The first sensation was a throbbing, blinding pain at his temple, a rhythmic agony that pulsed with the beat of his heart. The second was the smell—not just coal smoke and oil, but the coppery tang of blood and something else… something ancient and ozonic, like the air after a lightning strike.
Xian groaned, pushing himself up from the cold, gritty floor. His vision swam, then focused. And his blood ran cold.
He was kneeling in the center of a intricate pattern scrawled onto the rough wooden floorboards. The design was drawn in a substance that glistened darkly in the faint light. Blood. His eyes followed the lines—arcane symbols interwoven with geometric shapes, all forming a circle about ten feet across. It felt… hungry.
His hand, moving of its own volition, went to the source of the pain on his temple. His fingers came away sticky with fresh blood. A wave of nausea, thick and cloying, washed over him, and with it, a ghost memory—the cold, firm pressure of a barrel against skin.
His gaze snapped downward. There, lying just inside the circle next to his knee, was a revolver. It was a heavy, brutal-looking thing of aged steel and polished walnut. Its cylinder was open. A single, spent brass cartridge sat in one of the chambers, gleaming dully.
A fractured thought, not his own, echoed in his mind: "It didn't work. The circle is a lie. The gate won't open."
Then, the despair. A profound, soul-crushing hopelessness that felt like a physical weight. It was an echo, the final emotional signature of the body he now inhabited. The previous owner hadn't just died; he had performed a ritual suicide, hoping for some kind of transcendence or escape, and had failed utterly.
He killed himself, Xian realized with a terrifying clarity. And I… I woke up in the corpse.
The panic was immediate and absolute. He scrambled backward, out of the circle, his back hitting a cold, iron wall. He was in a small, cluttered room. Through a grimy, round window, the source of the faint light became clear: a sky choked with smoke, glowing with the orange hellfire of countless furnaces. The silhouettes of towering structures bristled with pipes and grinding gears. The air vibrated with the constant, subterranean rumble of machinery.
This wasn't his apartment. This wasn't even his century.
The body's memories, vague and jumbled like a dream, began to trickle in. A name: Alistair Finch. A profession: disgraced junior artificer. A reason for the disgrace: theoretical research into "forbidden transmutative energies." This ritual was his last, desperate attempt to prove his mad theories.
Xian looked from the blood circle to the revolver, then down at his own hands. They were slender, pale, and stained with ink and grease, not his own calloused programmer's hands. He was wearing a stained waistcoat and rough-spun trousers.
The headache pulsed again, a brutal reminder of the bullet that had ended Alistair Finch. But Xian was alive. The ritual had done something. It just hadn't opened a gate for Alistair's soul to leave. It had pulled one in.
A sudden, loud CLANG from the street below jolted him to his feet. Voices shouted in a clipped, English accent, mingling with the hiss of steam.
He was in a steampunk nightmare, wearing a dead man's body, surrounded by the evidence of his suicide. He had no money, no allies, and a pounding headache that felt like a bullet wound.
His first thought, sharp and survivalist, cut through the panic: I need to get rid of the body. Not my body. His. The evidence.
His eyes fell back on the revolver. With a trembling hand, he picked it up. It was heavy. Real. He snapped the cylinder shut. The single spent casing was a monument to his second chance.
A second chance born from a dark ritual in a world of steam and shadows. Xian, the programmer, was gone. He had to be Alistair Finch now. And he had to find out why he was meant to live when the original had been so determined to die.