Not darkness. If there was darkness there would have been something. This was the absence of everything. No light, no shadow, no depth or distance. I couldn't see my hands. Couldn't feel my body. Couldn't hear the sound of my own breathing because there was no breathing to hear.
It wasn't like closing your eyes. Closing your eyes still leaves you aware of the weight of your eyelids, the pressure behind them, the faint patterns that dance across your vision when you press too hard. This was none of that.
It was the strangest sensation I'd ever experienced—like being a thought without a thinker. A consciousness floating in a void that had no walls, no floor, no ceiling. No temperature. No gravity. No sense of up or down. I couldn't tell if seconds were passing or years. Time felt meaningless here, irrelevant.
I tried to move, but there was nothing to move. Tried to speak, but there was no mouth, no throat, no air to carry sound. I was aware, but that awareness had nothing to latch onto. No reference points. No context.
And then, slowly—agonizingly slowly—something changed.
It started as a faint sensation. Not sight, not sound, but something else. A pressure, maybe. Or the memory of pressure. Like the ghost of a feeling that used to mean something. It was so faint I almost thought I was imagining it, but it grew stronger. More defined.
Not the comfortable warmth of a blanket or the sun on your skin, but the raw, unfiltered heat of existence itself. It spread through me—or through whatever I was becoming—and with it came the first hint of a body.
I could feel them. Not see them, not yet, but feel them. The weight of them. The way they hung at my sides. Then my arms. My chest. My legs. Piece by piece, I reassembled, like a puzzle being put back together by invisible hands.
Sound came next. Muffled at first, like I was underwater. A low, rhythmic thumping that I eventually recognized as a heartbeat. Then breathing. Mine? Someone else's? I couldn't tell yet. But it was there, steady and insistent.
Not all at once. It started as a dim, hazy glow that pressed against my eyelids—eyelids I hadn't realized I had again. I blinked, and the light grew sharper, more distinct. Colors bled in. Brown. Green. Blue.
I blinked again, harder this time, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. The sky above me was a pale, washed-out blue, streaked with thin clouds that looked like they'd been painted on with a brush. The ground beneath my feet was dry and cracked, dirt and sparse patches of grass stretching out in every direction.
I looked down at myself.
My hands—different hands. Darker skin, rougher texture. Calloused and scarred in ways mine weren't. I was wearing something crude, animal hide maybe, stitched together with sinew. My legs were bare, feet wrapped in strips of leather.
I tried to speak, but the words caught in my throat. Not because I couldn't speak, but because I didn't know what to say. Where was I? What was this?
That strange, constant hum of awareness. Like Instinct, but amplified a thousandfold. It wasn't giving me specific information—it was just… there. Always there. A background presence that told me things I shouldn't know but somehow did. Like I was being forced to take certain actions.
I knew the sun was setting even though I hadn't looked at its position. I knew there was water to the east even though I couldn't see it. I knew the wind was shifting, carrying the scent of something distant but important.
But I also knew nothing. My memories felt foggy, distant. Like they belonged to someone else. I couldn't remember how I got here. Couldn't remember my name. Couldn't remember—
My name was Reynard. Chapters fırst released on novel•fire.net
The thought surfaced like a drowning man breaking through water, desperate and sudden. I clung to it, repeating it in my mind. Reynard. Reynard Vale. That was me. That had to be me. Alexis just administered anesthetic and she's was likely operating on my brain.
I'm assuming whatever I'm encountering right now is the part that I'm responsible for. Is this what she meant by me being part of my own surgery's success? Or is this something even she wasn't expecting. Either way this wasn't the first time I've had hallucinations. I've had them when I got my Boxer and Journalist job before.
But why is it that I couldn't feel my System?
I reached inward, searching for that familiar interface. The jobs. The skills. The notifications that had been a constant part of my life for years. But there was nothing. No interface. No rewards. No glowing text hovering at the edge of my vision.
I felt naked without it. Vulnerable. Like I'd lost a limb I didn't know I relied on so heavily. It wasn't my first time with my System disabled, but previously it was simply on a cooldown. This is like it never existed which makes the feeling so much more intense.
Movement caught my eye.
I turned, and for the first time, I noticed the others. People—humans, I think—scattered around me in a loose cluster. Maybe a dozen of them, all dressed similarly to me in crude hides and wraps. They looked wary, their eyes darting between me and the horizon.
One of them, a man with a thick beard and a scar running down his cheek, gestured toward something in the distance. He didn't speak. None of them did. But the meaning was clear.
I looked down and realized I was holding something. A spear. Wooden shaft, sharpened stone tip bound with leather strips. It felt heavy in my hands, unfamiliar despite the fact that my body seemed to know how to hold it.
The bearded man gestured again, more urgently this time. The others started moving, spreading out in a loose formation. They weren't organized—far from it. They looked confused, was one of the first times they'd ever tried to coordinate with each other. Trial and error. Fumbling through something new.
And they were looking at me like I was supposed to lead them.
I didn't know why. Didn't know what made me different from them. But I felt that same compulsion they seemed to feel. That instinct-driven pull toward something ahead.
The word surfaced in my mind unbidden. Not mine, but true nonetheless. There was food ahead. Animals. Prey.
I started walking, and the others followed.
We moved as a group—barely. No one spoke. No one needed to. We just moved, guided by that same primal awareness that seemed to connect us all. The terrain shifted as we walked, dry dirt giving way to rocky outcroppings and sparse vegetation.
Animals. Large, four-legged creatures grazing in the distance. I didn't know what they were called, but my body recognized them as food. As survival.
The group spread out instinctively, circling around the herd. The bearded man glanced at me, and I nodded without thinking. He moved. The others moved.
And then we attacked.
It wasn't coordinated. It wasn't elegant. It was chaos—bodies surging forward, spears raised, voices shouting in wordless cries. The animals scattered, bolting in every direction, and we chased.
I felt myself moving, but it didn't feel like I was in control. It was like watching a hyper-realistic movie where I was both the camera and the actor. My legs pumped beneath me, my lungs burned, my hands gripped the spear tight, but I wasn't choosing any of it.
I was just… following.
The herd split, and I stayed on the trail of one animal that broke away from the rest. It was fast, faster than I expected, but I kept pace. The ground blurred beneath my feet, my breath coming in ragged gasps.
The others were somewhere behind me, their shouts echoing in the distance, but I couldn't focus on them. All I could see was the animal ahead, its hooves kicking up dirt as it ran.
We ran for what felt like hours. Or minutes. I couldn't tell anymore. Time had become elastic, stretching and contracting with every step.
And then the ground disappeared.
Not gradually. Not with warning. Just—gone.
The animal stumbled first, its legs flailing as it fell forward into something dark and slick. I tried to stop, tried to dig my heels into the dirt, but momentum carried me forward.
The world tilted, and suddenly I was plunging downward into a pool of something thick and viscous. It wasn't water. It was darker, heavier. It clung to my skin like oil, dragging me down.
I tried to swim, tried to push upward, but the liquid pulled at me, filling my nose, my mouth. The animal thrashed beside me, its movements growing weaker.
Darkness closed in again.
Not the nothing from before.
Just the black of the oil surrounding my vision.