A Bright Light.
Then, darkness.
Cold, silence, emptiness.
And then—
Light.
Rin gasped for air as he woke up, his lungs filling as if he had just been drowning. His body ached, his muscles felt unusually weak. Something was wrong, but he couldn't pinpoint what.
He blinked rapidly, his vision blurry. As his eyes slowly adjusted to his surroundings, he realized he wasn't in his friend's room.
His body tensed.
His heart pounded violently as he tried to process the scene before him. He wasn't alone. Others were there—some still unconscious, while others sat talking amongst themselves. But what caught his attention the most was the floating, three-dimensional screen in the middle of the cave.
Nausea crept up his throat.
He knew this place.
"Oh, you've got to be kidding me."
Muttering under his breath, he tried to push himself up, but his body quickly betrayed him. A wave of dizziness hit, forcing him to lean against the wall to avoid collapsing.
The moment he moved, the conversations in the cave stopped, and all eyes turned toward him.
"Oh, he's awake."
The speaker was a young man with messy blond hair and a relaxed smile. He stood up and approached, but when he saw Rin's exhausted state, his expression turned concerned.
"You don't look well. You should lie down and rest. Dimensional transport affects both the body and soul—don't force yourself to move."
Rin was in a state of mental chaos, but even so, he accepted the help. He allowed the blond young man to support him gently, while his body continued trembling from exhaustion.
But...
Something told him to look at his reflection.
Slowly, he turned. And when his eyes caught his mirrored image on a smooth crystal surface, he froze.
A young man with unkempt white hair and striking blue eyes stared back at him.
Rin stepped closer, his heart hammering in his chest.
That wasn't his face.
He looked exactly like the character his friend Lucas had created in the game.
Then, as if his mind were being torn apart, a sharp pain surged through his skull, stealing his breath away.
And then, like a rushing tide, memories crashed into him.
Memories that weren't his.
Flashes of another life overwhelmed his thoughts—fragments of this body's past before he inhabited it.
A fallen noble. His life had been a cycle of indulgence, using his charm and good looks to live off noblewomen, especially widows.
Eventually, things escalated to the point where he seduced a princess—the third princess of the kingdom, who had fallen into his grasp with ease.
One night, while inside her luxurious carriage, they were ambushed by a masked group that brutally slaughtered the knights and servants.
In desperation, he had thrown himself off a bridge into the river below.
The last thing he saw before losing consciousness was the glow of the pendant hanging around his neck—the one he had received from a noble widow he had been involved with.
The memories ended there.
Rin's breathing was unsteady.
That wasn't his life—yet now, it was engraved in his mind as if it were.
Waking up in a cave. Reincarnating in a game as a character his friend had designed. The wave of foreign memories crashing over him.
'This… has to be a dream.'
He shut his eyes and shook his head.
No.
No, this wasn't real.
But the cold air of the cave was real. The exhaustion weighing on him was real. The person helping him was real.
And the memories?
They were real, too.
Clutching his temples, he clenched his teeth as the pain continued to drill into his skull. The more he resisted, the worse it became, as if his past life and his new existence were being forcibly fused together.
He didn't want to believe it.
But he knew.
He knew that this…
Was real.