Nicolas had not moved.
His back against the bed frame, knees pulled up to his chest, he stared at the wall without really seeing it. Raven's memories continued to flow in—not like reading a book, but like remembering a dream one had almost forgotten. Images, voices, sensations that were not his own and yet, now, were.
He let them come.
It was a video, in Raven's memories. One of those old documentaries the domes broadcast so that younger generations would understand where the world they were born into had come from. Nicolas replayed it as if he himself had watched it, sitting somewhere in a poorly lit schoolroom.
The commentator's voice was measured, almost too calm for what it described.
"In the darkest hour of the catastrophe, when the beasts seemed already to have won..."
That was when they had appeared.
The Chosen.
Nicolas let the word resonate in his head. Chosen. It sounded religious, and that was no accident—in the early days, people had wanted to believe it. Saviors. Envoys. Something providential in all that chaos. The reality was simpler, and less poetic: mana had flooded the world, and certain human bodies had mutated as a result.
One in a thousand, Nicolas thought. And the other nine hundred and ninety-nine?
He knew the answer. They had built walls.
The domes.
He closed his eyes, and Raven's memory gave him something that felt like pride—the foolish, collective pride instilled in children so they could endure the place they lived. Domes also called fortresses, overequipped and protected by force fields that isolated entire cities from the outside world. Inside, people rebuilt. They lived. They pretended it was normal.
Outside, the beasts had claimed their territory.
The tides, they called them. Compact hordes that swept across the plains like a wave, crushing everything, leaving nothing standing. Nicolas struggled to visualize it concretely. His doctor's mind searched for numbers, scales. Raven's memories had none. Just that muffled fear, ingrained since childhood, that the walls would not always hold.
Because they had not always held.
LaCosta had fallen. At the beginning of the catastrophes, when overpowered monsters had surged there a little less than a hundred years ago, and then nothing—a lost continent, domes collapsing one after another, populations slaughtered or evacuated under conditions that school documentaries preferred not to detail. Only Morvane and Barm remained. Two continents. What was left of humanity.
Magic. Beasts. Domes.
Nicolas opened his eyes.
"Yeah," he said to himself, under his breath. "Definitely a transmigration."
He did not know exactly when the vagueness turned into melancholy, and the melancholy into anger.
Perhaps when he thought of his diploma. The sleepless nights. The endless shifts, the attendings who pretended not to see, the times he had stayed on his feet through sheer stubbornness because he had no right to break down, because he had no one to rely on.
Years. Years spent building something.
And now?
A wandering consciousness in the body of a sixteen-year-old kid, in a world where monsters prowled behind walls.
"Shit."
The word escaped on its own, hoarse, desolate. Almost ridiculous in the silence of the room. But it was the only word that truly matched what he felt—not articulate rage, just the raw, petty realization that sometimes life is unfair in a completely absurd way, and there is nothing else to say.
He stayed there, staring at the ceiling.
Ten minutes, maybe. Or twenty. Time passed differently when you had two lives in your head.
Then, gradually, something steadied within him.
So, said an inner voice that truly belonged to him—neither Nicolas nor Raven, but both at once. Who am I, then?
Raven Scrow. Sixteen years old. Dome M-77.
The faces of the family emerged, still blurry at the edges—a father, a mother, a brother, a sister. Outlines. Presences. He would have time to define them.
A small apartment in the southern part of the dome, where the buildings were made of salvaged materials and the alleys smelled of garbage that was never really properly removed. The kind of place where everyone knew each other and no one asked how you were because the answer was always the same.
M-77. Third class. One hundred and twenty square kilometers for ninety thousand people.
Third class, he repeated inwardly. He did not need Raven's memory to guess what that meant. Underequipped. Underfunded. Archaic defenses.
He let out a short, humorless laugh.
"Not only do I transmigrate into another world," he murmured, "but it's into the poor neighborhood of a second-rate city on a continent at war with monsters."
He waited for it to make him feel something terrible.
It did not.
On Earth, he had had no close family. No friends who would truly miss him. His colleagues appreciated him, he thought—or at least respected him. His neighbor watered his plants. That was about all he was leaving behind.
He had always been like that. Not cold—no, he did not define himself as cold. But contained. Steady. The kind of person people call calm when they mean to be kind, and distant when they do not. During his studies, during his shifts, with his colleagues: always that same neutral, serious facade that let very little through.
That temperament would not leave him here.
He stood up.
Slowly, the muscles of Raven's body a little stiff—he would have to learn that too, learn how this body worked, what it knew how to do, what it did not. He looked around the unfamiliar room. The thin walls. The slightly yellow light. The smell of old fabric and damp concrete.
He was alive.
That was, for now, enough.
He had no idea what "that" meant yet—surviving here, in this world, in this body, in this family he did not know. But he had time to figure it out. And he had always known how to do one thing, at least.
Hold on.