His hands buried in his hair, Nicolas remained motionless for a long moment. His breathing slowed gradually.
He wondered if all of this was simply a dream.
He raised his eyes.
The ceiling was smooth, a slightly creamy white. No visible light fixture, yet the room was bathed in a soft, diffuse light. Nothing in this place was familiar to him. Nothing matched his memories.
He put his feet on the floor.
That was when he understood that something was very wrong.
The distance between his eyes and the floor was abnormal. Too great. His hands, resting on his thighs, caught his attention. They were not his own. The fingers were longer, thinner. The skin smoother, without the small scars accumulated over the years. The callus on his right middle finger, forged from years of holding medical instruments, had disappeared.
He felt his shoulders, his chest, his arms. The proportions were not his own.
Panic seized him.
His breathing accelerated. His heart beat hard. Hypotheses he dared not formulate clearly jostled in his mind.
He rushed toward the mirror.
He had spotted it on the left wall. He reached it in a few strides and looked up at the polished surface.
In the mirror stood an adolescent.
Nicolas stepped back instinctively. His back hit the edge of the bed. His eyes remained fixed on the reflection, wide, incredulous.
The adolescent appeared to be about sixteen years old. A muscular but lean body, broad shoulders, narrow waist. His facial features were regular, almost symmetrical. A well-defined jaw, straight nose, slightly prominent cheekbones, smooth skin. Black hair. Amber eyes. A stature of about one meter eighty-two.
Nicolas raised a hand to his face. The adolescent in the mirror did the same. His fingers made contact with his cheek. He touched his forehead, his eyebrows, his nose, his lips, his chin. Every sensation confirmed what his eyes were seeing.
He was not dreaming.
Among all the confused hypotheses that had been racing through his mind, one had just found its confirmation. He had transmigrated. The word formed with perfect clarity. A term he had encountered in online novels.
When that word formed in his mind, the pain struck him.
An atrocious pain in his head.
He collapsed to the floor.
His eyes closed.
Darkness swallowed him.
A good thirty minutes passed.
His eyelids fluttered. Nicolas woke up.
The memories returned gradually. He sat on the edge of the bed and endeavored to digest the new memory that had appeared to him—a foreign memory, which now coexisted with his own, that of Nicolas Bar, a twenty-eight-year-old doctor originally from the United States.
This world was called Terra Nova.
A planet radically different from Earth, surpassing it technologically. It had three continents: Morvane, Barm, and LaCosta. All its technology ran on mana.
Mana was a fundamental energy, omnipresent, permeating all things. Of a purity and power superior to any other known form of energy. It could be released in a controlled manner to power a city or operate a vehicle, but also in an explosive and devastating manner. Weapons running on mana exceeded in power anything Earth had ever conceived, including nuclear arsenals.
Two hundred years earlier, Terra Nova had undergone a major event: the Mana Resurgence.
Before that, mana already existed, but in a latent state, barely perceptible. A few ancient cults knew of its existence and used it discreetly. Then the concentration of mana in the atmosphere, the soil, the oceans, and living beings increased exponentially over the course of a few weeks. An energetic deluge that submerged everything.
The effects had been considerable. Life expectancy had increased. Medical technologies cured previously incurable diseases. Energy had become clean and virtually unlimited. The progress made in two hundred years exceeded what terrestrial humanity had achieved in two millennia.
But the Resurgence had not only been a source of benefits.
Domestic animals had mutated. They had become monsters. Dogs exceeding the size of horses, with jaws capable of crushing steel. Cats turned into nocturnal predators whose claws pierced armor. Bovines transformed into massive creatures charging anything that moved with enough force to topple buildings. These monsters were not only physically terrifying: their minds had also evolved. They displayed a cunning, an adaptability, and a coordination in their attacks that defied understanding. And their strength was multiplied tenfold by mana.
The death toll had numbered in the billions. Entire cities had been wiped off the map. Humanity had come close to extinction.
Nicolas let all of this settle into his mind.
He was no longer Nicolas Bar, a twenty-eight-year-old American doctor. He was now a sixteen-year-old adolescent, an inhabitant of Terra Nova—a world where mana permeated all things, where technology had reached unimaginable heights, but where humanity lived under the constant threat of intelligent and overpowered monsters born from the Resurgence.
He had transmigrated.