The sky over Neo-Shanghai burned gold and violet as the fireworks tore it open, again and again, celebrating a year that the whole world seemed to agree was worth celebrating. Year 2100. A century of progress condensed into a single night of light.
Kael Draven did not look up.
He walked beneath it all with his hands buried in his pockets and his shoulders bent under a weight no one else could see. Around him, the city roared with laughter, with music spilling out of bars, with strangers embracing strangers simply because the numbers on a calendar had changed. He moved through it like a ghost moving through a world that had already forgotten to notice him.
"Rejected. Again."
He said it quietly, almost as if testing how the words felt in his mouth. Three years of trying. Three years of interviews that ended in polite smiles and rehearsed regrets. Today was supposed to be different. Today was supposed to be the one that finally turned things around.
It wasn't.
He turned down a narrow side street where the streetlights flickered, half-dead, casting more shadow than light — a small, forgotten corner in a city too busy celebrating itself to notice its own cracks.
That was when the ground disappeared beneath him.
*CRACK.*
There was no warning. No sound before the sound. Just the world giving way, and then the terrible, weightless drop of a man falling into something the earth had been hiding.
"W-What—"
The darkness swallowed the rest of the sentence.
---
Somewhere far beneath the neon and the fireworks and the year 2100, everything went silent.
Awakening
Birds were screaming somewhere above him — not in alarm, just in the ordinary way birds screamed at the start of a new day. The air smelled of wet soil and crushed leaves, thick and unfamiliar, nothing like the recycled air of the city he'd fallen out of.
Kael's eyes opened slowly.
"…Where am I?"
He lifted a hand to rub his face — and stopped.
These were not his hands.
They were darker, rougher, threaded with a wiry muscle that had clearly come from years of physical hardship, not gym memberships. He stared at them the way a man stares at a stranger's reflection in his own mirror.
He sat up too fast. Pain split through his skull like a crack running through glass, and with it came a flood — not thoughts, but memories. Someone else's memories, forcing their way into him like water through a broken dam.
A tribal village nestled between green hills.
A father, broad-shouldered and respected, the head of his people.
An uncle who smiled too easily.
Betrayal, sharp and sudden.
Murder, hidden behind closed doors.
Exile, delivered without mercy.
The boy this body belonged to — Aristo, seventeen years old — had watched his world collapse in the space of a single night. Framed for a crime he never committed, cast out by the very uncle who had orchestrated his father's death, he had wandered for two days on the edge of starvation before his body simply gave out.
Kael pressed both palms against his temples, breathing hard.
"No," he whispered. "I'm Kael Draven. I'm—"
The sentence never finished.
The System
Light gathered in the air before him — not sunlight, but something colder, more deliberate. It folded itself into the shape of a translucent figure, glowing faintly blue against the green of the forest.
*"Welcome, Host."*
The voice was calm. Mechanical. Utterly indifferent to the fact that it had just shattered what remained of Kael's understanding of reality.
His pupils shrank.
*"You have been transmigrated to the world known as the Than Primitive Realm."*
"…What?"
*"You now inhabit the body of Aristo, age seventeen."*
The voice did not pause for him to process this. It simply continued, patient in the way only something without a heartbeat could be.
*"Your mission: build your own village, and develop civilization using the knowledge of your former world."*
A beat of silence. Then, quieter, heavier —
*"And take revenge for your father's death."*
*"Only upon completion of this mission will you be returned to your original world — at the exact moment you left it."*
A pale blue interface bloomed in the air before him, lines of text arranging themselves like something out of a game he used to play late at night to forget how badly his life was going.
**[ Primitive Development System — Activated ]**
Kael stared at it for a long moment. Then he let out a slow breath, and something in his chest — disbelief, maybe, or the last thread of denial — quietly gave way.
"So this is real."
First Survival
The forest stretched in every direction, dense and indifferent, filled with sounds he couldn't name and didn't trust. Somewhere close, something screeched. Somewhere farther, something answered it.
He pushed forward anyway. There was no version of this where standing still helped him.
It was hunger that made him stop — a deep, hollow ache that reminded him he hadn't eaten anything in what his body insisted was days, even if his mind still measured time in hours. That was when he saw them: small brown fruits hanging in a loose cluster from a vine coiled around a tree trunk.
The interface flickered to life again.
**[ Honey Drop Fruit — Identified ]**
- Edible
- Non-poisonous
- High sugar content
- Restores stamina
He didn't hesitate. He picked one, turned it once in his rough new fingers, and bit down.
Sweetness burst across his tongue, followed by a warmth that spread through his chest and down into his limbs like sunlight finally reaching cold ground. He ate another. Then another, until the ache in his stomach dulled into something bearable.
"Not bad," he murmured, wiping juice from his chin with the back of his hand.
For the first time since waking in this body, something in him steadied.
He kept walking.
Night in the Cave
The forest didn't fade into darkness so much as surrender to it — light draining out of the canopy until the trees became black shapes against a deeper black. Somewhere in the distance, something howled, low and long, and the sound crawled straight up Kael's spine.
He needed shelter. Now.
He found it half-hidden behind a curtain of thick vines — the mouth of a cave, dark and narrow, easy to miss unless you were looking for exactly this. He pushed the vines aside and stepped in carefully, senses on edge, ready to run.
Nothing moved.
The cave was deep, cold, and silent — no eyes glinting in the dark, no breathing but his own. Safe enough. For tonight, at least.
He sank down against the stone wall, letting his head fall back, and stared up into a ceiling he couldn't see.
"New world," he said quietly, to no one but himself. "Primitive era. Build a village. Take revenge."
He almost laughed at how absurd it sounded out loud.
Then his eyes hardened, the exhaustion in them giving way to something harder, more deliberate.
"If the world abandoned me once…"
He let the silence stretch, the words settling into him like a decision finally made.
"…then I'll build a new one myself."
Outside, beyond the vines and the dark, the moon rose slow and pale over the Than Primitive Realm — over untouched forests, over hills that had never known a road, over a world that had no idea what it had just let fall into it.
Inside the cave, in the quiet dark, the first night of a future king's reign had begun.