Chapter 1: The Dying Man |
“Did you remember everything I told you?”
Lost in a daze, Shade finally snapped back to reality, looking around with confusion. The last thing he remembered was helping a friend with funeral arrangements. Then, in the next instant, he was here.
This was a bedroom—but certainly not a bedroom from the 21st century. The dim, yellowish light filled the room with a faint warmth. The slightly worn wooden floor was clean, but the walls were discolored with age. In one corner, a stack of books was piled precariously, as if ready to topple at any moment. Next to the pile, a bookshelf held various items like metal kettles and photo frames.
The photos were all black and white.
The walls bore not just oil paintings but also two metal pipes. On closer inspection, the clamps connecting the pipes were rusted, and one thinner pipe branched off near the desk. The desk, made of brown wood, was cluttered with papers. Its drawers were half-open, revealing more documents.
A brass desk lamp connected to one of the pipes was still glowing. Its design, with a heavy, trumpet-like shade, was quite unusual.
“Hmm? Not an electric lamp? A gas lamp?”
It was hard to tell just by looking, but with the pipes running along the walls and connected to wall-mounted lamps, it certainly wasn’t electric. The warm yellow glow wasn’t very bright, illuminating only the desk area, but it filled Shade with an inexplicable warmth.
By this light, he noticed the oil paintings on the walls, the black-and-white photos on the desk, and the unfolded newspaper lying in the shadows on the floor. Though he couldn’t read the text, the letters weren’t Chinese characters—they were alphabets.
The air carried a faintly decayed smell, reminiscent of a funeral home. Shade recognized it—it was the same smell he had been surrounded by just moments ago while assisting his deceased friend.
“Did you remember everything I told you?”
The voice rang out again, snapping Shade out of his stupor. For the first time, he became fully conscious. Someone was gripping his right wrist tightly. As his mind and body synchronized, he looked down.
He was standing beside the bed in what appeared to be a 19th-century gentleman’s bedroom. The bed was a four-poster type, but only three sides had curtains. Both the bed frame and the visible parts of the headboard glinted under the bedside gas lamp.
The lamp itself was intricately designed, shaped like a cherub holding up the light. Shade found himself momentarily captivated by its craftsmanship.
The hand gripping him belonged to the man lying on the bed. Likely the owner of the bedroom, this middle-aged man wore a dark checkered pajama set. Only his head and one emaciated hand protruded from under the blanket.
The man had a distinct Caucasian face, with sunken eyes and sagging cheeks. His hand, gripping Shade’s wrist, was alarmingly skeletal. He looked like someone on the verge of starving to death. Shade even felt that if he spoke too loudly, he might need to plead with the man not to die.
Shade didn’t know anything about the situation and needed answers from this man.
“So... did I just transmigrate?”
This thought came to him as he began piecing together the situation.
At least the man on the bed, though frail, showed no signs of corpse spots. Otherwise, Shade would’ve been far more concerned about his current predicament.
“Did you remember everything I told you?”
The weak man on the bed asked for the third time, his brown eyes deeply sunken yet fixed intently on Shade. Though Shade couldn’t understand why he’d been thrown into this unfamiliar world, he realized that his best course of action was to play along—at least until he understood his situation well enough to plan his next steps.
He opened his mouth to reply but quickly realized that the man wasn’t speaking Chinese—or any other language Shade knew. Yet, somehow, he could understand the words. He tried to respond in the same language but discovered, with some embarrassment, that he could understand but not speak it.
“Seriously? I can understand but not speak?”
A ringing noise filled his ears, and his back itched nervously. Being unable to communicate in this foreign world was a worst-case scenario he hadn’t foreseen.
The buzzing in his head wasn’t from his nerves. Suddenly, he realized it was a voice. A woman’s voice, whispering in his mind:
“Sixth Epoch, Universal Calendar Year 1853, Summer, Day of the Silver Moon’s Radiance. You’ve arrived in this shadowed world. You know you need an identity, so you must inherit everything tied to this foreign body. Your first task is to prove you can integrate into this world.”
“A sys...” His instinctive thought was that this might be a system, but he quickly dismissed the idea.
The woman’s voice was elegant and soothing, like a poem whispered in reverence, enchanting yet strange. However, the language she used was neither Chinese nor the one spoken by the frail man. It was older, deeper—like an ancient breeze passing through the veil of time to reach the present. Even understanding this language felt like touching something divine and mysterious.
Shade felt a nauseating pressure in his head, as if the very language carried a supernatural force.
“This must be the local language. And the voice in my head isn’t a system—it’s something that was already part of this body.”
Shade came to this conclusion, his pupils narrowing slightly as his mind raced to a darker realization:
“This new world—this Victorian-esque world of steam and gas—is one filled with the extraordinary and the uncanny!”
He wasn’t the type to resist reality. If transmigration was possible, then supernatural phenomena seemed no less plausible. His priority now was to figure out his current situation and answer the man’s question to uncover his identity.
Focusing his thoughts, Shade mentally addressed the voice:
“Whoever you are, listen carefully. I want to accept everything about this body, but I lack its memories and linguistic abilities.”
“Now, you have them.”
It felt as if a brick had been shoved into his skull and stirred maliciously. The fact that he didn’t pass out was nothing short of a miracle.
Shade didn’t gain the body’s original memories but instead received knowledge—knowledge of “Drarian, the official language of the Northern Kingdoms.” It was like having a translation device in his mind, though he hadn’t fully assimilated it. He wasn’t yet familiar with slang, idioms, religious references, or cultural nuances.
“I apologize, sir. I’m feeling unwell. Could you please repeat what you wanted me to remember?”
Using his newfound knowledge, Shade managed to translate his thoughts into halting Drarian and spoke with an intentional awkwardness. The frail man gripping his wrist unexpectedly tightened his hold. For someone so thin, his strength was surprising.
“You’re still the same—always slow on the uptake... Fine, I’ll say it again.”
Apparently, the body’s original owner wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, and Shade’s stumbling response hadn’t raised suspicion.
“Shade...”
The pronunciation was strikingly similar to his own name.
“I’m about to die. I’ve known this for three months. That’s why I picked you—a vagabond—to take my place. I changed your life, gave you a new name, taught you basic literacy, and shared some common knowledge. After my death, you will inherit everything: my detective agency, all my possessions. But you must do one thing for me—a very simple thing.”
Although his tone was weak, the man’s sunken eyes, fierce as a dying wolf’s, made Shade’s heart tremble. He avoided meeting the man’s gaze, not out of fear, but to match the personality of the body’s original owner.
“Take over my detective agency. Do whatever you want with it, but keep it running. On September 5th, 1853—three months from now—you will receive a letter. Retrieve it and burn it. That is the price for inheriting everything I leave you.”
The man’s hand gripped Shade’s wrist tightly, despite his feigned struggle to appear frightened. The man’s strength was unnervingly strong for someone so frail.
“This is my only request, Shade Hamilton, from me, Sparrow Hamilton.”
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