The Impossible Dawn

The impact never came. The sensation of falling simply… dissolved. Not into blackness, but into a perfect, starless void. The screaming wind that had clawed at his ears winked out, replaced by an absolute silence—a quiet so deep it became a pressure, like a fist closing around him from every side.

My body… it’s gone. The thought flickered through him, disjointed and pale, the way a half-forgotten dream does just before waking. He had no eyes to see, no tongue to speak, no lungs to heave panic into his throat. Even the name “Kael,” with its ledger of failures and its final, desperate act, seemed like a story told about someone else. He was a single point of awareness—no mass, no gravity, a lone bead of thought sliding across an infinite black sheet. A thread pulled loose from the grand tapestry of existence, adrift and alone.

Time wasn’t a thing here. He couldn’t say if an eternity had passed or if he was still suspended in the instant after the jump, his body never quite hitting the pavement. There was no heartbeat, no breath, no hunger or ache. He existed in this state of pure, cold nullity, a ghost without memory, a candle snuffed but somehow still faintly warm at the wick.

Then something changed.

A warmth, slow and tentative, began to creep into the void, pressing back the oppressive cold the way the first hint of dawn nudges at the horizon. It wasn’t light—there was nothing to see—but a pressure with a different flavor. Not the crushing silence, but something like a pulse.

Then came a sound. Faint at first, almost imagined. A rhythmic thrumming from an impossible distance, like the echo of a drum through cavern walls.

Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

The beat of a colossal, cosmic heart.

Something ancient, vast, and utterly incomprehensible had found him. It caught the lonely thread of his being and began to weave him back into existence. Not a repair—he sensed that immediately—but a reforging, as if the old material had been melted down to pour into a new mold. He could feel the frayed, rotten ends of his old life—the crushing debt, the dull ache of heartbreak, the final, bitter taste of despair—being meticulously trimmed away and discarded like corroded wire. The process was clinical, almost indifferent, yet painstaking.

What remained was his core: a sharp, cynical realism forged by hardship; a quiet, deeply buried empathy he’d tried to drown under sarcasm and anger; and a profound, bone-deep exhaustion with lies.

The weaving grew faster. The warmth intensified, like the heat of a forge. The cosmic heartbeat swelled louder, until it wasn’t distant anymore. It was inside him. It was him.

A gasp, ragged and agonizingly real, tore through a throat he hadn’t possessed moments before. Air—raw and tasting of damp earth and woodsmoke—flooded lungs that burned as if they’d never been used. He tried to inhale again and doubled over, coughing violently, his body convulsing on a hard, uneven surface. The world slammed back into him with sensory violence so total it almost knocked him unconscious.

Cold drizzle spattered his face. The sting of raindrops. The scrape of rough cobblestones digging into his palms. His knuckles white as he clawed at the ground. He rolled onto his side, retching, gulping in the smell of wet stone and rust and distant hearthfire.

He pushed himself upright, every muscle screaming. Looked down. Same worn-out jeans, same thin, soaked jacket. His boots left muddy imprints on the uneven stones.

How?

The rooftop was gone. The sprawling cityscape of his old life was gone. Instead he crouched in a narrow, grimy alleyway, hemmed in by timber-framed buildings leaning against each other like tired old drunks. The walls were patched with dark moss and crooked signs painted in unfamiliar scripts. No electric lights, no neon glow—just the flickering, oily orange of a single lantern casting long, writhing shadows across the wet stones.

He staggered to his feet, spine hunched against the drizzle, and tilted his head back. The smog-choked sky of his city had vanished. In its place stretched a canvas of the deepest, clearest indigo he had ever seen.

And hanging in it were two moons.

One was a brilliant silver-white orb, its light crisp and cold, casting razor-sharp edges onto the rooftops. Beside it, like a shy companion, floated a smaller sapphire-blue moon whose glow felt softer, dreamlike. Their combined light turned the wet stones of the alley into ribbons of pale fire.

Kael’s mind, which had been scrambling to process pain and cold, simply screeched to a halt. The sight was so fundamentally, cosmically wrong that his brain refused to process it.

A dream, his inner cynic supplied automatically.

It has to be. I’m in a coma, my brain firing off its last desperate fantasies. Oxygen deprivation during the fall. A dying hallucination.

He dug his nails into the back of his hand and pinched hard. The flare of sharp, undeniable pain shot up his arm like a signal flare.

Alive. I’m alive. Somehow.

He stumbled out of the alley and onto a wider street, blinking like a newborn animal. The street opened up into a crooked thoroughfare paved in stone, lined with stalls and timbered façades, dripping with banners of faded color. People ambled past in worn leather and simple cloth—and in gleaming steel armor, dented and scarred from actual use.

A burly man with a braided beard and a heavy axe slung over one shoulder laughed with a woman balancing a basket of faintly glowing mushrooms. A city guard in a dented breastplate leaned against a wall, a longsword at his hip, his expression one of bored professionalism. A trio of children darted past, trailing a carved wooden toy that skittered across the stones under its own power.

No cars. No smartphones. No murmur of engines. Just voices, clatter of boots, and the distant, rhythmic clang… clang… clang of a blacksmith’s hammer ringing through the air. A whiff of iron and charcoal followed each blow.

Kael turned slowly, trying to take in the impossible panorama. He caught a glimpse of a sign above a shop door—hand-painted, with looping letters he couldn’t read but which glowed faintly at the edges. He smelled baking bread so rich and yeasty his empty stomach cramped with a sudden, wild hunger.

Okay. So, not a coma. An incredibly elaborate, multi-million-dollar prank? A theme park? A psychotic break? Any of those made more sense than this.

And yet… the air was too crisp and clean, free of the exhaust fumes he’d breathed his whole life. Even the wet stones smelled of rain rather than engine oil. His breath plumed faintly in the cool night. The cold bit his fingers. Every sensation sharpened to a high-resolution reality he couldn’t dismiss.

A ridiculous, absurd word from all those comics and web novels he used to read to escape his grey life popped into his head:

Isekai.

The sheer, cosmic irony of it hit like a body blow. He had stepped off a rooftop looking for a quick, final ending. Instead, it seemed, he’d stumbled into a new beginning.

He thought of the cosmic heartbeat again, the impossible warmth. Was this some kind of judgment? A second chance? Or simply the cruelest joke the universe could play—yank him back from oblivion only to dump him into a fever dream with two moons and no instruction manual. 

If yes, then at least give me a chance to choose my cheat max level power.

Broken, lost, and utterly alone in a world that had no right to exist, Kael drew a shaky breath. The night air burned cold in his lungs but it was real. More real than anything had been in years.

He flexed his fingers, felt the weight of his sodden jacket, and looked down the street, where the flicker of lanterns and the smell of bread promised at least the idea of shelter. The cobblestones were uneven but solid under his boots. His stomach growled. A nearby tavern door swung open and spilled warm light and laughter into the night. He felt, against his own will, a tiny spark of curiosity—faint but undeniable—flare under the exhaustion.

With no plan, no map, no idea of how or why, the man who had been Kael took his first hesitant step onto the damp cobblestone streets of a city he would soon come to know as Ashvale.