The last thing Leo remembered was rage.
A pure, incandescent fury directed at the fools who had used substandard rebar on his design.
The shriek of tortured steel and the sickening lurch of a twenty-story fall were just the details. The insult was the point.
Then, nothing.
A silent, timeless void.
✧✧✧
He came to with a sharp gasp, lungs burning.
The first sensation was cold. A deep, penetrating dampness that clung to him like a second skin.
The second was the smell.
Musty stone, wet wool, and something vaguely like old cheese.
He blinked, his eyes struggling to focus in the gloom.
This wasn't a hospital.
Above him, dark, heavy beams sagged, stained with water spots the size of dinner plates. He was lying on a mattress that felt less like a bed and more like a bag of assorted rocks.
A wave of vertigo hit him hard.
Falling. Now this.
Okay, Leo. Analyze the data.
His mind, a creature of habit, tried to impose order.
Possibility one: Bizarre, hyper-realistic dream.
Possibility two: Hell is a poorly maintained medieval hovel.
Possibility three...
He pushed himself up. The body he moved was not his own. It was lighter. Younger. Weaker.
The vertigo intensified.
This wasn't a dream. This was something else. Something fundamentally wrong.
Before the panic could fully set in, a heavy wooden door creaked open. The sound was a long, agonized groan from rusted hinges.
An old, wizened man stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the dim light of a hallway.
"Lord Kaelen?" the man whispered, his voice trembling. "Thank the heavens. You're awake."
Kaelen.
The name echoed in the hollows of Leo's mind. It felt foreign, yet... connected. Like logging into someone else's account. The files were there, but the user was new.
Flashes of memory that weren't his. A stern-faced man with a patchy beard. The feel of a horse between his legs. The taste of watered-down ale.
"Where...am I? And... who are you?" Leo began, his voice a raspy, unfamiliar whisper. It was the voice of this 'Kaelen'.
"You're in your chambers, my Lord," the old man said, stepping cautiously into the room. "I am Gideon, your father's steward. You collapsed, you see... after hearing the news about the Baron."
The borrowed memories supplied the context.
The Baron—his father—was dead.
And this body's original owner had apparently fainted from the shock. His system had crashed, and Leo, the opportunistic squatter, had just slipped in through the open firewall.
"The Baron," Kaelen repeated, his new mind racing. A Baron's son. That implied some level of comfort. A silver lining, maybe.
"How did he die?"
Gideon's face fell. "It was an accident, my Lord. A terrible, tragic accident. The main stairs... it had been raining, and there was a patch of moss..."
Kaelen stared. He waited for the rest of the sentence.
A duel? Assassination? A respectable cause of death for a nobleman?
"Moss?" he finally asked, his voice flat.
"Yes, my Lord," Gideon confirmed miserably. "He slipped."
Kaelen fell back against the lumpy mattress, a strangled noise escaping his lips.
It might have been a laugh. It might have been a sob.
He, a titan of industry who could buy a small country, was reincarnated as the heir to a man whose arch-nemesis was a bit of damp greenery.
The cosmic joke was not funny.
His one dream—a state of ultimate, work-free bliss—had just been cruelly snatched away. He wasn't on the path to a lazy retirement. He was the new owner of a place so poorly managed it was actively trying to kill its inhabitants with basic botany.
A profound weariness settled over him. He just wanted to sleep. But the lumpy mattress and the draft from the window made even that impossible.
The problems were all around him, a thousand tiny barbs.
The squeaky door. The damp air. The lumpy bed.
He couldn't relax in an environment this flawed. It was like trying to sleep next to a leaky faucet. Drip. Drip. Drip.
A symphony of incompetence.
With a groan of utter reluctance, he forced himself to sit up again.
"Gideon," he said, the name feeling a little more solid on his tongue. "You are the steward, right? For how long?"
"For forty years, my Lord."
"Right." Kaelen took a deep breath. "This... is a fixer-upper. A big one. Before I can even think about my long-term retirement, we have to address the immediate operational failures that are making my life hell."
Gideon blinked. "Retirement, my Lord?"
"It's a metaphor," Kaelen said dismissively. "First things first. My bed. It feels like a bag of potatoes. Is this the best we have?."
"Yes my Lord, this belonged to the previous Baron, your father. And I believe this is the finest in the whole territory."
He stood up and began to pace, his new body feeling awkward. He wasn't working because he wanted to. He was working because the universe was forcing his hand. This was pest control. He was exterminating the problems so he could finally get some peace.
"Here's what we're going to do," he announced. "We are going to conduct a full diagnostic of this castle, starting with this room. I need tools. A hammer, nails, some oil for the hinges. And I want a report—a simple one—on how much money we have. My comfort is expensive, and I need to know the budget."
Gideon looked like he was trying to solve a complex math problem in his head. "Tools... and money, my Lord? But... the funeral rites..."
"The Baron is dead, Gideon. Mourning him in a cold, drafty room won't make him any less dead," Kaelen said, his voice laced with a grim pragmatism.
"But fixing that hinge might just keep me from going mad and joining him. Now, hop to it. My retirement isn't going to build itself."
He pointed emphatically at the door, a reluctant baron taking the first, deeply annoying step toward making his miserable new home just barely habitable.