Year 1500 AD, Japan
The rain had stopped sometime during the night, but the road remained muddy.
That was the first thing Ren noticed when he opened his eyes.
The second thing he realized was that he had absolutely no idea where he was.
He lay beneath the overhang of a half-collapsed wooden building, curled around himself in an attempt to preserve whatever warmth remained in his body.
His clothes were soaked through, his stomach was empty, and his head hurt badly enough that he wondered, at first, if he’d suffered a concussion.
For several seconds he simply stared at the beams above him.
Then he remembered — he was dead.
Or at least, he should have been.
The last thing he recalled from his old life was walking home.
Headlights.
A horn.
A sudden impact.
He had expected darkness.
Instead, he had woken up here.
Japan.
Not modern Japan.
Japan five hundred years in the past.
He knew that from the clothes, the houses, the road — and, most convincingly, from the fact that the first person to speak to him yesterday had been dressed like an exhibit in a museum.
Ren slowly sat up.
His stomach growled.
“Of course.”
His voice sounded strange in the quiet morning — not because it was unfamiliar, but because everything else was.
He rubbed his face.
“Okay.
Think.”
That had become his favorite word over the past week.
Seven days since he’d appeared in this world, and seven days since he’d realized that whatever force had brought him here apparently saw no need to explain itself.
He didn’t know where he’d come from, why he’d been brought here, whether his old world still existed, or if he could ever return.
He didn’t even have an identity — though that problem had turned out to matter less than it sounded.
Fifteenth-century Japan wasn’t exactly an age of centralized records.
Nobody asked for a passport.
Nobody asked him to prove he existed.
People simply assumed he was some wandering commoner, which, technically, he was.
The bigger problem was food.
Ren looked down at his clothes — plain, cheap, the sort a poor traveler might wear.
He hadn’t been wearing them before he arrived; he’d simply appeared in them, another unexplained gift from whatever had sent him here.
There had been a few others.
He understood Japanese perfectly — could speak it, read it, write it, despite never having studied a word of classical Japanese in his old life.
Somehow the language simply made sense to him.
The first time someone had spoken to him, he’d braced for confusion.
Instead, the words had simply resolved into meaning, and he’d nearly cried from the relief of it.
Being able to communicate had probably saved his life.
Being literate was another matter entirely — or so he’d assumed.
When he first saw the characters on a wooden sign, he’d stared at it for almost five minutes, certain that a modern Japanese speaker’s fluency wouldn’t stretch back five hundred years.
Yet somehow it did.
The meaning simply arrived.
Not translation, not memorization — instinct.
His hand could even reproduce the strokes.
Whatever had sent him here had decided communication was necessary.
It had simply neglected to provide anything useful beyond that.
Ren sighed.
“Thanks.” The sarcasm disappeared into the empty building.
He stood, legs stiff.
Outside, the village was waking.
Smoke rose from several roofs.
A woman called for her child.
A dog barked somewhere in the distance.
For a moment he simply stood and listened — it was strangely peaceful.
Then a man walked past carrying a spear, and the peace evaporated.
Right.
This was Japan in 1500 — not that Ren knew the exact year.
He could only guess, roughly mapping what he saw onto the Gregorian calendar he remembered.
The Sengoku period — a time when being in the wrong place at the wrong moment could get you killed.
Wars, bandits, starvation, disease, famine, and men with weapons who needed no legal reason to use them.
Ren had spent his first few days doing exactly one thing: surviving.
He’d quickly learned that a literate commoner had some value — he could read signs, keep records, help merchants with simple calculations, write letters, make himself look a little more educated than he really was.
But there was a limit.
He had no family, no village, no lord, no trade, no reputation, no money, and no explanation for where he’d come from.
Fortunately, this era was full of displaced people — wanderers, farmhands, monks, merchants, refugees, ronin, orphans, people whose homes had been swallowed by one conflict or another.
A man appearing from nowhere wasn’t remarkable.
A man claiming to be a wandering commoner was even less so.
So Ren had settled on a simple story: his home destroyed, his family dead, himself just passing through.
He never elaborated, and people rarely asked — when they did, he looked sad and changed the subject.
It worked, for now.
His goal wasn’t wealth, power, or finding a way home.
Not yet.
His goal was simpler: stay alive.
Everything else could wait.
He spent the morning walking, avoiding major roads whenever he could — not because he knew exactly what to fear, but because he didn’t, and that was worse.
The Sengoku period had taught him quickly: you didn’t need to know where the danger was.
You only needed to know that it existed.
He passed several groups of armed men, and each time he lowered his gaze and stepped aside.
No staring, no questions, no speaking unless spoken to.
The rule seemed to work.
By midday he’d earned enough carrying sacks for a merchant to buy a bowl of rice and some pickled vegetables.
Not much, but it was food.
He sat beneath a tree and ate slowly.
The rice tasted better than anything he could remember — maybe hunger did that, or maybe it was simply that for the first time in days he wasn’t sure where his next meal would come from.
He looked up at the sky and thought about home.
Modern streets.
Electric lights.
Convenience stores.
Trains.
Phones.
Air conditioning.
Instant noodles.
The internet.
His old life felt impossibly distant already.
He wondered if his family had buried him.
If there’d even been a body.
If they knew he was dead.
He lowered his gaze.
He didn’t want to think about it — thinking about home didn’t help, and he couldn’t go back.
Not yet.
Maybe never.
He needed to survive first.
The first week taught Ren something modern history books had never managed to explain properly: being poor was exhausting.
Not the kind of exhausting that came from a long day at work, followed by a hot shower and a bed.
There were no showers here.
There was barely enough food.
And there certainly wasn’t a bed waiting for him at the end of the day.
Every morning began with the same calculation — where am I eating tonight?
Every evening ended with another — where am I sleeping?
He took whatever work he could find.
The first job was carrying sacks for a merchant.
He spent hours hauling rice until his shoulders burned, while the merchant stood nearby shouting whenever he slowed down.
“Faster!”
Ren gritted his teeth and kept moving.
When the work was finished, the merchant handed him less rice than they’d agreed on.
Ren stared at it.
“That’s not what you promised.”
The merchant looked at him as though he’d spoken nonsense.
“You carried less than you were supposed to.”
“I carried everything you gave me.”
“Then you should have carried it faster.”
Ren opened his mouth, then closed it again.
There was no contract, no written agreement, no authority he could appeal to.
The merchant had money, connections, and several bigger men working for him.
Ren had none of those things.
He accepted the smaller payment.
The next day he found work helping repair a fence.
An older laborer took pity on him and showed him what to do.
Ren was clumsy at first, but by midday his hands were beginning to understand the work.
“You’ll get it eventually,” the old man said, handing him another length of rope.
It was the first encouragement Ren had received since arriving.
“Thanks.”
The old man merely grunted.
The landowner, however, spent most of the afternoon complaining that Ren was inexperienced.
When Ren finally asked whether he’d be paid for the full day, the man laughed.
“You should be grateful you’re allowed to work here.”
Ren wanted to point out that the man was the one who’d needed workers in the first place.
Instead, he bowed.
“Yes, sir.”
That became another lesson: never argue with someone who could afford to make your life harder.
Not every day was like that.
Some days were simply miserable.
One afternoon, Ren spent hours carrying water between a well and a house.
His arms shook by the time he finished, and the skin around his palms had begun to ache.
When he finally sat down, an old woman working nearby noticed him.
“You look half-dead.”
Ren managed a tired laugh.
“That’s about right.”
She stared at him for a moment before handing him a small piece of dried fruit.
“Eat.”
Ren blinked.
“For me?”
“For the work.”
It wasn’t much, but he accepted it with both hands.
“Thank you.” She waved him away as though it were nothing.
Ren ate slowly.
For perhaps ten minutes, the world didn’t feel quite so hostile.
Then he had to get back to work.
Another day, rain forced him to spend hours walking because the innkeeper at the nearest village refused to let him sleep under the roof without payment.
Ren ended up spending the night beneath an abandoned storehouse, listening to rain strike the wooden boards above him.
The next morning, he woke with a stiff back and an empty stomach, and kept going.
A few days later, Ren ran into a different kind of problem.
He was carrying firewood when a group of armed men came down the road.
Everyone moved aside.
Ren did the same — but one of them stopped anyway.
“You.”
Ren froze.
The man looked him up and down.
“Where are you from?”
“Nearby.”
“Which village?”
His mind raced.
“South.”
“South of where?”
“South of here.”
The men laughed.
One reached for the bundle of firewood.
“Give it to us.”
Ren looked at the wood, then at the swords, then back at the wood.
“Of course.” He handed it over, and the men walked away without another word.
Ren stood there for several seconds, staring after them.
Back home, someone stealing his belongings would have been a crime.
He could have called the police.
He could have complained.
Someone would have at least pretended that what happened mattered.
Here, there was no number to call, no authority to complain to, no one who cared whether those men had stolen from him or simply taken what they wanted.
No one argued for him.
No one pitied him.
Nobody even looked at him.
Ren slowly turned and continued walking.
That night he ate half a bowl of rice and saved the rest for morning.
He hated himself a little for feeling grateful — but gratitude was easier than hunger.
By the end of the week, Ren had settled into a routine: keep his head down, accept whatever work appeared, never reveal how little he understood, never ask questions around armed men, never sleep somewhere that looked too comfortable.
And above all, never let anyone realize he had absolutely nobody behind him — because that was the part that frightened him most.
No family.
No lord.
No employer.
No friends.
No village that would even notice if he vanished.
He was completely alone, and every day someone else seemed to hold something he needed — food, shelter, protection, money, information, authority.
He had spent his entire previous life assuming that being powerless simply meant being unable to do something.
Now he understood what it actually meant: it meant other people got to decide what happened to you, and you had no way to stop them.
On the afternoon of the seventh day, Ren sat beneath a tree, eating the cheapest meal he could afford.
He stared at the rice in his hands.
“I can’t keep doing this.”
The words came out barely audible.
He wasn’t even sure what he meant by them — carrying sacks, sleeping in abandoned buildings, being cheated, being threatened, being hungry, or simply waking up every morning knowing that the strongest person nearby could ruin his entire day without consequence.
He needed something.
Anything.
A skill, a position, a weapon, power — something that would make him less helpless.
Ren finished eating and stood.
That’s when he noticed something lying beside the road.
At first he mistook it for trash.
Then he noticed the glass, and stopped.
It was beautiful.
Far too beautiful.
Small, about the size of his palm, clear glass with a faint bluish tint, a silver stopper, a thin chain wound around its neck.
Inside, a dark blue liquid moved slowly, viscous and almost gelatinous, clinging to the glass whenever it shifted.
Ren stared at it.
He didn’t know it yet, but the first thing this world had ever offered him would cost far more than anything he’d been forced to give it.
“…What?”
He looked around.
The road was empty; nobody had noticed.
He crouched.
The bottle sat in the mud without a scratch on it — strange enough on its own.
Glass this fine had no business lying in a fifteenth-century ditch.
He reached for it, and the instant his fingers touched the glass, something appeared in his mind.
Not a voice, not quite.
Text — white letters against an endless grey fog.
[Blasphemous Slate]
Ren froze.
The words vanished, replaced by a second line.
[Sequence 9 — Seer]
His heart began to race.
“What?”
More followed — not language he recognized from any book, but merely a name: Seer Potion.
Ren had no idea what a Seer Potion was.
He didn’t know what a Sequence was or why a bottle like this had appeared in front of him at all.
But he understood one thing clearly: the liquid and the text were connected.
He picked the bottle up slowly, and the writing vanished.
“System?”
Nothing.
“Hello?”
Silence.
He shook it.
The thick liquid inside oozed sluggishly along the glass, but nothing answered.
“Okay.” He looked at the bottle, then the road, then back again.
His first thought was hallucination.
His second was that he’d finally gone insane.
His third was more practical: don’t drink mysterious liquids.
Possibly the most obvious survival rule in existence — especially for a liquid in a bottle that had simply appeared out of nowhere.
He set it down, walked five steps, stopped, and looked back.
Still there.
He kept walking — ten steps, twenty, thirty — until curiosity eventually won over his suspicion, and he turned around and went back for it.
“Why me?” Nothing.
He studied the liquid — dark blue, thick as gelatin, beautiful, and somehow wrong in a way he couldn’t articulate.
Something about it made his instincts whisper danger.
He held it up to the sunlight.
For a moment, he thought he saw something moving inside.
He jerked it away.
Nothing out of the ordinary happened.
Just viscous liquid, behaving like viscous liquid.
He sat beneath a nearby tree, the bottle in his hands, and started thinking.
If the “system” was real, this was probably a reward — maybe for surviving his first few days.
Maybe it granted power.
Maybe it could get him home.
Maybe—
He stopped himself.
That was exactly how people died: assuming the mysterious gift was a good thing.
He thought of every horror movie and fantasy novel he’d ever consumed.
Strange potion — don’t drink.
Unknown artifact — don’t touch.
Mysterious voice — don’t trust.
A supernatural entity offering power — run.
None of those rules solved his actual problem.
He was in a world with no identity, no money, no connections, no grasp of local politics, no combat training, no idea whether monsters existed here — and he’d just found a supernatural object that might give him an edge.
Refuse it, and what did he have?
Nothing.
Drink it, and he might die.
Or worse.
“How much worse can things get?” he asked the bottle.
He immediately answered himself.
“Don’t ask questions like that.”
He debated for the better part of an hour.
Eventually hunger won — not physical hunger, but the hunger for security, the need to stop being helpless.
If this thing truly granted power, refusing it might be the stupidest decision available to him.
He’d just have to be careful.
A small amount, maybe.
A taste.
He checked the Slate again.
Same line: [Sequence 9 — Seer].
Nothing about ritual, nothing about procedure, nothing about consequences.
“That’s not very helpful.”
No answer.
He closed his eyes.
“All right.
One sip.”
He pulled the stopper.
The smell was faint, not unpleasant — seemingly ethereal.
He hesitated.
Every instinct in him screamed don’t, don’t, don’t.
His hand shook, and he nearly set the bottle down.
Then he thought of the man with the spear.
The starving refugees.
The uncertainty of everything.
He thought of waking up alone with nothing, and of how easily anyone stronger than him could end his life with no consequence at all.
He raised the bottle like a man toasting himself before a drink he already regretted.
“One sip.”
He swallowed.
The decision to stop at one sip proved to be beyond his control.
The thick liquid seemed to have a will of its own, and what should have been a single mouthful became the entire bottle, drained before he could stop himself.
For half a second, nothing happened.
Ren laughed nervously, as though trying to comfort himself.
“See?”
Then his body locked.
His eyes went wide.
The liquid, gelatinous only moments ago, now felt sticky — spreading through him like thin tendrils, dragging stimulation and cold into every cell of his body.
He could only convulse as his vision rapidly blurred.
All colors seemed to saturate — the reds grew redder, the blues bluer, the blacks blacker — rich and smeared together like an impressionist painting, until he could no longer tell one shape from another.
Slowly, his surroundings turned discernible again.
The colors bled back to normal as an endless grey fog rolled in around him.
Something moved inside his skull — not pain.
It was more like his whole consciousness had been dropped into an ocean.
The world vanished.
Sound disappeared.
His body felt distant, his thoughts came apart —
and then something looked back.
His mind went blank.
He saw a vast palace.
Twenty-two enormous chairs surrounding a throne.
A door.
A black moon.
A silver river.
A shadow too large and too wrong to properly perceive.
His mind tried to make sense of it and failed, and the moment he strained to understand, something inside him twisted.
His fingers spasmed and bent at angles no human hand should manage.
His breath turned ragged as a thin, dark liquid began dripping from his mouth like saliva.
He dropped to his knees, which felt as if they’d turned to solid iron.
“No.” He couldn’t move.
His vision fractured — the trees around him grew impossibly tall, the sky swelled enormous, every sound became unbearably loud.
He could hear insects beneath the soil, water moving through roots, blood in his own veins, a bird’s wings hundreds of meters off, voices on a road he couldn’t even see.
His mind tried to process all of it at once.
Too much.
Far too much.
He screamed, and the sound that left him didn’t sound like his own voice — closer to chalk dragged across a blackboard tangled with shattering glass.
It was ugly.
He grabbed his head with hands that no longer felt entirely his own.
“Stop!”
Something was happening to him — not just physical, but something deeper.
His emotions were splitting apart: fear, anger, hunger, curiosity, suspicion, each suddenly its own separate creature moving through his mind.
He understood things he’d never learned.
People were patterns.
Emotions were patterns.
Words were patterns.
Actions were patterns.
Connections stretched between everything — the tree, the road, the village, the clouds, his own heartbeat — all of it pointing toward something else.
Something more.
His sanity slipped.
Everything can be understood.
Everything must be understood.
You must understand everything.
His breath stopped.
“No.” He didn’t know where the thoughts had come from.
“No.” He dug his fingers into the dirt.
“I don’t need to understand.” The pressure only grew.
Understand.
Understand.
Understand.
Understand.
He clenched his teeth.
“No!”
He forced his mind toward something simple — his name.
Ren.
His old apartment.
His mother’s blurred cooking.
The shadow of a convenience store.
The sound of a train platform.
Some stupid television show.
Anything human, anything ordinary.
Rain against an apartment window.
The hum of an air conditioner.
The glow of a phone screen.
A train car full of sleeping strangers, someone’s music leaking from their headphones, a child laughing.
Normal.
Normal.
Normal.
His breathing slowed.
The fog receded.
The palace vanished.
The impossible knowledge drained away, and he collapsed.
When he opened his eyes again, the sun was setting.
His body was drenched in sweat, his hands trembling, and the bottle lay empty beside him.
He caught his own reflection in a small puddle where he’d collapsed.
No twisted fingers.
No extra eyes.
No strange angles at his knees.
Still human, as far as he could tell.
He touched his chest — heartbeat normal.
He checked his hands, his face; both normal.
He breathed.
Normal.
He sat up slowly.
“Well…
that’s…
one piece of good news.” The words barely formed, and he couldn’t bring himself to smile as he stared at the empty bottle beside him, unable to speak for several seconds.
“…What did I just drink?”
No answer.
Something felt different, though he couldn’t say how — his senses were sharper, his hearing keener.
He somehow knew someone was approaching from behind before he heard their footsteps.
He turned.
Nobody.
Then, a few seconds later, footsteps, and an old farmer rounded the bend.
They stared at each other.
“Are you all right?” the farmer asked, watching him with open suspicion.
“I thought I heard some weird, creepy noise…”
“Yes, I’m alright.” His voice came out normal enough.
“I might have just tripped over something.”
An excuse too feeble to survive scrutiny — but the farmer merely nodded and walked on, clearly uninterested in finding out more.
Ren watched him go, then looked down at his own shaking hands.
He had survived.
Somehow, he had survived.
He picked up the empty bottle and laughed — not a happy sound, but the laugh of someone who had barely escaped something terrible.
“You idiot.” He turned the bottle over in his hands.
“You absolute idiot.
I could have died.”
He remembered the fog.
The palace.
The impossible shapes.
The feeling of his own mind being torn apart.
“What if I couldn’t stop?”
That question frightened him more than anything else that had happened.
The potion hadn’t simply granted power — it had nearly destroyed him, and he still didn’t know why.
Regret sat heavy in his stomach.
He should have left it lying in the mud.
He should have walked past.
For the first time since arriving in this world, Ren seriously considered turning his back on whatever door had just opened in front of him.
Power wasn’t worth losing himself.
Not at that price.
After another five minutes, he stood, legs weak, and started walking.
That night he found shelter in an abandoned shrine, sitting beneath its wooden roof and staring into the dark.
He could barely make out the shape of some long-forgotten offering in the main hall.
Ren tried to close his eyes, but he couldn’t sleep.
Every time he did, he saw the grey fog again.
Eventually he whispered, “System.” Nothing.
“Blasphemous Slate.” Silence.
He sighed.
“Sequence 9.” Still nothing.
He was starting to wonder if the whole thing had been some kind of hallucination when white letters appeared in front of him, hanging against that same grey fog.
[Sequence 9 — Seer]
Ren froze.
More text followed.
[Successfully Consumed]
His heart sank.
[Advancement Requirement: Digest the Potion.]
“Digest?” No answer.
He waited.
[Act as a Seer.]
“What’s a Seer?”
Silence.
“Of course.” He laughed weakly.
“Of course you won’t explain.”
He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, telling himself he’d figure it out tomorrow.
Tonight he just wanted to sleep.
Just before his eyes shut, one more line appeared — and this time something cold settled in his stomach.
[Friendly reminder.]
He sat up straight.
The words came slowly.
[The consumed characteristic has detected a compatible presence.
%&^#^&%.]
“What?”
A final line.
[Do not allow It to awaken.]
The letters vanished.
Ren went completely still.
Outside, something howled in the forest — not a dog, not a wolf, something deeper, something that set every instinct in his body screaming.
He reached slowly for the small rusted knife he’d managed to scavenge earlier that day and closed his hand around it.
For the first time, he wondered whether the power he’d just gained was the most dangerous thing in this world.
Or whether something out there had already noticed him — and was coming to find him.
You guys might know me from my other fanfics which I dropped (because I lost my email and hence, my account with the same name so I had to start a new one).
I’m very sorry that I couldn’t finish any of the fanfics I started cause I had planned most of the skeletons of the plot already…
I apologise deeply for that, but I regret to inform you that I will not be continuing any of those fanfics.