"Ahhh!" A raw, desperate scream echoed from a small, isolated cottage nestled deep within a valley. Surrounded by untamed wilderness and with no other homes in a mile radius, the sound was swallowed by the silence. No one heard it.
"Mph! Agh!" A muffled, gurgling voice continued to escape from within the cottage, a frantic plea that met no answer.
'Oh God! Where have you brought me?' The thought screamed inside the mind of a young man, no older than sixteen. With a handsome, finely chiseled face and striking blue eyes that now bulged with terror, he could have easily been mistaken for a celebrity gracing a magazine cover.
Currently, however, his situation was anything but glamorous. He was in a perilous, life-ending position, hanging from a thick wooden beam in the ceiling. A rope was tied brutally tight around his neck, cutting into his skin. His feet dangled a foot above the dusty floorboards, kicking and twitching in a futile search for ground. He couldn't breathe, and with every passing second, the black spots dancing in his vision grew larger, threatening to consume what little consciousness he had left. The panic was a physical entity, a cold beast clawing at his chest.
This nightmare had all started so mundanely. Just a short while ago, he was a man in his early twenties, a college student on Earth. Running late, he had dashed into the street without looking, his mind on a pending exam, not the massive truck bearing down on him. The screech of tires and a blast from the horn were the last things he ever heard. Then, darkness. Now, he had been violently thrust into this new reality, transmigrated into a new body in a new world. He began to wonder, if it would be a normal world like his own, or a fantasy realm of demons and gods.
The answer came as a painful, chaotic torrent. Suddenly, the memories of the body's original owner began to flood his mind, not as a gentle stream but as a psychic battering ram.
He felt the original Damian's childhood joys, his adolescent fears, and the crushing weight of his final days. Through this violent integration, he learned that this was a world of cultivation—a place where martial prowess and spiritual power determined one's worth, and where strength reigned supreme.
"Why am I even thinking about this?" he choked out in his mind. His life was literally hanging by a thread. He had already tried everything he could think of. He had clawed at the knot until his fingernails were bloody and raw, he had tried to swing his body to hook a leg over the beam, but nothing worked. His mind, already numb and reeling from the influx of foreign memories, grew even more muddled from the suffocating lack of oxygen.
As someone who had died only moments before arriving here, he recognized the grim finality of the encroaching darkness. He knew he was about to die again.
"Stop playing with me..." were the last words that escaped his mouth in a broken rasp as his body went limp, the fight finally leaving him. He thought it was over, but a few minutes later, his eyes shot open. The same room, the same dusty floor, the same rope digging into his neck. The agony of lack of oxygen returned with a vengeance.
"What? Was I just unconscious?" he thought, but he changed his confusion with the instinct to survive. This time, he didn't waste a precious second contemplating his new reality. His only goal was to get free.
'What can I even do?' he wondered desperately, pulling at the rope with a surge of adrenaline, hoping it would snap. It held firm. The only thing breaking was his will to live. His vision tunneled, and he fell into the familiar, terrifying slumber of unconsciousness once more.
Though his spirit wavered, his body refused to give up. He awoke again to the same grim scene, the cycle of death and revival a unique form of torture.
This time, a new idea sparked. With frantic haste, he fumbled through the pockets of his simple upper robe. He searched all four, one by one, his heart hammering against his ribs. In the last pocket, his fingers brushed against something small and hard.
Hope surged through him. The gods hadn't abandoned him yet; he found a sharp-edged stone. But just as he grasped it, his vision blurred, his head spun from the prolonged lack of air, and he died once more.
He was back again. With a muffled gasp, he plunged his hand directly into the correct pocket and retrieved the sharp stone. It glowed with a faint, ethereal blue light in the dim cottage. In any other situation, he might have paused to admire its otherworldly beauty. Now was not the time.
He immediately began sawing at the rope above his head, the stone's edge biting into the coarse fibers. Slowly, painstakingly, the strands started to fray. He managed to create a small gap, just enough to wedge his fingers in and pull, creating a sliver of space to draw a ragged, searing breath—his first true breath in this world. The air burned his raw throat, but it was the most glorious sensation he had ever felt.
Energized, he continued to cut away at the remaining strands. With a few more desperate breaths and several more scrapes of the stone, the rope finally snapped. He fell in an ungraceful heap, crashing hard onto the wooden floor of his new cottage.
"Ouch!" he cried out, the impact jarring every bone in his new body. It was just an involuntary response, he told himself, a reaction from the body, not from him.
With his body finally free and his lungs greedily gulping in air, he lay on the floor for a long moment before pushing himself into a sitting position to properly sort through the memories of the body's previous owner. Strangely, the original host was also named Damian Ash born. He had half-expected an eastern name for a cultivation world, something like Yuan Feng or Shen Shuang.
The more he delved into the memories, the more his initial relief curdled into sheer terror, until a single, terrifying thought crystallized in his mind. 'I am going to die.'
The reason for his dread lay buried within the boy's memories—the memories that explained why the previous host had been desperate enough to choose death by hanging.
"Good gracious, I am going to die a torturous death, aren't I?" Damian muttered, the full weight of the situation crashing down on him. The memory played in his mind with painful clarity: a bustling city street, the scent of spices and sweat, and then a careless turn. The original Damian had accidentally bumped into a young woman, knocking her off balance. This woman was the sole daughter of the Hazelwood clan, a family infamous for its vicious brutality throughout the entire Kingdom of Ember fall.
The implications of that simple, accidental encounter were dire. Firstly, the Hazelwood clan was very protective of their heiress. They would likely skin him alive for daring to touch her. Secondly, even if he somehow escaped the clan's wrath, a horde of powerful and jealous noblemen vying for the princess's affection would surely see to his demise in the most creative and painful ways imaginable.
"Should I just strangle myself again?" Damian joked darkly, the gallows humor a weak defense against his rising fear. He pushed himself shakily to his feet. The situation was grim, but he had to find a way to survive.
He looked at the blue stone still clutched in his hand. The memories now supplied him with a name for it: a spirit stone, the primary currency and a vital resource for anyone practicing cultivation.
'Thanks, little fellow,' Damian thought, pressing the cool stone to his lips for a moment in gratitude.
His mind then wandered back to the bizarre cycle of his repeated awakenings. He distinctly remembered taking the stone out and dropping it to the floor just before he lost consciousness the third time. Yet, when he had awoken, the stone was nestled safely back in his pocket. He was certain he hadn't put it there.
Unable to comprehend this strange, impossible phenomenon, he tried to dismiss it as a stress-induced hallucination. But a sliver of doubt, and a kernel of hope, remained. Shaking his head to clear the troubling thoughts, he walked towards the cottage door, determined to finally see the world he had only witnessed in borrowed memories.