There were few things in his world that Nimh hated more than self-pity.

It was a horrible sensation to feel, and an even worse sight to see. And unfortunately for him, he was experiencing both.

Oh, the joys of possession.

Not only was this useless husk of a human body on the border between life and death, but fragments of its life still echoed through it. Despite being weak, it stubbornly refused to pass on. Nimh had not expected that, nor had he expected what he felt from those echoes.

No fury or anger, no joy or pleasure. Not even a memory, just a vague memory of what the husk had been. Through it, Nimh could glean some of what the world he was entering was. And he was not impressed.

Of course, Nimh could wipe those echoes of memory away completely. He had been trained for just this kind of operation. The problem was the echoes were tethered to a realm that he couldn’t afford to severe. Not until he seized control of the body and made it his own.

Nimh was a Spirit Invader. A specialised kind of infiltrator trained by his people to take over worlds. The infiltration method was easy. All he had to do in his previous world, was die.

Not permanently. Just long enough to untether his spirit from his world, enter the Realm of Infinite Dreams, find a weak host with a mediocre connection to the Realm of Infinite Dreams and use them to pull himself through to a new world.

Super easy. His people had mastered the method and used it to conquer thousands of worlds. Unfortunately, the success rate was like one in a million. So, a lot of his fellow compatriots died and failed to leave the Realm of Infinite Dreams.

Kind of a bummer. But that was life. Or the afterlife.

Rest in peace, my brothers.

Now, Nimh had a job to do. Take over the planet. Another super-easy task, especially with his well-trained spiritual abilities. All he needed to do was find a body, possess it, and make it his own. Once he did that, it would be an easy task to conquer this world.

Or it should have been. Another reason to hold those echoes of memory, and information was power.

This world was filled with superhuman beings who had powers that eclipsed Nimh’s. Not just as he was now, in this pathetic state. But even greater than he had been in his home world. That was worrying.

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No problem. Or so Nimh had encouraged himself. Just play their game, take a body, become superhuman and kill their strongest off. Surely it wouldn’t be that hard.

That had been Nimh’s initial thought process.

He had since reconsidered as he sifted through the fragmented memories and echoes of knowledge. As it turned out, there was something of a ranking system with these superhuman beings with S-Ranks being the crème-de la-crème of the bunch at the top. Only a few hundred made it there and their powers, from what Nimh understood, were far beyond the elders of his people.

After assessing this new information, and determining there would be thousands of A-Ranks, tens of thousands of B-Ranks and literal millions of C-Ranks, Nimh saw no way to conquer these people.

Even the C-Ranks, the fourth-lowest Rank, could trounce the strongest masters of Nimh’s home world. Even better, there was a system in place to keep track of every one of these superhuman monsters. All except for the F-Ranks who couldn’t even be considered human in this society.

At least the E-Ranks were considered human and were on the global census. F-Ranks were the forgotten, ignored, and contemptible mass below the notice of society. Such creatures were shunned from society and left to their own devices in backwater cities, sanctioned away from society.

Nimh had spent some time planning how to possess an S-Rank or an A-Rank. After all, why bother going for anything less than the best? But his hopes were dashed when he made a soul-crushing realisation.

Their Physical Arts were astounding, their Cognitive Arts were abysmal and their Spiritual Arts disgustingly unsophisticated. It made Nimh sick just watching them. But what they lacked in finesse, they made up for with potency.

His people had refined their Spiritual Arts to a fine point. Spent millennia perfecting their spiritual manipulation, the art of creation and destruction was like breathing to them. And yet, here were barbarians whose innate power was so great that even a specialist like Nimh couldn’t scale the impossibility of possessing one.

The shame was enough to make him want to return to the Ream of Infinite Dreams and weep into nothingness. But Nimh had the pride of his people behind him. He would not give up.

And so, he studied his soon-to-be-conquered foes. And his despair grew. Each Rank he descended, the worse he felt. A-Ranks to C-Ranks were impossible. Even without ever training their spiritual arts, their innate defences against possession were mighty. D-Ranks were not so bad, and neither were E-Ranks. At least Nimh could sense the immense gap between him and them.

Only F-Ranks were weak enough for him to possess. And that was where Nimh’s problems began.

F-Ranks were just so weak. They had little to no physical foundation, let alone a connection to the art and despite their shoddy mental abilities, their connection to the Realm of Thoughtful Heights made them stupidly self-aware and cautious of the strange spirit that stalked them.

Higher-ranked superhumans didn’t care. He was too weak to affect them. F-Ranks could sense him and instinctively knew he could do more than affect them. Luckily not even F-Ranks cared about other F-Ranks.

Thus, how Nimh had effortlessly possessed this pathetic body. And was now suffering the echoes of the man’s life. And for the first time in his life, Nimh felt pity.

For himself.