In a flash of blinding light, the sounds of squealing tires reverberate through Jun Kai’s ears as his body goes limp and his vision dark. For a brief period, there was nothing at all. Then a pleasant light washed over Jun Kai and he felt himself ascended. A bright room with clandestine candles burns furiously. The heat was making Jun Kai uncomfortable as he struggled to keep his eyes open in this room of almost pure light.
Before him was a beautiful woman, her slender figure emanated a gorgeous fire and a large curve curled up her lips. “Finally, the heavens have granted me another playtoy.” She spun a small fire on the tip of her finger. She stood up and flung her fiery red hair to the side.
“Where am I?” Jun Kai looks around and back at the woman who had intended to make her presence known to him.
She scoffed, “Huh. You dare ask questions in front of a goddess? I’ll have you know that your fortune isn’t so bad to be summoned to the East Lands of Heaven. Only here can you be reincarnated with your memory intact.”
“Reincarnated?” Jun Kai’s eyes opened wide. “I’m going to be reincarnated?”
He looked around curiously.
“You’re going to keep your mouth shut in my presence. You dare offend a goddess? The audacity of mortals is astounding!” She harrumphed, cupping her bosom.
Jun Kai nodded.
“Well then.” She smiled, waving her hand in the air as the room morphed into a garden with a river flowing through it. They stood atop a bridge with a lever firmly embedded in the bridge. “Let’s test how far your luck will take you in the next world.”
The goddess harrumphed once more and pulled the lever to an equalized middle. The river began to glow with a bright light and sparkling orbs began to defy the laws of gravity as Jun Kai could see a tiny world inside of each orb.
“Amazing!” He said with surprise. He then looked back at the goddess and smiled, “By the way what’s your name?”
The goddess had been grinning but she heard Jun Kai ask her what her name was and she immediately blushed, losing her footing and throwing the lever all the way to the negative and breaking it then some. It had been over a century since a mortal man had asked her what her name was and it quite literally flabbergasted her.
Jun Kai frowned and rushed to her side, “Goddess! Are you okay?”
The goddess had an incredible look of fear struck inside of her eyes as she stared at the broken lever. Jun Kai glanced over and saw that there were numbers indicating how lucky one’s reincarnation would be. It quite literally stated, “Reincarnation Luck Factor.”
“I-I’m sorry. I’ve doomed you. To that place of all places…”
Jun Kai stood up and looked at all of the orbs suddenly pop as one was left. It circulated with a dark red aura as it approached Jun Kai.
A loud booming voice erupted throughout the East Lands. “Jun Kai of Earth, your reincarnation has been selected.” A flaming whip lurched out from the burning orb and sucked Jun Kai’s soul into the orb without a hint of hesitation.
For a while there was nothing but darkness.
Then Jun Kai’s memories began to resurface and he realized that he had been reincarnated. His heartbeat rose and his eyes shot open as he began to struggle for air. He was deeply submerged within a thick green fluid, tubes covered every orifice of his body. A blaring alarm went off inside this encasement. Through the semipermeable tank he could see figures dashing around frantically as he struggled for air.
With a click and sound of release, a metal sheet released below his feet and the fluid drained from the tank. He was left naked inside the tank as a few of the people outside the tank took a mild interest in him. Jun Kai thought this was weird. If he were some science experiment, surely his awakening would arouse more attention?
A scanner appeared from the ceiling of the tube and began speaking, “J-32997640, of Northern Komm Prefecture, awakening complete.”
The tube scanner was sucked up along with all the tubes connected to his body. A sliding door opened up and Jun Kai stepped out of the tube with a thousand questions to ask.
The scientists didn’t pay any attention to Jun Kai as he walked down the steps. They were intensely focused on operating panels and equipment.
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“Where am I?”
None of the scientists flinched at his question, instead a beast-like creature appeared from behind Jun Kai with protruding horns like a bull. “Keep moving. I will guide you to your destination. Don’t bother asking them questions, they could care less.” He pushed Jun Kai forward.
Jun Kai could only cry on the inside as he aimlessly walked forward. Why was it that he was reincarnated inside of this body instead of a newborn baby? He wasn’t one to question how reincarnation works but he was pretty sure his situation was outside of the norm. Whatever world he had been reborn into, this was surely something beyond his current imagination.
They entered a dark corridor and the tunnel led them to a vault-like door. It opened automatically as they approached and a bright light filled the corridor. The puffy clouds of the sky could be seen with rolling mountains in the distance. Jun Kai was truly moved almost to tears. Beyond the fact that he was already suppressing the emotions of missing his family back on Earth.
“Good luck, as I say to everyone who I escort. You’ll fucking need it.” The bull sighed as Jun Kai’s eyes met a cliff’s edge that fed into a depth that was impossible to see the end of.
He looked around and saw that there were thousands of other vault-like doors where people were falling out of the sky from. It was then that his heart took a plunge, “Wai--”
The bull pushed him off and he descended into the darkness with which not even light could feed shape to. Jun Kai pissed himself, the excretion flying up into the air as his skin flapped. “AghhhhHHHhhhhhh!!!!!!” He screamed, his heart unable to take this level of adrenaline as he plunged into the darkness of this never ending skydive.
He fell unconscious and awoke on concrete. “J-32997640, failed. Number of failed candidates: 32997630, ten have passed this stage.”
Jun Kai opened his eyes in a valley full of people. He stood up, questioning how he was alive. “Wh-What’s going on?” He was nearly shoulder to shoulder with people. Huge monitors rotated around them in the open sky of a vast valley.
“J-32997641, failed. Number of failed candidates: 32997631, ten have passed this stage.”
Most, if not everyone around him exuded a calmness or confused demeanor about themselves. Everyone had thin white robes on to cover themselves now. Jun Kai understood that in this world not everyone was reincarnated with their memories intact. In fact, he was apparently one of the lucky few to have been given a rare opportunity. His one trump card in a world where those with the worst karma resided! What kind of nightmares awaited him?
A shorter man appeared beside Jun Kai with a brown pencil mustache. He looked at Jun Kai and then back at the circulating monitors, “There has to be over a thousand people in this circle. What’s going on?”
Jun Kai shrugged, “I’ve just awoken in a tube and fell off a cliff. Now I’m here.”
The shorter man strokes his pencil mustache. “That is indeed a similar experience to mine.” Suddenly, the monitors all appeared with one face on it. The man had slicked back blonde hair and an extravagant black suit.
“I’m the Director of the Northern Komm Prefecture. Today all of you have been born. I will give you a brief introduction to the world you now reside in with three simple points. Please make sure to pay attention. I will not repeat myself, as information is the most valuable commodity in this world.”
“One, information, knowledge, and the ability to exercise it is more valuable than anything you can put your hands on.”
“Two, less than one percent of you will ever get to leave the Northern Komm Prefecture and live as citizens.”
“Three, this world operates on one fundamental: games. Everything can be decided in a wager. Even your lives. Those who are at the top are the ones who can be considered prodigies. Those of you who cannot overcome the limits of your mind will never reach the heavens.”
“Let the first game begin.” The monitors zipped to black and a loud siren sounded as a robotic voice echoed across through the enormous valley.
“Scale the cliff and exit this pit. You have forty-eight hours to escape before termination. Use any means necessary.”
A strange energy channeled through everyone surrounding Jun Kai. Some people immediately broke out into fights while others impassively recruited people to their groups. In Jun Kai’s eyes this was a man-eats-man situation where the onlookers were watching if people were capable of making working groups against a terrible problem.
Jun Kai smiled, using his knowledge from the previous world to give him a clear cut edge in surpassing those cliffs. He looked up at the cliff and his face nearly crawled off his skull. “W-What the hell!? This cliff has no climbing points. This is a wall not a cliff!” His eyes bulged out as he pointed at the wall. People looked over toward him with mild interest but then turned away because of how meager he looked.
In Jun Kai’s eyes this wall was easily over three thousand feet tall. How could anyone be expected to scale such a monumental goal? Even worse, termination in forty eight hours? What did termination mean in this world?
Jun Kai felt himself more and more in agreement with the director. Knowledge was everything in this world, and he had none of it. Not an inkling bit of knowledge to his name, and he was expected to deduce a way to escape this wall himself?
Truly that goddess had royally screwed him over by having him reborn in a world where the expectations were presidential.
Jun Kai sat cross-legged and deciphered what information he had in his head. First of all, humans weren’t the only sentient species in this world. That much was proven by that talking bull. Secondly, most if not all humans were being produced artificially in tubes and then they were being dumped into a funnel-like system where only the clever were able to proceed to citizenship. Assuming that the rest were trashed by obvious context clues.
Jun Kai’s eyes then popped when he realized that he had been assigned a number. Not only was he J-32997640, but the loud speaker had claimed that ten people had cleared the skydiving stage without failure? What kind of extraordinary people have been born into this world?
Jun Kai rumbled through his head, making vast speculations only to arrive at dead ends with his limited knowledge. As to why he wasn’t dead and the weird structure of this society, those were questions he did not have answers to. Similar to how the information he did have didn’t give him an answer to the massive wall that stood in front of him.
“God I need some tylenol.”
“Tylenol?” The pencil-mustache man asked him.
“Ah, it’s nothing.”
“What’s your name?” Jun Kai said.
“You mean my assignment code? I’m J-32997504, and you are?”
“Err…just call me Jun Kai.” He rubbed his neck, looking over to the side with an awkward smile.
“Alright then! If you want to be Jun Kai, I’ll be Kai Len!” He rubbed his mustache with a glint in his eyes as he walked a bit closer to Jun Kai.
Jun Kai didn’t really understand where he had gotten the name from, but he didn’t question it. The other party likely didn’t have an answer either. He sighed, glancing at the wall before them.
This truly was the start of a crazy adventure.