A sharp, persistent ringing filled my head, as if someone had decided to use my skull as their personal alarm bell. I tried to groan, to wave my hand and silence the damned noise. But my limbs felt like they were made of wet cement… heavy, sluggish, barely responding to the commands of my foggy mind.
There was light.
Not the warm yellow sunlight that usually slipped through the curtains of my cheap university dorm room, but a cold, white glow—like the lights of an operating room I'd seen in movies.
Great, I thought.
Had I ended up in the hospital after another night of cheap caffeine and marathon reading sessions of "Frontier Academy Chronicles"? Maybe I had pushed things too far this time.
"Uh… ngh…" I muttered something resembling a groan, forcing my heavy eyelids open. It felt like an eternity, but eventually I managed to crack them just a little.
The ceiling was a pale white. Nothing suggested I was about to meet my creator or anything dramatic like that.
Then a strange smell crept into my nose—a faint mix of disinfectant, the familiar weight of accumulated dust, and maybe… the light scent of someone who hadn't showered in two days.
Definitely not a luxury hospital, I concluded.
Maybe the poor ward. Or worse.
"Mom… did you bring me coffee?" I whispered.
But the voice that came out sounded strange—rough, slightly deeper than I remembered. Like someone else trying to imitate my voice after a wild night.
That was… strange. Very strange.
I forced myself to sit up, using whatever remained of my willpower. Dizziness hit me hard, as if the entire world had decided to spin just to mock me.
I swayed and grabbed something solid beside me to steady myself.
The bed.
It was as hard as a wooden plank, and the sheets were as rough as sandpaper.
"Where did my comfortable sponge mattress go—the one that knew every complaint of my abused spine?" I muttered bitterly.
Then I looked at my hand.
"…Hah."
The blood in my veins froze. Or at least that's what it felt like.
This wasn't my hand.
Impossible.
It was the hand of a young man—strikingly elegant. Long, slender fingers with nails that, thankfully, had clearly never heard the word biting. Pale skin without a single scar or ink stain from the pens that usually decorated my hands.
My hands had been the hands of a laborer in the mines of caffeine and words—hands that knew the texture of cheap plastic keyboards and lukewarm coffee cups far too well.
This hand…
It looked like it had just stepped out of an advertisement for luxury hand cream.
My heart began pumping adrenaline through my system like there was no tomorrow.
No. This was a dream. A nightmare.
I squeezed my eyes shut tightly, clinging to that explanation like a drowning man grabbing a straw.
"Wake up, Adam. Wake up, you lazy monkey. You have a nine-o'clock lecture," I whispered to myself—or to the stranger who had stolen my voice.
I opened my eyes slowly.
The same damned hand.
The same unfamiliar room bathed in cold, morgue-like lighting.
"Alright," I muttered, feeling a wave of dark sarcasm wash over what little calm I had left. "Either I've officially gone insane… or someone is playing a very cruel prank on me."
I got out of bed, trying to ignore the trembling in my legs that felt like jelly.
The room was pathetically small.
Walls painted in a shade of beige that practically screamed resignation to life. A single iron bed, a cheap wooden desk with scratches across its surface, and a wardrobe that had clearly seen better days.
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing from the organized chaos of my life.
No posters of forgotten bands.
No piles of books I had sworn I would read someday.
No scattered lecture notes forming a kind of abstract art across my floor.
Then, like a magnet, my gaze was drawn to something hanging on the back of the worn wooden door.
A full-length mirror.
Its surface was slightly foggy.
A chill ran through my body.
A small, rational part of my mind screamed at me to ignore it—to go back to bed and hide under the blankets until this nightmare disappeared.
But the larger part of me—the damned curious part that always got me into trouble—pushed me forward.
One step.
Two.
Each step heavier than the last.
I stopped in front of the mirror and forced myself to lift my head.
The person staring back at me from the other side was not Adam—the exhausted university student with dark circles and messy hair who barely had time for himself.
No.
This person was… different.
Strangely different.
Thick jet-black hair, styled as if it elegantly defied gravity—messy, yet somehow perfect, with loose strands dancing across a high forehead.
Wide gray eyes stared back at me, sharp and piercing, filled with the same shock and disbelief I felt.
His facial features were carved with unsettling precision: a straight nose, a sharp jaw that hinted at stubbornness.
He was handsome.
The kind of handsome that made you wonder if he had just escaped from a magazine photoshoot.
"Impossible…" The word left my mouth like a broken whisper.
I watched the stranger in the mirror move in perfect synchronization with me.
"This… this isn't me."
I raised my hand—that elegant, unfamiliar hand—and touched the reflected face. My fingers met smooth skin and prominent cheekbones that had never existed on my old face.
This body wasn't mine.
But this voice… this trembling whisper still carried traces of me—my tone, my essence.
I pressed a hand against my chest, trying to calm the drums pounding inside it.
Calm down, Adam.
There had to be a logical explanation.
But what logic could possibly explain this madness?
"At least…" I found myself whispering again, sarcasm dripping from every word, "if I had to wake up in someone else's body, I'm glad it's not a bald dwarf with crooked teeth."
"There's always a bright side… even if it's as dark as a well."
"Oh God," I whispered.
I had definitely lost my mind.
Or maybe I had lost it a long time ago, and this was just my brain finally telling me.
I stepped back from the mirror, as if afraid that the handsome stranger inside it might step out and strangle me.
No. This wasn't the time for a nervous breakdown.
I needed information.
Anything.
Any clue that could explain this terrifyingly real nightmare.
My eyes began scanning the small room again—this time with desperate focus.
That cheap wooden desk…
Maybe it held something.
I approached it cautiously, every muscle in my body tense.
The desk was almost empty, except for a thin layer of dust and an empty cup stained with dried brown marks.
How ironic, I thought bitterly.
Even in this twisted reality, I can't escape abandoned coffee cups.
Then I saw it.
A rectangular piece of plastic—something like an ID card or a driver's license—lying next to the cup.
I bent down and picked it up with fingers that still felt unfamiliar to me.
There was a photo on it.
The same face I had just seen in the mirror.
The same messy black hair.
The same piercing gray eyes.
Name: Adam Lester
"Damn."
The same first name.
Was this some kind of sick joke? Had someone decided to make my transfer—or whatever the hell this was—as confusing as possible?
"Adam Lester," I murmured.
The name felt strange on my tongue.
I flipped the card over.
Date of birth.
Address.
But nothing about "university student surviving on instant noodles and dreaming of becoming a writer."
Instead, there was a faded stamp.
Hope Blossom Orphanage.
An orphanage.
Great.
As if things weren't bad enough already.
Not only was I in someone else's body, but this body didn't even have a family that might notice something was wrong… or wonder where the real Adam had gone.
A strange mixture of distorted freedom and crushing loneliness washed over me.
"At least…" I muttered absentmindedly.
"No need to explain this to Mom. She'd probably have a heart attack."
I placed the card back on the desk.
Another wave of exhaustion hit me.
No memories.
Nothing at all about this Adam Lester's life.
Was he happy?
Lonely?
Did he have friends?
Enemies?
Was he good at math?
All I had inherited was an annoyingly handsome body… and the fact that he grew up in an orphanage.
What a wonderful and completely unwanted start.
I tried to take a deep breath, forcing myself to focus.
Denial wasn't going to help me.
Whatever happened had already happened.
The real question was:
Where the hell am I?
I stood up and walked toward the room's only window.
It was covered by a thin, worn curtain.
I hesitated for a moment before pulling it aside.
What I saw made me freeze.
These were not the familiar streets of my smog-filled university city.
No.
This was… different.
Unsettlingly elegant.
The buildings were towering structures of glass and metal—sleek designs I had only seen in big-budget science fiction movies.
Smooth, streamlined vehicles moved silently below.
As if they were floating above the asphalt.
Floating.
"In… the air?"
"Impossible…" I muttered, pressing my face against the cold glass.
In the distance, a massive digital billboard was mounted on the side of a building.
I couldn't read the words clearly from here, but the bright colors and animated images were unbelievably advanced.
Then I noticed something else.
The people.
Their clothes looked mostly normal, but with subtle futuristic touches.
Some of them wore strange devices around their wrists or attached to their ears, glowing with faint light.
One man walked past while talking to the air, laughing, then nodding his head.
There was no phone.
No headset.
Nothing visible.
"This isn't my world…"
The words came out slowly.
The level of technology here…
It was decades ahead.
Maybe more.
Had I been abducted by aliens with excellent taste in city design?
Or had I completely lost my mind and ended up in some absurdly luxurious psychiatric facility?
Panic began rising in my chest again—cold and sharp.
Everything was wrong.
Everything was strange.
My body.
My name.
This room.
And the world outside that window.
I stepped back, my mind spinning.
I needed something real.
Something solid.
Something that could prove I wasn't just a walking hallucination.
My eyes returned to the desk.
Next to the coffee cup and the ID card… there was another object.
A tablet.
Not a normal iPad.
It was almost completely transparent when powered off.
I hesitated.
Then my trembling fingers pressed what looked like a side power button.
The device glowed with a soft sky-blue light.
A user interface appeared—unlike anything I had ever seen.
Three-dimensional icons floated across the screen while streams of information moved smoothly through the display.
It was unbelievably fast.
"Alright, Adam Lester," I said to the stranger I apparently was now, trying to steady my voice.
"Let's see what kind of technological hell you've dropped me into this time."
But before I could start exploring the tablet, something else caught my attention in the corner of the room—right under the desk.
A gray metal box.
About the size of a small desktop computer.
A power cable ran from it into a wall socket.
A computer.
Something familiar.
Something I might actually understand.
"Maybe… just maybe," I thought, a spark of hope appearing for the first time, "the internet here is still the internet."
"And maybe… just maybe…"
"Google still exists to answer my desperate questions."