She wakes up with her cheek glued to the floor.
Cold tiles bite through her skin, the world tilting as if the room is a ship and she is the worst kind of passenger. Her head throbs in thick pulses, each beat a dull hammer behind her eyes. She tries to inhale and regrets it instantly. The air tastes wrong. Sour. Metallic.
Something wet clings to her face.
She blinks. Once. Twice. Again, longer this time, lashes sticking together as if sleep has turned to glue. The blur unknots enough for her to understand what the wetness is.
Watery vomit, half-clear, half-foamy, smeared along her cheek like an accusation.
Her stomach lurches at the realization, nausea rising on cue as if her body is offended that her mind needed proof. Bianca swallows hard, throat burning, and plants both palms against the tile to push herself up.
Her hands land in it.
She doesn't care. Disgust arrives late,but right now the room is spinning and she needs an anchor, even if the anchor is bile.
She forces herself upright, elbows shaking. The movement makes the dizziness snap sharper, turning her vision into a carousel of shadows and pale walls. For a second she thinks she's going to black out again, and panic hooks its fingers under her ribs.
Where is she?
She lifts her head, blearily scanning. The ceiling is unfamiliar. The light is wrong, too white, too steady. The room isn't hers. There's no comforting clutter, no posters, no half-finished notebooks, no familiar corner where dust gathers 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 look sun-faded and tired.
Not her room.
Her heart kicks. She tries to stand.
The world lurches sideways.
Bianca catches herself on the edge of the desk, fingers scrabbling for purchase. Her knees threaten to fold. The taste of vomit hangs in the back of her throat, and her skin prickles with the sudden cold sweat of fear.
No. No, no, no.
Her mind claws for explanations. Party? Kidnapping? Hospital? Dream?
Then the memories hit. They don't arrive gently. They slam into her like a door thrown open in a storm, a flood of images and sensations that are too sharp and too intimate to be imagination. A name that isn't hers, stitched into the inside of her skull: Bianca Vetra.
A school corridor that smells of chalk and damp wool, laughter ricocheting off stone walls. Bruises hidden under long sleeves. Hands that shove. Voices that hiss. A kitchen that is too quiet now, chairs that stay empty, parents' faces blurred by time and grief because they're gone. An accident. A year ago. Insurance papers and condolences and the dull, constant ache of being orphaned in a world that keeps moving anyway.
A small savings account. Coins counted twice. A hope held so tightly it becomes a bruise all on its own: If I wait long enough, if I train, if I meditate, if my mental strength rises… I can protect myself. I can make them stop.
Waiting hopefully for birthday that passes like a ghost, candles lit, wishes swallowed before they can even form. The despair that comes when the clock ticks midnight and the status window flickering behind the eyes showing her that her mental strength is 27, so low it might as well be a sentence.
The humiliation of it is visceral, hot in the throat. The despair is worse, because it isn't dramatic. It's quiet. Heavy. Practical. The kind that says: There is no future here. Not for you.
A bottle. A handful of pills. A gulp of water.
Then darkness, curling in like a blanket.
Bianca's breath catches. Her hands tighten on the desk until her knuckles pale.
Those memories aren't hers and yet they fit inside her like organs. She sways, stomach flipping again, and something in her mind goes cold with certainty. The girl who owned this body… isn't here anymore. This isn't a narrow escape. It's 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, is gone anyway.
In a way, the attempt succeeded. Just not in the way anyone would write in a tidy report.
Bianca—this Bianca—remains, blinking and shaking, left holding the pieces like broken glass.
She stares at the cracked mirror on the wardrobe door, and when she catches her reflection the panic turns strange, almost distant. The face staring back is young, pale with sickness, hair stuck to her forehead, eyes rimmed red from tears and vomiting.
Eighteen years old and not her. Her chest tightens. She drags in a shaky breath and feels another wave of information rise, not memories this time but knowledge, like facts being poured into her brain through a funnel.
This world is not the one she came from.
There are no countries in the way she remembers them. There are kingdoms. Borders that don't match any map she's ever studied. A continent that resembles Europe in the way a dream resembles a familiar street: similar shapes, wrong proportions, too large, too old.
And there are Gates.
They appear like wounds in reality, ruptures that open into places that shouldn't exist. Inside, monsters breed and gather. Sometimes they stay within. Sometimes they push through, spilling teeth and claws and hunger into cities and villages, turning marketplaces into slaughterhouses and roads into graveyards.
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 arrives, global and undeniable, threaded through every human the way a heartbeat is threaded through flesh. At eighteen, it awakens fully, like a door unlocking in the mind, and it gives them power. Not the simple kind. Not swords made of light or fire thrown from bare hands.
This world fights monsters with creativity.
Summoners defeat Gate creatures and receive cards, and through those cards they can create and call forth characters, myths, and beings shaped by stories. Fiction becomes weapon. Imagination becomes shield. Every legend, every tale, every invented hero can be forged into something that stands between a human and a monster's mouth.
Bianca's stomach twists again, but this time it isn't only nausea. It's awe, sickened by dread.
She is in a world where stories are not entertainment. They are survival.
Her gaze drops to her shaking hands, still smeared with vomit. She wipes them clumsily on her pajama pants, breath shuddering, and tries to think around the pounding in her skull.
She is eighteen.
She has a name that isn't hers.
She is in a room she doesn't recognize in a weird, dangerous world.
Bianca swallows, throat burning, and forces herself to stay upright. She wants to believe it is a sick joke. A fever dream stitched together from too many late nights and stranger fears.
But the vomit still burns sour in the back of her throat, like a reminder she can't swallow down. Her palms are still damp with it, sticky when she flexes her fingers. The ache in her skull isn't the polite throb of a nightmare. It is blunt, real pain, the kind that makes her teeth grind when she moves.
Reality doesn't blink away.
Her breath shivers, caught between panic and something worse, something thin and final that tastes like the edge of despair. She clings to one last thread of defiance and says the word out loud, voice hoarse in the small room.
"System."
For a heartbeat, nothing happens.
Then a screen snaps into existence in front of her, translucent and clean, hovering at eye level as if it has always belonged there. White text. Neat lines. 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 freezes.
Her eyes drag over the numbers once, twice, as if repetition will make them lie.
Two hundred and twenty-seven.
Not twenty-seven.
Her throat tightens. She remembers the weight of the old Bianca's despair like it is still lodged inside her ribs, remembers the crushing humiliation of that tiny number against the expectations of this world. She remembers the whispered averages like a cruel classroom lesson: 150 for a normal awakened summoner, 200 for someone above average, someone with promise.
And Bianca is… higher than that.
The screen hangs there patiently, indifferent to how it tilts her entire existence.
Two hundred extra points. Enough to summon Bronze cards, enough to call something into being and not collapse immediately afterward. Enough, in this world, to be dangerous. Enough to be alive.
Her fingers twitch, as if she wants to reach into the screen and grab the number, shake it, demand an explanation. She stares until her vision blurs at the edges.
Is it because the soul changed?
The thought slips 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. That 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 hurts with it. With the unfairness. With the intimacy of inhabiting someone else's last hour. Her legs give out, or maybe she lets them. She sinks back down until she's sitting on the floor again, knees drawn in, shoulders rounded. The screen hovers in front of her like a ghost that refuses to leave.
For a long moment she just… mourns. In the quiet way grief often arrives, as if it is ashamed to take up space. A soft exhale. A stare at nothing. A heavy recognition that a girl is gone and Bianca is wearing her life like a borrowed coat.
Eventually her eyes drift toward the small television perched on a stand in the corner. The remote lies on the desk, close enough. Bianca reaches for it with a hand that still trembles and clicks the power button.
The TV flickers to life with a bright jingle and a blare of excited commentary. Color floods the room, loud and glossy. A logo spins on-screen, sharp and patriotic, and then the camera cuts to an arena bathed in light.
The Junior National Card Competition.
Even through the haze in Bianca's head, she recognizes it from the other Bianca's memories. The event everyone watches, even people who pretend they don't care. The place where Summoners become stars, where worlds and characters are paraded like banners and weapons at the same time.
The camera swings over a wide stadium packed with cheering crowds. The commentator's voice is breathless, almost reverent.
"—and we're down to the final exchange! Deep Silver versus Light Silver, folks, and no one expected this matchup!"
On-screen, a man stands on one side of the arena, posture steady, eyes focused. Behind him, his summoned figure holds the line with the calm of a legend.
A knight in shining armor, cloak snapping in an unseen wind. The card displayed briefly in the corner confirms what Bianca already knows from the other Bianca's half-obsessive watching.
It's the Knight Gawain
Gawain's sword glows with a warm, almost sunlike brilliance. Each time he shifts, the light follows, as if day itself is loyal to him. Next to him there's a dragon-like creature and across the field, a woman raises her hand, fingers painted with runes. Her expression is sharp, calculating. Around her, the air shimmers as her summons take shape.
Five fairies dart through the air in looping spirals, tiny bodies trailing glittering dust that sticks to the light like oil. They move like distractions made flesh, tugging attention, tugging fate. Gawain's gaze tracks them, his stance adjusting with disciplined patience. Two go to him while the other three go to the small dragon.
And behind the fairies, half-hidden by a curtain of conjured mist, another figure stands with slow, deliberate certainty.
A witch.
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 builds is 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 ripples outward from it in subtle waves.
The 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.
The dragon flinches, but Gawain does not. He turns, sword raising, sunlight pooling along the blade as if it recognizes an oncoming threat.
Bianca watches, still half-sick, still shaking, and feels the world settle into place around her in a way nothing else has managed to do.
This isn't her old Earth. This is a world where stories fight in stadiums and where Bianca Vetra's life, stolen or inherited or saved by sheer accident, has just been handed a number that changes everything.