Death was quieter than Anderson Alduien had expected.
No light. No judgment. No warmth.Just a sudden, suffocating stillness, like being sealed inside his own skull.
So this is it, he thought. Oblivion.
Then pain arrived.
Lungs burned. A heart stuttered out of rhythm. Nerves screamed as if they had never learned how to exist properly. Anderson gasped, dragging air into lungs that did not belong to him.
He sat up violently.
The world lurched.
A cracked ceiling swam into view, stained with water damage and nicotine smoke. A single naked bulb flickered above him, buzzing weakly. The air reeked of coal dust, mildew, and old metal.
Anderson pressed a hand to his face.
Younger. Thinner. Calloused hands, but not from laboratories. From poverty.
He inhaled slowly.
I am alive, he concluded. Which means something interfered.
Memories surfaced, his own this time.
A white laboratory. Endless nights. Breakthroughs no one wanted to hear about. Warnings dismissed as madness. A mind that never slept because the truth was always one equation away.
And a home that had grown quiet.
He remembered missed birthdays. Empty chairs at dinner. His wife's voice, growing tired... then distant... then formal. She had asked him to come home once.
Just once.
He hadn't.
When the papers arrived, he'd barely looked up from his work. She'd found someone else. A better man. One who came home. One who listened. One who knew his children's favorite stories.
I can't do this with you anymore, Anderson...I barely see you...your kids barely know you, all for what?
Those were his wife's last words as she looked at him, hoping...Hoping that he would say something
Thinking back to the moment Anderson sighed, knowing that no matter what he said, nothing could change the damage that was done.
By the time Anderson realized what he had lost, the house was empty.
The silence had been worse than any argument.
Then came the firing. The public ridicule. The final rejection letter branded him a dangerous obsessive...a madman.
The last memory hit hardest.
Rain. Night. Headlights blinding white through a windshield slick with water. His phone was buzzing in the passenger seat, a message he hadn't read yet.
Impact.
Metal screaming. Glass exploding. His body was folding in ways it was never meant to.
And then...
Nothing.
Anderson staggered to his feet in the unfamiliar room.
The present asserted itself violently.
A mattress on the floor. A single table. A cracked mirror. A window overlooking a fog-choked street where gas lamps burned weakly through soot and drizzle.
Not my world, he realized.
Foreign memories rushed in.
An eighteen-year-old boy. Crippling debt for trash parents who had abandoned him. Failed Aether evaluations. Rejected by hunter guilds. Eviction notice due by the end of the week.
A newspaper lay on the table.
PORTAL SURGE IN EAST LONDON — HUNTER CASUALTIES CONFIRMED
1920s England.
But wrong.
Portals tore open reality. Hunters fought monsters with aether and steel. And beyond them lurked things older, night creatures that stalked gaslight shadows, ghosts bound to unfinished rituals. Rare, not because they were myths, but because encounters left no survivors.
His jaw tightened.
"I don't know what gave me a new life or why, but from what I understand, my life is basically forfeit,"
A hunter without aether was a dead man.
He laughed softly.
"Of course," he murmured. "You'd give me a second life and cripple it."
He noticed the eviction notice on the table, folded with polite cruelty.
No money, no allies, no power.
He straightened.
For the first time since his death, anger stirred, not wild, not emotional, but focused.
"I lost my family because I chose knowledge over presence," he said quietly to the empty room. "I lost my life because others feared what I understood."
The Law of Equivalent Exchange.
Nothing without cost. Nothing without consequence.
He looked at his reflection in the cracked mirror, young, starving, crimson ollow-eyed, short, brittle hair that seemed to be falling out, and a scar on the cheek that came from constant abuse.
"This time," he said calmly, "I won't lose what's mine."
Outside, something howled, wet, deliberate, wrong.
Weak body.Cruel world.Perfectly exploitable system.
Alchemy did not require faith. Botany did not require approval. And monsters, monsters always followed rules.
By the week's end, he would be homeless.
By nightfall...
Anderson would begin hunting.
And this time, he would not just survive.
He would understand this world so completely that it would never take anything from him again, and the force that took enough pity on him to give me a new chance at life.
[A/NHello, I hope you enjoy this story alongside my other one. This chapter is slightly short because it is the prologue; the other chapters will be longer.]
[Character Images: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAlchemistHunter/]