Free Web NovelChapter 1: Fortune of the Unfortunate
Come! Oh, come! I dare you foul things, you misfortuned and daring, so pure and sacred things! Bless yourselves! How else might you live!? Feast on your misfortune, bury its corpse beneath the deadfalls, and come in your slews! And then, be gone, and leave me... let me be, slobbering my blood beneath my lightfall.
- The remembered death rattles of a profane sovereign, infamous in those great, tormented ages of wondrous strife, said seven seconds before death.
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Death is such a cold embrace, so indifferent and full of nothing but more of the dead.
To die is to return oneself to the embrace of heaven, and be soothed from the strife of the living world by those ethereal, gracious gods.
You will be condemned to your rightful suffering in death, with no choice but to endure punishment for the misery you inflicted upon others, and your mischiefs.
Those were things one person told the next, and that next told him, to comfort or sentence the other.
Laurent now knew what rattling, stained lies those were. The tirades, so innocent and callow, were barely worth more than the spiel of a mumbling, ignorant child.
Or was it that he was the oddity?
He was dragged into darkness within those moments as the snowflakes of his fading, blurring memory fell away like the sands of time, once he finally died.
It was expansive beyond anything comprehensible, however, perhaps it could be described as drowning if there was anything sensational to it.
But it was strange. He didn’t feel like he was suffering, thrashing to return to the surface and breathe air. He sank and sank and sank further, letting everything that remained of himself fall.
Its hadal embraced him so warmly, so finally relieving and blissful, so full of emotion.
Those moving, drifting lights in the depths that he passed, the ones lurking as if ready to devour him, and those pulls that he felt from the darkness itself took nothing away from the softness.
However, it also did not feel like the promised soothing of the heavens.
While drowning, he breathed, grabbing for whatever sustenance was there in the strange place.
His lungs and gut bulged full. Strain sent some kind of sensation of pain, and then the hunger would return.
So, he ate ravenously, without an end neither to the darkness or wisps of light nor to his appetite, chasing the fleeting comfort that came from satiation.
He did not know that what he swallowed and breathed, were the fragmented wisps of the lights in that ocean of darkness. They, like streams of mist, flowed into the small, vulnerable light that he had been reduced to in death.
As he ate, his light grew and grew, and eventually, he happened upon one full, bright light. However, it, even bright, was losing its luminosity without him doing anything to it, and it was stained in flecks of darkness. freēwēbnovel.com
In that state, largely lacking consciousness, driven by hunger, he ate it whole.
Suddenly, the depths rumbled beneath him, and a bright, shining and blinding light enflamed before him, consuming him.
"Sell out that wretch!"
"Even a cursed thing like yourself should have some sense! Let the Seniors through!"
The livid bellows of people—men?—thundered through his ears and into his throbbing head, demanding whatever semblance of wakefulness that he could muster.
’What... in the?’ Laurent’s thoughts crawled as if being dragged up from the depths of a pit of quicksand, ’Where... am i? Is this... the afterlife?’
In Laurent’s life, he had perhaps spent twenty of his years actually able to live.
He was great at school—his mother, of latin descent would not accept otherwise—fantastic at sports, and average height. When going through high-school and partly through college like that, at the heights of their little lives, what student would not be as full as the ocean with confidence and charisma?
He lived the heights of that life, enjoying, despite his strict parenting, the debauchery, stress, and indulgences of it, both loved and hated.
And all of that came crashing down when he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—a progressive neurodegenerative disease that attacks motor neurons in the brain and spinal chord. Worst of all is, his case degenerated him very quickly.
Within the year, he had already been bound to a wheelchair, and after that... he dreaded to think any further about it. The immense, unholy misfortune it brought piled on through the years.
His family struggled to keep up with medical bills, he was isolated all the time with fake friends scattering like leaves in autumn.
Even with real friends it was not as if they could always be there; they had the responsibility of living their own, normal lives. They couldn’t afford to spend weeks helping take care of him when he pissed or shat himself.
He never held it against them for it. Why would he? But ultimately... he would be lying if he said he had not been bitterly envious.
If not for his family and those who even despite their real lives, supported and took care of him, he would have ended it himself far sooner, perhaps even when he was diagnosed, but because they were there he persisted for years.
Laurent instead surrendered to the constant emotional distress that he was in from watching everyone that he cared for suffer each day because they had to take care of him. He died to a heart attack.
In those same final beats of his heart, a large part of him was relieved.
Although he would never say that. He would never forgive himself for betraying the commitments and care of everyone that stuck with him if he did.
"Half-elven witch, begone! Get out of our way! Today, we will cripple even more, and remove that profane practitioner from our righteous sect!"
The cacophony of voices gradually creaked his awareness back to him, and he felt his face grimace deeply, his throat groaning. His whole body was in pain.
’Cripple...’ His crawling, fogged attention was taken by that particular word, and realization shun upon him through the murkiness of the lingering darkness. ’Wait... I didn’t die?’
Laurent felt the relief, and whatever lingering comfort that he had found from the coddling of that darkness, drain away from him there. The TV in his hospital room had been left at full volume it seemed.
’So the doctors saved me in time...’ he could only swallow down the bile of misfortune. What was strange is, he was mentally awake, though barely, and yet he wasn’t physically awake, ’Sleep paralysis again, huh...’
At that final somber thought, he tried to regulate his breathing and calm his mind.
By now, after so many hundreds of bouts with it, sleep paralysis was a great friend of his. He knew that panic would do nothing but make the experience worse.
Gradually, the very strange sensation of his fingers moving, then his hand and his full arm, and then his neck moving came to him.
Those sensations of his body moving induced a far greater urgency within him than the screeching, aggravating demands that were coming from the TV.
When was the last time that he had felt them move anything remotely close to what was biologically proper? five or six years?
The rush blitzed through him like lightning, and he snapped his eyes open.
Then he miraculously jolted his torso off of the wet ground first, regardless of the pain it grated through him. Then he used his arms and legs to spring himself up fully, his eyes widening larger through each of the actions.
"H—How!?"
A strange voice scraped out of his throat, unlike anything that he would have expected it would be like after years of not using it. Instead, it sounded utterly foreign, and despite the prior thought, perhaps that was only natural after not speaking for years.
Laurent had to stagger to catch himself, feeling dizzy with a damnable headache making itself very apparent every moment.
Immediately disregarding that, he brought his arms up to look at his hands. Then he began dancing the individual fingers.
A sharp breath eased the twist in his gut, rushing into his head as his nose burned.
There was such strength, such, such, relieving strength in his hands as he closed them into tight fists, even despite the fact that he felt they were weaker than they should have been. And right there, noticing the fact that they felt like they could be stronger, he choked on the next breath he tried to take.
Then, his body, without the need of a command, began moving as if knowing what he was already about to check next.
His foot, standing over a pooled liquid, strode forward—and he remembered the fact that he had staggered; he had staggered and stopped himself from falling!
His hurrying footfalls splashed the liquid over the ground a little, spattering against his shin, and calf. Air rushed through his chest which felt particularly odd, as if there was something squirming within it, however, he did not care.
Laurent whipped his head around as he willed his feet continued; how could he not?!
That being said, one thing that was made apparently clear is this was not the hospital and there was no TV.
’Please...’
He was within a shack, or at least that was what it seemed like. Beams of sunlight illuminating the space were broken only by two strips of tattered curtain that faintly fluttered by the will of the slight breeze. Towards the back was a crude bed, if it could even be called such, when it was just a thin, worn mat laid over the ground with a dark brown, well-cut, rectangular rock for a pillow.
’Please, please tell me this is not a dream!’
Taken by this whirlwind of emotion, he could not care any less about the fact he did not know where he was or about the commotion beyond the wooden walls.
His eyes had fell onto a tall mirror that had lines of cracks running through it, and his feet so willingly carried him towards it.
Laurent heard the faint splash beneath his feet, and the wet patter of them as he walked beyond the puddle, leaving a trail of whatever liquid that was beneath him, but he did not care to check. He took long, euphoric strides, his face still stricken with disbelieving shock. freёweɓnovel.com
Then he came to stand before the mirror, and finally, he felt the wet of tears slipping down the contours of the face that he wore.
The visage was certainly not his own; that wrinkled, compressed sagging face of his was nothing in comparison to the one that he wore now, even with the scars that marred this face and that strange tattoo over its forehead.
’This... shouldn’t be possible, right? I have transmigrated?’
Being someone of the modern age, especially considering his condition, he was a voracious reader, from traditional books to the most nonsense machine translations ever.
So, He was naturally familiar with the concept.
But... for it to happen to him?
In this body, he looked much healthier in comparison, with tight skin, a good jaw and sharp eyes that were strangely purple. Long, black satin smooth looking hair fell free behind his back, and he was standing!
"Ouyang Qianye, if there is anything left of you as a man, come stand before me this instant! Prove to us that you are neither a cultivator of the profane nor a spy of the Ashen Dusk Sect!"
Ouyang Qianye was standing so straight and proper, slathered in blood, with a gaping gulf through his chest, right through his heart.
