Thirty minutes to midnight.
Ren ran through the Seventh Form one last time, feeling the perfect economy of motion, the way the original Ren's body knew exactly how to move. Sword cultivation was more than just technique—it was about unity between intent and action, mind and body.
Ironic that he'd inherited a body that excelled at something requiring absolute integration, when he was literally two people crammed into one skull.
But the body remembered. And Takumi's mind could optimize what the body knew.
That'll have to be enough.
At fifteen minutes to midnight, the System chimed softly in his mind.
---
NOTICE: WORLD 1 ENTRY COMMENCING IN 15 MINUTES
PARTICIPANTS: ALL CITIZENS AGE 18 AS OF CURRENT YEAR
ENTRY IS MANDATORY
DURATION: VARIABLE (MONTHS IN TARGET WORLD = 1 DAY EARTH TIME)
OBJECTIVE: GAIN INFLUENCE AND HARVEST ESSENCE
PROHIBITIONS: INDISCRIMINATE SLAUGHTER OF SENTIENT NATIVES WILL TRIGGER WORLD WRATH
COOPERATION PERMITTED
RANKINGS WILL BE CALCULATED UPON RETURN
PREPARE YOURSELF
---
Ren read through it twice, looking for details he might have missed. Nothing new—these prompts had been public knowledge for months, ever since the eighteen-year-olds received their status screens on their birthday.
What the prompts didn't mention: what World 1 actually was. What "gaining influence" looked like. What monsters would be there. What the natives would be like.
Blind insertion into unknown territory. The System didn't believe in tutorial modes.
Five minutes.
Ren checked his gear one final time. Sword loose in its sheath. Rings secure on his fingers. Mental state calm, analytical.
He realized he was smiling slightly.
Takumi Hayashi had died at a desk, under fluorescent lights, drowning in spreadsheets and caffeine. Whatever else World 1 was, it wouldn't be boring.
And Ren Ashveil—the original—had spent eighteen years training for something that mattered, even if his family never acknowledged it.
Now both of them would find out if it was enough.
One minute.
The world seemed to hold its breath. Ren stood in the center of his quarters, hand resting on his sword's hilt, watching the countdown in the corner of his vision.
00:00:45
00:00:30
00:00:15
He thought briefly of the Earth he was leaving—the unified world government, the mana-stone economy, the families jockeying for power in a post-scarcity society built on harvesting other realities. He thought of his father's cold indifference, his siblings' avoidance, the servants' carefully neutral expressions.
Nothing worth rushing back to.
00:00:05
00:00:04
00:00:03
00:00:02
00:00:01
INITIATING WORLD TRANSFER
The air around Ren began to shimmer with pale blue light. He felt a pulling sensation, like reality itself was reaching into his chest and dragging him sideways through dimensions that didn't quite exist.
His vision blurred. The room dissolved into streams of color and light.
The last thing he saw was his own reflection in the window—a young man with a sword, about to step into the unknown.
Then Ren Ashveil fell between worlds, and everything went white.