Kraft woke up with a pounding headache, the kind you get after celebrating all night after finishing an exam—only to find himself face-down on a letter.
Even in the dim, yellowish light, he could clearly see that a corner of the letter was soaked with drool, the ink on the rough, slightly yellow paper smudged into a blurry mess where the letters had crammed into the corner.
Right beside the letter was a dip pen. The ink on its nib had long dried and caked over, making the original markings impossible to distinguish. But one thing was obvious—this was definitely not the cheap, mass-produced dip pen he’d bought online for twenty bucks with free shipping. That one was a flawed product of modern industry, sure, but at least it didn’t feel this... primitive.
He could feel the tiny splinters on the pen shaft with his numb fingers. Writing with this thing would be like something out of a duel with a Dark Arts professor from Harry Potter.
Of course, that strange pen was nothing compared to his own bizarre behavior. His bleary eyes glanced at the top of the letter—what the hell, a letter written in English to his grandfather? At least it looked like English. Writing a letter in English to a grandfather who’d never learned a word of it in his life was so ridiculous that he had to wonder if he’d been taking some weird, cliché-heavy English exam before this.
Kraft instinctively reached for his pocket.
Empty.
He felt like there should’ve been something hard in there, something he always carried with him. The emptiness was unnerving. He rubbed his eyes and looked around the room on instinct, hoping to spot the missing item.
The rough wooden desk beneath him was even coarser than the pen. Aside from the pen and the letter, there was only a stub of a candle—the source of the room’s dim glow. No familiar desk lamp. That made things even weirder. He should’ve been in his dorm, not in a setting straight out of a horror movie. And yet, a thought echoed in the back of his mind, insisting everything was perfectly normal.
He stood up smoothly. No groggy blood pressure drop, no numb legs. His body leaned forward naturally, his breathing was strong and steady, and his lungs exhaled with such force that they blew out the candle flame.
In the darkness, he stretched. He could feel the fluid strength in his muscles—limber, healthy. A sensation he hadn’t felt in ages.
He groped in the dark toward what he instinctively knew was the bed. His surprising ease navigating the room startled even himself. His body moved with uncanny precision as he sat down on the bed’s edge and lifted the blanket, ready to go back to sleep for real.
In that warm, dark space, the thoughts that had been suppressed by his headache began to float up.
He thought about his grandfather—someone he hadn’t seen in ages. Maybe it had been six months, maybe less than two.
The memories in his head were dreamlike and chaotic, like AI-generated art. In one moment, the old man wore reading glasses, flipping through obscure Traditional Medicine books beneath a glass panel. In the next, he was leaning on a greatsword, deep in conversation with robed figures.
The backgrounds kept shifting between a Chinese-style country villa and a house of thick granite walls. Whispered conversations echoed in his ears—audible, but impossible to make out. It was like a surreal mashup of strawberry-mapo tofu, and yet, it all somehow made sense.
Of course, before he could drift off completely, he groped around for that thing again—for the third time.
First beside the pillow, then at the headboard, then under the blanket.
It took him a while to realize what he was looking for.
Where’s my phone?!
Wait, what’s a phone again?
Where’s my phone, where’s my phone?
What is a phone?!
Did I lose my phone?!
...
After a brief episode of panic, the sleepiness and pain were thoroughly chased away. His mind was now fully awake, and the situation was finally clear.
Something otherworldly had happened.
After a night of wild celebration post-exam—and maybe a few events that would help his roommates graduate with honors—he had, for reasons that might include karmic completion or some fantastical explanation that even third-rate novelists couldn’t come up with, been flung into another world.
Goodbye, sub-health.
And maybe, somewhere along the way, something got lost in translation. The soul now inside this healthy body couldn’t even remember its own name, though the exam content was still carved into its mind.
As for this body’s original owner? A country noble’s spirited young man, raised under the watchful eye of a traditionally-minded grandfather. He grew up in a three-generation-spanning manor, where “PE class” mostly meant swinging a greatsword in wide arcs.
Around age ten, thanks to the grandfather’s encouragement—despite being nearly illiterate himself—the boy started pursuing an education. Under a rigorous and painful curriculum, Mr. Anderson managed to teach him the local alphabet. It looked like English, sounded like English, and even wrote like English—but it definitely wasn’t English. From that point on, Kraft became the first literate member of his family in three generations.
Now, these two souls were facing one good news and one bad news:
The bad news:
They’d been thoroughly stirred together. You in me, me in you. They’d likely never be separated again.
The good news:
They were stirred so thoroughly that they might as well be one entirely new person. Memories and thoughts flowed freely through a shared mind. Like vinegar mixed with soy sauce. Pepsi with Coke. Red wine topped off with Sprite. As far as anyone could tell, this blend wasn’t just functional—it worked. Maybe even perfectly.
(End of Chapter)