I woke up with the worst migraine of my life. The kind that doesn't just throb, it screams. And just as I groaned, trying to get my bearings, another assault hit me.
The smell.
Rotten fish, moldy bread, piss, and something else I'd rather not identify. I blinked against the early light stabbing my eyes and finally saw where I was, lying in the middle of a garbage heap, half-buried in muck, bruises blooming across my ribs, and blood dried across my lip.
Before I could even begin to question what had happened, the memories came. Not the ones that belonged to this body, but mine.
Thirty agonizing minutes passed. I sat there in that pile of waste, unmoving, processing a truth no sane person could accept easily.
I died.
I, Edward, Ed, as I preferred, was dead in my original world. And now, I had awakened in the broken body of a boy who had just been beaten half to death and dumped like yesterday's trash.
His name was Edward too. Maybe fate had a sick sense of humor.
He was fifteen. A year away from awakening his class, whatever that meant in this new world filled with magic and monsters. He lived in a small town about a hundred kilometers from the Kingdom of Avalon's northern border.
Well, lived.
His father had just died a few days ago, and his mother had passed during childbirth. The boy had no relatives, no friends, no allies. His father wasn't some court mage or warrior, he was a simple scribe. Barely literate, if I'm being honest, but good enough to copy city documents for a pittance. His dream was for his son to follow in his footsteps. To live a quiet life, perhaps better than his own.
But dreams don't pay for medicine.
The boy, my predecessor, had taken out a loan to treat his father's fever. When the treatment failed and the old man died, the debt didn't. He couldn't repay it. The thugs from the loan guild could've waited, bled him slowly for silver. But they saw an easier path: take the house and be done with it. So they came. Kicked him. Beat him. Left him for dead in the slums.
And then... I woke up.
Just my luck. Not only did I get reborn in a world filled with mages and knights capable of leveling mountains, I ended up in the worst possible starting position.
No family. No food. No home. No talent.
Definitely not a chosen one.
I sighed, long and low, steeling myself. The rising sun bathed the city in warm orange hues, making the edges of broken rooftops and rusted gutters glow like gold. For a moment, it looked almost beautiful.
Almost.
I dragged myself to my feet, ignoring the shooting pain in my ribs, and limped away from the garbage heap. I knew there was a well near the edge of the slum, dry, often, but still the only source of water for those too poor to afford anything else.
It took time to reach it, every step scraping at sore muscles and reopened wounds. When I got there, I found a shallow trickle at the bottom, just enough to wash the filth off my body and clothes. The water was cold, painfully cold, but it was better than smelling like the dead.
I didn't have a towel, of course, so I put the wet clothes back on, shivering under the breeze as I stepped into the narrow, muddy streets of the city.
No food. No roof. No friends. Only a soaked shirt, aching bones, and whatever luck I had left.
But I was alive.
And that meant I could still fight.
I made my way toward the market square, guided by the smell of bread and sweat and open fires. My stomach growled angrily, but I ignored it. First, I needed to find out where I was. What kind of world was this?