I woke up, and the first thing I noticed was the sheer, dizzying height of the ceiling.
It felt impossibly far away, painted a pale cream and edged with elaborate, gilded molding that disappeared into shadow.
'This isn't my room,' was the first coherent thought that managed to swim through the residual fog of what I distinctly remembered being death.
Looking around only deepened the strangeness.
The room was certainly luxurious, spanning an area that could easily fit my entire old apartment.
Heavy velvet curtains, the color of deep burgundy wine, hung at windows tall enough for a giant.
The furniture—a four-poster bed draped in fine silk, a wardrobe carved with complex, almost unsettling floral patterns, and a dark, polished wood desk—looked like something pulled directly from a museum's historical wing.
It was opulent, yes, but decidedly not modern.
No sharp lines, no glowing screens, just old, heavy wealth.
A wave of crushing despair washed over me.
Didn't I die? I felt the sharp, aching disappointment in my chest.
'I'm tired... I want to be free, what's this!'
The protest was silent, a desperate scream trapped behind my teeth.
'I didn't ask to be revived again!'
All the agonizing struggle, the final, welcomed surrender to nothingness, seemed to have been for naught.
After what felt like an endless, silent internal struggle, the urgent panic started to recede, replaced by a cold, unsettling curiosity.
I brought my hands up, turning them over slowly in the filtered light.
They were perfect.
Smooth, without a single scar or rough patch.
They were a porcelain white that spoke of a life spent nowhere near harsh labor or even harsh sun.
Most jarringly, they were healthy, full.
Nothing like the skeletal, fragile hands I remembered from my past life, all skin stretched tight over brittle bones.
I flexed my fingers, watching the tendons move beneath the flawless skin.
'Is this transmigration? But still... how how is this possible?'
The question was illogical, given the circumstances, but I couldn't stop thinking it.
I was here.
In a life I didn't recognize, in a body that wasn't mine, when I should have been nothing at all.
I stared blankly at the ceiling for a while longer, just letting the silence of the massive room press down on me.
I focused on my breathing, slow inhale, slow exhale, a futile attempt to ground myself in this ridiculous reality.
After a few minutes, the sheer absurdity of the situation—being dead, then being this alive—finally gave me enough motivation to move.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed.
The silk sheets whispered against the foreign skin of my legs as I stood.
I was tall. Taller than I had been. My joints didn't ache.
I walked across the thick carpet to what looked like a full-length mirror leaning against one wall.
The glass was polished to a dizzying sheen, reflecting the rich shadows of the room.
When I finally met my own reflection, I stumbled back a half-step.
A young man greeted me.
But "young man" felt like an inadequate description for the creature staring back.
He was stunningly, almost aggressively handsome, the kind of perfect symmetry that felt manufactured, like a painting or a character from a fantasy novel, not a real person.
His hair was a vibrant, tousled mess of blood-red that caught the meager light and seemed to glow with its own internal fire.
His eyes, set beneath aristocratic brows, were a brilliant, almost luminous deep green, so bright they seemed to hold secrets.
He was tall, elegantly built, and wore the expensive silk nightclothes with a natural, languid grace.
'It's so handsome that it felt like it's not a real person.'
The thought echoed the shock I felt.
This was my face now.
I reached a hand up, my own white, smooth fingers touching the mirror, right over the reflected cheekbone.
The glass was cool.
The reflection moved precisely with me.
'I wonder who it is.'
The question was rhetorical.
I knew exactly who it was, physically.
The body was me, now.
But the previous owner, the one who had worn this face before I was dumped into it—who had he been?
And what life was I now trapped in?
The moment I was about to turn away from the mirror, the heavy wooden door, which I hadn't even noticed before, flew inward with a solid thud against the wall.
I spun around, my heart immediately hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs.
A man stood in the doorway.
He was broad-shouldered, wearing simple, functional gray leather armor over dark clothes, and a longsword hung at his hip.
His face was rough, marked with scars, and his eyes were cold.
He looked at me with an expression that was purely dismissive, as if I were a particularly insignificant insect, or perhaps just a stain on the rich carpet.
"How's the experience Your Highness?" he asked, a nasty, rasping sound that was supposed to be a chuckle.
I stared at him, my mind scrambling for any context this new body might hold.
'I don't know what he meant.'
My memory was a void where this life should be.
I couldn't place him, his face, or his sarcastic title.
He took a slow step into the room, his eyes never leaving mine.
"Blame your father for making enemies, and I was just doing my job so don't blame me either."
He punctuated the sentence with a shrug, casual about what I could only assume was a threat, or perhaps an explanation for my current predicament.
'What... Then... Did I just wake up from getting kidnapped!'
The realization hit me like a physical blow, simultaneously terrifying and absurdly funny.
The sheer, utter ridiculousness of the situation made a wild, hysterical urge to laugh bubble up in my chest, but I pressed my lips together and held it back.
I couldn't afford to look insane.
The man paused, seeming to enjoy my stunned silence.
He crossed his arms over his chest, his gaze sharp and judging.
"Well what can a weakling prince do?" he sneered, the word "weakling" delivered with utter contempt.
I was a prince—who was apparently weak, and I was being held captive, yet in a room so luxurious it was fit for a king.
The absurdity of the situation was really...
My kidnapper is apparently wealthy enough so why kidnapped me?
A hot, bitter wave of anger rose up from some deep, untouched part of my mind.
It was a vicious heat that targeted the man in front of me, but was truly rooted in the unfairness of my situation.
The life I had personally ended, the hard-won peace of non-existence, had been ripped away and replaced with this, a life I didn't even want.
That alone was bad enough.
Apparently, that insult to my final choice was not enough; I had been kidnapped as well.
The sheer audacity of it all was staggering.
'They drag me back into the world only to lock me in a gilded cage and mock me for being weak?'
Fortunately, years of grinding, awful life circumstances in my previous existence had trained me well.
I had perfected the art of wearing a blank, unreadable mask.
My face, this new, flawless face, remained utterly still, utterly expressionless.
'At least it was helping me now.'
The man's taunts landed with a hollow echo, unable to find purchase in the numbness I'd cultivated.
I stared back at him blankly, the vibrant green eyes of this prince-body giving away nothing.
I didn't acknowledge his sarcasm or his questions.
I didn't flinch at the contempt in his voice.
I simply stood there, letting him see only an empty slate, the silence of the massive room thickening around us.
Let him keep the conversation going; I wouldn't give him the satisfaction of a reaction.
My internal rage quickly cooled into a sharp, focused desperation.
'I need to find a way to escape.'
The silence I was giving the guard wasn't going to last forever, and I didn't want to find out what his next move was.
My eyes darted around the luxurious prison, taking in the heavy door and the distant windows.
My mind, however, was already pulling up data from a lifetime of reading.
'Based on the novels I read there should be magic in transmigration.'
It was a ridiculous assumption to base my life-or-death situation on fiction, but it was all I had.
If this was a trope-laden fantasy world, I had a duty to my former self to exploit it.
'I transmigrated so I should be the protagonist right?'
The thought was a strange mix of cynicism and wishful thinking.
Protagonists always had a hidden cheat, some innate power, something to break the script.
I looked the guard dead in the eye, ignoring the contempt there, and did the only thing I could think of: I willed it.
I forced every ounce of my concentration and my strange, unwanted renewed life into the desire to see my magic, my power, my system status—whatever this world called it.
A sudden, faint blue light shimmered directly in front of my face, like a piece of glass catching the sun, and then solidified.
The guard didn't react, which meant it was likely only visible to me.
It was a neat, crystalline blue panel filled with text, hovering in the air.