He died doing something truly unremarkable.
Not storming a castle. Not slaying a dragon. Not even choking on glory.
Just standing behind the counter of a 24/7 convenience store, beneath flickering fluorescent lights, scanning expired energy drinks while a half-naked conspiracy theorist argued with a rack of potato chips.
"I'm telling you, man... they live in the moon. Not on it. In it. Hollow moon. Moon reptiles. NASA's just a puppet show."
Zephyr Mayhem nodded absently, not because he agreed, but because it made the lunatic leave faster. That was his real superpower: the ability to shut down nonsense with passive encouragement.
He was halfway through pretending to mop the floor when the aneurysm hit. No light. No warning. Just an instant white-hot spike behind his left eye, then darkness.
And silence.
Until the silence started whispering.
He opened his eyes.
But they weren't his eyes.
A chandelier twisted like melted glass above him, swaying gently as if in water. The ceiling pulsed faintly, breathing in slow intervals. Everything felt... wrong. The bed beneath him was soft, but it was the kind of softness that suggested it had eaten people before.
The air reeked of dust, secrets, and something metallic. Like blood pretending to be perfume.
Zephyr sat up. His fingers trembled—not with fear, but with the kind of awareness one gets when waking up somewhere very, very expensive and very, very cursed.
"Alright," he muttered, voice raspy. "This isn't Kansas. And I'm not Zephyr Mayhem anymore."
He reached up to touch his face. Same nose. Same stubble. But... no glasses. No name tag. No pain in his lower back from standing twelve hours.
Then, a knock. No, a pulse—on the edge of his mind.
[LEGACY INITIALIZING...] [CALIBRATING: ANOMALOUS PARAMETERS DETECTED] [WARNING: THIS SYSTEM RUNS ON FRAGMENTED IMPOSSIBILITIES]
Zephyr blinked.
A floating text box. Transparent. Flickering like a bad hallucination. And of course… it had to be Comic Sans. Reality really was broken.
He exhaled slowly. "This is hell. I died and went to ironic hell."
But deep down, he knew better. This wasn't punishment. This wasn't reward. This was wrong. Deeply, fundamentally wrong.
Which meant...
He smiled.
"Let's see how much sense I can break before breakfast."
The room around him shifted. Not in the way furniture moves, but in the way reality hesitates.
The walls flexed like lungs. Shadows twisted even when no light source moved. A painting on the wall—once an elegant portrait of some noble ancestor—was now a screaming void stitched into canvas.
Zephyr didn't flinch.
His mind, forged by midnight shifts and cheap caffeine, didn't process fear the way it was supposed to.
Instead, he got curious.
He stood, legs shaky but functional, and crossed the room. The floor felt slightly too soft, as if walking on the skin of a god pretending to be carpet. Every step made the air shiver.
The mirror on the far wall showed his reflection—but the longer he stared, the more the image lagged. Like it wasn't sure who it was supposed to be reflecting anymore.
Zephyr lifted a brow. "Great. Identity crisis on top of cosmic relocation. Love that for me."
[SYSTEM QUERY: ACCEPT LEGACY?] [Y/N]
He snorted. "Sure, why not. Let's make some mistakes that break causality."
The moment he thought 'Yes', heat surged through his spine like liquid lightning. He doubled over, not from pain—but from recognition. Like a part of him had been missing this nonsense his whole life.
[LEGACY ACCEPTED] [WELCOME, HERETIC]
The text vanished. The room didn't.
It folded.
Reality creaked, and something behind the walls—something that remembered being geometry—growled softly. Not in anger. In interest.
Zephyr cracked his neck. "Guess I've got a fan."
He opened the door.
And the hallway blinked.
It had no right to do that. It didn't move—it reconsidered itself. One moment it stretched into infinity. The next, it was just a corridor with six crooked doors, three of which weren't always doors.
Zephyr stepped forward.
Not because he had a destination. But because wherever this was going… he wanted front-row seats.