"Death is a gift that brings out the best in people, because when they have nothing else left, they reflect on what is most important to them."
As a gamer, Lysander Herriot would not usually find himself in such an introspective, almost philosophical state of mind — except now, in this moment where, with startling clarity, he perceives how much time he has remaining.
Even without the people in white cloaks — more akin to messengers, somehow, and always, bearing worse news than actual doctors — telling him he only has eight hours left to live, he can feel the cancer in his body.
Even though he might not have predicted it as accurately as the machines and tests had done, he acutely felt in his veins, seemingly aware of every nerve and fibre in his body, the ones that were decaying, the ones that were vainly struggling to fight, and his heart, beating in a stuttering rhythm he could no longer fix. He didn't need the doctors to tell him; his mind understood what his body had felt for days.
The ethereal clarity one experiences under the shadow of death is… difficult to describe. It could be an acute and crystal-clear focus in one moment, and then a foggy, spaced-out state of mind in the next, but most of the time it was a mix of both. His life did not flash before his eyes; however, he looked back upon them actively.
His mind was torn between the past and present. One was recalling the life he had lived, swiftly and almost involuntarily. The other was intensely aware of the present, as if his senses had been heightened.
His mind buckled under the weight of dying, with every thought coming in rapid bursts—too fast, too sharp, too vivid. Past and present didn't cycle; they collided, overlapped until he could hardly tell which moment he was experiencing.
The ceiling above him was a dull, hospital-white, stained by flickering shadows cast by his side lamp in occasional bursts of agony.
The fluorescent light above was harsh and green, with a slightly eerie quality. He no longer had the strength to switch it off. A monitor beside him beeped slowly at first, then irregularly.
Lys, eleven, recalling the alarm clock in his parents' that was ringing repeatedly, ignored it during their arguments. He remembered sitting on the stairs, listening to his mother sob, wanting to go in but afraid to. The unit in the old flat rattled every night. He would wrap himself in a blanket shaped like a dragon, pretending he was protected from all that was bad.
The monitor beeped sharply and suddenly again. Was it louder than before? He tried to find a pattern in the beeping, but there was none. The air conditioner blew across his skin, too cold, brushing against his bones. He shivered now, though the blanket here was thin. A nurse whispered outside his door, words muffled by the wall.
Lys, ten, recalling his teachers' whispering after the divorce. He remembered watching their lips move, always glancing at him with pity he couldn't understand then. Now, he could almost make out each syllable beyond the door, but couldn't focus long enough to decode them.
The antiseptic smell was sharp enough to sting his nose. It was to his sense of smell as a needle would be to his skin. His mouth tasted the slightest bit of metallic bitterness. A cup of water would be welcome. Pain throbbed behind his eyes.
More noise out in the hall.
Lys, sixteen, was feeling the world spin after he fell during P.E., his face scraping against gravel. He remembered the sting, the embarrassment, the quick attempt to laugh it off.
This pain now wasn't sharp. It was heavy and throbbing. Thick. All-consuming. He felt the texture of the hospital sheet under his fingertips — rough, cheap cotton.
Lys, seven — his grandmother's quilt was softer. It had tiny embroidered flowers. He used to drag it everywhere during weekends at his house. His fingers were now colder, almost numb. The nurse had set the temperature too low, goddamn it. And the humming is so noisy.
Voices down the hall again.
Lys, fourteen, his brother calling from the kitchen, voice cracking with excitement over a new game they bought together. The memory brought warmth—and guilt. His brother isn't here now. Lysander didn't want him to be that way.
Everything folded over itself.
He felt it all at once, as if his life was no longer a line but a dense knot, tightening around him, pulling every version of himself into this single moment.
He couldn't tell where he was anymore — only that he was everywhere he had ever been, and he was running out of time in all of them.
More voices down the hall.
All he could hear now was an overpowering rhythm of his heartbeat in his chest. A steady thump… thump… thump. The noise was audible in his ears, feeling neither too quiet nor loud, yet washing everything away.
The world narrowed down to a single point of sound, of the slow, falling tone of his beating heart.
Thump… thump… thump.
Then— oblivion.
A quiet so engulfing as if the world's humming had finally shut down.
A silent void held him, as if caressing his soul. He felt weightless, as if a suspended object in the air. He could not see, hear, or sense anything from the environment, as it was actually just his bodiless consciousness pondering the strangeness of the afterlife.
It was nothing like anything he imagined, or anything that resembled what the religious texts he knew preached of life beyond death. The afterlife he experienced was strange.
Lys expected nothing after the failing of his organs, nothing but his remaining consciousness. Actually, nothing at all—the fact that he was still able to think was a minor shock.
But then, another feeling emerged inside his will. The faintest awareness lingered, thin as a fraying spider's thread. A numb feeling of a body attached to his soul again returned to his body. After half-adapting to a formless state of will, returning to a body felt foreign.
He opened his eyes. There was no ceiling. No hospital lights. Just a dim and lightless expanse that stretched far and distant.
He tried to survey his surroundings, still in a half-reverie that maybe this was the true afterlife. But no, Lys could not even see his own arm. He could feel it, sure, but not much else. Am I blind?
"This is— it?" The words left him.
He tried to stand and found himself rising effortlessly. His body moved without much resistance, weightless and strangely distant, as though the body he had was a set of clothes rather than flesh.
His gamer's instinct, an ingrained habit, told him to assess his surroundings, to find an objective, a path forward. But there was nothing much to see in the first place.
In the distance, he could hear vague sounds of dripping water, so ethereal that he could doubt whether he heard it. The air was crisp with faint petrichor and the slightest whiff of moss.
There was a smallest sound of constant clanking against stone somewhere distant, so much that Lys nearly missed it over the sound of his breathing.
The body he occupied shivered, suddenly. Not from the wind, for there was none, but from attention.
A subtle feeling of strangeness bore on his skin, as if somebody was staring intently at it, and their gaze became palpable. A chill threaded through him—this wasn't the afterlife he had imagined.
Someone— something had noticed him.
Soft light particles suddenly manifested in an area not too distant from him. It was at a higher place, perhaps on an elevated platform. The light was blue and beautiful, each particle the size of sand grains, forming rapidly and swirling.
Yet, the lights did not illuminate the surroundings, as if they were formed from the remaining scarce bits of light left in the expanse he was in, taking away the last of it in the form of particles.
The light swirled in a vortex, gathering into a figure, rapidly forming yet also carrying a soft and unhurried feeling. A silhouette of a person formed from the vague and illusory light.
It carried no face, yet Lys felt it held an undeniable awareness, as if its mere presence changed something in the space that was too small for him to pinpoint exactly, yet large enough for him to feel that it was there.
Lysander felt its attention settle on him, and its weight was gentle but vast, like standing beneath a starry sky.
It wasn't until this moment that Lysander looked back and accepted that he was in a new world. This wasn't an afterlife, but a whole new world with a new body and his complete memories — a transmigrator. It was real, and he could only hope to adapt.