Chapter 1 : THE BORROWED BODY
The first thing was the light. White. Surgical. Burning through his eyelids like it had personal business with his retinas.
Ethan Cole opened his eyes and choked on recycled air.
Metal ceiling. Low. Close enough to touch if he raised his arm. Riveted steel panels with condensation beading at the seams. A fluorescent tube hummed above him, one end flickering in that particular rhythm that meant the ballast was dying.
He tried to sit up. His body didn't cooperate. Not in the way a body doesn't cooperate after a rough night—this was wrong at a cellular level. His center of gravity was off. His arms were too short. His legs folded at angles his muscle memory didn't recognize.
"What the—"
His voice cracked. High. Thin. A teenager's voice.
The last thing he remembered was Interstate 95 outside Richmond. A logistics convoy running late because the DOD changed the delivery window again. Rain turning the highway into a skating rink. The eighteen-wheeler jackknifing across three lanes. His hands on the wheel of the escort vehicle. The crunch. The spin. The guardrail coming through the windshield like a spear.
Then nothing.
Then this.
He brought his hands up. They were pale, thin-wristed, soft. No calluses from years of handling cargo manifests and military crates. No scar across the left knuckle from the time he'd caught it on a shipping container latch in Fort Bragg. These were a kid's hands. Unmarked. Unused.
His chest tightened. His breathing came fast and shallow—then a blue light pulsed at the edge of his vision.
Translucent. Geometric. Like someone had projected a holographic interface onto the inside of his corneas. Text scrolled across it in clean sans-serif font:
[WONKRU ETERNAL SYSTEM — INITIALIZATION COMPLETE]
[SOUL-ANCHOR BOND ESTABLISHED. HOST INTEGRATION: 97.3%]
[WELCOME, TRANSMIGRATOR.]
He bit his tongue. Hard enough to taste copper. The pain was real. The blood was real. The blue interface hovering in his vision didn't give a damn about either.
His jaw clenched. He pressed his back against the wall—cold metal through thin fabric—and forced his breathing into a four-count rhythm. In through the nose. Hold. Out through the mouth. Hold. The technique that got him through his first deployment brief, his first convoy ambush drill, his first real emergency.
"Okay. Okay. Breathe. You're not dead. Maybe. Figure out the rest later."
The interface pulsed again, softer this time. A menu materialized:
[STATUS — HOST PROFILE]
[Name: Ethan Cole]
[Age: 17]
[Location: The Ark — Skybox Juvenile Detention]
[Timeline: 97 Years Post-Nuclear Apocalypse]
[Bond Status: Permanent. Severance = Death + Soul Dissolution]
His blood ran cold.
The Ark. Skybox. Ninety-seven years post-apocalypse.
He knew those words. He knew exactly where he was. Not because he'd been here before—because he'd watched it. Every episode. Seven seasons. A hundred hours of post-apocalyptic television drama about a space station running out of air and a hundred juvenile delinquents dropped onto a radioactive Earth.
"I'm inside The 100."
The thought should have been absurd. It was absurd. It was also, apparently, his new reality, because the metal cot beneath him was real, the recycled air burning his nostrils was real, and the interface humming in his vision didn't care about his disbelief.
[SYSTEM TUTORIAL INITIATED]
[WONKRU ETERNAL is a Civilization Preservation and Kingdom Building System.]
[PURPOSE: Guide the Host in rebuilding civilization from apocalyptic conditions.]
[The System bonds with transmigrators who possess the potential to lead. You have been selected.]
More text. He read it like a man reading his own autopsy report—clinical detachment wrapped around raw terror.
The System broke itself down in pieces simple enough to follow. He had stats—physical, mental, leadership—all starting at base 10. He had resource pools: Health Points, Mental Fortitude, Stamina, and something called System Energy that powered everything the System could do. He had a level—1, titled "Survivor"—and experience points to earn.
[PRIMARY FUNCTION: CIVILIZATION PRESERVATION ENGINE (CPE) — TIER 1]
[Capacity: 100 Knowledge Units. Storage: Text, diagrams, verbal recordings.]
[Additional functions locked. Level requirements not met.]
[CURRENT STATS]
[Level: 1 (Survivor) | EXP: 0/500]
[HP: 150/150 | MF: 125/125 | SP: 130/130 | SE: 100/100]
[All Attributes: Base 10]
The System was a toolbox. A powerful one, eventually—he could see grayed-out functions down the tree: resource detection, construction planning, population management, survival protocols. All locked behind levels he hadn't earned yet. Right now, at Level 1, he was a man with an empty filing cabinet and a body that didn't fit.
"Start small. Work up. Same as logistics—you don't build the supply chain on day one. You build the first depot."
A clang from outside his cell door made him flinch. Heavy boots on metal grating. A guard's baton rapping steel.
"Lights out in five, Cole."
The voice was bored, routine. The guard didn't wait for a response. Boots moved on. More rapping on the next cell door.
Ethan's mouth opened to respond and something strange happened—words came out that he hadn't chosen.
"Got it."
Flat. Quiet. Automatic.
The original Ethan Cole's reflexes. Fragments of muscle memory, vocal patterns, habitual responses. They sat in his body like furniture left behind by a previous tenant. The memories themselves were incomplete—scattered images of a quiet childhood in Factory Station, a mother who worked water recycling, a father he never knew. A conviction for stealing food rations. Nothing dramatic. Nothing notable.
Nobody would notice if Ethan Cole started acting different. He'd been a ghost before. A background character in his own life. Stress changes people, and Skybox prisoners had plenty of stress to go around.
The fluorescent tube above him flickered twice, then died. Emergency lighting kicked in—a dim amber strip along the base of the wall, just enough to see shapes.
In the near-darkness, Ethan held his new hands in front of his face. Turned them over. Flexed the fingers one by one. Seventeen years old. Young enough that the joints moved smooth and painless, without the click his old knees used to make every morning. No wedding ring tan line—he'd never been married in his old life, but there'd been someone. The memory was already losing focus, like a photograph left in the sun. Her name started with—
He closed his fists.
"Not now."
The System interface dimmed to a faint outline in his peripheral vision—present but not intrusive. It would wait. It was patient. It was bonded to his soul and couldn't go anywhere, and neither could he.
Three days. That's what the show's timeline gave him. Three days before Chancellor Jaha announced the dropship launch. Three days before a hundred juvenile prisoners—including the body he was wearing—got strapped into seats and fired at a planet that would try to kill them in every way imaginable.
Grounders. Mount Weather. Radiation. Disease. Starvation. Political collapse. And further out, the events he barely wanted to think about—Praimfaya, the bunker, the Dark Year. Horrors stacked on horrors stretching seven seasons into a future he could see but couldn't share without sounding insane.
"Three days to plan. Three days to position. Three days to figure out who I need to be standing next to when that dropship door opens."
He lay back on the cot. The mattress was thin enough to feel every ridge of the metal frame beneath it. His spine complained. His body wanted sleep, but his mind was a logistics board with a thousand pins and no string.
"Clarke Griffin. Bellamy Blake. Wells Jaha. Raven Reyes. Octavia. Murphy. Finn. Monty. Jasper. Every one of them a piece on the board. Every one of them alive right now, tonight, in cells just like this one."
And Wells—Wells Jaha, the Chancellor's son who everyone hated for his father's sins. The kid who'd get stabbed to death by a twelve-year-old girl named Charlotte three days after landing. Unless someone changed the equation.
Unless someone was standing close enough to matter.
Ethan pressed his palm flat against the cold wall. The metal hummed with the vibration of the Ark's life support—a sound the original Ethan had been born hearing, a sound like a mechanical heartbeat that never stopped.
[TUTORIAL COMPLETE. SYSTEM FULLY OPERATIONAL.]
[OBJECTIVE GENERATED: SURVIVE. BUILD. PRESERVE.]
[Good luck, Host. You will need it.]
The amber emergency light painted the cell in shades of rust and shadow. Somewhere down the corridor, a prisoner coughed. Somewhere else, metal groaned as the Ark adjusted its orbital position.
Ethan closed his eyes. Not to sleep. To organize.
"Clarke is in solitary. Can't reach her yet. Wells is in general population—isolated, hated. Reachable. Murphy's crew runs the common areas. Bellamy isn't a prisoner—he'll sneak onto the dropship later. Monty and Jasper are together, low threat, high value."
He built the map in his mind, the way he used to build convoy route plans: assets, threats, chokepoints, opportunities. The System pulsed faintly at the edge of his awareness, recording, cataloguing, doing whatever a semi-sentient civilization engine did when its new host was too busy plotting to sleep.
Three days.
He swung his legs off the cot and planted his bare feet on the freezing deck plate. His toes curled against the cold. A small, absurd part of his brain—the part that was still a twenty-four-year-old man from Virginia who liked craft beer and college football—registered that he missed socks.
"Priorities, Ethan. Socks later. Survival first."
He crouched beside the cot and began doing push-ups. His arms shook on the fifth one. This body had spent months in a cell doing nothing. He pushed through to ten, collapsed, rested, and started again.
The System logged the activity without comment.
By the time the real darkness settled—the Ark's artificial night cycle dropping the corridor lights to nothing—he'd managed thirty. His arms burned. His chest heaved. Sweat cooled on skin that still didn't quite feel like his.
Thirty push-ups. That was his empire's foundation. A seventeen-year-old's trembling arms on a prison cell floor, two hundred miles above a planet that glowed green with radiation in the viewport he couldn't see from here.
He wiped his face on his sleeve, lay back on the cot, and stared at the ceiling he couldn't see anymore.
The amber light had gone out.
In the absolute dark, the System's interface glowed like a single blue star, and Ethan Cole began to plan.