Chapter 1 : The Soul That Survived

Have you ever heard of reincarnation in another world?

If you have spent enough time reading stories, then you probably already know how it is supposed to work. Someone dies in their original world, usually under circumstances that are either tragically unfortunate or absurdly convenient, only to open their eyes in a completely unfamiliar land. They remember everything about their previous life, discover that their new body possesses some extraordinary ability, and, before long, begin a second life with all the advantages they never had the first time around. A new world, a new identity, and a chance to become someone far more important than they ever were before.

At least, that is how the stories usually tell it.

I suppose I should begin by introducing where I came from. I was born on Earth, in a country that probably means very little to you now . I could give you the name of the city where I was born, describe the streets I grew up around, or tell you about the ordinary life I lived before everything changed, but none of those details are particularly important to what happened afterward.

What matters is that, eventually, I became one of those unfortunate souls who died in one world and awakened in another.

Of course, my death was nothing like the stories.

No speeding truck suddenly appeared out of nowhere and send me flying across dimensions. I wasn't murdered by some deranged stranger, nor did one of my jealous colleagues decide that pushing me onto a railway track would be an appropriate solution to whatever disagreement we happened to have. I didn't slip in the shower, choke on a piece of food, or suffer some absurdly convenient accident that would have made my death feel as though it had been written by an author who had run out of ideas.

There was no dramatic final moment, and certainly no benevolent god waiting on the other side to explain that my death had been an unfortunate mistake.

And, thankfully, I wasn't killed by a truck.

I always found that particular explanation ridiculous.

Think about it for a moment. What kind of truck possesses enough power to cross dimensions? Is it secretly some ancient cosmic artifact disguised as an ordinary delivery vehicle? Perhaps there is an entire civilization somewhere in the universe responsible for manufacturing interdimensional trucks, and their greatest achievement is apparently driving into unsuspecting pedestrians at exactly the right moment.

The idea becomes even more absurd when you consider the other variations.

Apparently, writing the wrong comment on the internet can sometimes be enough to attract divine punishment, as though the universe itself has a moderation system capable of detecting sarcasm. In some stories, pressing the wrong button, insulting the wrong person, or leaving a particularly unpleasant review somehow possesses enough metaphysical significance to tear a human soul from its original universe and throw it into another.

I had spent most of my life studying physics, so perhaps I was predisposed to find such explanations irritating.

I was a scientist.

More specifically, I worked in advanced space engineering, where my research focused on one of humanity's oldest dreams and one of its most stubborn impossibilities: teleportation.

For decades, countless researchers had tried to solve the same fundamental problem. Distance was not merely a number on a map; it was one of the great limitations imposed upon civilization. Even after humanity had learned to escape the surface of its planet, and to observe distant galaxies through instruments powerful enough to turn ancient light into measurable data, the universe remained vast beyond comprehension. The stars were there, visible and tantalizingly close, yet separated from us by distances that could swallow generations.

Teleportation promised to change that.

Our project was not the crude science-fiction version in which a person stepped onto a platform and disappeared before instantly reappearing somewhere else. The actual process was far more complicated. We were attempting to manipulate space , creating a stable passage between two predetermined points without requiring the matter travelling through it to cross the distance in the conventional sense. The mathematics had consumed generations of researchers, and the practical difficulties had eliminated nearly every promising design we had ever constructed.

Then, after decades of failure, we finally reached the point where the impossible began to look merely difficult.

That was the dangerous part.

Human beings are very good at becoming careless when an impossible dream begins to resemble a successful experiment.

I was proud of what we had accomplished. Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether I was too proud.

There is an old saying among engineers: if something can go wrong, eventually it will. At the time, I regarded it as little more than cynical humor shared by exhausted people who had spent too many nights staring at equations. I had no idea that, within a few hours, I would learn exactly how inadequate that saying really was.

The earthquake struck without warning.

One moment, I was standing inside the primary research chamber, watching the stabilization readings climb toward the threshold we had spent years trying to reach. The next, the floor moved beneath my feet with such violence that the entire room seemed to twist around me.

The first sound was not the collapse of the building but the scream of metal.

Steel support beams groaned somewhere above us, their deformation amplified through the walls until the entire facility seemed to be producing a single enormous cry. Equipment fell from its mounts. Glass shattered across the floor. Emergency lights flickered to life as the main power grid failed, bathing the laboratory in intermittent red illumination.

The alarms began almost immediately afterward.

They were designed to warn us about containment failures, structural damage, power instability, radiation leaks, and dozens of other emergencies that we had considered during the construction of the facility. None of those warnings, however, had been designed for a magnitude-nine earthquake occurring beneath a research station built around one of the most delicate experiments in human history.

People were shouting.

Someone was calling for the emergency shutdown.

Someone else was trying to reach the control room.

I remember grabbing the nearest console simply to keep myself upright while the entire world seemed to shake apart around me. On the other side of the reinforced observation glass, the teleportation gate continued to operate, its concentric rings trembling violently as automated systems struggled to maintain a process that should never have been running under such conditions.

Then the tsunami arrived.

By the time the warning reached us, there was nothing left to warn.

A wall of water struck the facility with enough force to make the earthquake seem almost insignificant. Reinforced barriers folded beneath the impact, sections of the outer structure disappeared beneath several meters of seawater, and emergency generators that had been designed to remain functional during catastrophic flooding were submerged one after another.

The facility lost power.

The backup systems failed.

The containment protocols began shutting down.

And at the center of it all, the teleportation gate remained active.

I remember staring at it through the darkness, unable to understand why the system had not already collapsed.

Then I saw the distortion.

At first, it looked like a flaw in the air itself, a tiny region where the light seemed to bend inward. I thought one of the optical sensors had malfunctioned. I even remember reaching for the communication panel to report the anomaly.

Then the distortion became perfectly black.

It was not an absence of light in the ordinary sense. It was something far more complete. A tiny sphere hung in the center of the chamber, so dark that my eyes struggled to understand its boundaries, as though reality itself had been cut away and replaced by a hole leading somewhere that no human mind was meant to perceive.

The calculated radius was approximately two millimeters.

I remember thinking that the number had to be wrong.

A black hole.

Inside our laboratory.

Something so small that it could have been hidden beneath a fingertip.

Almost laughable.

But appearances mean nothing when physics itself becomes your executioner.

I knew enough about physics to understand what that meant.

A black hole did not need to become enormous to be dangerous. Its size was not an indication of how harmless it was, because the mass compressed within that radius was the real monster. The object suspended before me was not a miniature version of some harmless cosmic phenomenon. It was a concentration of matter and energy whose gravitational influence had become completely detached from anything human civilization had ever managed to control.

I had spent my career trying to bend space.

In the end, we had succeeded in creating something that did far more than bend it.

We had created an abyss.

The black hole did not explode. It did not roar. There was no spectacular wave of energy announcing the end of the world.

It simply existed.

And existence was enough.

Earth did not disappear in a single instant. That would have been almost merciful. Instead, the planet began to come apart as the gravitational anomaly consumed everything around it. Buildings collapsed long before they could be swallowed. Mountains fractured. Oceans rose into impossible walls before being pulled apart into streams of water and vapor. The atmosphere itself became a vast, turbulent spiral disappearing toward a point too small for the human eye to comprehend.

From space, the planet must have looked like a dying star viewed from impossibly close.

But I never saw it from space.

I was still there.

My body was being torn apart.

There was no dignity in death. No final words, no peaceful acceptance, and certainly no heroic sacrifice. Every atom of my body seemed to resist the forces pulling it toward that impossible point, and the result was pain beyond anything I had previously believed the human nervous system could experience. Flesh stretched. Bones fractured. Blood was ripped from my veins. For a brief and horrifying moment, I understood exactly why the process was sometimes compared to stretching a strand of spaghetti.

Then even that sensation disappeared.

My body was gone.

I should have been gone with it.

But something remained.

Something that, according to everything I had ever learned, should not have existed independently of the body that had produced it.

My soul.

The strange stone hanging around my neck was the reason.

It was roughly ten centimeters across, irregularly shaped, and unlike anything I had ever encountered in a laboratory. We had originally classified it as a meteorite fragment because its exterior resembled material of extraterrestrial origin, but every attempt to identify its composition had failed. It contained elements we could not properly classify, displayed physical properties that contradicted known materials, and resisted several forms of analysis that should have revealed its structure immediately.

I had carried it with me for years.

I had never understood why.

When the black hole consumed me, the stone did not break.

Instead, it reacted.

I cannot describe exactly what happened because there was no longer any physical body through which I could observe it. There was only consciousness, suspended in an incomprehensible darkness while something held me together against a force that should have reduced me to nothing.

My soul crossed the abyss.

I don't know how long it took.

Time had ceased to have meaning.

Perhaps it was a fraction of a second. Perhaps it was thousands of years. Perhaps the journey occurred outside time entirely. All I know is that when consciousness finally returned to me, Earth was gone, humanity was gone, and every person I had ever known had vanished into the same darkness from which I had somehow escaped.

I was alive.

That should have been a miracle.

Instead, it felt like a punishment.

For years afterward, I wished that whatever had protected me had failed. Because survival was difficult to call a blessing when the price was being the only person left to remember that they had ever existed.

I remembered my colleagues.

I remembered the arguments we had about the experiment.

I remembered the nights spent inside the laboratory.

I remembered the people who had trusted me.

Most of all, I remembered the moment when the gate failed.

The questions became impossible to escape.

What if we had reinforced the containment chamber?

What if I had postponed the experiment?

What if we had taken the instability readings more seriously?

What if the earthquake had occurred ten minutes later?

What if I had noticed the anomaly sooner?

What if...

What if...

The questions changed over the years, but their purpose never did. Each one led back to the same conclusion: somewhere in that chain of decisions, there had to be a moment when I could have done something differently.

I never found it.

Perhaps there had never been one.

Perhaps the disaster had always been inevitable.

Or perhaps that was simply what I told myself because accepting responsibility was easier than accepting that billions of lives could disappear without meaning.

No answer ever came.

And life, as always, simply didn’t care.

Eventually, even guilt became exhausting.

And then, one day, I opened my eyes beneath an unfamiliar sky.

And now...

Here I am.

In a world where swords clash with magic.

Allow me to introduce myself.

I am Rowan Calder.

The greatest mage in history.

Master of magic.

The Great Ruler of the Eternal Soul.

Six thousand years ago...

...I was reincarnated into this world.