Sailing through the void quickly became very boring after the initial terror of the nothingness. As it turns out, it doesn’t matter how fast you’re going if you have nothing to compare yourself to. Part of me had been worried that Gaia had just sent me off in a random direction hoping I would eventually hit something. Thankfully, I could still feel their power surrounding us, my host and I, and guiding our trajectory to . . . wherever we were going.
My host’s soul was still in stasis and with little else to do to pass the time I delved into the information that Gaia had imbued me with. Despite the fact that they had said it was only the “basic” abilities of our kind, some of the listed powers just seemed ridiculously overpowered. Obviously I knew I had total awareness of my surroundings, which would grow in scope as I got more powerful, but I also had perfect memory. Like, perfect perfect. Like ‘if I saw a dog I could count the hairs on its ass from memory’ perfect.
The list went on and on, but most of my powers seemed to stem from my ability to control the “energies of cause and effect”, or causal energy for short. As its name suggests, causal energy can be used to do, well, pretty much anything. As long as you had enough energy, there didn’t seem to be a limit to what you could do. What you want to happen, happens as you want it to.
My mind was swimming from all the possibilities, such that I was caught completely off guard when we finally hit something. One minute we were floating through the black, the next we had hit what felt like a wall of pudding. That is if said pudding was made of acid.
The void suddenly started burning away at the fringes of my presence that had been drifting outside the soul’s protection. I snapped myself back to safety as we began to sink into what I was guessing to be the barrier that Gaia had told me about.
The crossing seemed to take hours as we sank ever deeper into the inky darkness, only for us to be pushed out of the barrier with an almost audible *pop*.
Once again under the guidance of Gaia's power, we were sent hurtling through a new universe. I watched in amazement as galaxies, stars, and nebulas of every color and shape blurred as we flew by.
Finally, we began to slow as we approached a particular yellow star with a small bluish-green dot orbiting it.
We fell like a meteor over the lands as snow capped mountains gave way to wide valleys dotted with many villages and towns. The smallest of which were only a dozen buildings made of mud, wood, and thatch.
We slowed further and further as one of the smaller villages came into view at the base of a mountain, a thin patch of forest between them. To my surprise our trajectory leaned more towards the forest rather than the village proper as we began weaving between the trees. Only to stop at a tragic sight.
A small boy, only barely into his teens, slumped against a tree with half-formed bruises covering his body. I heard laughter as three other boys casually walked away from the scene, cajoling each other in an unknown language. Maybe they didn’t know, they probably thought the bruised and beaten boy had just passed out. They couldn’t see the remains of the boy's soul breaking down as the embers were carried away on an unseen breeze.
I stifled the feelings of horror and disgust welling up inside me. I had a job to do.
“I’m sorry this happened to you. We will pick up where you left off and do right by you.” It wasn’t much, but I could at least promise the boy we wouldn’t waste the life he’d left behind.
I gathered the last remnants of the dying soul and, essentially, coated my host with them. Which, according to Gaia’s information, should give my host memories and knowledge from the previous owner of the body. As the energies mingled and were absorbed into each other, I lowered us into the body and used the last of Gaia’s provided energy to bind the soul back to the body and to heal the worst of the wounds, resurrecting him in the process.
I watched as the largest cuts and bruises shrunk to less than half their previous size, while the smaller injuries disappeared completely. A jolt to the heart kicked it back into working order as blood began circulating, bringing some color back to the boy’s face.
As the organic machinery of the body was whirring back to life, I felt the soul around me begin to stir as well. The feeling was indescribable, somewhere between a beating pulse, like a heart, and a buzz from an electric motor. It was slow to start but was getting stronger and faster.
Everything was set. Now, I just needed to do one thing.
“What the hell am I going to do when he wakes up?!”
I hadn’t given it any real thought because I had just been focusing on not messing anything up in the whole transmigration process. Now, at the rate everything is going, I probably only had a couple minutes to figure out what I was actually going to before he woke up.
I wracked my incorporeal brain trying to find a single good idea, coming up empty. Even if I just laid out the situation to him, there wasn’t much to say. I was a system, he’s a transmigrator, that’s about it!
“. . .Ugh . . . Where am I?”
I flinched as I heard my host wake up and begin to look around him. The confusion was quickly replaced by panic as he noticed the unfamiliar environment and his new injured body.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
I let out a mental breath, steadying myself. ‘Showtime!’ I thought. “Might as well go with a classic.”
&&&&&&&&&&
Alex - or was it Caleb? - had been having a pretty average day. He’d just finished his last class for the day and was heading back to his dorm. Admittedly, he might have gotten too comfortable not looking both ways at that particular crosswalk, but barely anyone used that road anyway, so he thought it was fine.
At least until the last sounds he heard were a truck’s horn and screeching tires.
He expected to wake up in a hospital somewhere, wrapped head-to-toe in bandages. Instead, he woke up alone in a dark forest in a body that was most definitely not his. Not to mention all the weird thoughts and memories crammed inside his head of a life he’d never lived. He would’ve started flailing in panic if this body didn’t feel like it had also been hit by a truck.
As questions and wild theories began to spin around in his head, he was shocked out of his stupor by a bright blue, glowing box in front of him.
========================================================================
Congratulations!
You have been successfully transmigrated to a new world!
========================================================================
Caleb felt his. . . Alex. Alex felt his jaw drop as he saw what should have been impossible.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
&&&&&&&&&&
I had to stifle a laugh at my host’s reaction to the notification. It did feel a little cliche to use the blue box, but it was recognizable, direct, and it got his attention. The way it worked was a little weird though.
I could’ve made an actual hologram in front of him, a trick of bending the light in just the right way. But it was actually easier just to make him hallucinate the box instead, plus it used less of my energy.
Speaking of which, I was getting energy!
As the boy moved and looked around, every movement seemed to push out more causal energy. Which, I guess made sense considering he was supposed to be dead and therefore not moving. The very fact that he is alive means that he is changing fate and in turn making more energy for me.
But, as I was relishing the moment of having steady income, I noticed two abnormalities in the flow of energy. The first was that a portion of the energy I was absorbing seemed to just vanish into thin air. When I looked for the reason I found a small corner of my presence that felt different. I recognized it as Gaia’s energy and remembered that they had said they were going to take a portion of whatever I made. I mentally shrugged. It wasn’t that much anyway.
The second abnormality was weirder. While most of the energy was flowing directly into my presence, buried in the soul as I was, a fraction of it was getting “stuck” in the boy’s body. I grabbed at the energy, trying to pull it into my (metaphorical) gaping maw, only for it to slip out of my grasp no matter what I did.
I sighed in exasperation. I’d probably need to dig through Gaia’s info dump some more to figure out how I could use this. I’d spent most of the journey here studying it, but I had barely made any headway due to the sheer volume of information they provided.
I pushed these thoughts away for the moment because my host had finally pushed himself to his feet. He had steadied himself on a tree and was looking around, probably trying to figure out where he could even go.
An idea came into my mind, which then grew into a plan. I quickly detailed out a new notification and projected it into his brain.
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A new Mission* has been generated!
Mission: Homeward Bound
Description: It’s getting late and your parents are going to be worried sick. Get home before sunset!
Reward: 10 XP
*Missions are mandatory and will result in revocation of the system if failed.
========================================================================
My host looked at the message dumbly for a moment before sighing, a feeling of defeat echoed through his soul. I took note of that, being able to feel his mentality through our link could become very useful.
I obviously wouldn’t follow through on the threat of leaving, but hopefully he would never figure that out.
He pushed himself off of the tree and began to limp and stumble in the same direction the other boys had walked off in earlier. I hoped that meant the memories of the previous inhabitant had transferred over smoothly.
&&&&&&&&&&
It took over an hour to reach the edge of the forest, because Alex kept having to stop and rest due to the state of his body.
I had finally learned my host’s name because halfway through the hike he had apparently had a minor identity crisis and called out “My name is Alex goddamn it!”. I didn’t know if that was his previous life’s name or this one’s, but it’s still progress!
Alex had also picked up a stick to use as a cane, helping to support his weight and make his arduous journey a little easier. It was especially useful now that there were no trees for him to lean on. The area had been cleared, leaving only a thin dirt path leading to the village over the hill.
The sun was just starting to set as the village came into sight.
“Meh, I’ll count it.” I thought.
========================================================================
You’ve completed the Mission!
You’ve been rewarded 10 XP!
========================================================================
========================================================================
100 XP is needed for the next level.
(10/100 XP acquired)
========================================================================
“There.” I thought. “A reward and a goal to pursue. That should buy me some more time while I figure all this stuff out.”
Alex sighed in relief after reading the first notification, before groaning in frustration at the second. I was surprised he hadn’t tried to interact with me yet considering it’s usually the first thing all those isekai protagonists try to do. Yelling out things like “Status!” or “Analyze!”. Then again, it would probably be weirder if things actually went the way they usually did in those stories.
As Alex limped towards the village, I saw the large wooden fence that surrounded it. 10 feet high made from rough hewn wood and having clearly weathered many storms, but still standing. A small gate was cut into the fence facing towards the forest. I could see someone sitting in front of it, who had perked up and had started running towards us as we crested the hill.
As he got close I could hear him shouting in that same unknown language. I hadn’t forgotten, but it just kept slipping my mind that this was another world with different people and histories. I probably should have been more surprised by the fact that the people here were human at all and not a completely alien species.
Before I could fall down the rabbit hole of what all this could mean the man finally made it to us and promptly began exclaiming and fussing over the boy. I never liked reading the subtitles in anime so I decided to hook further into the soul around me and get a better understanding of the local language through my host’s perspective.
“Holy shit, Caleb! What the fuck happened to you?! Look at your face for fuck’s sake!” The man cursing as well as any sailor shocked me for a moment, but he seemed to care for the boy so he was probably alright. A boy whose name is apparently Caleb. Hmm.
“My name. . . is. . . Alex.” Were his last words before he collapsed into the man’s arms, exhaustion having finally caught up to him.
Well. . . it could be worse. . . right?