For the hundredth goddamn time, I glared at my reflection in this piss-poor excuse for a mirror, my face twisted with fury. What kind of sadistic, brainless worm decided it'd be funny to toss me, Kain motherfucking Kluvert, self-made billionaire and taster of life's finer things, into this medieval swamp of sadness with no seasoning or WiFi? No espresso. No Wagyu. No smart home tech. Just hay, mud, and soup that tasted like wet despair.
This wasn't some fantasy fairytale land. This was hell's sandbox.
I still couldn't believe it. No, I refused to believe it. Some omniscient sadist or God thought it would be fun to throw me into a world where the thought of bathing once a week was extravagant. Who decided to reincarnate me as a half-starved noble in a land where the richest man owns two goats and a rusty pitchfork?
Do they know who I am?
I used to date only the finest women. I've ghosted billion-dollar meetings before brunch. My net worth could've bought a country. Maybe two. I had penthouses in four cities and a yacht longer than this entire town.
And now I'm sleeping on straw.
Straw.
Not even the good kind. The flea-ridden, patchy, damp kind. The kind that makes you itch in places you didn't know could itch. Welcome to luxury in the 1200s.
I clenched my fists until my nails bit into my skin. The rage boiled over. I could barely stop myself from screaming until my throat bled. I wanted to punch something, break something, burn it all to the ground.
But all I could do was breathe. In. Out. In. Out. If I lost control now, what would I have left?
The only tiny saving grace in this grand fantasy prank was the cheat. Every night, for exactly one hour, I could access the internet. Not some fantasy wiki, not medieval history textbooks real internet. Google. YouTube, Reddit, and Pornhub if I really wanted. But after sixty minutes? A migraine like someone had split my skull open and poured in molten steel. A sharp, unrelenting punishment for trying to escape my cage.
So yeah. One hour. One chance a day to claw some kind of advantage from my old world and drag it into this one.
And the cherry on top? I'd been given a title. "Baron." A meaningless, rusty crown over a patch of cold, cursed land that couldn't grow a goddamn beet. My territory was nothing but frostbitten dirt, starving peasants, and a forest everyone insisted was "haunted." Maybe it was. I didn't care. I wasn't scared of ghosts. I was the ghost.
At least the peasants feared me a little. They bowed. Called me "my lord." I didn't correct them. It was the one indulgence I had left.
Still, I hated everything. The food. The smell. The hopelessness of it all. The sheer lack of anything resembling joy. And worst of all, the reminders. The whispers of a life I'd lost.
I'd spent my one hour today not Googling medieval farming techniques or edible bark or "how to make soap with pig fat." No. I'd spend it reading my own goddamn obituaries.
Every major outlet. BBC. CNN. Al Jazeera. Forbes. Bloomberg. Hell, even TMZ had something slick to say.
> "Kain Kluvert, tech billionaire and visionary entrepreneur, presumed dead in a tragic bridge collapse."
"The empire builder, lost too soon."
"Nobody recovered. Investigation ongoing."
Ongoing? Bullshit.
If I was dead, why did my bones still ache in the cold? Why did I bleed? Why did every breath of this dung-scented air burn like a punishment?
I was no ghost. Ghosts don't bruise.
And yet the world had moved on without me. They were writing elegies. Tributes. Speeches about my legacy while I was here, alive and pissed, trying to figure out how to make life bearable for me here.
I snapped.
My fist drove into the mirror with a crack that echoed through the miserable hovel I now called home. Glass exploded like a frozen scream, shards scattering across the floor.
And just like that, he was gone.
No more golden hair styled with precision and ego. No more piercing blue eyes that turned heads in boardrooms and bedrooms alike.
Just blood. Just broken glass. And a warped reflection staring back.
The world had already buried Kain Kluvert.
But they were wrong.
Because I wasn't dead.
Not yet.
And when I get out of this miserable purgatory, I swear, by every cent in my lost accounts and every grudge I still carry, I'll burn the sky until the gods beg me to stop.