I awoke to pure confusion. Spontaneously attaining consciousness without the hazy fog of a good night's sleep will do that.

When I woke up, it took a second for me to realize I was lying down and staring up into a ceiling. Looking around, it appeared I was actually alone in a hospital room. I could tell by the nauseating scent of sterility in the air.

I moved to sit myself up but the bout of weakness in my arms made it a struggle. When I finally managed the task, I looked myself over and couldn't see any injuries on my body. I was all skin and bones, though. Muscle atrophy was the first thing that came to mind.

Weird.

I tried to recall why it was that I found myself so weak and in a hospital and nothing came up. Nothing came up at all. As in, no thoughts would form at all on my past. I couldn't remember what I'd been doing since, well, ever.

No matter how hard I tried, no details about anything regarding my past would come to me. Not my name, not who I was or was trying to be, not my family, not my friends, not about school or work, or whatever else I could have been focusing on.

Nothing…

"Hello," a voice drew me out of my attempts to recall anything.

"Hello?" I answered in kind.

Huh. My memories were gone, but apparently, I could still process language and speak. That would certainly be useful.

"How are you feeling?" Asked the nurse or doctor who had at some point gotten within reaching distance.

"I'm alright. I felt a bit weak, though. Can't seem to remember what happened to me though," I said.

"That's probably for the best," the nurse grimaced. "You were caught up in a Grimm attack. Your whole village was razed to the ground and only a dozen or so people survived."

"Grimm? What's that?" I asked, not really caring about anything else she had mentioned.

'Yikes,' I thought at the realization, 'I guess I'm either sociopathic or apathetic.' It was the only thing I could assume regarding my personality, considering my utter lack of concern over the fate of who-knows-who-many people, many of which possibly being family members.

"Oh dear," she looked at me pitifully, "Do you really not know what Grimm are?" When I nodded at her question, she sighed as she spoke while writing on a clipboard, "You must have extremely bad amnesia to forget the threat of the Grimm."

"I can assure you, it's worse than you think," I laughed humorlessly. "I can't remember anything from before I woke up."

"That… I'll go fetch the doctor," she said.

The next couple of hours pass by in a flurry of testing, questioning, and info-dumping the likes of which I could not have fathomed before experiencing it all myself. First, my doctor arranged for me to undergo just about every medical test I could think of: X-rays, Blood tests, Urine Tests, Microbiome (Poop) Tests, CAT Scans, MIRI Scans, EKG readings, Ultrasounds… I lost track after they started asking questions to seemingly test my sanity.

Then after the doctor finally accepted the fact that I really couldn't remember anything, he and the army of staff members who had run the gauntlet throughout the day in testing me, stuck around to answer any questions I had. And boy did I have a lot of questions.

In the order I found most important to least, I was apparently an eighteen-year-old man from a small village just outside of Vale. My name was Lapis Lain and I was the only surviving member of my family. Because everyone in my family was dead, I had already been entrusted with their financial assets.

Even more important than the next bit about superhumans and evil monsters was the fact that in this god-forsaken world I had woken up in, healthcare was free so none of the money I'd just inherited had been touched by the government for my extended medical stay.

Unfortunately, there was still a bit of tax the estates had to pay before they were distributed to me, but it wasn't anything ridiculous. Less than 1% of the gross total I'd been given went to paying off any remaining taxes for income earned in the current year as well as paying off any outstanding debts.

Not perfect, but I got the feeling I was getting off lucky.

Anyway, I was not on Earth anymore. Wait a minute. Earth? The only thing I knew was that it was supposed to be the name of the planet. So… I guess I was isekai-ed to this other world?

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

I was on Remnant, where people could unlock the power of their souls to use Aura and constantly fought against evil negativity monsters known as the Grimm. Also, Humans were not the only sentient, sapient species and there were also Faunus; a.k.a. Demihumans.

Alas, besides what passed for common knowledge, I didn't get any concrete answers for any of my deeper questions from the hospital staff. The only thing I knew for sure was that politics, corruption, and ignorance still ran rampant despite all the cool things this world had going for it.

Gods were real, but they had abandoned the world. Technology was way more advanced than I could understand and there were people around with superpowers, yet the monsters were winning. Litteral existential dread was made manifest and people were still too stupid to come together. Instead, humanity and faunuskind were essentially in a cold war against each other.

Exactly how bad this world's affairs were I wasn't sure, but it seemed pretty bad.

Oh well, not my problem.

Context clues from my personal observations and the way my thoughts worked suggested I had been given a new lease on life. Died and reincarnated, transmigrated, whatever else. I was from Earth and had been given a second chance on Remnant.

Sure, it was a pitiful and much more dangerous world than I was expecting, but that was okay. I didn't need to get caught up in all the bullshit that made the world so utterly bleak and hopeless. Huntsman and Huntresses had been fighting the good fight against the Grimm for hundreds or thousands of years.

So what if humans and faunus had been losing territory and population? So what if monsters prowled and searched for sources of fear and negativity to kill all intelligent life? I didn't need to bother with any of that nonsense so long as I stuck to the safety of a Great Kingdom.

I was already in Vale. I just needed to stay put and not foolishly leave out for some dumb reason, like to experience the rest of the world or attempt to become a Huntsman. The prospect of getting superpowers was tempting, but I preferred a lifestyle that was already bought and paid for by my body's biological family.

[Congratulations! For walking a mile, you have earned a Common Gacha Coin!]

Uh oh.

I nearly tripped, I was so flabbergasted by the sudden message that appeared in my head.

'Is this supposed to be my Isekai Cheat? But I don't want to go on some stupid adventure and become a forgettable protagonist!' I almost burst out in tears; internally, that is; people on the street would just have seen me stop and grow slightly wide-eyed.

Alas, I could not resist the temptation of possibly becoming hilariously overpowered, regardless of the context of this world's power hierarchy. I was but a simple man and whatever cursed divinity gave me this power knew my one and only weakness.

Gacha…

They must have known this would draw me into the fray!

One does not simply begin gacha. Moreover, this was real life, not some stupid pay-to-win mobile game! All I did was walk a bit and I earned a chance for… honestly, I had no idea. But it seemed promising and no one can deny that.

I willed for the Common Gacha Coin to fulfill its purpose and a transparent wheel appeared directly in front of where I was looking. An illusory coin appeared and slotted into the wheel before it began to spin faster than I could follow until it began to slow down and stopped.

[Results: Rarity — Common 2 | Gallon of Water (Item)]

Wow, that was underwhelming but also kind of reasonable. I mean, I only walked a mile. If I had to be rewarded with something, it made sense for such a mundane feat to be matched with a mundane reward.

Still, I knew how this would play out. Now I was curious. If this was what I'd get for drawing a Common Gacha Coin what about a better one with a higher rarity? I would not be satisfied until I experienced the ecstasy of pulling a Legendary or maybe even a Mythical, if such a high rarity existed.

And of course, because those would probably result in bullshit powers and abilities, I would inevitably want to use them. How convenient for there to be a whole group of evil monsters around for me to play with. Not to mention, I'd probably need to amass power and a whole host of other abilities to get that far. Gacha Coins were implied to be rewarded for achievements after all.

Thus, my new life began. Only a few hours after waking up and convincing myself that it was for the best to just keep my head low and retire at eighteen with "my" entire family's inheritance, I found myself accepting reality for what it was and the fact that the universe itself was dead set on seeing me become a generic isekai protagonist.

'Not if I can help it!' My inner thoughts raged.

Isekai protagonist I probably couldn't change by the nature of my circumstances. But I would not accept going the traditional route. I would be doing this on my terms, damn it!

After leaving the hospital, I bought myself a Scroll —this world's version of a high-tech super phone — and made a note documenting the rules I would abide by on my path to Gacha greatness.

Rule number one: I would not be a pushover, sniveling, pathetic loser. It was kind of subjective, but a reminder of what the usual isekai protagonist was like was enough to know what not to be.

Rule number two: I would not turn training and gaining power the full extent of my new life. This was not a game, no matter what my bullshit gacha powers suggested. It was my new lease on life and I would not ruin it by giving up simple pleasures and entertaining distractions. Powers and gambling was cool and all, but not at the cost of my life or sanity.

Rule number three: I would not follow common sense. This was mostly related to the context of my background and situation. Logically speaking, what I was supposed to do after deciding to seek strength and the power to get better Gacha Coins? Train, train, train until I got good enough to enter a Huntsman Academy.

'That's where all the good guys meet and learn to fight against the bad guys, right?' I made my own voice whiny in my head to mock the idea.

'Of course, and that's exactly why I'm not going to do that! The narrative of the world would force me into more and more bullshit until eventually either I saved the world or died trying, probably.'

No, instead of doing the obviously right thing in my situation, I would figure things out on my own. It would either go swimmingly or fail catastrophically. But! Only in a way that wouldn't end with me risking my life needlessly.

If I couldn't at the very least get overpowered enough as a regular civilian working around my lack of experience, skill, strength, and finesse with Gacha powers, I definitely didn't get an isekai cheat good enough to pursue fully cultivating.