Transmigration and Sudden Death

Wu Muming woke from the cold.

One moment, he had been amid the blaze of an exploding laboratory; the next, he was awakened by freezing cold.

Just like every male protagonist at the beginning of a story, he woke up in an orphanage.

Except he had it even worse.

He woke up in the orphanage storeroom.

Aside from the muddy floor and dust drifting through the air, his only companions were moldy wooden barrels and a mop growing black fungus.

Wu Muming stiffly tried to move his fingers. Pain, as though he had been run through a meat grinder, spread from the depths of his soul throughout his body, making him shudder. A great gulp of air thick with mold and dust rushed into his lungs. Wu Muming coughed as he greedily breathed, feeling warmth gradually return to his body.

Along with his ragged breathing and violent coughing came countless fragmented memories flooding into his mind.

Wu Muming had been a promising young man from the twenty-first century. While staying up late to conduct an experiment, he had the misfortune of encountering an explosion in the laboratory upstairs.

He had not died in the explosion, but it had collapsed the floor, sending a one-ton ultra-low-temperature freezer crashing down from above.

Wu Muming died on the spot.

It did not even hurt.

He had died quite peacefully.

Then he woke up in this storeroom.

Interestingly, this body was also named Wu Muming. His English name was Tierra Wu, and like him, he had been born on June 28, 1980. He had the same parents and the same appearance.

The only difference was that this Wu Muming's parents had immigrated to the United Kingdom during the immigration wave of the 1980s, carrying impractical dreams of a foreign land.

A week after their plane landed, they were shot to death in a dark alley beside a theater.

Tragic. Truly tragic.

This Tierra had then been sent straight to an orphanage and had died of hypothermia during the night an hour ago.

Discrimination against Chinese people had still been quite severe in the 1980s.

It showed itself everywhere: schools, workplaces, government offices, restaurants—and, of course, orphanages.

Sometimes, discrimination among children was even more vicious and blatant.

Among a group of blond, blue-eyed orphans, you were the only one with black hair and black eyes. If they did not bully you, who would they bully?

It began with small things: having his food stolen, having his toys stolen. Then they picked fights with him, shoved and beat him. Finally, they had played a prank by dousing him in cold water and locking him in the storeroom.

Tierra Wu, whose health had already been poor, had died of hypothermia that night.

After lying on the floor for a while to recover, Tierra slowly sat up. He placed his right hand on his left wrist and silently counted to sixty.

"My heartbeat is fine."

Tierra had majored in biology and pharmaceuticals in college in his previous life. Though he had not been a proper medical student, he still knew some basic medical methods.

"Hm?" Only after checking his pulse did Tierra notice a ring on the ring finger of his left hand, one that clearly did not fit his current identity. "This is..."

There were no windows in the storeroom, the door was shut tight, and it was already lights-out. The surroundings were pitch-black, so Tierra could only feel around with his right hand.

The ring felt as though it had been carved from some kind of bone.

It was a size too large for his ring finger. Its surface was uneven, seemingly carved with some sort of pattern. Dense markings covered the entire ring.

In the darkness, a person's other senses became sharper.

Only after feeling over it again and again did Tierra barely make out the patterns that he normally would never have noticed. They seemed to be extremely distorted English words.

"Th... mer... el... eas... gol... la... ei... lin..."

Tierra tried to pronounce the words based on the gaps between the markings and English pronunciation.

The moment the final syllable left his mouth, Tierra vanished from the storeroom as if erased by an eraser.

The next instant, light flashed before his eyes, and he appeared in a dim library.

"Urgh—"

Although Tierra's stomach was completely empty, he could not help dry-heaving. He felt as sick as if he had ridden a roller coaster for five straight hours.

Tierra lay weakly on the ground like a dead dog. Only after the sensation faded slightly did he roll over and lie on his back, facing upward.

What Tierra saw was a vast ceiling far above him. Beneath it were neatly constructed stone walls, each ring growing smaller than the last. Even the lowest level, where Tierra stood, covered nearly five hundred square meters. It was an inverted pyramid-shaped structure, with at least a thousand levels by rough estimate. Each level was only about half a person's height and hollowed out, crammed haphazardly with all kinds of books and scrolls.

After recovering a little strength, Tierra sat up. Only then did he see a crude wooden table standing right beside him, piled with rolls of parchment and a desk lamp made of strange stones.

Tierra slowly crawled toward the table and dropped heavily into the wooden chair in front of it.

The parchment on the table was piled in complete disorder. Several sheets had even been torn apart and crumpled into balls.

Tierra casually picked up a sheet of parchment. It was densely covered in twisted writing, somewhat like English but not quite. After staring at it for a while, Tierra felt dizzy and lightheaded.

Yet when his finger touched the words, a shudder-inducing stream of information poured into his mind.

"...Among all universes and all living beings, apart from the gods and descendants personally bred by the Supreme Mother Goddess, no species of life can compare to..."

Tierra snatched his hand away in fright.

Then he reached out to touch another parchment with his finger.

"...Peel a Manli Fruit knocked down by a thunderstorm, dry it in the sun, grind it up, and take two spoonfuls..."

Tierra stared at the twisted writing.

He was certain that he had never seen these words before, yet whenever his fingers touched them, the knowledge represented by those words automatically flooded into his mind.

After looking through several parchments, Tierra vaguely formed an unpleasant suspicion. With a grim expression, he walked toward the nearest stone alcove.

Tierra carefully ran his hand along the spines of the books. One title after another, each brimming with a sense of blasphemy and evil, entered his mind.

The largest and thickest one... the "Necronomicon."

A thinner one, like an ordinary school textbook... the "Book of Eibon."

A tall, narrow one wrapped in an unknown hard cover... the "R'lyeh Text."

A thin volume stitched together with cotton thread like an ancient Chinese book... "Profound Lord's Seven Chapters..."

Whoosh. The ancient book flew from the shelf and fell before Tierra. Its pages turned by themselves without any wind, opening before him.

At that moment, Tierra had never found Chinese characters so terrifying and revolting.

He recognized every character on those pages. The instant his gaze met the two pages of Chinese text, every hair on his body stood on end. It was as though incomprehensible knowledge had been forcibly crammed into his soul. Chaotic whispers, screams, and incomprehensible images filled his mind.

Goosebumps rose across his body one after another, growing larger and larger until they crowded together into translucent, viscous pustules.