I couldn't see.
My eyes were open—I was pretty sure they were open—but there was nothing. Just pressure. Everywhere. Like being buried alive, except the walls were moving with me, squeezing tighter every time I tried to shift.
Breathe. Just breathe.
Except breathing felt wrong too. The air was thick and warm, tasting faintly of minerals and something organic I couldn't place. I tried to stretch my arms, my legs, anything, but they were pinned against something smooth and curved.
Panic clawed up my throat. I shoved harder, thrashing against the walls that wouldn't give. My shoulder hit something solid and—
The world tilted.
Everything lurched sideways. My stomach dropped as gravity took over and I was falling, tumbling, the cramped darkness spinning around me until—
Crack.
The impact knocked the air from my lungs. Pain shot through my side, but more importantly—light. A hairline fracture had opened above me, letting in a sliver of gold that burned my eyes after so long in the dark.
I didn't think. I just pushed.
The crack spiderwebbed outward with a sound like breaking ice. I slammed my shoulder into it again and again until chunks of something white and hard gave way. Light flooded in, blinding and wonderful, and I clawed my way through the opening.
I hit stone and collapsed, gasping.
When I could finally open my eyes without them watering, I rolled onto my back and stared at what I'd been trapped inside.
An eggshell.
Pieces of it lay scattered around me, each fragment thick as my thumb and gleaming wet in the sunlight. The inside was coated with a clear membrane that clung to my skin—no, not skin. I lifted my hand to wipe it away and froze.
That wasn't my hand. They were claws. Red scales covered what should have been fingers. Deep crimson, catching the light like rubies. Four talons curved from the end, each one sharp enough to score the stone beneath them.
I turned my other hand over. Same thing. Scales, claws, completely wrong.
"What—"
The sound that came out of my mouth made me stop. It was my voice, but rougher. Deeper. Like someone had taken my vocal cords and run them through gravel.
I tried to stand and immediately fell. My center of balance was gone, shifted somewhere behind me. When I twisted to look, I saw them—wings. Small, translucent things folded against my back, membranes stretching between thin bone structures.
No.
No, that wasn't possible.
I scrambled upright—on four legs this time because apparently that's what I had now—and caught sight of my reflection in a puddle of egg fluid.
Yellow eyes with slitted pupils stared back at me. A snout where my nose should be. Small horns just beginning to protrude from my skull. Scales everywhere, that same deep crimson, overlapping in perfect symmetry down my neck and across my chest.
A dragon.
I was a fucking dragon.
The cave around me was massive. Easily fifty feet to the ceiling, with stalactites hanging like stone teeth. Sunlight poured through an opening at the far end, painting everything in shades of gold and amber. Other eggs dotted the floor—seven, maybe eight of them—all still intact.
I tried to think. Tried to remember how I'd gotten here.
There was... something. A word that felt important. Earth.
The name hit me like a punch to the chest. Earth. I'd been there. I'd lived there. But everything else was fog—no faces, no names, no memories of what I'd been doing or who I'd been. Just that single word and the bone-deep certainty that I didn't belong here.
Wherever here was.
I made my way toward the light, each step a new lesson in coordination. Left front, right back. Right front, left back. My tail—because apparently I had a tail now—dragged behind me, scraping against stone. By the time I reached the cave mouth, I'd only tripped twice.
Then I saw outside and forgot how to breathe.
Mountains. Dozens of them, stretching to the horizon in every direction. Their peaks pierced clouds that looked almost purple in the afternoon light, and between them, valleys so deep they disappeared into shadow. The sky itself was wrong—too blue, too vivid, like someone had cranked up the saturation until reality couldn't contain it anymore.
And flying between two distant peaks, something massive moved through the air. Even from here, I could make out its serpentine body, easily a hundred feet long, undulating through space like it was swimming.
Another dragon.
"This is insane."
My voice barely rose above a whisper. But what else could I call it? I was a dragon, there were more dragons, and I was standing in a world that looked like someone's fever dream of a fantasy novel.
I flexed my claws, watching the scales shift and catch the light. Each one was perfect, overlapping like armor plates. Beautiful, in a way that made my stomach turn. This wasn't my body. These weren't my hands.
"Life detected."
I whipped around, searching for whoever had spoken. The voice had been clear, mechanical, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.
"Initializing status."
"Who's there?"
No answer. Instead, something appeared in front of me—a translucent blue screen hanging in midair like a hologram. Text scrolled across it, sharp and bright against the mountain backdrop.
Name: No Name
Species: Baby Dragon
Rank: E
Status: Normal
Level: 1
HP: 10/10
Mana: 25/25
Strength: 7
Defense: 10
Agility: 6
Magic: 3
Titles: No Titles
I stared at it. Blinked. Looked around the screen, behind it, through it. It didn't disappear.
"What the hell is this?"
A status screen. Like in a video game. My stats—because apparently I had stats now—laid out in cold, clinical numbers.
"How do I—" I stopped, shaking my head. This was ridiculous. Talking to a floating screen. "How do I level up?"
I didn't expect an answer. But the voice came back immediately, flat and emotionless.
"Skill acquired: Divine Messenger."
The status screen flickered. A new line appeared at the bottom.
Skills: Divine Messenger
"Okay, what does that—"
"Divine Messenger allows the user to inquire about status screen functions and receive detailed information."
So it was an interface. A help system. Great. Fantastic. I was trapped in a game I didn't remember signing up for.
"Fine. How do I level up?"
"Experience points are gained through combat. Defeating monsters will increase your level and improve your statistics."
The cold feeling in my gut got worse. Kill monsters. Of course. Because what else would you do in a fantasy world with a status screen and RPG mechanics?
I was about to ask another question when I heard it—a low rumble that made the ground beneath my claws vibrate. It came from somewhere beyond the cave, deep and resonant, like distant thunder.
Except that wasn't thunder.
Something moved at the cave entrance.
It stepped into the light slowly, and my brain struggled to process what I was seeing. A bear—at least, it had the basic shape of one. But this thing was massive, easily three times my size, with matted fur so dark it seemed to absorb the sunlight. Spikes jutted from its shoulders and spine, each one as thick as my forearm and crusted with dried blood. Two curved horns sprouted from its skull, wickedly sharp, and when it opened its mouth to taste the air, I saw rows of teeth that had no business being in any bear's head.
"Divine Messenger."
I barely whispered it, but the status screen appeared instantly above the creature.
Species: Demon Bear
Level: 25
Rank: C-
HP: 275/275
Mana: 150/150
Strength: 40
Defense: 45
Agility: 32
Magic: 15
My blood went cold.
Level twenty-five. Every single stat was higher than mine—some by a factor of five. I was level one. A baby dragon with seven strength and three magic going up against that thing would be suicide.
I dropped behind the nearest boulder, pressing myself flat against the stone. My heart hammered so hard I could feel it in my throat. The bear's head lifted, nostrils flaring wide as it sampled the air.
Then its head turned. Slowly. Deliberately. Toward the cave.
Don't move. Don't breathe. Don't even think too loud.
Every muscle in my body locked up. The bear took a step forward, then another. Each footfall made the ground tremble slightly. I could smell it now—rot and copper and something acrid that burned the back of my throat.
It sniffed again, head swinging in a slow arc.
I forced myself to think through the panic. The eggs. We'd all been in eggs, probably smelled similar. If it had pinpointed me specifically, it would've charged already. Right? It had to work that way.
Please work that way.
The bear's movements changed. Its muscles bunched, head lowering.
Then it charged.
I tensed, ready to run, but the creature thundered right past my hiding spot. The wind from its passage nearly knocked me over, and I caught a glimpse of those spikes up close—some of them had chunks of meat still stuck to the tips. Then it was past me, barreling deeper into the cave toward the unhatched eggs.
I didn't wait to see what happened next.
My claws scrabbled against stone as I bolted for the entrance. Every instinct I had—old ones I didn't remember and new ones that came with this body—screamed at me to move faster. The coordination I'd been struggling with didn't matter anymore. Terror was a hell of a teacher.
I burst out of the cave into sunlight and kept running.
The forest ahead was dense, all twisted trees with bark like scales and leaves that shimmered iridescent in the light. I crashed through undergrowth that tore at my scales, low branches whipping across my face. Behind me, I heard something that might have been a roar or might have been breaking eggshells, and I didn't look back to find out which.
Then I saw it through the trees—a flash of blue, bright and clear and impossibly inviting.
Water.
I put on a burst of speed I didn't know I had. Branches gave way to open air and suddenly I was sliding down an embankment, claws digging furrows in the dirt as I tried to slow down. I hit the lake's edge hard enough to splash water across the shore.
I didn't care. I plunged my snout into the water and drank like I'd been dying of thirst.
The liquid was cold and perfect, washing away the taste of fear and egg fluid and cave dust. I drank until my stomach felt tight, until my heart stopped racing, until I could finally think again.
When I lifted my head, the forest was silent. No birds. No insects. Nothing but the gentle lap of water against the shore and my own ragged breathing.
I was alone.
Alone in a fantasy world, in a body that wasn't mine, with a status screen that told me I was weak and a demon bear somewhere behind me that could kill me without breaking a sweat.
My reflection stared up at me from the water's surface. Crimson scales. Yellow eyes with slitted pupils. Small horns just beginning to emerge from my skull. Wings that looked too fragile to ever support my weight.
A dragon.
I was a dragon now. Not human. Maybe never human again, if the blank space where my memories should be was any indication.
"Okay," I said to my reflection. To myself. To this strange new world that didn't care if I was ready or not. "Okay."
I didn't know what I was agreeing to. Survival, maybe. Figuring out how to live in a body that moved wrong and thought in instincts I didn't recognize. Learning to navigate a world where level twenty-five monsters could show up at your cave and RPG mechanics were apparently just how reality worked now.
The crimson dragon in the water stared back at me, and I realized something: I was terrified. But I was also still alive.
That had to count for something.
I turned away from the lake, scanning the tree line. The bear was back at the cave. Other dragons existed—I'd seen one flying. There were probably more monsters out there, more things that wanted to kill me, more impossible situations waiting around every corner.
But I'd survived the first one.
"One step at a time," I muttered. My voice was getting easier to control, the rough edge less jarring. "Figure out how this body works. Find food. Don't die."
Simple goals. Achievable goals.
I could do this.
I had to.