The first thing I noticed when I came to was the emptiness. No. That was a lie. The first thing I noticed was the pain. It started from the center of my being and spread out from there to the rest of my body. It was as if something deep inside me, something important, had been ripped out. No. That wasn’t the right word. Shattered. That was more fitting. It felt as if something vital to my very being had been shattered beyond repair, leaving an empty void in its place.

The second thing I noticed, or third rather, was how heavy my body felt. It was as if someone had filled my veins with lead, leaving me slow and sluggish. Even the slightest movement required great effort and left me tired. I even found it difficult to open my eyes, let alone lift up my head. As for getting up and exploring… Wherever I was, that was out of the question.

When I managed to open my eyes, after several minutes of effort, I looked around. The lighting in this place was dim, but bright enough for me to see by. I found myself looking up at a canopy made from blue silk. It seemed familiar, though I couldn’t quite remember why. Wherever I was, it wasn’t my room back at Vanguard Tower, the home and headquarters of the Vanguard Guild. I knew this because I didn’t have a canopy bed.

Nor was I in the infirmary of Vanguard Tower. I didn’t smell the sharp scent of antiseptic, nor did I hear the beeping of the various machines the infirmary staff used to monitor their patients’ condition. Instead, I smelled some kind of medicinal incense, one enchanted to promote the body’s natural healing process based on the mana I sensed. I heard nothing except for the sound of my own breathing.

My mouth felt dry and tasted foul. I didn’t know how long I had been unconscious, but it was long enough for me to develop a serious case of morning breath. I wriggled around, just enough to get a sense of what I was laying on. It was a bed, that much was obvious, though it felt like a cloud. Like the canopy, my blankets and bedsheets were silk; high quality silk, by the feel of it.

It was clear that whoever brought me here had a lot of money. If it wasn’t the Vanguard Guild, then perhaps it was one of the other major hunter guilds. However, if that was the case, why didn’t they just send me back to the Vanguard Guild? To imprison me? That didn’t seem right.

The Vanguard Guild was one of the top ten hunter guilds in the entire world. No one would risk starting a conflict with them by kidnapping an S-rank hunter like myself. Besides, this place was too fancy for a prison.

After mustering what little strength I had, I tried to lift my head to take a better look at my surroundings. When that failed, I looked left and right instead. The curtains of this canopy bed, also made from blue silk, were all drawn. They were thick enough that I couldn’t see beyond them. Great.

Again, a strange sense of familiarity struck me. I knew this place, I had been here before, but I couldn’t quite remember when or how. No matter how hard I wracked my brain, I couldn’t remember. It was maddening, like an itch that I couldn’t quite scratch. I tried to think back to before… Well, to before whatever happened that left me in this state.

The moment I tried, my head exploded with pain. So much so that I couldn’t think for several seconds. My vision dimmed as my grasp on consciousness slipped. I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth as I waited for the pain to pass. Little by little, it faded away until nothing but a dull ache remained. I took deep, even breaths before I opened my eyes again.

Despite the pain, thinking back to before I ended up in this place yielded results. A series of blurry memories surfaced from the depths of my mind. I remembered entering the Gate with my team, the one with a Demon Lord. After that, things get a little jumbled. I remembered fighting through hordes of demons in a hellish landscape, before entering a dark and foreboding castle. After that, nothing is clear until the fight with the Demon Lord himself.

My team and I fought him in his throne room. The Demon Lord was a beefy fucker that stood over a dozen feet tall. He wore black spiky armor, a horned helmet, and wielded an over-sized mace.

The fight itself was a chaotic mess. We destroyed most of the throne room. I remembered most of my team going down, though I didn’t know if they just fell unconscious or died. I couldn’t check, since I was too busy trying not to die. Despite that… We won? I think we won. It was difficult to tell.

Francis Marlowe, my team’s resident wizard and the only one still standing besides myself, attacked the Demon Lord with a powerful spell. That gave me the opening I needed to deal the killing blow. However, the Demon Lord retaliated, hitting me square in the chest with his mace.

The blow launched me across the throne room. I felt my ribs shatter and my organs burst. After that… I didn’t remember what happened after that. I was still flying through the air when my memories cut out. No matter what happened, I couldn’t recall anything beyond that point. After that, I woke up in this place.

An icy hand gripped my heart as one possibility came to mind. What if… What if the Demon Lord’s final attack killed me? As an S-rank hunter, I was far stronger than the average human. In fact, I was pretty sure I could survive a nuke. Granted, I wouldn’t be in good condition afterwards, but still. However, a Demon Lord was powerful enough to level entire cities with ease. A blow from one was far more powerful than a nuke.

If that was the case, if I died after taking a blow from a Demon Lord head on, then where was I? Perhaps this was the afterlife. However, it felt too painful for that. Had I transmigrated? It wouldn’t be the first time. If so, whose body was this? It wasn’t mine. At least, I didn’t think it was. When I previously transmigrated, I reincarnated into a new body on Earth with the memories of my past life intact. This felt different from that.

Like my current body, or perhaps my old body, this body belonged to an adult man and not a baby. I could tell that much at least. So, if I died and transmigrated, a big if, then I somehow ended up in someone else’s body. God, I hoped not. Or, if I had, I hoped I ended up with the memories of this previous body’s owner. Otherwise, I knew I was in for a rough time.

Even if I hadn’t died and transmigrated, the fight with the Demon Lord had crippled me. The emptiness inside of me was from the lack of my mana core. I realized that now. That’s why I felt so weak. I could still sense and control mana to a limited degree, an ability all Awakened shared, but I could no longer produce any or circulate it throughout my body.

Fuck.

Without a mana core, I couldn’t cultivate or use any of my techniques. In my current state, I was little better than a regular human. Perhaps I could find a way to repair my mana core, but I doubted it. A shattered mana core was a crippling injury. I supposed I could form a magic circle and become a wizard, but I recoiled at the idea.

From the memories of my first life, I knew that I had little talent when it came to magic. In other words, I was shit at being a wizard. Back then, before I accepted that fact, I tried everything I could to fix it. Hell, that was what led to my first death. I tried to increase my talent by force and died for it.

Maybe that’s what happened to the original owner of this body, assuming I transmigrated. What if he was also a wizard without any talent for magic and tried to increase his talent by force? A wry smile spread across my face. If so, that would be one hell of a coincidence. Perhaps that was why I ended up in this body in the first place. We were kindred spirits.

Ugh, thinking about all of this gave me a headache. Right now, I had a lot of speculation and little concrete information. I needed to figure out what was going on, where I was, and how I ended up here. That was my first order of business. Afterwards, I would be able to figure out where to go from here.

I was crippled, but that didn’t mean I planned on giving up. This wasn’t the first time I died and ended up all alone in a strange place. No matter what, I would not only survive, but thrive. I did it before, and I could do it again.

A wave of exhaustion washed over me and darkness encroached upon my vision. Okay, nevermind. My first order of business was resting and recovering. Then I would figure out my current situation and decide where to go from there. All the resolve in the world couldn’t help me if I couldn’t even lift a hand.

I stopped fighting to stay awake and let the darkness take me.