Consciousness returned like a drowning man breaking the surface—violent, desperate, unwelcome. Ren floated in a space between spaces, his mind trying to reassemble itself from component atoms scattered across probability.
System Error: Reality.exe has stopped responding. Would you like to send an error report?
The joke came unbidden, his brain's desperate attempt to process the unprocessable. He'd died. He remembered that much. Purple mist, dissolving reality, the taste of extinction. But death was supposed to be more... permanent.
Unless this is hell. In which case, 2/10, terrible atmosphere, no wifi.
Cold hit him like a sledgehammer made of absolute zero. Not winter cold—this was the cold that existed before temperature was invented. His eyes snapped open to purple-tinged darkness that writhed like living things.
He lay on ground that couldn't decide what it wanted to be. Too hard for soil, too rough for stone, too wrong for Earth. Purple mist coiled around him, each tendril leaving trails of tingling otherness across his skin. The stuff pulsed with its own heartbeat, curious and predatory.
"Okay," he croaked, his voice sounding like someone had gargled gravel. "Tutorial level sucks. Where's the skip button?"
Standing required negotiating with muscles that had apparently forgotten their purpose. Everything hurt with the deep, existential ache of existing where existence was optional. The mist clung to him, making each movement feel like swimming through cosmic molasses.
Visibility: three meters of purple hell before the fog ate everything. No landmarks. No signs. No convenient quest markers floating overhead. Just him, his miraculous intact cargo shorts, and the growing certainty that he'd been isekai'd by the universe's most pretentious truck-kun.
Right. Assessment time. Standard isekai checklist:
✓ Transported to another world
✓ Mysterious circumstances
✓ No tutorial
✗ No system menu
✗ No cheat skills
✗ No convenient exposition fairy
Overall rating: 3/10. Wouldn't recommend to friends.
A sound drifted through the mist—not quite wind, not quite whisper, entirely too much like reality clearing its throat. Time to move before whatever made that sound decided to investigate the new toy.
He picked a direction (all equally terrible) and started walking. The ground shifted textures with each step: crunch, squish, scrape, scream—
Wait. Scream?
He decided not to investigate that particular texture.