Cade doesn't live in a fancy place, but he knows it well. One doesn't live in the same apartment for over a decade without learning every corner.
Which is why the moment his eyes open, his brain starts trying to wake up more.
The ceiling above him is wood planks, not plaster. The walls are not beige and pale blue stripes, but more wood, thicker and arranged atop bricks of dark grey stone. The floor is odd, in that it appears to be dirt, but is so packed and, it appears, brushed as he sees no rocks or sticks or other debris in it.
Nothing like his carpet or tiles.
The light, too, is different, though that he understands. Upon sitting up properly, he can see unlit lanterns and candles and a part of the wall that appears to be made of paper.
He's never had paper walls or windows before. The only reason he knows that they exist is from his version of "cultural research": Heavenly Travel, Golden CoreCultivation.
He'd only made it halfway through the plot before being sidetracked, and it's for that reason he thinks he might know some of the things around him better. Every building in the game was open and had things and NPCs to interact with, from the smallest hovel to the largest palace. He'd spent ages just combing towns and finding secrets and treasures in the small things.
He'd also spent about a quarter of the time the game was open instead trying to look up the terms used sometimes. Cade has not ever been interested in delving deep into variety. He likes what he has and what he watches and so on, and that means that his habits are unbreakable and he also... might not be the best at knowing terms and genres and things.
The community had been sweet as anything though, always willing to answer questions in-game or on forums. Most enjoyed the difference it had to what he's been told similar games are like. Apparently, such intense and extensive lore and worldbuilding and generated aspects are not only rare in games in general, but especially in games that focus more on grinding resources and doing things fast.
Honestly, if he wasn't certain he's not dreaming, he'd think this is a dream about the game.
But the sun shines through the paper window, there are weak drafts across his skin, and his clothes are not the shirt and jeans he'd collapsed in the night before, but some rougher fabric. Linen? That's at least a catch-all term where he's from, so it fits either way. There's a jacket over a robe, wide sleeves and all, and loose trousers with a sash holding it up.
Even his shoes are cloth, held together with stitching at the top, nothing like his normal thick-soled sneakers.
All of it is different shades of brown, like he's trying to blend in with the ground. He's fine with the color, it's just odd to not be in dark blues and blacks. He's intrigued by the presence of a few pouches on his side, weighed down a bit and all clearly full of different things.
He reaches into one, standing as he does, and finds odd little stones of yellow, chalky in color but smooth in the way resin is when he runs his fingers over it.
He knows what these are! Spirit Stones!
In the game, there were three types of currency, ranging from what you could get from normal NPCs to what most people just resorted to buying. Spirit powders were pretty simple, the most basic thing you could get. He had, according to nearly all his online friends, too many of them. Then again, he spent the most time just exploring the world, while many others went to dungeons or wildernesses.
Spirit powders could buy anything from most NPCs, given most were just normal people. They also could be traded 10 for 1 spirit stone. That was the most useful in the long-term play, as they could buy most everything that was magical or not found in the real world.
For 500, you could get a spirit jade, and those were ones he had issues with. He personally never spent a single one, just out of principle. They were the currency that either took forever to get, because you could only trade with a specific group of NPCs in a specific place to get them, or you could buy them with actual money.
He's never been a fan of that, in any game. A few, sure, when they made it worth it to play the game and feasible to do so without the purchase, and it was more "buy a small thing, get a big game boost or outcome". Charging hundreds for fake currency? Not his cup of tea.
Regardless, if he's, for whatever reason, in the game or something like it, then he's holding money in his hand. Weird yellow rocks, sure, but still useable.
He counts the amount in there. There's at least 10, which was about the same as you got starting the game. He checks the other pouches just to know what's inside.
One has a bunch of herbs, one has several pieces of what he thinks are dried roots, and the last has a bunch of little bundles. They look like spirit powders, which would be great, because if there's a few dozen in there, that's a few more stones.
As he's told many a friend, he's not greedy, just incredibly motivated to have lots of things. They can be cheap, small, worthless to others, but he likes having lots of things.
Hence why he has lots of useless cardboard pieces he got from little plastic packages. And the board filled with badges and pins. And the bags of dice ranging from RPG to a really nice set of bone dice he hasn't taken out of the wrappings yet.
Focus, Cade.
He looks around, hoping for some sort of information. Is this a simulation? An afterlife? Some weird lucid dream so he thinks he's not dreaming but actually is?
He thinks he remembers some terms for if this is just a real actual world. What is it, isekai? No, that was more specific. Uh, transmigrating? Transmigration, that's it. Barek always talks about that stuff, usually because people do a lot of things with such a vague genre.
Any world and any person.
If this is his world, what is his person?
Surely he'll get some information from something... right?