He awoke inside a body suspended between two walls, wrists bound by thick, cold chains pulled taut like execution cables.
His upper torso was bare. Frigid night air drifted in through a narrow window high above, mingling with pale moonlight and making his body tremble. Whip marks covered every inch of his well-built frame. This was the body of someone who had endured prolonged torture.
His wrists were raw and inflamed from bearing heavy iron restraints for days. The soles of his bare feet burned so intensely he could barely stand on them. He was inside a dark cellar, yet he was not alone. Fat, swollen rats watched him incessantly. They were waiting for him to die, or at least collapse, so they could feast on his flesh.
His hair had grown long and filthy, falling over his face. He had lost weight, a sign that he had been held in this dungeon for weeks at minimum. His lips were cracked, though thankfully his handsome features bore no permanent scars.
He was Areth Landerbern, heir to the wealthy Duchy of Landerbern, son of the late Duke Oregon and Duchess Elizabeth, and once considered one of the most promising young nobles in the kingdom.
And yet now, in this damp cellar, he struggled merely to open his eyes.
Then something changed.
His body convulsed. His joints trembled. His head snapped upward with inhuman speed, and he rose onto his calloused feet as if flooded by sudden energy. The magically reinforced iron chains binding his wrists pulled straight under the violent motion.
Areth's chest rose and fell rapidly.
But his eyes had changed.
The haze and exhaustion were gone. In their place was clarity. Cold calculation.
Ethan's consciousness did not settle all at once. It fractured first. Memories collided. On one side: a fluorescent-lit room, a computer monitor, a fist clenched in frustration. On the other: palace gardens, vows whispered beneath moonlight, secret meetings with a beloved fiancée.
Two lives overlapped.
For a moment, his head spun. His stomach tightened.
"This…" he whispered, voice hoarse yet deep. "Where is this…?"
The chains still bit into his wrists.
He inhaled.
One.
Two.
Three.
Then he looked around. And what he saw stunned him.
Despite the darkness, he could see with unnatural clarity. This was night vision, the passive blessing of the Moon Goddess. He attempted to move. His muscles obeyed.
First confirmation.
He was not paralyzed. His nervous system functioned. The body had suffered severe torture, but the skeletal structure was intact. Shoulder joints in place. A dull ache along the left rib, likely broken two weeks ago and left to heal improperly. Painful, but not fatal.
Ethan, now Areth, narrowed his eyes.
High humidity. Strong scent of mold. The stone walls were precisely cut, not crude. This was not a modern prison. It resembled a dungeon constructed within an ancient castle.
He strained his wrists. The chains tightened. Cold. Heavy.
But not just heavy.
There was something on them.
The surface was not smooth. His fingers traced shallow grooves. Patterns. Possibly script.
Ethan frowned.
"What the hell am I saying…" he muttered.
How did he know it was writing?
He had never touched ancient metal etched with magical sigils in his life. Yet something in the back of his mind insisted the grooves were not decorative. Suppressed knowledge clawed toward the surface.
"Is this… mana?"
The word left his lips, and he flinched.
Mana?
How did he know that?
Suddenly, his consciousness shut down. At least, that was how it would appear from the outside. In truth, it became denser than ever before. Foreign images and memories stormed his mind. The pain compressed his skull so violently he thought he would die.
Every memory of the body's original owner, Areth Landerbern, from his earliest recollection up to minutes before imprisonment, forced its way into Ethan's brain. Significant or trivial, nothing was spared.
For Ethan, it felt like minutes, hours, perhaps days of agony.
From the outside, only minutes passed.
When he opened his eyes again, shock flooded him.
"What the fuck… is going on?"
Those were not his memories.
They were Areth's.
His breathing faltered.
"No. This is too advanced for a dream."
The brain does not fabricate an entire secondary personality with this level of coherence. Even if it did, the memories would not feel so alien. These images felt like fragments of another life forcibly inserted into his skull.
He slammed his head lightly against the stone wall.
"I need to wake up."
He closed his eyes. Took a deep breath. The cold dampness of the stone seeped into his back. The pain was real. The ache in his rib was real. The burning in his soles was real.
Pain in dreams is rarely this consistent.
He reasoned.
If this is a dream, the environment will respond unnaturally.
"Hey!" he shouted suddenly.
His voice echoed through the cellar. The rats flinched but did not flee.
Echo duration: natural.
Sound distortion: natural.
The stench of stagnant water in his nose: natural.
Too much sensory fidelity. Far too complex for subconscious fabrication.
His heart pounded faster. One by one, logical explanations collapsed.
What remained?
Reincarnation?
Dimensional transfer?
Consciousness displacement?
A cynical smile tugged at his lips.
"Fantastic. So I got isekai'd."
He still did not believe it.
This could be a joke. A sick experiment by friends. Maybe VR technology was further advanced than he thought. Perhaps he was inside some neurological trial.
He needed to test time.
He did not know how many days had passed. He felt hunger, but not fatal levels. Meaning he had been fed intermittently. Meaning he had not yet been executed.
He remembered the novel's timeline.
Areth was kept in the dungeon roughly three to four weeks after the coup. Execution on the eleventh day of the final week.
His vision darkened briefly. He remembered the scene. Nobles who knew Areth was innocent but remained silent for political gain. His brothers' mocking smirks. His fiancée's cold expression and betrayal.
And worst of all…
The whore he had once called mother, standing at the center of it all. His stomach churned.
When he had read the novel, he had been furious. "Idiot," he had said. "How can someone be this naive?"
Now he was inside that idiot's body. He remained silent for a long while, alone with his thoughts. Then he slowly lifted his head. If this is a dream, I play along until I wake up.
"If it isn't… Then this is the greatest opportunity of my life."
Because he knew the story. He knew the power he would gain on the day of execution. He knew this captivity would end. The moment that realization settled fully into place—
Something inside him snapped.
A faint breath escaped his lips.
Then his shoulders trembled.
And then—
He began to laugh.
Not quietly.
It started as a muffled chuckle but rapidly escalated. The chains rattled. He threw his head back.
"HAHAHAHA…"
The dungeon walls hurled the sound back at him.
It was such a mad, terrifying laugh that even the scavenger rats skittered away as if in some exaggerated cartoon panic. Pure laughter born from absurd irony.
"The most tragic character in the novel," he gasped between breaths, "ended up in the hands of the man who read it."
He laughed louder.
Footsteps approached.
Heavy. Irritated.
The bolt on the door scraped open with a metallic shriek.
"Shut the hell up, bastard," the dungeon guard growled.
The door creaked ajar. Torchlight flooded the chamber. Areth stood between the chains, a wide grin splitting his face as he lifted his head. His eyes were no longer clouded.
The guard hesitated.
That gaze was not the same as yesterday's.
Areth inclined forward slightly. The chains tightened.
"I'll kill you all… Every single one of you. I'll bathe in your blood. Because I can. Yes… I can..."
The guard froze. Though he would never admit fear of a weakened, tortured youth, he took several unconscious steps back and swallowed hard, betraying himself.
"I think the little bastard's finally lost his mind…" he muttered.
As he walked away from the dungeon, he passed the remainder of his shift imagining the warmth of his wife beneath their blankets, eager for the night to end.