She woke up with her cheek glued to the floor, cold tiles bit through her skin with the world tilting as if the room was a ship and she was the worst kind of passenger. Her head throbbed in thick pulses, each beat a dull hammer behind her eyes. She tried to inhale and regretted it instantly. The air tasted wrong. Sour and metallic.
Something wet clung to her face and she blinked. Once. Twice. Again, longer this time, lashes sticking together as if sleep had turned to glue. The blur unknoted enough for her to understand what the wetness was: Watery vomit, half-clear, half-foamy, smeared along her cheek like an accusation.
Her stomach lurched at the realization, nausea rising on cue as if her body was offended that her mind needed proof. Bianca swallowed hard, throat burning, and planted both palms against the tile to push herself up.
Her hands landed in the vomit but she didn't care. Disgust arrived late, but right now the room was spinning and she needed an anchor, even if the anchor was bile. So she forced herself upright, elbows shaking. The movement made the dizziness snap sharper, turning her vision into a carousel of shadows and pale walls. For a second, she thought she was going to black out again, and panic hooked its fingers under her ribs.
Where am I?
She lifted her head, blearily scanning. The ceiling was unfamiliar and the light was wrong, too white, too steady. The conclusion was that the room wasn't hers. There was no comforting clutter, no posters, no half-finished notebooks, no familiar corner where dust gathered like an old secret. Just a narrow bed pushed against one wall, a cheap desk, a wardrobe with a cracked mirror, and a window with curtains that looked sun-faded and tired.
It was not her room.
Her heart kicked again and she tried to stand but the world lurched sideways. She caught herself on the edge of the desk, fingers scrabbling for purchase. Her knees threatened to fold. The taste of vomit hung in the back of her throat, and her skin prickled with the sudden cold sweat of fear.
No. No, no, no.
Her mind clawed for explanations. Party? Kidnapping? Hospital? Dream?
Then the memories hit but they didn't arrive gently. They slammed into her like a door thrown open in a storm, a flood of images and sensations that were too sharp and too intimate to be imagination. A name that wasn't hers, stitched into the inside of her skull: Bianca Vetra. A school corridor that smelled of chalk and damp wool, laughter ricocheting off stone walls. Bruises hidden under long sleeves. Hands that shoved alongside voices that hissed. A kitchen that was too quiet now, chairs that stayed empty, parents' faces blurred by time and grief because they were gone. An accident a year ago took them. Then insurance papers and condolences and the dull, constant ache of being orphaned in a world that kept moving anyway.
She remembered a small savings account. Coins counted twice as a hope held so tightly it became a bruise all on its own: If I waited long enough, if I trained, if I meditated, if my mental strength rose… I could protect myself. I could make them stop.
She remembered waiting hopefully for birthday that passed like a ghost, candles lit, wishes swallowed before they could even form. The despair that came when the clock ticked midnight and the status window flickering behind the eyes showing her that her mental strength was 27, so low it might as well be a sentence.
The humiliation of it was visceral, hot in her throat. The despair was worse, because it wasn't dramatic but quiet and heavy. The kind that said: There was no future here. Not for you.
She remembered the bottle in her hand and taking a handful of pills. Then a gulp of water.
Afterward, all she remembered was darkness, curling in like a blanket.
Bianca's breath caught as her hands tightened on the desk until her knuckles paled because those memories weren't hers and yet they fit inside her like organs. She swayed, stomach flipping again, and something in her mind went cold with certainty. The girl who owned this body… wasn't here anymore. This wasn't a narrow escape, but a swap.
Bianca Vetra tried to commit suicide and failed, her body vomiting up the poison instead of letting it finish the job. But the mind inside that body, the soul that carried that despair, was gone anyway.
In a way, the attempt succeeded, just not in the way anyone would write in a tidy report.
Bianca—this Bianca—remained, blinking and shaking, left holding the pieces like broken glass.
She stared at the cracked mirror on the wardrobe door, and when she caught her reflection the panic turned strange, almost distant. The face staring back was young, pale with sickness, hair stuck to her forehead, eyes rimmed red from tears and vomiting.
Eighteen years old and not her. Her chest tightened as she dragged in a shaky breath and felt another wave of information rise, not memories this time but knowledge, like facts being poured into her brain through a funnel.
This world was not the one she came from. There were no countries in the way she remembered them, but there were kingdoms with borders that didn't match any map she'd ever studied in a continent that resembled Europe in the way a dream resembled a familiar street: similar shapes, wrong proportions, too large, too old.
And there were The Gates.
They appeared like wounds in reality, ruptures that opened into places that shouldn't exist. Inside, monsters bred and gathered. Sometimes they stayed within while sometimes they pushed through, spilling teeth and claws and hunger into cities and villages, turning marketplaces into slaughterhouses and roads into graveyards. However, humanity did not survive by luck. It survived because something else appeared at the same time as the Gates: A System.
Not a government decree, not a new religion, not a technology someone invented. It simply arrived, global and undeniable, threaded through every human the way a heartbeat is threaded through flesh. At eighteen, it awakened fully in a person, like a door unlocking in the mind, giving them power. Not the simple kind like swords made of light or fire thrown from bare hands.
This world fought monsters with creativity.
Summoners defeated Gate creatures and received cards, and through those cards they could create and call forth characters, myths, and beings shaped by stories. Fiction became weapon and imagination became a shield. Every legend, every tale, every invented hero could be forged into something that could stand between a human and a monster's mouth.
Bianca's stomach twisted again, but this time it wasn't only nausea but awe, sickened by dread.
She was in a world where stories were not entertainment; they were survival.
Her gaze dropped to her shaking hands, still smeared with vomit and she cleaned them clumsily on her pajama pants, breath shuddering, as she tried to think around the pounding in her skull.
She was an eighteen years old young woman with a name that wasn't hers, in a room she didn't recognize in a weird, dangerous world.
Bianca swallowed, throat burning, as she forced herself to stay upright. She wanted to believe it was a sick joke, a fever dream stitched together from too many late nights and stranger fears. However, the vomit still burnt sour in the back of her throat, like a reminder she couldn't swallow down. Her palms were still damp with it, sticky when she flexed her fingers. The ache in her skull wasn't the polite throb of a nightmare but a blunt, real pain, the kind that made her teeth grind when she moved.
Reality didn't blink away. Her breath shivered, caught between panic and something worse, something thin and final that tasted like the edge of despair. She clung to one last thread of defiance to say the word out loud, voice hoarse in the small room.
"System."
For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then a screen snapped into existence in front of her, translucent and clean, hovering at eye level as if it had always belonged there. White text and neat lines formed the same interface the other Bianca had stared at, like a verdict.
Name: Bianca Vetra
Author Name: –
Age: Eighteen
Mental Strength: 227
Rank: Bronze
Summons: –
Cards available: –
Worlds available: –
Crystals: 0
Bianca freezed as her eyes dragged over the numbers once, twice, as if repetition would make them lie because the number on the screen was not twenty-seven but two hundred and twenty-seven.
Her throat tightened as she remembered the weight of the old Bianca's despair like it was still lodged inside her ribs, remembering the crushing humiliation of that tiny number against the expectations of this world. She remembered the whispered averages like a cruel classroom lesson: 150 for a normal awakened summoner, 200 for someone above average, someone with promise. And Bianca was… higher than that.
The screen hanged there patiently, indifferent to how it tilted her entire existence. Two hundred extra points was enough to summon Bronze cards, enough to call something into being and not collapse immediately afterward. Enough, in this world, to be dangerous and survive.
(Enough to live.)
Her fingers twitch, as if she wanted to reach into the screen and grab the number, shake it, demand an explanation. Instead, she stared until her vision blurred at the edges.
Was it because the soul changed?
The thought slipped in, quiet and poisonous. The old Bianca was weak, ordinary in the one place that mattered. She had been holding on with numb fingers, believing that if she endured the bullying, if she survived long enough, her mental strength might rise and she might someday summon something strong enough to stand between her and the cruelty of other teenagers with money and copyright licenses and parents who still lived.
She had held on... and then she had let go.
Bianca's chest hurt with the unfairnessof it and with the intimacy of inhabiting someone else's last hour. Her legs gave out, or maybe she let them. She sunk back down until she was sitting on the floor again, knees drawn in, shoulders rounded while the screen hovers in front of her like a ghost that refuses to leave.
For a long moment she just… mourned in the quiet way grief often arrived, as if it was ashamed to take up space. There was a soft exhale coming out of her as she stared at nothing with the heavy recognition that a girl was gone and Bianca was wearing her life like a borrowed coat.
Eventually, though, her eyes drifted toward the small television perched on a stand in the corner. The remote was on the desk, close enough for Bianca to reach for it with a hand that still trembled. She clicked the power button and the TV flickered to life with a bright jingle and a blare of excited commentary. Color flooded the room, loud and glossy and a logo spun on-screen, sharp and patriotic, and then the camera cut to an arena bathed in light.
The Junior National Card Competition.
Even through the haze in Bianca's head, she recognized it from the other Bianca's memories because it was the event everyone watched and waited for, even the people who pretend they didn't care. The place where Summoners became stars, where worlds and characters were paraded like banners and weapons at the same time.
The camera swung over a wide stadium packed with cheering crowds where the commentator's voice was breathless, almost reverent, as he explained the competition.
"—and we're down to the final exchange! Deep Silver versus Light Silver, folks, and no one expected this matchup!"
On-screen, a man stood up on one side of the arena, posture steady, eyes focused. Behind him, his summoned figure held the line with the calm of a legend. It was a knight in shining armor, cloak snapping in an unseen wind. The card displayed briefly in the corner confirmed what Bianca already knew from the other Bianca's half-obsessive watching: It was the Knight Gawain.
Gawain's sword glowed with a warm, almost sunlike brilliance. Each time he shifted, the light follows, as if day itself were loyal to him. Next to him there was a dragon-like creature and across the field, a woman raised her hand, fingers painted with runes. Her expression was sharp, calculating. Around her, the air shimmers as her summons took shape: Five fairies darted through the air in looping spirals, tiny bodies trailing glittering dust that sticks to the light like oil. They moved like distractions made flesh, tugging attention, tugging fate while Gawain's gaze tracked them, his stance adjusting with disciplined patience.
Two went to him while the other three went to the small dragon.
And behind the fairies, half-hidden by a curtain of conjured mist, another figure stood up with slow, deliberate certainty: A witch but not the green-skinned caricature of children's books, but something older and sharper, a silhouette wrapped in dark robes, hands lifted as if pulling invisible threads. The spell she built was visible even to the untrained eye, a dark coil gathering above her palms, condensing like stormclouds forced into a single point. The air in the arena rippled outward from it in subtle waves as rhe fairies swoop closer to Gawain, trying to pull his attention away at the critical moment, making him unable to help the dragon. One of them flashes bright, a burst of light meant to blind and the dragon flinched, but Gawain did not. He turned, sword raising, sunlight pooling along the blade as if it recognized an oncoming threat.
Bianca watched still half-sick, still shaking, and felt the world settle into place around her in a way nothing else has managed to do.
This wasn't her old Earth but a world where stories fought in stadiums and where Bianca Vetra's life, stolen or inherited or saved by sheer accident, had just been handed a number that changed everything.