Chapter 1: Transmigration
Adam Wright was awakened by the cold.
One moment, he had been engulfed in the flames of a laboratory explosion; the next, he was jolted awake by freezing temperatures that seemed to seep into his very bones.
Like every unfortunate soul cast that transmigrates, he found himself waking up in an orphanage.
But his situation was far worse.
He woke up in the orphanage's storage room, buried beneath the building in what felt more like a tomb than a basement.
Aside from the muddy floor and dust floating in the air, only moldy wooden barrels and a mop covered with black fungus kept him company.
Adam tried moving his fingers stiffly, only to feel a pain akin to being put through a meat grinder shooting from the depths of his soul throughout his entire body. The agony made him shudder violently, causing him to inhale large amounts of musty, dusty air into his lungs. Coughing and gasping, Adam greedily breathed in the air, feeling his body gradually warm up.
Along with his frantic breathing and violent coughing, fragmented memories flooded his mind.
Adam Wright had been a promising researcher of the 21st century, working late on an experiment involving forbidden compounds when an unfortunate explosion occurred in the laboratory above him.
He didn't die in the explosion itself, but the blast collapsed the floor, sending a one-ton containment unit filled with specimens crashing down on him.
Adam died instantly—or so he thought.
He didn't even feel any pain then.
His death had been mercifully swift.
And then he woke up in this storage room that reeked of things far worse than mold.
Disturbingly, this body was also named Adam Wright, with the same birth date of June 28, 1980, and bore an uncanny resemblance to his former self.
But this Adam's parents had moved to the UK with dreams of a better life. A week after their plane landed, they were shot dead in a dark alley next to a theater.
Tragic. Truly tragic.
This version of Adam was sent directly to an orphanage and died an hour ago from hypothermia during the night.
The orphanage was no heaven. Being thin and small among a group of children made you an easy target for bullying.
It started with small things—having food snatched away, toys taken, then being picked on, pushed around, and beaten. Eventually, it escalated to being doused with cold water as a prank and locked in this storage room.
With his already weakened constitution, Adam had succumbed to the unnatural cold during the night.
After lying on the ground for a while to recover, Adam slowly sat up. He gently placed his right hand on his left wrist and silently counted for sixty seconds.
"Heartbeat is normal."
In his previous life, Adam had studied biochemistry with a focus on genetic anomalies. Although he wasn't a medical doctor, he understood enough about human physiology to know that what he was feeling was impossible.
"What...?" It was only after checking his pulse that Adam noticed a ring fused to the ring finger of his left hand—not worn, but somehow merged with the flesh itself, as if it had grown there. "This isn't..."
The storage room had no windows, and the door was sealed tight. Since it was well past midnight, the darkness was absolute, pressing against his eyes like a living thing. Adam had to rely on touch to examine the ring, though his fingers recoiled from the contact.
The ring felt as though it were carved from human bone—specifically, finger bones fused together in impossible angles.
It was perfectly sized now, having somehow adjusted to fit his finger. The surface was densely covered with engravings that made the entire ring feel uneven.
Adam traced the patterns with trembling fingers, feeling them pulse with warmth beneath his touch. The engravings formed words in languages that looks ancient, yet somehow he understood their meaning.
"Thy... mer... all... eas... gol... lla... ai... he... lin..."
As the final syllable escaped his lips in a voice that didn't sound entirely his own, Adam felt reality tear around him like wet paper.
The sensation was beyond description—his body dissolved and reformed, his consciousness scattered across dimensions before being forcibly compressed back into shape.
The next moment, sickly light assaulted his eyes, and he found himself in a library.
"Ugh~~"
Though his stomach was empty, Adam couldn't stop the violent retching.
Weak and shaking, Adam collapsed onto the floor. The surface beneath him wasn't wood or stone, but something that felt disturbingly organic and warm like skin. Only after the nausea subsided did he manage to look up.
Above him stretched an impossible structure—a vast inverted pyramid that seemed to extend infinitely upward, its walls lined with countless shelves that defied perspective. The geometry hurt to look at directly; angles that shouldn't exist, distances that changed when observed, shadows that fell upward instead of down.
Each shelf was crammed with books, scrolls, and objects that seemed to somehow squirm. Some volumes appeared to be bound in materials that looked suspiciously like human skin, while others seemed to be made from substances that didn't exist in any natural form.
After regaining some strength, Adam noticed a table beside him—if it could be called a table. The surface was smooth and black, covered with papers that seemed to write themselves as he watched, words appearing in inks and erasing on its own after some time.
Adam approached the table with growing dread and lowered himself onto what passed for a chair. As he sat, the chair shifted unnaturally to fit his shape.
The papers were covered in text that hurt to read, symbols that seemed to crawl across the page like living insects. Some documents appeared to be written in english, but not exactly the same.
Adam reluctantly touched one of the documents.
Information flooded his mind—terrifying knowledge of concepts that human consciousness wasn't meant to contain. Images of cosmic horrors, mathematical impossibilities, and truths about reality that made him want to claw out his own eyes.
"...Among all dimensions and all entities that crawl between the stars, aside from those spawn directly birthed by She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, no creature can match the hunger of..."
Adam was so frightened that he quickly yanked his hand away.
With mounting horror, he approached the nearest shelf. The books seemed to sense his presence, some volumes pushing forward eagerly while others recoiled as if afraid.
His trembling fingers traced the spines, and titles burned themselves into his consciousness—names that should never be spoken aloud, works that somehow contained instructions for acts of cosmic blasphemy.
The largest tome, bound in what looked like human flesh still warm to the touch... The Necronomicon.
A slimmer volume wrapped in hardcover... The Book of Eibon.
A tall book whose pages turned themselves, showing different content to each eye... The R'lyeh Text.
One book—a thin volume that seemed almost normal until he touched it—suddenly flew from the shelf, landing open before him. Its pages fluttered without any wind, settling on a spread that made Adam's sanity begin to fray at the edges.
The text was in English, but written in a way that made each word feel like a violation. As his eyes moved across the sentences, his haris stood on end, as if some forbidden knowledge was forced into his soul and chaotic screams and incomprehensible images filled his brain.
His skin began to change, not just goosebumps but something far worse. Pustules erupted across his flesh, each one containing something that moved independently, pressing against the thin skin that contained it, desperate to break free and begin its own terrible existence.