Prologue

Day 0, Morning

Dear Diary,

Today, I opened my eyes and found myself at a hilly meadow. I saw violet flowers to my right, and a glassy pond to my left. Behind me was a range of mountains, and ahead of me stood a wooden cottage with a smoking chimney on the roof, and a forest of emerald trees flanking it on both sides. It looked warm, comfortable, and inviting.

So, I did the only thing I could. I grabbed the dagger and slit my own throat.

…

I’m sorry, that must be terribly confusing, isn’t it? I suppose I should start from the beginning. My name is Kaylan Chin, and I’m 31 years old. I’m a freelance translator, and I was in the middle of translating a web novel when I suddenly found myself in this strange world with partial amnesia. And how do I know I’m missing some memories? That’s because I do not remember how I came to be here. In most stories, there usually is an incident that facilitated the protagonist’s transition to a different universe—a death, a portal, a supernatural truck and more—but in my case there was no such incident, or rather, I do not remember them at all. One second I was typing, “Just because I’m cute doesn’t mean I’m harmless!” at my work table, and the next, I was lying on the ground. Don’t ask. It's something to do with a cat.

My first thought was that I had blacked out or something. While I had never fainted in my life, it was the only explanation as to how I went from sitting on a chair to lying spread-eagle on the floor. My second thought was that the ground I was lying on wasn’t a floor. A floor didn’t feel soft and ticklish, and it couldn’t be a carpet because I never owned one. It was around this time I sat up, pulled an offending blade of grass out of my hair—yep, it was definitely no floor—and found myself standing in the picturesque world I described above.

At this point, it still hadn’t occurred to me that I wasn’t on Earth. Although I couldn’t even begin to fathom what kind of person would bother kidnapping someone as mundane as I, the fact was far crazier things had happened for far less. That was until I noticed little discrepancies here and there that added up to a mountain of evidence that I could not possibly ignore.

The first discrepancy that clued me in was the grass right beneath my feet. Did you ever get the sense that everything seemed right at the beginning, but some time later you realized that it was anything but? I was blinking stupidly at the ground for a couple of seconds when I abruptly realized that the leaves were snowflake-shaped. I jumped. After confirming that my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me, I looked around intently and found many little things that seemed normal to me at the beginning, but not really. The clouds, for example, looked a little edgier than normal. If I were to describe a cloud, it would be a round, bubbly, concentrated mass of water vapors that could make it rain at any moment. The ones in this sky though, they looked just a little too jagged and sharp to be the clouds I was used to, like polygons. I could almost imagine cutting a fruit with the edge, except that wasn’t possible because water vapor was water vapor no matter what shape they assumed. Right?

There were many more little oddities like these, so much so I almost couldn’t believe that I had missed them the first time. Some trees had so many shoots on their branches they might as well be plant porcupines, and at the end of each shoot was a single diamond-shaped leaf. The violet flowers at the distance were actually much farther away than they looked, and the reason I made the mistake was because they were ridiculously huge, like twice as tall and many times as wide as me kind of huge. The glassy pond to my left looked still enough to be frozen, which shouldn’t be possible considering how warm it was. Maybe it was because that particular area was completely windless, but I found that hard to believe considering that I just got punched in the face by a particularly strong gust of wind, and my current location wasn’t that far away from it.

Long story short, when the realization that I wasn’t on Earth finally dawned upon me, my mind turned perfectly blank as if I had been struck by a lightning bolt. As I’m recording this, I’m still not sure why I had felt so shocked at the time, but it had definitely taken me an unbelievably long time before I finally returned to reality.

There was one more other oddity I noticed among all the oddities. After I finally snapped out of my daydream after god knows how long, I patted myself down and discovered that I was wearing my clothes, a belt, a bag, and a dagger. Some of these items are not like the others. In fact, none of these items except my clothes belonged to me. I usually never keep anything in my pockets unless I was outside, and I hadn’t worn a belt since I quitted my old job. A bag? A dagger? Like are you kidding me? I jumped a whole feet into the air when I finally took notice of them.

Ignore the fact that someone or something had slipped these on me without me noticing, what was truly strange was the materials that made up the items. For starters, the belt was a shadow black strap joined together by a silver buckle. The buckle, as far as I could tell, was just ordinary metal, but the strap was a different story. The first time I ran my fingers across its surface, I flinched because it felt ice cold and wet to touch. It wasn’t actually liquid, however. I realized that when I wiped my fingers across my pants and found them to be perfectly dry. I also tried stretching them a little and found them to be fairly sturdy and elastic. It wasn’t as elastic as rubber—that would kinda defeat the purpose of a belt—but it was flexible enough to make a note about. And obviously, it was unlike any leather, plastic, or any material I had ever encountered. It was… something. My overall impression was that it was weird as hell.

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The rest of the items were just as unsettling as the belt. The bag looked plain and simple on the surface—it had one large interior pocket, four smaller exterior pockets, and a pair of shoulder straps—but a careful caress revealed that it was made of the same material as the belt. Its color was different though, sky blue to be exact, so it seemed that whatever this material was, it was probably as malleable as plastic on Earth, if not more so. Speaking of which, it was where I found you, my dear Diary. You, a thick stack of rectangular papers wrapped inside your brown, leather-like cover, were lying snugly inside the interior pocket of the bag. I won’t lie, I had thought you were an ordinary notebook at the beginning, maybe even a bit useless because I didn’t have a pen on me and so couldn’t write anything on you, but now… now I know better. But more on that later.

If the bag and the belt could still be made on Earth—it could be some top secret military creation or something, who knows—then the dagger was a different beast altogether. Possibly literally. At first glance, it was a strange thing where one-third of the blade—the portion extending from the yellowish guard to be exact—was wavy-patterned, while the rest was straight but bent at an odd angle that, to my untrained eye, seemed to suggest that it was built wrong or something. The equally curvy hilt hinted otherwise, however. The entire weapon was made out of metal, and it looked as pristine as new. It did not have a sheath, and it was hanging off a hook attached to my belt.

Ironically, despite its unusual appearance, the dagger was easily the most normal-looking item out of all the things that had mysteriously appeared on my person without my consent until this point. Of course, I would immediately regret that sentiment a second later. When I grabbed the hilt and slid it out of the hook, I had expected to feel the cold, hard sensation of metal in my palm. Instead, what I felt could only be described as flesh. Soft, firm, coarse, uncomfortably warm flesh with an underlying core of unbending hardness that, no thanks to the aforementioned imagery, reminded me of bones. I almost threw it out of my hand. I would have flung it as far away from me as possible if it hadn’t suddenly become stuck to my palm like glue while squirming as if it was alive it was definitely alive let go let go let go of me!

For a good few seconds, I yelled my favorite string of curses again and again while flailing my arms around like a cat with its tail caught by a mouse trap. However, the dagger refused to dislodge from my hand no matter how hard I tried to throw it away, and my panicked attempt to pull it away with my free hand only resulted in both my hands being stuck to it. It was at this time something truly unnatural, something that made me realize that my old life was truly gone forever, occurred. Something slimy and wet, alien and invasive crept out of the hilt of the dagger and dug into my palm. I could feel everything. It seeped through my skin, entered my veins, spread across my whole body via the blood circulatory system, and finally became one with my cells. I imagined this was how it felt if the human body could perceive say, the dissolved oxygen and all the other substances in its blood, and I did not like it one bit. I screamed. I writhed. I scratched away at my skin as if I was experiencing the most horrible itch in my life (it was not an itch, but I would have to invent a new term if I were to convey the utterly alien sensation I was feeling at the time exactly), uncaring at the fact that the dagger was cutting through my clothes and turning my flesh into sushi during the mad struggle. It did not matter one bit.

Eventually, the itch ended. The process had been agonizingly slow—it felt as if the moment was dragged out so that I would suffer as much as possible and never forget the memory forever and ever—but after the alien thing had merged with me completely, the horrible sensation abruptly vanished like it never existed. Like a discarded vessel, the dagger fell out of my slackened grip and hit the ground with a thud. My first thought after was to find a rock and smash the damned thing into a million pieces, but I was far too exhausted, and I suspected it was too late already. Whatever horror was inside the dagger had already migrated to my body instead. There was the small but not insignificant possibility that the horror was still connected to the dagger, and damaging it might irritate it enough to torture me all over again, or worse. I couldn’t imagine what it was, but if there was one thing I learned in my incredibly average life, it was to never underestimate life’s ability to kick you when you were down.

I closed my eyes. As I lay belly down on the snowflake-shaped grass and attempted to catch my breath, I wondered what I had done in my life to deserve such punishment. Yes, punishment. You see, I was convinced at that point that maybe I had died after all, and my soul was sent to the Chinese hell “diyu” to atone for my sins. It was said that diyu were made up of eighteen levels in total, and each one represented a different aspect of atonement and different punishments. While I had no idea what sin I was being punished for, I was damn sure I wasn’t going to suffer being possessed by some otherworldly entity, or being eaten from the inside by some sort of parasite, or dropping in and out of consciousness and discovering that my body had done all sorts of horrible things during the missing gaps between my memories, or more. Fuck me, I should not have read all those horror stories, because now my mind wouldn’t stop conjuring one horrifying possibility after another. If even one of these things were true, then I… I would rather die than suffer through them.

I opened my eyes hoping that it was all a dream, and that I would wake up to reality and greet my ceiling fan once. But it wasn’t. I found myself at a hilly meadow. I saw violet flowers to my right, and a glassy pond to my left. Behind me was a range of mountains, and ahead of me stood a wooden cottage with a smoking chimney on the roof, and a forest of emerald trees flanking it on both sides. It looked warm, comfortable, and inviting. I fell into despair.

So, I did the only thing I could. I grabbed the dagger and slit my own throat.