"Where am I?" an old soul whispered into the void.
He had once been a man on Earth. He had lived for 150 years, a century and a half of power, pleasure, and plenty.
He was the wealthiest man on the planet, his fortune so vast that even kings once borrowed from his coffers.
He had known the love and the fleeting affection of countless women, each more beautiful than the last. His life, to any outsider, had been perfect.
But no one ever knew the real him.
Behind the gilded walls of his penthouses and the whispers of boardrooms, he was something else entirely. In secret, he was an avid webnovel reader, devouring hundreds of chapters a night.
He was a lover of anime, of fiction, of worlds that were not his own. While the world saw a titan of industry, he dreamed of isekai adventures, cultivation realms, and second chances.
Now, there was only darkness.
"Is somebody there?" he shouted, his voice echoing into nothingness.
No one answered.
The silence pressed in on him like a physical weight. He tried to move, but his limbs, if he still had limbs, would not respond.
He tried to breathe, but there was no air, only the cold, endless dark.
Then he felt it. A pull. A suction from deep within the void, like a great invisible mouth had opened beneath him.
He opened his mouth to scream, but before any sound could escape, something reached into his chest and ripped his soul free from his body.
It was not painful, but it was terrifying, the sudden awareness that the flesh he had worn for 150 years was gone and he was nothing but a fragile, drifting light.
"Ahhhhhhh!" he screamed, and the scream went on forever.
He was falling. Not through air or water, but through an endless tunnel of silence and cold.
Time lost all meaning. Minutes or millennia could have passed.
He tumbled through the abyss, his thoughts unraveling, his memories flickering like dying candles.
Just as he thought he would fall forever, light exploded behind his eyelids.
When he opened his eyes again, the sun was blinding.
He was lying on his back. Warm grass pressed against his bare skin. The sky above him was impossibly blue, dotted with soft white clouds that moved too slowly, too peacefully.
A gentle breeze carried the scent of wildflowers and earth.
For a long moment, he simply lay there, breathing.
Then, clear and sharp as a bell, a sound rang out inside his head.
"DING!"