His gaze swept the small room, no more than ten square meters, and locked on the smoke-stained wooden walls. A few torches guttered in their brackets, their weak orange glow washed out by the sunlight slanting through the windows.
Beneath the right-hand window near the door, clay and wooden utensils lay in a precarious pile: pots, bowls, a chipped cup, and other modest things.
Then his eyes found the two beds jutting from the far wall, set close to his own. He stared at them. He understood, without quite knowing how, that they had belonged to this body's family. For a long moment, some instinct beneath his will locked his gaze there and held it fast.
Then a strange grief tightened in his chest. Memories followed, blurry at first, then sharpening. Shared meals across the low table now visible at the back of the room. Two strange faces, eerily familiar. Quiet laughter in this cramped space. The warmth of voices that should still be beside him.
But they were gone forever.
The beds—he understood now. They had belonged to this body's sister. And his wife.
He tried to scowl, but the movement sent a sharp throb through his swollen jaw. His hand rose to it before he could think.
"Tch. This body is in a bad state." The words came out mumbled. Pain radiated everywhere—his chest, his arms, the places this body had used to shield itself from a beating. He spat blood onto the dirt floor.
"Tch. You called me your child," he muttered, anger threading through the ache. "And this is where you drop me? A broken body, a village full of hostile people, the outskirts of a forest crawling with orcs."
He let out a slow, pained breath. "Hell of a start for a savior. Wonderful." He tried the old calming trick, slow exhale, calm mind, but it felt useless here. He shoved the bitterness down before it could cloud his head.
Then again, maybe the dragon hadn't had a choice. Maybe this was the only way in. Or maybe there was a deeper reason. Or maybe he was just paranoid.
His gaze drifted back to the two empty straw beds. The grief hit him in a second wave, colder, more crushing than before. Before he could stop them, tears traced paths down his swollen, grime-streaked cheeks.
His throat constricted and burned, as though a live coal were stuck in it. He clenched his fists until his battered fingers screamed. Then, one by one, he forced them to unclench.
He squeezed his eyes shut, blocking out the sight of the empty beds. "What? What am I crying for? Some strangers?" His voice came out raw. "Get a grip. It has to be this body. Yes—it must be this body's fault. They were dead before I even got here. These memories, these emotions... they're just this body's hormones."
He focused on the rise and fall of his wounded chest. "The world is full of people. I can replace a few dead strangers. They shouldn't matter to me." He rasped the words into the quiet room. "Sentiment is a luxury I can't afford. Not in my situation."
He took another breath and steadied himself. "They're already dead." He repeated it into the empty room, over and over, as though teaching this body the reality it refused to accept. Slowly, the storm in his chest began to ease. But the tears kept coming.
He scrubbed them away with the back of his hand, then again, harder, dragging rough knuckles across his swollen face until the salt-sting faded and his breathing evened out.
When the grief finally receded, what remained felt like an empty kind of calm.
"Too close," he murmured.
Then his stomach cramped in a loud growl that sent a wave of weakness rolling through him. Forty-eight hours without food. He felt like he could eat a whole cow.
But he knew better than to dream.
Gritting his teeth against the hunger, he forced himself upright. His joints cracked in protest; knees, spine, shoulders, all of them objecting to sudden movement after two days flat on his back.
His eyes swept the room again, careful to avoid anything that might stir unwanted memories. His gaze settled on the clay pots by the door—the ones Rill's wife and sister had used every morning to fetch water from the river in the forest.
To the left, beneath the other window, sat a pair of rough-hewn wooden boxes that served as their wardrobe. As for Rill, the man who had owned this body, he apparently owned nothing beyond the tattered straw vest scratching against his bruised chest and the coarse brown pants stiff with layers of dried mud, cut short enough to leave his ankles bare.
He crossed to one of the pots, crouched, and dipped a clay cup into the water. He gulped it down, then another, and another, until the hunger dulled to something almost manageable. With what little energy remained, he lifted the pot, his ribs aching, forcing a wince, and carried it to the window. He angled it until the afternoon sunlight struck the water's surface, turning it into a makeshift mirror.
When the ripples settled, he leaned over and studied the reflection staring back at him. The face in the water was young—seventeen, maybe eighteen—with messy black hair that refused to lie flat. Despite the swelling, there was a symmetry to his features. He leaned back, assessing the lean muscle beneath the bruises. A frame built for labor.
"Not bad," he murmured, raking his fingers through the matted hair before leaning in again. "At least I won't be fighting an uphill battle in the looks department like on earth."
He turned from the water and crossed back to the straw bed, his vanity fading as a sharper focus settled into his gaze. He sat down, spine straight despite the ache, and drew a deep breath.
He closed his eyes and focused inward, envisioning the shape of his soul. When his eyes snapped open, a translucent blue panel hovered before him. He passed his hand through it, his fingers met only air, like a hologram. Better that way, he decided, and shifted his attention to the flickering display.
[Name: Aris Seldon | Strength: 1.2 | Agility: 1.3 | Vitality: 0.7]
"Strength," he murmured, glancing down at his own hands, the lean muscle corded along his arms. 1.2. No idea if that's high or low for this world. Need more data. His gaze narrowed, drifting toward the wall. And does it scale with weapons? Or is that a separate calculation?
He rose and crossed to the wall where the utensils were stacked. Crouching, he picked up a crude iron knife, its wooden grip rough against his palm. He turned back to the panel. The strength stat hadn't changed.
So it only reflects baseline physical capability. Not equipment.
He probed deeper, letting the biochip's interface unfold in his mind. Strength, he learned, was divided into two branches: physical and mental. The first was self-explanatory. The second measured the ability to hold a massive, complex idea in one's head without losing coherence, and the sheer mental power to force your way through an intractable problem until it finally cracked.
With a satisfied nod, he tossed the knife back to the ground and shifted his focus to Agility. This one didn't require much thought. The biochip confirmed what he'd already guessed: it represented speed in all its forms, mental and physical alike.
Physical agility was straightforward—the ability to dodge, weave, and change direction in an instant without stumbling or losing balance. Mental agility on the other hand was subtler but no less vital. It measured how quickly a mind could pivot when new information arrived.
If the first plan failed, an agile mind didn't panic. It dropped the old approach, seized a new one, and connected the dots without getting stuck.
His gaze drifted to the Vitality reading: 0.7. Simple enough. If 1.0 is baseline for a healthy adult, I'm operating at a thirty percent deficit. Anything below one means the body is ailing.
He stroked his chin, expression darkening. And if average humans sit between 1.0 and 2.0... where do the orcs land? 3.0 Strength? 5.0? He exhaled slowly, the numbers sinking in like stones. No wonder the villagers are terrified.
He delved deeper. Like the others, Vitality split into physical and mental. Physical was straightforward—the body's resilience. Mental vitality measured stamina of the mind: what kept the brain from burning out after hours of relentless work.
A mind with high vitality could think, create, and stay razor-sharp from dawn to dusk without collapsing into headache or exhaustion. In theory, vitality numbering in the thousands might make a person near-immortal. But that was a thought he couldn't afford to entertain. Not now and not in his situation.
He set aside the simple stats and refocused on the panel, drilling down to the biochip's core features. They materialized at the bottom of the display. His eyes locked onto the first entry:
[Scan: Maps a one-meter area omnidirectionally, centered on the body.]
He activated it without hesitation, expecting the world itself to transform before his eyes. But it was his perception that shifted—only when he channeled the ability through his vision did a translucent blue wireframe explode outward, mapping everything within a one-meter radius in a silent, 360-degree burst.
In both his mind and eyes, overlaid across his vision, he could see the geometry of the water pot, the rough edges of the iron knife, even the frantic skittering of a beetle beneath the floorboards. A perfect 3D rendering, real-time and razor-sharp.
Incredible. Real-time environmental data. Nothing escapes me. He braced for his mind to be overwhelmed by the flood of detail, but instead of drowning, he felt only a surge of exhilaration. A grin tugged at his bruised face as he turned to the second feature, the one that made sense of all this data. "Storage," he murmured, and activated it.
Suddenly, his mind felt clearer. His thoughts snapped into order, memories and present experiences sorting themselves into folders like a computer finally defragmented.
He focused on one of the earliest files. His childhood on Earth surfaced with startling clarity: his father's exhausted face returning from work, smiling despite the weariness, the strong arms that lifted him, the rough hand that stroked his hair.
His mother's gentle eyes. The porridge he'd refused to drink, and the swat she'd given him, after which he'd eaten it anyway, crying between spoonfuls. Their home, since burned to ashes, filled with a warmth he could never get back.
It felt like yesterday. As if he were still sitting at that table with them. He let himself linger there a long moment. Then, quietly, he closed the file.
Nearby folders held the darker memories: his family's death, their house reduced to ash, the struggles that followed. He skipped them and wandered instead through the records of his life. Chemistry lessons he'd absorbed, physics he'd hated, the biology class Madam Eli had taught with her droning voice.
Every subject he had ever studied, even glimpsed, was preserved in perfect, granular detail. Every novel read on shady websites, every spicy movie watched in secret. And beside these, clustered like corrupted data, sat Rill's memories: shattered, fragmented, incomplete.
He didn't linger on them. His focus shifted to the third feature. "Analyze," he murmured, picking up the knife once more and activating it.
[Analyzing... Analysis Complete.]
[Object: Crude Knife | Composition: 82% Impure Iron, 18% Organic Fiber (Oak)]
Hmm. Straightforward enough. His mind was already jumping to the final feature.
[Optimization: Identifies optimal refinement and enhancement pathways for analyzed items.]
Good. They supplement each other. He turned toward the door, his expression hardening. The stats are still too vague. I need more data to calibrate them. Optimization can wait.
He pushed the door open and stepped outside. Warm sunlight washed across his skin—the first fresh air he'd felt in two days—and the heat seeped into his aching muscles, easing the stiffness.
For a moment, he simply stood there, letting the world settle over him. The lingering grief in his chest dulled in the light. He stayed a moment longer, eyes closed, then drew a deep, freeing breath.
The air carried the scent of cooking smoke and wood fires, and beneath it, something roasting—beef? Rabbit? His stomach, hollowed by two days of emptiness, clenched hard at the aroma.
He opened his eyes. The village spread before him: dozens of weathered wooden houses with straw roofs, arranged in orderly rows. His own small home sat at the northern edge, just meters from the perimeter wall to his right.
To his left came the rhythmic thud of an axe splitting wood. He turned, and a middle-aged man worked in the neighboring yard, a dog at his side. The animal locked eyes with Aris and barked, high and insistent. Aris turned away, facing forward. Dozens of meters ahead, another house blocked the view, chickens scratching in the dirt before it.
He eyed the plump birds greedily but felt the weight of watching eyes pressing from every shadow. He walked on, fingers brushing his left pocket. A few coins remained; the rest had been taken by the men who'd beaten Rill to death. He kept moving.
A left turn brought him to the junction, where more rows of wooden houses stretched from the settlement's front to its back. Most of the inhabitants stood in their yards, some watching him, some absorbed in their own labor.
He turned back from the junction and walked alongside the village wall—a three-meter-high barrier of sharpened logs. Beyond it lay a stretch of cleared ground, then the forest and its dangers.
After following the wall for some time, he reached a small clearing between the rows of houses. Two watchtowers rose above the palisade in the distance, each about five meters tall. He narrowed his eyes at the silhouettes of armed men atop them, bows slung across their backs. One spat over the edge. The other scratched his beard, gaze fixed on the dark line of the trees.