So there I was, falling through the air like a dropped pastel that just slipped out of a grease-stained brown paper bag on a hot Wednesday afternoon in the center of São Paulo.
My dress, this expensive silk monstrosity that probably cost more than my father's entire old Chevrolet, was flapping against my legs with the rhythmic, wet sound of a mop on a bathroom floor.
I wasn't even thinking about the fact that I was about to die, which was probably the normal thing to do, but about a stupid Excel spreadsheet I forgot to save back in my office before the truck sent me here.
I'd spent six hours on those pivot tables just to make sure my ex-fiancé's logistics firm would go bankrupt by the end of the quarter, and now it was all sitting on a hard drive in a world I would never see again.
The sky above these Death Lands didn't look like something out of an epic fantasy movie; it looked like a bruise that won't go away, a thick, purple mess that smelled vaguely of burnt plastic and wet dog.
It was a rendering error in a game made by three guys who hadn't slept in a week and were living off energy drinks and deep, existential regret.
Then the system appeared, and let me tell you, it wasn't the clean, glowing blue hologram you see in those manhwas where the main character gets a second chance and becomes a god.
This thing was an absolute crime against graphic design, manifesting in a font that looked like a drunk monk had tried to copy Comic Sans with a broken quill while riding a horse.
It glowed a violent, offensive shade of neon magenta against a background that reminded me of split pea soup, making the text nearly impossible to read without getting a massive migraine.
It smelled like someone had forgotten a plastic container full of feijoada in the back of a car during a forty-degree summer in Bangu, a thick, greasy odor of scorched pork and bad choices.
I didn't even have to press a button because the confirmation was a physical weight that pressed down on my eyeballs until I could see my own optic nerves popping out.
The ten gifts were violent spheres of concentrated conceptual bullshit that wanted to occupy the same space as my ribs, instead of some cute little loot boxes with bows on them.
They slammed into my chest one after another with the heavy, wet thud of a frozen chicken falling onto a tiled kitchen floor, knocking what little air I had left out of my lungs.
Time didn't just stop; it gave up and went home, freezing the falling pebbles around me like flies stuck in a glass of cheap, warm beer that someone forgot on the table at a bar.
My soul was a small, shriveled thing, basically a grape at the bottom of a backpack that had been stepped on a few times, and these gifts started pulling on the corners of it.
The first two gifts, the Greed Bloodline and that Divine Reconstitution Pill, didn't wait for me to give them a five-star review before they started doing aggressive construction work on my anatomy.
They went off at the exact same time, which was a terrible mistake on my part because it felt like someone had poured a liter of boiling oil and half a bottle of bleach directly into my veins.
My mana pathways had always been garbage, thin and brittle like those cheap plastic straws that crack the moment you try to put them in a coconut, and they simply gave up.
They didn't just break; they exploded in a shower of useless biological meat, leaving me hollowed out for a split second before the golden sludge of the bloodline took over.
It was a beautiful, disgusting agony that made me want to rip my own teeth out just to have something else to focus on besides the sensation of my bone marrow being replaced by liquid sunshine.
There was no dignity in it, no cinematic glow or choir of angels singing in the background, just me making a sound like a dying alternator while my ribs clicked into new positions.
I remembered my uncle's mechanic shop back in the neighborhood, the smell of burnt oil and the sound of someone swearing at a radiator, and for a second I really wished I was there instead of here.
At least at the shop, the worst that could happen was a heavy wrench falling on your foot, not your entire cellular structure being rewritten by a system with bad taste in colors.
The reconstitution pill was basically scraping the inside of my skin with a rusty spatula, washing away all the impurities and the dirt from the floor where the guards had kicked me earlier.
The original Evelyn had this platinum blonde hair that was very 'my family owns three sugar plantations and I look down on people who use public transit,' but the Greed Bloodline didn't care about her aesthetic.
The tips started to fray and drift upward as if I were floating in a swimming pool filled with heavy syrup, the pale color draining away to make room for something much more obnoxious.
It wasn't a normal hair color, but a fluid, moving nebula of electric purple and electric blue that shifted around whenever I tried to take a breath.
It looked like a low-budget vaporwave wallpaper that some teenager would put on their computer to look cool, and the air around my skull smelled like a mixture of burnt electronics and extremely cheap bubblegum.
My eyes were the next thing to go, the boring brown irises melting away to become golden kaleidoscopes that didn't just look at things, but calculated their exact price in a currency I didn't recognize.
Every time my pupils adjusted, I could hear a faint, metallic clicking sound like the mechanism of an old cash register in a bakery that only accepts cash.
I could see the value of the rocks below, which was basically nothing, and the value of my own torn dress, which had dropped from three hundred gold coins to about two because of the stains.
It was a weirdly useful feature, even if it made me feel like an accountant for the apocalypse while I was still technically falling to my death through a purple sky.
I wondered if I could use this feature to check the price of people's souls, or if that was too much to ask from a system that smelled like a microwave fire.
Then the universe decided to resume its regularly scheduled programming, and the rush of the wind came back so hard it felt like a slap from a mother who just found out you spent the rent money on gacha pulls.
I was bracing myself for the impact, expecting my new, expensive-looking bones to turn into dust against the jagged rocks of the Death Lands, but the fall didn't hurt.
The miasma, this black, greasy fog that was supposed to melt my skin off and turn my lungs into soup, didn't actually do anything of the sort.
Instead of killing me, it rushed toward my skin like a bunch of stray dogs that just smelled a barbecue starting up in the neighbor's yard, eager to be let in.
My new bloodline didn't just ignore the poison; it opened its mouth wide and inhaled the entire atmosphere, chewing on the rot and converting it into pure, unfiltered mana.
It tasted like battery acid and green apple soda, a combination that made me want to brush my teeth with steel wool, but it also filled my muscles with a restless energy.
I landed on the ground with the absolute lack of drama of a wet leaf falling onto a sidewalk, my floating sneakers barely making a sound as they touched the soil.
The rock underneath me didn't have the same luck, however, cracking and spider-webbing out in a ten-meter circle that hissed as the impact energy bled into the stone.
I stood there for a second, testing my balance and wondering if I could use this new system to find a decent cup of coffee in this wasteland.
Of course, making that much noise and cracking the landscape in a place like this is basically the equivalent of walking into a bad neighborhood at three in the morning while waving a fifty-real bill.
Out of the long, greasy shadows of the gorge, something that looked like a starved pitbull made of rotten cardboard and wet chicken bones came lunging at my face.
It didn't have eyes, just two long strings of black slime dripping from the sockets, and it smelled so much like a garbage truck on a hot Friday afternoon.
I didn't even bother to raise my hands to defend myself, mostly because I was still trying to figure out if I'd left the gas on in my apartment back in the real world.
Before the bone-mutt could even get its jaws around my neck, a sharp, metallic bark echoed from the inside of my own shadow, vibrating the very light in the air around us.
Something small and made entirely of glowing cosmic crystals was already clawing its way out of the dark, and it looked very offended that something else was trying to eat its meal ticket.
The creature that emerged wasn't some majestic beast from a high-budget movie, but rather a tiny, glowing fox that seemed to be made of pure, distilled greed and expensive perfume.
It had nine tails that floated behind it like neon ribbons in a club, and it looked at the bone-monster with the same disgust I felt when I checked my bank account after paying my student loan.
There was a weird, buzzing energy in the air as the fox bared its teeth, making the shadows on the ground ripple as if the universe itself was having a minor panic attack.
The bone-thing didn't even have time to reconsider its life choices before the fox lunged at it, moving with a speed that left afterimages of purple light in the stale air.
I just stood there, watching this tiny crystal creature tear apart a nightmare monster while my hair floated lazily around my head, wondering if there was any chance I could find a phone charger in this dimension.
The system pinged again with that annoying Comic Sans font, asking me if I wanted to check the loot drop from the dead monster, which smelled like wet cardboard and copper.
I stared at the magenta text, which read 'Bone Marrow of the Damned - Value: 0.05 copper coins,' and I couldn't help but feel a little insulted by the sheer lack of profit in this fight.
This whole situation was turning out to be a massive waste of my time, but at least I had a glowing fox to keep me company while I figured out how to buy some better clothes.
My floating sneakers were still clean, which was probably the only positive thing that had happened since I woke up in this body, and I decided to start walking toward whatever was at the end of the ravine.