Marcus drifted into consciousness on a narrow cot.
A broken television sat in the corner like an injured eye, its screen strobing between snow and a warped newsfeed, throwing stuttering shadows across peeling wallpaper. The room smelled of damp cloth and old medicine—sharp, metallic, unfamiliar.
His hand moved on instinct, pressing to his sternum.
A heartbeat answered.
"I'm… alive?" he whispered, the words scraping out of a throat that felt unused.
A chair creaked.
A trembling, youthful voice—trying very hard to be steady—came from beside him. "Father… you're awake?"
Marcus turned his head.
A boy—pale, twelve at most—leaned over him, face drawn tight with exhaustion. Sweat darkened the boy's hairline. In his small hands was a damp cloth, which he used with careful, practiced motions to wipe Marcus's forehead, as if afraid a rough touch would shatter him.
"Father…" the boy murmured again, and his eyes glistened with something he refused to let fall. "You scared me."
Marcus stared.
Father.
The word hit like a thrown stone.
And then the world split.
Foreign memories crashed into him in a violent flood—names he didn't recognise but somehow knew, faces that carried a weight of guilt, the taste of power on the tongue, the humiliation of collapse. A man standing tall under a sky full of sword-light. A sect's cold laughter. The boy's thin shoulders were turning away as if expecting a strike.
Marcus sucked in a breath that wasn't quite his, and the room wavered.
He wasn't in his body.
He wasn't in his world.
He forced his gaze down at his hands: callused in unfamiliar places, veins mapped differently, skin just slightly rougher. A cultivator's hands. Hands that had held a blade, a seal, a life—and failed.
He swallowed, feeling the weight of the memories settle into shape.
Marcus. Qi Refinement Seventh Stage. Once-respected. Recently… ruined.
He let the conclusion escape his lips in a voice gone hoarse with disbelief:
"…So I transmigrated."
The boy flinched, eyes darting down like he'd been caught listening. His posture was hollow—too guarded for someone so young, as if he'd learned that making himself small was the safest way to exist.
Marcus's mind, still reeling, supplied a reflexive cruelty that wasn't entirely his.
"Idiot," he muttered.
The boy's shoulders tightened; the cloth paused mid-wipe. He didn't argue. He didn't look offended. He just looked—resigned.
That resignation stabbed deeper than the insult ever could.
Marcus exhaled slowly, and in that breath, he made a decision.
He wasn't going to be that Marcus.
He shifted, forcing his voice to soften, to steady, to become something the boy could stand near without shrinking. "Hey."
The boy looked up warily.
Marcus held his gaze. "You're not useless."
The boy froze as if the sentence didn't parse. Like his ears had heard it, but his world had never prepared him to believe it.
Something in Marcus's chest tightened—part guilt, part anger, part a strange protectiveness that rose faster than logic could justify.
A metallic ping rang out, crisp and unreal, as if someone had flicked a coin against glass.
[DING!]