My name is Elric.
I transmigrated. Yeah, just like that. One moment I was nineteen, living an average life filled with novels, anime, and the occasional existential crisis—and the next, I woke up in a different world. A world almost exactly like Earth. Same name, same moon, same sky. Just… different history. That's it. How convenient.
Here, I was sixteen. Still Elric. I guess even fate was too lazy to come up with a new one.
In this world, education was expensive and difficult. I somehow managed to finish secondary school. Shocking, right? My grades weren't anything special—average at best. My face? Not bad. Physique? Decent, though a bit frail. I'd call myself background character material in any other story.
My parents died when I was eleven. Since then, I'd been raised by my grandfather—a kind old man who ran two small shops: a grocery and an antique store. He passed away last month, and that's when I stepped in. Or rather, that's when this version of me woke up in this body.
I thought maybe I could live a peaceful life here. Open the shop in the morning, close it by evening, sip some bitter tea, and die of boredom at eighty.
Then it happened.
I moved out of my body.
Literally.
It started out of nowhere. One night, I just... slipped out. My soul floated above my body, glowing like a faint golden blob. I panicked. Thought I died. I mean, who wouldn't? It was the kind of thing you read about in a weird esoteric novel, but never thought would happen to you. But no—I could return with just a thought, like putting on an old coat. And the next night? I did it again. Voluntarily.
At first, it was terrifying. It was like being pulled in two directions—my body heavy, firmly planted on the ground, while my soul drifted away, light and weightless. But I quickly realized I could control it. The longer I stayed out, the more comfortable I became. I could move around freely, my spirit hovering above the world, unseen and untouchable. It was liberating in ways I didn't understand at the time.
Turns out, I could only do it at night. The sunlight burned me, not physically, but in my soul form. Daylight felt like trying to swim through acid. It wasn't painful, but it was unbearable. My soul would start to corrode, crumbling like parchment in a fire. I had no idea why this happened—maybe it was a quirk of this world or something else entirely. Either way, I learned fast to avoid the sun.
But still, life was good. Floating around at night, feeling the coolness of the night air seep into my very essence. The moonlight… that was the real catch. I discovered I could absorb it. Don't ask how—I just could. It wasn't like a simple absorption of light, though. It was as though the moon's essence seeped into my soul, filling me with something deeper. A strange, quiet strength.
The longer I stayed out under the moonlight, the more I felt… stronger. My soul recovered faster, my thoughts sharper. The moonlight seemed to nurture me, even grow me. I'd go to sleep in my body at dawn, and wake up feeling more alive than I had any right to be. I had to admit, it was a lazy guy's dream ability. No more stressing over food, no more worrying about bills or physical exhaustion. Just float, absorb, and become stronger.
But then, I did something dumb. Something really dumb.
I decided to experiment.
I pushed my limits. I tried seeing how far my soul could drift, how far I could go before I hit some invisible wall. I didn't really think it through. I was fascinated, caught up in the thrill of the new. So, one night, I decided to push further, much further than I ever had before.
That's when it happened.
I drowned.
No water, no ocean—just... void. A place with no sky, no ground. A place wrong in every direction. I felt as if the very fabric of reality had unraveled, and I had slipped through a hole into something that shouldn't exist.
I made the mistake of looking up.
Horrors. Things that don't make sense—shapes with mouths that shouldn't exist, limbs that folded into themselves in impossible ways, eyes that whispered things my mind refused to understand. The very sight of them felt like it was crushing my soul. My thoughts fractured, splintered, and for a moment, I wasn't sure if I could hold onto who I was. It was as though they were devouring me piece by piece, turning me into one of them.
One glance almost broke me.
I barely made it back.
When I returned to my body, it was with a sense of relief so intense that I thought I might pass out. My soul felt burned, singed by what I had seen. The very idea of going back to that place made me shudder, but I knew—I knew—it wasn't over. The void wasn't done with me. It wanted something from me. Something I couldn't yet understand.
After that, I didn't leave my body for a long time. For weeks, I stayed firmly in my physical form, only venturing out when necessary, absorbing moonlight to heal, to replenish. But I could feel it… the pull. That terrible, inevitable pull back to the void.
It called me.
One night, it was too strong. I found myself slipping out again, against my better judgment. But this time, I kept my head down. I didn't look up, didn't let my eyes wander to that nightmarish sky.
Instead, I saw the ground.
If you could call it that.
Strange, insect-like creatures, the size of ants, were fighting. One of them looked like a leech made of glass, its organs pulsing and shifting with unnatural fluidity. The other was even worse—a snake-like body with a rat's head, eyes that grew like tumors, squirming and shifting as if alive.
I don't know what happened, but I ended up killing the leech.
The weird part? It latched onto me.
Tried to devour my soul.
Cute.
I've lived two lives—nineteen years in the last one, sixteen here. That little parasite thought it could overpower me? I crushed its will and forced it into submission.
Now it's a part of me. A soul-organ, I guess. A second soul?
It doesn't think. It just obeys. I can summon it, control it, even split it to devour lesser things. It regenerates, too. It doesn't die unless completely annihilated.
I woke up that night drenched in sweat, gasping, my chest tight with the aftereffects of what I'd done. The leech… was still there. Connected. Mine.
I'm still experimenting with it, figuring out what else it can do. How much power it can give me. And how far I can go without losing control of it.
And honestly? I've got hopes now. Big ones.
In my previous life, I wasted time reading webnovels, cultivation stories, brain-melting MTLs. I used to dream of immortality, transcendence, all that. Maybe it was a childish fantasy. Maybe it was just escapism.
But here?
Maybe this time, it won't just be a dream.