"This User Is Dead!"

  "This User Is Dead!"

  The words floated above him, glowing faint and cold against the dark, and Aren stared at them for three full seconds before he realized he was on a boat.

  He sat up too fast. Nearly went over the side.

  His hands — both of them, wrong, bigger than they should be — slammed into the edges and held. The wood was rough and real against his palms. The boat rocked. The ocean stretched in every direction, dark and enormous and completely indifferent to him.

  'Okay,' he thought, and his mind skidded on the thought like a foot hitting ice. 'Okay. Don't—'

  He looked at his hands.

  The knuckles were different. The skin a different tone. A small scar sat on the left index finger that he had never earned. He turned them over once. Twice.

  'Those are not my hands.'

  The thought arrived flat and wrong, the way a sound does when it comes from a direction it shouldn't. He looked up at the ruin still cycling above his head.

  "This User Is Dead!"

  'Who is dead,' he thought. 'Me? The body? What does that—'

  He stopped himself. He could feel the spiral beginning, one question cracking open into three, three into nine, and he had learned young to recognize that pattern and wall it off before it swallowed him.

  'Solid ground first. Everything else after solid ground.'

  He breathed in through his nose. Salt water, heavy and coastal, the kind that settles into the back of your throat and decides to stay. Cold air. The soft rhythmic creak of wood. The rocking that had probably been rocking him for a while before he was conscious enough to notice.

  He remembered going to bed.

  He remembered the workout — last set finished around eleven, shower after, lying down. He remembered his ceiling.

  He did not remember anything between that ceiling and this.

  'Think. You've read about this. You've read hundreds of chapters of this exact thing.'

  Transmigration. The genre had rules — inherited memories, a system that introduced itself, a body that came with a past you could access. He waited for the dead man's memories to surface. A name. A face. Something.

  Nothing came.

  He pressed on the interior of his mind carefully, the way you press a bruise to map its shape. The body had history he could feel — muscle memory, a particular way of holding tension in the shoulders, a posture that wasn't his — but nothing he could read. No name. No faces. No past.

  'Every story I read, they always get the memories. Every single one.'

  He almost laughed.

  Almost.

  The ruin changed.

  The cycling stopped. The text dissolved and reformed, the luminescence going colder.

  *"Entering The Region Of The Gods Domain."*

  *"Retreat Is Necessary."*

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  He looked up from the ruin.

  The mist had come in while he wasn't watching. It sat on every horizon now, dense and white and advancing with a patience that had nothing natural in it. The current — he could feel it in the boat's movement, subtle and directional — was pulling him directly toward it.

  'Retreat,' he thought. 'It says retreat.'

  He put both hands in the water and pushed. The current noted his efforts and continued doing what it had been doing. He pushed harder. The boat moved approximately nowhere useful.

  Lightning.

  It split the sky without warning — one white fracture across the dark, there and gone in less than a second — and in the moment it illuminated the ocean Aren looked down.

  Something was beneath him.

  Not close. Deep. But large enough that even at that depth, even through dark water, the shape of it registered before the lightning died. Vast. Still. The suggestion of something that had been there long before the boat arrived and would be there long after.

  Then darkness again.

  Aren did not move.

  He sat very still, both hands on the edges of the boat, his breathing careful and controlled, and looked at the water that now looked exactly as it had before and was not the same at all.

  'Don't think about it,' he told himself. 'Current. Find the current's direction. Focus on what you can actually do.'

  He was focusing on what he could actually do when he saw the hand.

  It was inside the boat.

  Slender. Long-fingered. Palm-down against the wood floor near the bow, the way a hand looks when someone has reached over a ledge and is resting their weight on it.

  Aren looked at it.

  He looked at where it came from.

  Over the side of the boat. Down the hull. Into the water. Still going — stretching further than a hand should stretch, further than an arm, further than anything — descending into the dark below the surface without end, without a body attached that he could see, just the limb continuing downward into black water until the depth took it.

  'That,' he thought, with a clarity that surprised him, 'should not exist.'

  He didn't move. Couldn't. His mind had gone to that particular narrow quiet it went to when a situation exceeded his ability to plan for it — not blank, just reduced, processing only what was immediately in front of him.

  The hand had not moved.

  'It hasn't noticed me,' he realized. 'Whatever that is attached to, it hasn't noticed me yet.'

  He needed to keep it that way.

  He needed to not be here.

  Slowly — carefully — he reached out toward the hand. If he could push it back over the side without—

  The water rumbled.

  Low and deep, a vibration that moved through the hull and up through his palms and into his chest before his ears caught up with it. The hand twitched. Just once. The fingers spread slightly, pressing flat against the wood.

  'Don't,' he thought, at nothing, at everything. 'Don't don't don't—'

  The sound came from behind him.

  From inside the mist — a concussive blast that hit his chest before his ears caught up with it, low and massive and final, the sound a large gun makes when the sound itself is almost beside the point. Something had fired from inside the white wall. Something with enough force that the pressure of it arrived like a physical thing.

  The water reacted.

  The rumbling stopped. The hand withdrew — slowly, deliberately, sliding back over the edge of the boat and down the hull and into the water — and then the deep disturbance beneath him shifted, directional, moving away, descending back into whatever depth it had come from.

  The surface smoothed.

  The smell faded. A smell he hadn't consciously registered until it was gone — deep water and something beneath deep water, something old in a way that had no good word for it.

  Aren exhaled.

  He turned.

  The mist was still there. But something moved inside it now — a shadow growing as it approached, dark against the white. He heard it before he saw it clearly. The deep rhythmic groan of something large under its own weight. Wood and rigging and mass.

  A bow emerged first. Then the hull. Then the rest of it — massive and dark, no flag visible, no lights, cutting through the mist without announcement.

  A ship.

  He looked at it with the specific exhausted clarity of someone who has just survived one impossible thing and is watching another arrive.

  'Better or worse,' he thought. 'Those are the only two options.'

  He could not tell which this was.

  The ship came on through the mist, and the gap between them closed, and Aren sat in his small wooden boat with his borrowed hands in his lap and waited to find out.