Transmigration
[I wanted to be the strongest in the world.]
Out of habit, my gaze drifted sideways. In the display case set against one wall of the room, squarely in my line of sight, a mixed martial arts championship belt glinted under the light.
It was the only object left that bore witness to the most brilliant days of my life.
That's right. I used to be an MMA fighter — and the important part is that the verb there is past tense.
What had begun as a chance encounter with the sport turned into win after win, until at last I held the lightweight championship belt in my grasp. My parents, who had finally thrown up both hands at my stubbornness and reluctantly given me their blessing, lived in constant fear of seeing me hurt. They never stopped trying to talk me into quitting, but on that day, they were beside themselves with joy.
I thought I was the protagonist of the world.
Right up until the accident.
VROOOM—!!
It was, without question, an accident. An SUV driven by a man in his seventies suddenly accelerated and plowed into me as I walked along the sidewalk. I heard later that he claimed it was sudden unintended acceleration, or some such excuse?
Had I recognized that liar's charge a moment sooner, I might have dodged it somehow. But I happened to be on the phone at the time, and the only thing I could manage was to throw every ounce of strength I had into a jump right before the vehicle struck me. Borrowing the words of a witness, it apparently looked like I was flying through the sky?
That jump saved my life. It did not save my dream.
"You should count yourself lucky it ended at this. Your athletic reflexes are what saved your life. If you hadn't jumped, odds are you would have died on the spot."
The reason the doctor in his white coat could stand there smiling as he said that to me, freshly awake, was that half my body had stopped obeying me — my lower half no longer answered my commands. Had my legs still done as they were told the way they used to, his face would have come away with at least one mark on it. That's how desperate I felt — desperate enough to want to throw a punch at a doctor whose graying hair made him look nearly elderly.
After the accident, I became a leech who whiled away the hours glancing at that display case and chewing on old memories.
No — scratch that. A pants-shitter?
For all I know, the caregiver my parents hired called me "the pants-shitter" when she gossiped with her friends. And so the life went on: a life in which I couldn't even manage my own bodily functions, a life that hardly counted as living.
"Haaah..."
The sigh escaped me of its own accord.
I had dreams too. To step onto the world stage and raise a championship belt of my own! My striking was competitive enough in its own right, but it was my ground game that people said could hold its own even at the highest level. At the very least, in the lightweight division, I wanted to be the strongest in the world.
That was why I — a man with no need to fight for his bread — had shaken off my parents' objections and walked into a gym in the first place.
My parents counted my survival a blessing. I did not. What meaning was there in a life lived on empty, with the dream torn out of it? But whenever I pictured the grief it would put my parents through, suicide dropped itself off the list of options.
So naturally, I buried myself in one escape after another. I tried all kinds of movies, dramas, and novels, but nothing held my interest for long. They all flowed along a track already laid down, leaving no room for me to step in and change a thing.
And in the middle of it all, I found the thing that interested me most: wuxia games.
There, and only there, I could become the greatest under heaven whenever I pleased.
"The Greatest Under Heaven!"
What a title to make a heart race. It was the one every man wished he could wear at least once in his life — and the very reason my heart had pounded for fighting in the first place.
My favorite feature in those wuxia games was the one called Rebirth. I even caught myself daydreaming that if such a rebirth were real, it might just cure this godforsaken paralysis of mine.
Of course, wuxia games had their flaws. There were precious few of them to begin with, and the freedom was lacking — follow the script, or never see the ending.
That was why the next thing I turned my eye to was the Three Kingdoms, which scratched a similar itch.
"Zhuge Yang? Not even Liang... and look at the sorry state of this translation..."
There were minor translation issues, sure, but in the Three Kingdoms games I seized all under heaven. What satisfied me was the freedom. Even playing the same game, my choices produced different results every single run, and I loved that.
In my favorite title of the series, I usually started out with mediocre stats and raised a general to the very peak of martial power. I'd done plenty of other novelty runs too, but I suppose the playthrough that mirrored my own dream was the one that pulled at me hardest.
Somewhere in the middle of all that escapism, I suddenly felt how little time I had left. My body kept growing heavier, and a numb tingling was creeping into my upper body now as well. Something was very, very wrong.
Sure enough, my instincts were right on the money. The verdict came back: terminal.
My parents grieved. I took it calmly. What would be the point of a long life in a body like this — wouldn't that just be more suffering?
I played one last game. A single playthrough took a few days at the quickest, but since this was the final one, I challenged myself to something different. I'd run countless themed playthroughs over the years, yet for the finale I attempted the one thing I had never done.
Collect every treasure in the game!
For that, I did make use of a little program called the Treasure Locator. You can't collect treasures — or skip them — if you don't know where they are, now can you?
Not all treasures were created equal. Named treasures like the Sky-Piercing Halberd existed only as a single unique copy, while common ones like Secret Manuals could number a hundred identical copies apiece. My goal was to gather every last one of them.
Because I'd once come across a post like this in a gaming community:
A world first. I had no way of knowing whether it would truly count. But as long as I was satisfied, wasn't that enough?
How long had I been buried in the game? My body was stiffening by the day. By the time moving the mouse had become a struggle and my vision was starting to blur, I had finally succeeded in collecting every treasure. I checked the Treasure Locator and confirmed that the owner of every one of its thousands of registered treasures had been changed to "Ma Won" — my name, and the name I went by inside the Three Kingdoms game.
"A world first!"
It was a playthrough anyone could manage, given enough time. With an editor, it would have been over far sooner. But I liked that I'd pulled it off using nothing but the Treasure Locator.
Right then, an unfamiliar message popped up on my monitor. With my vision dimming by the second, the last thing I saw was the text blinking on the screen. I tried to call the caregiver over to ask about it, but no sound left my throat. In that instant, I felt my heart lurch violently. It began to ache, deep and dull.
That was my final memory.
In this world.
On a shabby back street, two middle-aged men clicked their tongues as they watched children running wild through the streets.
"Aigoo, there they go again."
"Wicked little brats, the lot of them. And poor little Won being a bit slow in the head and all... tsk tsk."
Where their eyes were pointed, a big kid in a tattered, worn-through gray outfit was bolting down the street, gasping for breath, three other children hot on his heels. Watching the pack thunder off into an alley, the two men carried on talking.
"You've lived in this village all along, so you'd know. How long has the Won boy been like that?"
"Ever since the first time I laid eyes on him, I'd say. He was all right while his parents were still raising him, but there's no one to look after him now..."
"Ugh, don't even bring up that boy's parents. Beasts would treat their own better."
I came to.
One moment I had been leaning back in my plush recliner, playing games in my room. The next, I opened my eyes to find myself standing in an alley, crumbling walls stretching away on either side of me.
What is this? Why am I suddenly standing outside?
A warm breeze brushed against my skin. I'd lived indoors, but on the rare outings for my hospital visits, the sky had always hung vaguely dulled by fine dust. Today it was clear beyond compare.
My musings got no further.
"Hey, you thieving bastard!"
With that shout, three kids dressed in clothes straight out of some ancient Chinese drama surrounded me and started swinging.
"Wh-what the—?"
I panicked. Former fighter or not, I had spent years paralyzed from the waist down, every ounce of muscle wasted away — and these kids were beating me with utter ruthlessness! They looked to be all of ten years old, granted, but their hands were heavy. Dull thuds rang out again and again, and everything hurt — badly.
"Hold on! What is this? Who are you people?!"
I flailed my arms wide to drive them off, but they were relentless. One of them even started kicking — a shin took a direct hit, and searing pain shot up my leg.
"Aaagh!"
I hugged my shin, whimpering, and crumpled where I stood.
...Hold on. Pain in my shin?
"What the...?"
Even while getting beaten senseless, I'd blurted that out like an idiot.
"Hey, what's with this punk? Is that all he's got?"
"That's 'cause he's a moron!"
"You monster freak! You thought you'd get away with stealing apples from our house?!"
Stolen apples or whatever — none of that mattered in the slightest. I uncurled and pushed myself up.
I stood a full head taller than the kids swarming around me. Shorter than the height I remembered — but that wasn't what mattered. A paraplegic has no business feeling pain in his shin. Which meant something about this situation was deeply, fundamentally wrong. It didn't feel like reality.
"Hey! The bastard's getting up! Hit him harder!"
I slipped past an arm that came swinging in with the shoulder wound up wide. The instincts were rusty from years of disuse, but my legs moved exactly as I willed them. I caught the opposite arm as it came around again — and there it was: my ink-black hand, stark against the kid's pale white forearm.
My skin had been ghost-pale from all those years indoors. This, too, felt wrong.
I drove an uppercut into the belly of the kid whose eyes had blown wide with shock.
"Kuh-hk...!"
In an instant, the kids froze.
"Boss!"
Apparently the kid I'd dropped was their leader. The ones who'd been tormenting me all rushed over in a worried knot to fuss over him.
"Hey, let me ask you something."
Now that I listened, the voice wasn't mine. And somehow, that wrongness felt almost welcome.
"Who am I?"