The Death of a Transmigrator

"Day five... I have to go outside."

Lu Yuanming had said this to himself for the ninth time.

He had transmigrated—to five years in the future, to the world of 2028.

It was still Earth. Why did he think so?

Because through the room's broken window, he could see English letters all over the street. He recognized the word New York appearing repeatedly among them, along with South Bronx.

That's right. He had transmigrated to the South Bronx, a famous slum district in New York City.

Lu Yuanming had transmigrated into someone else's body. Its original owner was Asian, but the problem was that Lu Yuanming hadn't inherited even the slightest bit of his memories. He had no idea what the man's name was or what kind of social connections he had.

From what Lu Yuanming had learned while exploring the apartment, the body's original owner wasn't very old. He seemed to be around the same age Lu Yuanming had been before transmigrating—somewhere in his twenties.

The body's original owner had been extremely poor. The apartment he lived in was run-down, and that wasn't all: there was barely any furniture in the room. Even though it was already 2028, the man didn't even have a phone. Lu Yuanming had figured out the date by peeking at some signs outside the window. It was simple: another US presidential election was underway, and the signs were plastered with information about the candidates. That was how he learned what year it was.

If poverty were the only problem, he could live with that. After all, he'd been given another chance at life. He wasn't going to complain.

But the real problem was that the body's original owner wasn't just poor—he was a drug addict!

The body was so thin and weak that his arms were covered in needle marks. Lu Yuanming started panting after moving around for only a little while. Looking in the mirror, he saw sunken eyes and a deathly pale complexion. The man looked as good as dead.

Lu Yuanming had practically felt like killing himself.

Fine!

He could put up with a frail body on the verge of death. At worst, he'd rely on sheer willpower to turn the body's life around. After all, he'd transmigrated into it; he himself had never picked up those bad habits. He'd only have to deal with physical withdrawal, not psychological cravings. As long as he stayed strong, he wouldn't fall back into them.

If that were all, Lu Yuanming could have endured it. But there was more!

Ever since he'd transmigrated, people had kept coming to knock on his door. Some were Black, some were White, and others were Asian. None of them looked like good people. Most were scrawny fellow addicts, and some were punks. Worst of all, some of his visitors were clearly gang members—real gangsters.

How could Lu Yuanming be so sure?

He swore on the bullet holes that had just appeared in his front door. What the hell else could those guys be but gangsters?

Before transmigrating, Lu Yuanming had been a college graduate from an ordinary family in Z Country. When would he ever have dealt with gangsters?

As an ordinary person from Z Country, things like drugs, guns, and gangs had always seemed a million miles away—about as distant as arguing politics with people online.

So Lu Yuanming was too scared to go outside or answer anyone at the door. After transmigrating, he'd managed to get by on a few pieces of bread he found in the room. When he got thirsty, he drank tap water. When he got hungry... well, when there was nothing else he could do, he went hungry. He'd lasted like that for four days, but he couldn't hold out any longer. He had to go outside!

"I found six dollars and thirty-five cents in all. I don't know what things cost here, but it should be enough to buy some food. After that... I'll take it one step at a time."

Lu Yuanming had too many things on his mind. He wanted to return to Z Country, especially to Chongqing. He wanted to find out whether he still existed there, whether his parents were still there, and whether he'd traveled to the future or to a parallel world. He wanted answers to all of it.

Before transmigrating, Lu Yuanming had been in a vegetative state. Shortly after graduating at the age of twenty-three, he'd been in a car accident while going to a job interview.

After that, he couldn't move at all. He couldn't even manage to twitch an eyelid. Strangely, though, his mind was still clear. He could hear people talking around him and feel his own body, but he couldn't make it move. According to the doctors' explanation to his parents and younger sister, all his symptoms indicated that he was in a vegetative state, and there was no guarantee he'd ever wake up.

Lu Yuanming had endured that torment for more than half a year. Trapped in darkness, he stayed there until a beam of light appeared before him. Instinctively, he "rushed" toward it, and then he transmigrated into the body of this Asian man in America.

More astonishingly, every seventy-two hours, he could transmigrate back. But when he did, he was still trapped in that vegetative body. His circumstances were no different from being dead... no, being trapped in darkness, able to hear the sounds around him but nothing else, was even more terrifying than death!

(There are so many mysteries. Why can I transmigrate? And why did I end up in the future...? Whatever. First I need to keep this body alive, then go back to Chongqing in Z Country and take a look!)

Lu Yuanming was thinking about his long-term plans, but right now, he had to face the prospect of going outside... In a city and neighborhood rife with gangs, drug dealers, robbers, and frequent shootings, it was no less than stepping onto a battlefield.

He pressed his ear to the door and listened for any sounds outside. Only after making sure there was nothing for at least several minutes did he carefully open the door and slowly slip out.

Beyond the door was a shabby apartment hallway. The wooden floor creaked beneath his feet, and the hallway was dim. There was one light on each floor, all old-fashioned yellow bulbs. Maybe they'd gone unrepaired for too long; the lights on many floors kept flickering.

Seeing that made Lu Yuanming feel uneasy. This old apartment building looked exactly like the sort of place where things went wrong in a horror movie about ghosts and curses.

But he was starving, and he couldn't worry about that now. With no one in the hallway, he hurried toward the exit on the first floor.

Just as Lu Yuanming reached the apartment building's entrance, he suddenly sensed someone watching him from behind. It was the strange, prickly feeling of being watched. He instinctively turned around, only to see a pitch-black hallway. Starting from the fourth floor, where he'd come down, every light had gone out. Apart from the light streaming in from outside behind him, all he could see was a deep, endless darkness, like the entrance to hell.

Lu Yuanming trembled all over. He couldn't see through the darkness, but he felt certain something was watching him from within it... Maybe not something human!

Driven by the instinct to survive, Lu Yuanming started running for the exit. The unknown terror left his mind completely blank, and he even screamed without meaning to. But just as he stepped outside the building, about to rush into the sunlight, a flowerpot dropped straight down from above and struck him squarely on the head.

With a sharp crash, Lu Yuanming's head split open and he was knocked to the ground. The intense dizziness nearly made him pass out on the spot.

But perhaps his experience of being hit by a car and ending up in a vegetative state had made him more resistant to dizziness. Or perhaps the inexplicable terror behind him was driving him onward. Whatever the reason, he didn't pass out. Instead, he lay on the ground and inched toward the sunlight outside, moving one finger at a time.

From the corner of his eye, Lu Yuanming could see inside the apartment building. In a daze, he seemed to see darkness surging toward him. The darkness inside the building had turned into something like liquid, rushing toward him at incredible speed.

He couldn't let that darkness touch him!

He knew it instinctively. If the darkness touched him, he might suffer a torment ten thousand times worse than death or becoming a vegetable!

Summoning the last of his strength, Lu Yuanming crawled toward the sunlight, moving himself along with his fingers. There wasn't even half a meter between him and safety, yet he crawled until his fingernails had peeled back, leaving his hands covered in blood. Finally, with the darkness less than a meter behind him, he pushed his head into the sunlight. At that instant, a warm sensation spread from the top of his head through his body, and the freezing feeling that had risen from deep inside him, raising goosebumps all over, vanished.

(I'm alive...)

Just as Lu Yuanming finally let out a breath of relief, a window on the apartment building's upper floor opened. A pair of hands covered in growths lifted a broken television and threw it out. It struck Lu Yuanming squarely on the head, and with a loud crash, his head was smashed to pieces.

Then... from some strange perspective, Lu Yuanming watched his own shattered corpse. He seemed to be floating five or six meters above it, looking down. He thought he should be afraid, terrified, angry, or excited, but he felt nothing at all. He couldn't even think. Lu Yuanming felt the "I" that made him who he was beginning to fade away...

Then, in the next instant—or perhaps in a state where he couldn't even sense time—a vast, tremendous force yanked him violently "downward"!

Lu Yuanming saw an enormous spiral, something like a tornado or a typhoon. From some higher vantage point, he saw the whole thing, with the Earth at the heart of the colossal spiral storm. He was swept into it, dragged downward through darkness, chaos, and the unknown. He fell from above, traveling an unknowable distance.

Then Lu Yuanming saw the land: a boundless stretch of black-gray earth. In the far distance loomed something larger than the stars, though he couldn't make it out clearly. Below him, he was falling toward a burning, shattered New York City...

At that moment, Lu Yuanming suddenly understood.

He was dead.

This was the world people entered after death!