The manager turned back to go and get his final payment, leaving Jill wide-eyed. How could they fire him when he had done nothing? He could have cried—but an acrid smell filled his nose.
Reality crashed back—heat, smoke, pain—as his eyes snapped open.
This wasn't his room. This wasn't any room he knew. He turned his head to the right, toward the heat assaulting his face.
The wall was burning. Orange tongues rose from the cackling curtain being consumed by flames.
His hand shot out, pushing himself away.
But the floor was slanted. He flipped and rolled down the incline, limbs flailing, desperate to escape the flames. Thud. His head collided against the wall at the lower side of the tilted room.
Pain flared. His throat and lungs protested as he took in the burning air. He coughed, eyes darting wildly, scanning for an exit. He had to move. He had to escape this furnace.
Then he saw it: an opening in the wall he had just hit.
He lunged for it and tumbled through into another room. Gravity carried him down until his right foot slammed against one of the two chairs bolted to the floor.
He scanned the room.
In the other chair, a man sat slumped foward, his upper body leaning on a control panel. Blood dripped from his head onto the glowing blue panel. A metallic object jutted from his temple.
He was dead.
Beyond the panel, a partitioned glass windscreen looked out onto an unfamiliar world shrouded in green. One of the panels was shattered, a broken tree branch projecting through into the cockpit.
A single look at the burning room behind told Jill what he was supposed to do. Smoke now moved into the cockpit. He moved, climbing over the controls and squeezed through the narrow gap between the frame and the branch.
His head met the outside world. The distance between his location and the ground revealed itself to be vast. If he jumped, his legs would be crushed.
But he could not stay in the cockpit, the fire would soon spread in. His gloved hand immediately moved to the broken branch and he pulled himself up and sat on it like one would with a motorcycle.
Using his hands, he pushed himself down the branch onto a bigger one then worked his way down. Having never climbed a tree in his entire life, Jill discovered he was quite good at doing the opposite.
His feet hit the ground and he let out a huge breath. The knot in his stomach untied itself with the breath, replaced by a wave of relief so profound his knees almost buckled.
Now that he was out of immediate danger, questions started flooding his mind.
'Where am I? How did I get here? What—'
The questions were cut off as his gaze lifted from his feet and he finally, truly saw what he had climbed down from.
It wasn't a building. It wasn't a cliff.
It was a ship.
A ship of dark, riveted metal, easily fifty meters long, lay cradled in the forest like a dying beast. It rested on its side, its elegant hull—designed to slice through air, not water—now crumpled and broken against ancient trees. One massive stabilizer fin pointed helplessly at the sky, its metallic skin raked raw by the branches that had torn through it during its descent. A long trench of churned earth and splintered wood stretched back through the forest behind it, a scar marking its final, violent path to the ground.
Fire blazed from multiple ruptures in its hull, painting the surrounding trees in flickering orange. Thick black smoke coiled upward, carrying with it the strange, acrid scent—an ozone tang that burned the nose and clung to the back of the throat. But beneath the smoke, beneath the crackle of flames, came a sound.
A pulse.
Thrum... thrum... thrum...
It emanated from deep within the wreck, weak and irregular, like the fading heartbeat of something that refused to die. A sickly blue-green light bled through the seams of the metal, pulsing in time with the sound, casting eerie shadows across the torn ground.
Jill stood frozen at the base of the tree, his mind struggling to comprehend what his eyes were seeing. This wasn't just a crash. This was a corpse. A massive, metallic corpse that had fallen from somewhere—somewhere far above this world of green.
His mouth opened, but no words came. Only a soft, broken sound.
Then the warmth came.
It started at the base of his skull, spreading forward like honey poured through his mind. Sweet. Pleasant. Unmistakably foreign. And with it came the memories, flooding in slow, deliberate waves—
Valdris Von Friezen. Son of the Archduke of Emeliar. Heir to the title. Honorary Earl of Blaistar. A noble citizen of Elykryn continent's Aetherion Empire, Emeliar Grand dutchy, Blaistar City.
His father, the Archduke had died in the Great war against the elves when he was five. Ever since then Valdris became sickly and weak making everyone question his inheritance of the Archduke title.
He was still too young to inherit the title and thus his mother Reyla Von Friezen became the Archduke on his stead.
Valdris loved his father and his death did not only affect him physically but also mentally. He became extremely introverted and only stayed in his room sleeping. Whenever he wasn't in his room, he would visit the mansion's library. Thus, he had extensive knowledge of the Empire that flooded Jill's mind.
Information now flowed in torrents entailing the life of Valdris. The world spun and everything became disoriented. The information overlapped and became overwhelming. The warm honey sensation was replaced with hot excruciating headache. The headache came in waves, each more painful than the next.
Knowledge flooded him—of magical beasts that roamed the Elykryn forests, of divine beings worshiped in temples across the empire, of the System itself and the stages of power he now possessed. It came all at once, mixed with fragments of Valdris's own thoughts: late-night musings about fate and free will, about whether the gods watched or simply didn't care.
The philosophy was Valdris's own—questions he'd asked himself in the dark, answers he'd never found. They threatened to overwhelm Jill not because they were profound, but because they were someone else's, and his mind wasn't built to hold two people at once.
He crouched, clutching his head as the years kept coming—
One year of knowledge turned to two and so on and so on until when Valdris was old enough to attend the Imperial Academy of Asteria in the Imperial City of Asteria.
The day before the admission day, fifteen years old Valdris Von Friezen, the sickly heir of House Friezen boarded an Ironcloud to attend the Academy. He was busy looking at the scenery below when the captain's voice boomed in the room after a terrifying sound tore in the chamber. The ironcloud's engines had failed and the ironcloud was falling.
Valdris had rushed to the gliding bay to use a glider to save him. He had reached for a glider but a strong pressure descended on the room and he was frozen. No matter what he did, he could not move. The ironcloud had descended and Valdris lost consciousness.
The information stopped coming then.
But Jill knew one thing clearly. Valdris had died and Jill had transmigrated into his body.
Thrum. Thrum. Thrum…
The engine now vibrated faster and Jill who was now Valdris knew what was going to happen.
His legs moved as he ran away from the ironcloud. He was about 50 meters away, still running, when—
BOOM.
The ironcloud exploded behind him. The wave from the explosion reached him and pushed him. He fell face first onto the grassy ground.
He pushed himself up and brushed off the grass from his clothes. His heart hammered frantically against his chest.
[Ping!]
A ringing sound filled his head from nowhere and everywhere at once.
Then, light appeared before him. A panel!
[God Ascension System initiating…]
[Host analysis complete]
[Congratulations, host, you have successfully awakened the God Ascension System]