Lucien's eyes snapped open, his breath catching in his throat. It felt as though he hadn't breathed for a long time, so he dragged in as much air as he could. Once his breathing steadied, his expression softened, only to shift into confusion.
'Where am I?'
The first thing that greeted his vision was a ceiling of exposed wooden beams. It shouldn't have been what he was seeing now.
He realized that he was lying down and tried to sit up, but something held him in place. Looking down at what pinned him, he couldn't help but frown.
A woman he didn't recognize clung to his right arm, her head resting against his chest. Her brown hair was tousled, her sleeping face peaceful, with a faint trace of drool at the corner of her lips. A worn blanket covered part of her body, but it was more than clear she was not wearing anything underneath.
'Who is she?'
She had an angular face, lightly tanned skin dusted with freckles, wavy brown hair, a straight nose, and thin lips. She clearly didn't share the same ethnicity as him.
'Also, what is this faint, reddish translucence within her body?'
That was when he realized he was naked as well.
Clothes, or whatever passed for clothes, lay scattered across the wooden floor. Among them, he spotted a pair of leather pants that looked wildly uncomfortable, a wrinkled linen shirt, and a pair of worn boots.
'Uh... did I just have sex with her?'
So many questions flooded his mind.
His frown deepened as he raised a hand to his face, brushing over his cheekbones, nose, and chin.
They are significantly sharper and more angular. His jaw was more defined than he remembered. And when his fingers brushed his neck, he felt scars, three thin, horizontal lines that definitely had not been there yesterday.
He quickly looked around the room. The antiquated interior, the outdated clothes scattered across the floor, and finally, the woman beside him, whose features didn't match any clear ethnicity from his world. He had settled the details into place a while ago.
'So I really transmigrated… after all.'
There wasn't a trace of excitement on his face.
'What the hell did that moon-sighting do to me? And why me?'
It felt like something straight out of cosmic horror.
His gaze shifted between the woman in his arms and the window across the room. He needed to figure out what kind of place he had ended up in.
Without a word, Lucien carefully lifted the woman off his chest and gently laid her onto the pillow, like he was defusing a bomb. She didn't wake. She only mumbled something in a strange language that, somehow, he understood.
Lucien got out of bed, his feet touching the cold floor as he stood unsteadily. The room spun for a moment, his head still feeling stuffed with cotton, but he forced himself to stay upright, searching for anything that could explain what was going on.
The room was small, perhaps four by four meters, with a bed that took up half the space, a rickety wooden table in the corner, and a small window that looked out onto the sky. A cracked mirror hung on the wall, so he walked over to get a better look at himself. The moment he saw his reflection, he let out a quiet sigh.
'Damn it, he's better-looking than me.'
The face staring back at him obviously wasn't his.
It was sharper than he expected, with defined cheekbones, a strong jaw, messy black hair, and red eyes. The redness didn't seem to come from irritation, but instead a natural color of blood, with crimson irises that have faint black specks drifting slowly within them.
'That's not a face you trust around peaceful plotlines...'
Losing interest in his reflection, he turned to the window. From this height, the view stretched across a cramped district of towering tenements.
The buildings rose eight to ten stories high, packed so tightly together they seemed to merge into one another. Crude bridges and jutting platforms linked them at irregular points, while sections of walls had been broken through to form makeshift connections. It felt less like separate structures and more like a single mass that had grown upward out of necessity rather than design.
The lower levels were built from heavier stone, giving them a semblance of stability, but everything above had been added later. Floors stacked unevenly, materials shifting from stone to wood, then to whatever else could be found. Some parts leaned, others bulged outward, as if the buildings were straining under their own weight.
Below, the streets were little more than narrow strips of worn stone, squeezed between the looming walls. Many paths disappeared into shadow beneath overhangs and hanging walkways, turning the entire area into a suffocating maze.
Farther out, he could make out sections of a damaged wall encircling the city, broken in places, while to the left, a towering structure rose above everything else, its height dwarfing the clustered buildings below.
He didn't dwell on it immediately as he lifted his gaze, hoping to see a clear sky. However, his eyes dimmed when he realized he couldn't see anything at all. The clouds were so thick they completely hid the celestial bodies.
If those celestial bodies were the same as the ones he knew, he assumed that this could very well be the same world, only in a distant past.
'I still haven't gotten this guy's memories. Doesn't that usually happen right after transmigration?' he complained inwardly.
As if on cue—
"—Ugh!"
A flood of information exploded in his head, hitting him with a migraine that felt like an electric shock.
[System Initializing…]
Lucien staggered, grabbing the table to steady himself as his body suddenly felt like it was being pulled in every direction at once.
[Memory Integration in Progress.]
He couldn't hold himself up any longer and collapsed to the floor, letting out a strained groan as memories that weren't his crashed into him like a tidal wave.
Fragments flashed through his mind.
One of the first was the image of a young boy with dark hair, no older than seven, crying beside the bed of a pale woman who no longer breathed.
It shifted to a fifteen-year-old, his hands drenched in blood, standing over his first kill with a hollow expression.
Then came a nineteen-year-old, kneeling on cold stone, a strange mark glowing on his wrist as a masked figure whispered, "You belong to the Covenant now."
Finally, the clearest and most vivid of them all—a twenty-two-year-old man standing in the middle of a burning city. The sky itself was torn open in places, leaking a strange miasma, while countless humans twisted into grotesque creatures, empty-eyed and wide-mouthed, crawling forward to attack the rest.
[Synchronization Complete.]
[Welcome, Lucien Mordren.]
***
A/N: Right, so this is a slow-paced story. If you've read Lord of the Mysteries, the early parts will feel somewhat similar in structure. The difference is that while that story leans more into a traditional slice-of-life approach, this one mixes that with Lucien being an assassin, so his "daily life" tends to involve more action (and, well, some smut too).
This is not a mystery-focused novel. The mystery here is handled more like Dark Souls. It's indirect and meant to be pieced together by the reader, unlike the structured, investigation-driven approach of Lord of the Mysteries. My main focus is on the characters, the sense of adventure, progression, and a more Souls-like style of action.
I already have chapters prepared up to around chapter twenty. Within that, there are smut sections and action scenes. The prologue itself should wrap up by chapter four.
There won't be any NTR, rape, yuri/gay content, or absurd fetishes. No hypnosis either. And while I can't promise perfect character writing, I don't like female characters who lack agency, so that's something I'll be mindful of.