Chapter 3: Eric. What the…

I sputtered and groaned. I coughed violently, rolling under my side, feeling like I was emptying an ocean of water out of my lungs. Nothing came out. I was lying down, what ever it was I was lying down on was not a comfortable hospital bed or any other kind of bed I had laid on; it felt more like a slab of stone underneath me.

The world was spinning, I was spinning, and my mind was reeling from what I was beginning to realize were memories that were not my own. I was me, but there was also another me, another life overlaid on top of mine. No, not on top of mine; I was on top of it; this other consciousness was weak. The memories that were there were a hazy fog of a dream, something half-remembered that I was only barely able to touch upon. What had happened? Where the hell was I? What the fuck had happened?

It was a flood of consciousness both from myself and this second consciousness that was underlaid beneath mine, beneath me. Tossing back and forth from my left to my right side, coughing some more, I groaned some more for good measure. There's nothing like a few good dozen groans that can't fix an annoying problem. And I was beginning to realize the problem I was facing was absolutely insane. I had been at Heaven's gate during a truly epic storm, and I had definitely been struck by lightning at least three times. Why I wasn't just a charred piece of flesh lying in the courtyard, I have no idea, and at the very least, I should have been in a hospital if people had found me. I most certainly should not be in a tiny ass room on a bed that felt more like stone than anything else.

I sat up and rolled my legs off the bed. I was covered in sweat, and I stank like cheap wine and sour milk. The room was small, with a single bed with a desk next to it and a wooden chair. With a great laborious effort, I sat this body's fat ass onto the chair. The bed was indeed made from stone, sculpted from the floor. The desk was simply made and had been sculpted from stone as well. The only wood in the room was the chair and the small armoire next to the door. There was a small window halfway up the wall that let in a modicum of light. Papers littered the desk, with strange swirly squiggles poorly drawn on them. There were two candles on the desk, a Firestarter, and a pen.

I was woozy with a painful hangover, like after nights of drinking during Mardi Gras. I wanted to vomit, but when I bent over and retched, I only dry heaved, thank God, because cleaning this room of vomit would have sucked a lot. Next to the bed was an honest-to-God wineskin like made from an animal. A memory bubbled up unbidden. It was spirit wine and not the good kind. This guy, who was I? Back on Earth, my name had been Eric; here, here, I was also Eric. Earth me, Eric Smith; this place me, Eric Leveson. That should be easy enough. Eric Leveson had gotten the spirit wine from a black market of sorts, and it had been what killed him.

"Who? What the hell?" I said out loud, my voice cracking a bit. My throat was dry and wrung out. My voice was also more nasally. I looked down, "Oh, what the hell, man, we look like shit." I said out loud.

I stood and went to the polished copper plate that hung from the door of the armoire. My face stared back at me, well, sort of. The neat and full beard that I meticulously trimmed was gone. It was replaced by a scraggly patchy thing that was an affront to beards everywhere. My belly was fat, my arms were spindly noodles, and my legs were no better than twigs. I looked like a miss-shaped toad.

"All those pushups, sit-ups, and hours in the gym. Gone. Down the fucken drain. Fuck." I said, sitting back down in the chair.

I had to piss. Another memory filled me. Down the hall to the left was this fifth stories bathroom. If I wanted to take a bath, the bathing house was two blocks down to the right. Everything was communal here in the exterior sect. My head spun more, and I placed my head in my hands and just breathed. I let the memories come and organize themselves.

Before I sorted this mess of where I was, I had to piss. I got up and went out the door and down the hall. As I left, I got the overwhelming erg to lock the door behind me. Theft of stuff, spirit herbs, potions, and pills happened all the time. But as long as you got whatever it was, you did not want to have stolen back to your apartment and locked it in; no one could steal from you. That is as long as they were not of a much higher cultivation than you.

There's that thought again cultivation.

I found the bathroom, it was similar to Earth, but the toilet was shaped like a pot, just a round thing that water would flow down the sides of and take the waist to the sewers. "So, they've got plumbing at least," I said, returning to my room and locking the door behind me.

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Okay, so let's get this straight. I more than likely died on Earth and wound up in this body here. Which is also me, but not me. I put a hand to my neck and found the same chain I had had back on Earth. My necklace was still there. I pulled it out; the meteorite was there. The same as from Earth, same shape, same weight, same color. This world's Eric had found it in much the same way; it had crashed right next to him when he was a child. It was the one thing he had been able to keep before he was taken by the empire from his northern ice-covered village and sold to the sect to be an exterior member. That was over a decade ago. This body was twenty-five.

So, I was twenty-five, on some planet or in some kind of realm called the endless lands or Lum'rathren. An old word for the endless lands.

My body was a fucking fat wreck, as this world's Eric was a lazy POS and had barely done anything with his life besides work, eat, sleep, drink, and visit the brothel once a month, more if he found some extra coins. He was a cultivator, yea, the chi, Tao, Asian Xianxia kind. But he was absolutely shit at it. He had been taken by an empire, the one I'm assuming we are in right now, and sold to the sect. He's not; I guess I should start thinking of it as me. I'm not really a slave, more a very lowly servant. The exterior sect's job is to do all the work for the outer sect, so the outer sect can do all the stuff for the inner sect. He had to; I had to work three days a week. The other four are for cultivating and training. Outer sect disciples only work two days a week, and inner sect members, well, I don't know, or this Eric didn't know, because he had never so much as laid eyes on an inner sect member.

I counted the days; luckily, this was his first day off, so I had four days to figure out what the hell was going on and how to fit in. He had gotten off after his third day of work, gotten blackout drunk on poisoned spirit wine, and died, leaving me to take the wheel of his decrepit life. I was going to have to do so many pushups and burpees to get back in shape, fuck. I am not looking forward to that. Eric's job, or my job now, was to cart wheelbarrows full of shit from one place to another. The sect was massive, so I would take a wheelbarrow from the spirit beast stables all the way out to the spirit farms. The trip took two hours both ways and on the days I worked, I had to take two loads of shit to the spirit farm. The outer sect disciples took care of the beasts, feeding and cleaning up after them, but they could not be bothered to take the highly valuable shit to the farms, so that's where the exterior sect took over.

The exterior sect was like a slimy mold that the sect put up with. We allowed the outer sect members to focus more on their jobs, but we were the lowest of the low. We got housing, food, and clothes twice a year. Simple drab brown work wear. Thicker in the fall before winter and thin in the spring for summer. We also got one allotment of cultivation aids during the summer. A pill, potion, or herb that would just barely count as a cultivation aid was given to us of the exterior sect. Luckily it was fall, so I did not have to worry about the up sweal of violence that accompanied this allotment of paltry goods.

I was no stranger to the world of cultivation through the numerous books I had read from back on Earth. When your life is full of really weird things happening, you tend to read everything you can about spirituality and the like. I found Xianxia when I was young and continued reading into my adult life.

That meant I knew I wanted to get the fuck out of this place. From the memories I was sorting through, this sect was the hell hole one could imagine a cultivation world would devolve into. The only problem was I was stuck.

There was no way for me to leave. Exterior sect members were bound in service to the sect, and the only way they could regain a modicum of freedom was by becoming an outer sect disciple. In order to do that, I had to compete in one of the numerous tournaments the sect put on throughout the year.

No luck in just trying to walk off or leave. Shit.

I laid down on the thin mat on the stone bed. I was exhausted, and even sitting in the chair was hard for this fat, worthless body. "All right, the sect, what the hell is the name of this place?" I said out loud to the drab, dull stone walls of the tenement apartment that I had been allocated to live in.

With the thought of where I lived, unbidden memories of the buildings and city of the Endless mountain sect came rushing through my mind. This place was not simply Asians; it was a hodgepodge mess of humanity that combined the worst parts of eighteenth-century European architecture with that of their Asiatic brothers and sisters. Clearly, people of Asian descent walked around, or what I was assuming to be Asian, from the memories of Old Eric. But also, there were Europeans, middle eastern, and Indians walking around. My mind tried to grasp at the other forms I remembered walking the streets, but their clearly nonhuman origins gave my Earth mind pause, and I could not clearly make out what they were or looked like.

Ah, the Endless mountain sect. The best way to describe a sect is it's like a corporation from back on Earth. Numerous clans, families, independent masters, and people all work for the sect to advance the sect's profits. Profits, in this case, are cultivation materials. The powerful join to get rare resources and materials, all while offering protection and training to those weaker. This arrangement is a thin veneer that holds sects together, as the powerful could just take what they want, and if it was not for the increased rarity and danger to acquire these materials at the higher levels of cultivation, then there would be no need for sects. They train and protect the weaker members because if one in a million becomes as powerful as an elder, then the sect's power exponentially increases.

The Endless mountain sect is one of the largest in the empire that kidnaped me as a child from my village. This was nothing new for the empire as their legions crisscrossed the land. Any child with the potential to cultivate was taken and sold to a sect for training. This was an honor because who would not want the opportunity to defy the heavens and become an immortal cultivator? That really matters to a ten-year-old kid screaming for his mother as he is transported for months to an unknown city and forced to work for people he has never met.

I needed water and food. Food would have to wait as that would require me to venture out to the mess hall for housing block Zun 73, and I do not want to do that yet. Plus, this body could do with a few days of water fasting to clear the toxins that had built up in it. My pee earlier had been bright orange with black in it. Not healthy, not healthy at all. I went back to the bathroom, where there were pitchers and cups outside the doors. I filled up the water jug and scurried back to my room.

I saw my first other person as I made it to my door. A neighbor five doors down quickly unlocked his room and ducked inside. He must have been coming off from his work shift because he was sweaty and dirty. I closed my door behind me. I drank four cups of water before I sat on the floor with my back to the bed. It was time to figure out this cultivation stuff, and from the memories I had, it was weird.