Chapter 1 - Memories
A sudden, splitting agony exploded inside my skull.
It wasn’t a headache or even a migraine.
It felt like someone had swung a sledgehammer straight through my forehead, cracked my skull open, and decided my brain looked a little too empty, so they filled it with... everything.
Cities made of glass.
People carrying tiny glowing rectangles in their pockets.
The internet. Anime. Memes.
Gacha games that convinced perfectly sane adults to gamble away their savings for fictional women.
And a world called Earth.
.
.
.
Wait.
I already lived on Earth.
Didn’t I?
I stumbled backward until my legs hit the edge of my bed, then collapsed onto it while clutching my head with both hands.
"...What the hell?"
My room was exactly as I’d left it.
My desk sat beneath the window, my practice sword rested against the wall beside an overflowing bookshelf, and pale moonlight spilled lazily across the wooden floor.
Everything looked perfectly normal.
Which was reassuring.
Because my brain certainly wasn’t.
I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping the bizarre visions would disappear if I simply refused to acknowledge them.
But they didn’t.
Instead, they settled like muddy water left undisturbed, each fragment drifting into place until the chaos became startlingly organized.
They weren’t random images.
They belonged to someone.
A boy my age.
He had my face.
My name.
My life...
No.
His life.
I remembered birthdays I’d never celebrated, schools I’d never attended, friends I’d never met, and an entire childhood that belonged to another version of me living on another Earth.
An Earth where monsters never clawed their way out of dimensional scars, where "Hero" was something children pretended to be instead of a government-issued occupation, and where eighteen-year-olds worried about university applications rather than Awakening before graduation.
Lucky bastard.
I let out a slow breath and rubbed my temples.
"So, I either just remembered another life,"
My gaze drifted across my bedroom.
"Or I finally snapped."
Honestly, the second explanation sounded far more reasonable.
Unfortunately, insanity usually wasn’t this well organized.
I knew what coffee tasted like despite never drinking it.
I knew what the inside of an airplane looked like despite never boarding one, and I somehow understood how something called the internet worked, even though our world had never invented the same thing.
Well.
That wasn’t entirely true.
HeroNet existed.
It was useful and efficient.
It also wasn’t filled with millions of complete strangers confidently arguing about topics they barely understood.
The other Earth had somehow turned that into a form of entertainment.
Humanity truly had limitless potential.
Just, not always in the right direction.
A laugh escaped me before I realized it.
It started as a quiet chuckle, then grew as I was sitting alone in my bedroom laughing like a madman.
"So that’s it,"
I whispered, staring blankly at the ceiling.
"The dreams."
For as long as I could remember, I’d been having them.
Not every night, but often enough that I’d begun wondering if something was fundamentally wrong with me.
Towering buildings.
Crowded trains.
Neon signs.
Schools without combat instructors.
Hospitals that didn’t require emergency anti-Rift shelters.
People always told me dreams reflected hidden desires or unresolved emotions.
Turns out.
Mine had simply been memories.
Not from this life, but from another one.
I leaned back against the bed and closed my eyes again, paying attention to something I’d ignored for years.
The emptiness was gone.
For as long as I could remember, there had been an inexplicable hollow feeling inside me.
Not emotional, not exactly–but something deeper, as though an invisible piece of me had simply never existed.
I had learned to live with it.
Then, sometime over the last few days, it had quietly disappeared.
I hadn’t understood why.
Now I did.
The missing piece hadn’t been created.
It had finally returned.
"That’s disturbingly like a trope."
I frowned.
"I blame the alternate me."
Judging from his memories, he’d consumed enough fantasy novels to permanently damage both of our internal monologues.
Which reminded me, as I suddenly sat upright.
"Oh."
Right.
There was one extremely important question that demanded immediate investigation.
If I’d just experienced the standard opening act of approximately ninety-eight percent of every transmigration novel ever written.
Then there was only one logical next step.
I climbed off the bed, straightened my shirt, rolled my shoulders, and stood in the middle of my room.
After a brief moment of consideration, I adjusted my stance.
If destiny intended to bless me with unimaginable power, the least I could do was look presentable.
Taking a deep breath, I puffed out my chest and extended one hand with all the dignity of a legendary cultivator addressing the heavens.
"System."
Silence.
Perhaps it hadn’t heard me.
I cleared my throat.
"System."
Still nothing.
"Status?"
No glowing blue screen appeared before my eyes.
"Inventory?"
Nothing.
"Skills?"
The room remained stubbornly ordinary.
I narrowed my eyes.
"...Quest Log?"
Not a flicker.
No tutorial.
No mysterious voice.
No supreme being greeting me.
No dragon politely informing me that fate had finally noticed my existence.
No ancient grandpa sealed inside a ring.
Lol, I don’t have a ring on me though.
I even waited another ten seconds, just in case the universe was suffering from high ping.
Because these days it actually happened.
"Seriously? I know you’re up there."
Silence.
"Don’t play hard to get."
I folded my arms and sighed.
"If you’re trying to build suspense, congratulations."
One Minute Later...
"I already hate you."
The universe, displaying its commitment to customer service, chose not to respond.
I clicked my tongue.
"So no System."
Disappointing.
Not devastating.
Just, incredibly rude.
After everything I’d been through tonight, the least reality could’ve done was reward me with a blue holographic screen.
I wasn’t asking for omnipotence, just a little professional courtesy.
I wandered over to the open window and rested my forearms on the sill.
Outside, New York glittered beneath the moonlight.
Most cities measured themselves by their skylines.
Ours measured itself by the silhouettes of Heroes patrolling above them.
A streak of emerald light shot across the night sky before vanishing behind distant skyscrapers, probably another Hero responding to a Rift alert or Villain Attack.
Just another ordinary night.
Except.
Nothing about my life felt ordinary anymore.
Apparently there really had been another version of me.
Another Earth.
Another life.
And somehow, against all reason, his memories had become mine.
The question wasn’t how.
It was: Why now?
The question refused to leave me alone.
Recovering another person’s memories overnight wasn’t exactly the kind of event I could shrug off and deal with after breakfast.
If anything, the more I organized them, the more unsettling they became.
They fit together too well.
There weren’t any contradictions, no hazy gaps or dreamlike distortions.
Every memory carried the same quiet certainty as my own.
I remembered learning to ride a bicycle in Central Park when I was seven.
I also remembered falling off one in a place called London.
Only one of those had actually happened.
Right?
I pinched the bridge of my nose.
"Okay, let’s establish one thing first."
Talking to myself usually helped.
"If those memories are real, then I haven’t become someone else."
I was still Evren Sorin.
I still remembered every birthday Mira had celebrated with me.
Every argument with my so-called friend, the Chinese spy Fatty Fu.
Every sparring match I’d ever lost.
Every report card reminding me that my swordsmanship was respectable, my grades were above average, and my talent for Awakening remained impressively nonexistent.
The new memories hadn’t replaced mine.
They’d simply, merged.
Like two books sharing the same ending, or maybe the beginning.
"Which is somehow even weirder."
I leaned against the window frame, letting the cool night breeze clear my head.
Far below, traffic continued flowing through Manhattan as if nothing extraordinary had happened.
Cars moved between towering buildings reinforced with Rift-resistant alloys, while illuminated billboards advertised everything from Hero agencies to Rift equipment.
One massive screen displayed the smiling face of a Platinum-ranked Hero promoting an energy drink.
Conquer Every Limit!
"Easy for you to say jacked bastard!"
That man could probably punch a dragon unconscious before breakfast.
I, meanwhile, hadn’t even Awakened.
Eighteen years old.
Graduation tomorrow.
Still Bronze Rank.
If there was one thing guaranteed, then it was to earn the sympathetic smiles from relatives.
To be fair, Bronze wasn’t weak.
It was simply... ordinary.
Most people never advanced beyond it.
Most people never wanted to.
They graduated, found stable jobs, married, and lived perfectly respectable lives without ever challenging Rifts deeper than the government considered safe.
Heroes were the exception.
Not the rule.
Unfortunately, I’d spent my entire childhood wanting to become one.
A childish dream, according to some.
An impossible one, according to my teachers.
"A late Awakening isn’t unheard of," they’d always tell me.
It sounded encouraging until you realized they repeated that exact sentence every single year.
I sighed.
The other Earth had something called college applications.
Honestly?
Those sounded considerably less stressful, or maybe not.
My gaze drifted upward.
The night sky looked almost peaceful.
Almost.
Anyone who grew up after the Sundering learned to recognize the faint shimmering scars stretched across the sky.
They resembled cracks in black glass, barely visible unless you knew where to look.
Nobody alive remembered a sky without them.
The memories from the other Earth did.
For a brief moment, I envied that version of myself.
He’d looked at the stars and wondered whether humanity was alone in the universe.
I’d grown up wondering what might crawl through the next Rift.
Perspective really was everything.
"I should stop romanticizing his life."
Sure, his world hadn’t suffered monster invasions.
On the other hand, he’d endured something called "final exams."
No civilization survived horrors like that without permanent psychological damage.
A laugh escaped me.
The strange thing was.
Laughing felt easier now.
As if recovering those memories had quietly removed a weight I’d carried for so long that I’d forgotten it existed.
I glanced toward the old wooden bookshelf standing beside my desk.
Most of the shelves contained history books, sword manuals, and Rift ecology texts I’d accumulated over the years.
One shelf, however, held nothing but fantasy novels.
My fantasy novels.
"You have got to be kidding me."
I walked over and pulled one book.
The Regressed Swordsman Lives Twice.
"I had a type."
Actually, both versions of me had a type.
No wonder the transition had been so seamless.
Apparently, regardless of the universe, I was destined to consume unhealthy amounts of escapist fiction.
An uncomfortable thought suddenly occurred to me.
"Wait."
I froze.
"The novel."
The memory surfaced almost instantly.
Among the countless stories my alternate self had read, one of them stood apart.
Not because it was particularly well written.
Far from it.
It had become popular because of its absurdly ambitious setting—a parallel Earth divided into different supernatural civilizations, where every region interpreted the same mysterious energy through entirely different traditions.
Heroes.
Martial Artists.
Mages.
Saints.
Aura Knights.
I felt my heartbeat quicken.
"No."
That couldn’t be right.
There were plenty of stories with similar ideas.
This was just coincidence.
It had to be.
Slowly, I closed my eyes and searched through the unfamiliar memories again.
New York.
Nexus Academy.
The World Threat.
Hell.
The Dragon Empire.
The Sundering.
My eyes snapped open.
"You’ve got to be kidding me."
Those weren’t similar.
They were identical.
Or...
Almost.
The differences were subtle, but they existed.
Names that didn’t quite match.
Events remembered out of order.
Characters who looked different.
Entire details that felt fuzzy.
Like rereading a plagiarized novel.
I frowned.
"So I don’t actually know the future."
That would’ve been too convenient.
Instead, I possessed half-remembered plot points.
Forum discussions and fan theories.
Comment sections arguing over details nobody could prove.
Was it A-- cup?
"Great!"
I wasn’t carrying a walkthrough.
I was carrying spoilers.
Potentially inaccurate spoilers.
Somehow, that felt perfectly in character for the universe.
If there really was some omniscient being orchestrating my life, they clearly had a twisted sense of humor.
Still, even unreliable information was information.
If I remembered a hidden inheritance, I could investigate it.
If I remembered a dangerous Rift, I could avoid it.
If I remembered someone important.
Well.
That depended on whether reality decided to cooperate.
For the first time that night, excitement began replacing confusion.
Not because I thought I’d become invincible.
Far from it.
But because possibilities had appeared where none had existed before.
The future no longer felt like a wall.
It felt like a puzzle.
"This feels Interesting."
A quiet smile tugged at the corner of my lips.
Maybe tomorrow wouldn’t simply be Graduation Day.
Maybe...
It would be the first day my life finally started.
Just as that thought crossed my mind, I heard the unmistakable sound of unsteady footsteps approaching my bedroom door.
"Huh?"
The footsteps stopped.
A second later, someone fumbled with the doorknob.
Once.
Twice.
Then the handle slowly turned.