The first day of my existence consisted of a full blown panic attack.

Or that’s what I compared it to at least. Lacking lungs to hyperventilate with or a heart to have pound in my chest kind of removed a lot of the obvious symptoms of a panic attack. I had come into awareness in a sea of inky blackness and I couldn’t see, feel, or hear anything else around me. Suffice it to say I was not handling it well.

In fact it’s probably a good thing I didn’t seem to have a heart of my own, it definitely would have given out.

In the midst of my lack-of-body induced hysteria, I was fortunately blessed with plenty of time to get used to the nothingness around me. It wasn’t easy, and although I have no idea how long it took for me to regain a sense of control over myself, my panic slowly subsided.

As my mental faculties return to me my surrounding awareness began to grow. This isn’t to say much of anything actually changed in terms of the void that seemed to surround my senses. There was still nothing to see or hear.

I did, however, have a new sensation to feel.

Underneath me was a strange tugging sensation. It was an extremely miniscule sensation and I only was able to notice it because the rest of everything was absent. Feeling this tug, I tried to reach out and grab at it….except I had no hands to grab anything with.

I wasted a whole week trying to desperalty reach out to touch or take hold of this sensation, which I now likened to some kind of cord that was linking me to something else. I needed to figure out what was on the end of this cord. Despite having gotten over my initial panic at lacking a proper body, I was still grappling with an intense lack of stimulation.

Eventually, I tried a different tactic. Instead of trying to reach out and pull the cord, and whatever was attached to it towards me. What if I pushed myself towards it. Of course I didn’t necessarily have a wall to push off of, instead I was going to push off myself.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

Admittedly this wasn’t a well thought out idea, pushing against myself logically shouldn’t actually result in me going anywhere but I had little else to try. My mental state had become addled in my desperate attempt to reach out towards the cord and I was beginning to just try whatever I could.

I pushed against myself….and I moved!

Not by a significant amount. In fact, judging by how the tugging sensation became stronger, I probably moved less than a thimble’s amount of distance. However, moving at all was an achievement, and having managed to figure out little else in my new existence, I clung to my new found traversal ability.

I briefly tested seeing if I could move myself away from the cord as well and found that I could, however I quickly panicked again as the tugging sensation from the cord became lighter. If I lost track of the cord I would go back to just floating in a void without any sensations at all again.

I pushed myself towards the cord. As I got closer to what it was attached to I began to experience a rushing sensation. I followed the feeling, almost experiencing a sense of euphoria at the new experience, and found myself suddenly merged into something.

Light finally flooded my eyes, and while I still couldn't feel anything new, I could now see. My prolonged experience in darkness had left me hungering for visual stimuli, and I began to properly take in my environment for the first time since I gained consciousness.

I observed the worn gray stone bricks lining the walls, drapes of moss and fungi providing the room with its only color. I was in a square chamber, most likely underground given the knots of roots that seemed to have broken through the chamber’s ceilings, simultaneously crumbling and oddly reinforcing the stone it chewed through.

In the far corners of the room were dilapidated remains of chairs and chests, seemingly thrown about as if someone was in some kind of terrible rush to clear the room yet lacked anywhere to put anything.

All of this was secondary however, to the massive amount of skeletal remains that seemed to encircle me. Arranged around me were mounds of bones entwined with black cloth that were once probably robes. Each of them had a bronze sword sticking out of their chest, and I felt like I had stumbled onto some form of mass suicide.

I would have stumbled backwards, but I felt locked in place by whatever form I had seemingly found myself possessing.

I looked down at myself, finally taking my new form in for the very first time. My awareness seemed to originate from a red gem within the pommel of a bronze short sword. The pommel itself seemed to be a twisting handle of metal iron, the blade being held in place by a singular spike of iron that had been forged through the blade and pommel together, holding the entire thing in one piece. The sword itself, I would estimate only to be a foot long, was lodged within the chest of the skeleton at the very center of the room. At this point, reality hit me.

I’ve possessed a fucking sword.