I admired the scenery as I drove along the backroads of Colorado. I moved here 2 weeks ago, and the scenery of the mountains dusted with snow at the jagged peaks –most often covered by clouds I might add– and carpeted with the lush pine forests, still amazed me. I was headed home from a long overtime at work on a Friday evening, and I was taking the scenic route home to relax a little bit. Even though I liked my 2 roommates, Eric and Corin, they got loud sometimes. Who am I kidding, they don’t know any setting other than loud. They even sleep loud! I thought to myself with a snort. Coming around a bend, I saw some train tracks with the bar down, and I heard a train in the distance, so I stopped and turned on the radio. Switching channels until I found some nice, quiet instrumental music. I rolled down the window and filled my lungs with the fresh, cool, mid September breeze. I smiled to myself, for the first time in a long time feeling content. The train started moving by, and was moving very fast, so I hoped I wouldn't have to wait here too long. Hearing a screech, I looked behind me and my eyes widened. A truck had just whipped around the corner, and was heading straight towards me, and would have no time to stop, and the road was too narrow to move out of the way, so doing the only thing I could, I curled up into a ball, making myself the smallest target possible. That was probably the only thing that saved me from the initial impact. The train, however, had different ideas. As it turned out, the truck was moving far faster than I had initially thought, and had a lot more momentum. My small Toyota was flung through the gates of the railroad tracks, and with a shriek and a crunch of tearing metal, the front of my car impacted the moving train. Sparks tore out of the crushed engine, and with a whoosh, a gas fire exploded inside the hood, and the car was flung to the side and into the woods. With a crunch of shattering glass, the passengers' side landed on the ground. I have to get out of here! I frantically tried to reach the door handle, but the airbag was keeping me from reaching it, compressed as if I was in a ball on the seat. So, doing the only thing I could do, I started frantically kicking the door as hard as I could from my disadvantaged position. The door started to bow outwards, and I could actually see outside. I started to hope that maybe, just maybe, I would make it out before the fire reached me. That’s when the engine blew up. Since the engine had been crushed closer to the driver because of the front getting crushed from the train, the explosion hurt me more than it should have. I was flung backwards, shattering the back window while shards of metal burst inwards from the front, slashing through my clothes, ripping apart flesh and muscle alike. I felt my skull throb. I think I might've slashed it while flying through the back window, but things were hazy, far away. I felt myself lying on the grass, felt my warm blood pump through the hundreds of cuts, scrapes and puncture wounds all over my body, felt the burns across my face and arms, and I felt coldness spread slowly from my fingers and toes. I’m dying, I thought faintly before passing out. 

I came too floating in a light gray void with pulsating purple veins. Am I dead? There's no way I survive getting shards of metal through my body and bleeding that much. I just sat –floated? -- waiting for something to happen. I sat there for what felt like an hour, just waiting. Nothing happened at that time, and it seemed like nothing would happen. As I tried to examine my body, I found I had none, I seemed to be just a ball of conscious thought, floating in this gray and purple void. The first pangs of panic set in as the hours passed and still nothing happened. Deciding to distract myself with memories to stave off the panic and anxiousness. I was – Had been? still wasn't sure if I was dead yet – a 23-year-old, and just out of college. I had just been getting to my flat that I owned with two of my friends, Brice and Connor, after overtime at work. It might have been a lot of work, but hey, money is money. Especially for a college student with enough debt to fill a small lake. I hope those two don’t worry about me too much. Those medical bills are going to be worrying though, especially with the car as well. Now I hope I might be dead. Maybe I'll get pulled into one of those LITRPG worlds like in one of those xianxia novels” I thought with a chuckle. That would be something indeed. As I kept waiting for something to happen; to wake up in a hospital room with monitors beeping at me, to realize this was a dream and wake up, wake up in an ambulance, anything really, I came to a conclusion that maybe nothing would happen at all, and that maybe this was my whole existence now. Panic began to truly set in at this point, and in an effort to stave off the inevitable insanity, I dove into memories of my early life. I had been born to loving parents and was an only child. I was born on the lower end of society, but due to hard work from my parents, we slowly grew to the middle class, and I was comfortable most of my life. I had a small but very close-knit group of friends and went to college for an architecture degree. I had moved into the flat with my friends a little while after college and worked at a small architectural firm. I didn't have any more family who would miss me as my parents had died a few years ago, and the last of my other relatives had died when I was 12. As what seemed like a day had passed, I finally allowed the panic I had been pushing off to set in. If this is the afterlife, I want to see the manager. Wait, never mind, I do not want to meet the person who decided this would be the afterlife. I still held out some hope that this was just some fever dream my mind put me in to get rid of the pain while in a hospital somewhere, but that hope was quickly diminishing. The hours dragged by slowly, and when about a week had passed, I felt that I was for sure going a little insane, and I had completely given up hope that this was a fever dream or hallucination. Slowly though, I started to notice a change in the surroundings. It might have been a sign of growing insanity, but I could've sworn I was being watched most of the time. After another hour, I was sure I was being watched. After another hour, a presence bloomed around me, and I felt like I was being suffocated. How does one strangle someone without a body? A quiet part of my mind wondered, while the rest was screaming in panic. I tried to shove the presence away, but I had no body. Suddenly, all at once, the presence receded, and a voice boomed outward. It was androgynous, and almost as if two mountains had clashed together, trying to imitate vocal cords. “Spirit signature found lacking and has been successfully imprinted on wheel of rebirth, a world will now be selected, please stand by” A wheel like those in family fortune appeared, and thousands of different words were imprinted in little tiny slices. And when I said thousands, I meant closer to millions, as I couldn't even see the individual words, and the wheel was very large. What I could see, however, was that each slice was a different shade of green or red. The wheel spun for a minute or two, and turned into a blur of green and red. It slowly stopped, and ended up stopped on a brilliant red slice, but I couldn't see the name.  The voice spoke again “Zeryndel selected. Danger level– High. Survivability– Low. Please select a minor blessing to increase survivability.” Wait, my Soul is lacking? High danger level? Low survivability? Can I spin again? I tried to speak, but again, no body, and thus no mouth or vocal cords. The colors must’ve been the danger level of each world, and as my luck would have it, I got one of the most dangerous ones going by the shade of red. A list of names spooled out in my head, things like Ki condensation pill, Minor elemental affinity- air, minor elemental affinity earth, etc. From the names of these, I inferred that this world was some sort of world with magic or cultivation. I quelled my excitement at the thought of that, as I hadn’t forgotten the danger and survivability ratings the being had announced. Finally, my eyes found a blessing that I thought would do nicely in this supposed new world. “Spin elemental affinity selected. Please stand by” Another wheel spun into existence. As the wheel slowed down, I saw some of the elements offered. Air, fire, lightning, crystal, earth, water, and shadow were just a few of the ones I saw. Each slice was bigger or smaller, depending on the element. Some were so small that I could barely see the words, with air, earth, fire, and water being the largest with the rest getting progressively smaller from there. The wheel slowly stopped, and it looked like water would be the landing zone, before I looked closer, and the arrow had actually stopped on a tiny green sliver. Looked like my luck had held out after all. The voice, which had been an androgynous robotic voice until now, paused and said in a distinctly male voice “Well now, looks like lady luck has smiled upon you mortal. Good luck, you're going to need it.” then, it returned to its normal robotic tone “Chrono selected. Memory wipe initiated. Memory wipe failed; elemental affinity too high for automated wipe. Requesting higher access. Memory wipe override accepted, rebirth commencing” Before I had time to process anything of that sentence, I was sucked into a wall of white light. 

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In a dark part of space, a being floated. The thing looked like a slice from a starry night sky with what looked like a laptop in front of it. The being smiled, a slash of white along a previously black surface. This is sure to be interesting. Life is so boring nowadays. The being closed the laptop and blinked out of existence, but the words of the laptop still burned in its memory. “Memory wipe override authorized. Please stand by.”