1 Thunderstruck

I was a typical gamer guy and I played allot of online mmo's and rpg's though I always tended to be a loner and a spell caster even irl I dabbled in a little Wiccan magik though mostly because my irl friends dragged me out to their weird events including a couple renaissance festivals and a actual visit with a Wiccan coven the guys had their hearts in the right places. At my coming of age or better known as my 18th birthday I locked myself in my room and started a gaming marathon that lasted 16 hours and I was full diving the entire time it was the best day of my life I started a new game and I was grinding my way to in game greatness and then it happened. A bolt of lightning struck the transformer outside my house and even full dived I heard it, now dive gear has a huge amount of systems that prevent any kind of electrical discharge into an operators head not to mention the physical safeguards so what happened next should have been impossible. A bolt of energy traveled from far and wide struck my house and blew through my surge protectors and all of the built in safety features in my dive helmet and struck my head with enough electrical energy to liquify alloy steel needless to say my head was not even an obstacle. I watched myself in a detached third person view and I could feel every single moment of the pain not that there were many as I mostly converted to ash and vapor instantly. It's a disturbing thing watching yourself die while that was bad what came next was worse I felt a dragging sensation and then darkness followed by the most intense pain I'd ever felt and it seemed unending I'd have gleefully committed murder to not feel that again.

Time has no meaning when agony is everything that was the lesson I learned from my little experience and then once the pain began to subside I realized I couldn't move my limbs physically refused to function and everything was still black. I don't know when I realized that I could see again though only in shades of gray and slowly I examined my surroundings which made zero sense in black and white like some kind of expressionist painting done in gray and it took me a long time to figure out that I was in a forest in a very crowded cluster of bushes to be specific. I thought I'd gone to heaven but some kind of surreal one or possibly this was hell it was not what I would have expected of either to be honest it was sanitary to say the least.

I found I still couldn't move and it was starting to get concerning maybe I actually found a surrealist hell to distract myself I began studying the things I could see and realized that the trees around me were only vaguely like the trees I remembered seeing just days ago like some kind of hybrid between a pine tree and a maple they towered into the distance. I spent my day in a daze for the longest time as it neither grew brighter nor darker and I must have laid there for a week before I realized that I could move again and it brought new pain for me which made me realize that I was alive somehow and not in any way I had ever heard of before.

I spent entirely too much time contemplating my existence and when I realized that I was probably the architect of my own pain which was soon to come I decided that I should attempt to do anything to speed the process along so I attempted to meditate. In my failing attempts at meditation I managed to get myself into the right mindset and actually meditate for a while and I immediately noticed a difference it felt like everything had become more clear and my physical state seemed to improve so I continued to meditate in the hopes that I would completely restore my physical self which somehow seemed to be happening. I have no idea how long I lay in that state before I realized that I could sit up and move on my own power but once I realized that I could I pretty much tried to stand up immediately.

I had no idea what happened or how I'd ended up in this surreal experience like something out of fantasy there was no way that this was real but there was no interface and even the emergency logout functions were not functioning I was terrified that this was real. I found my only solace in attempting to clear my mind to meditate something that I'd tried before with no success but here and now it was working and that was almost frightening in and of itself why would meditation do what it seemed to be doing why did I feel like I was making more progress when I was doing it. I was no master of arcane lore I only had video game fantasy knowledge and some Wiccan lore and theories that I'd picked up over the years of gaming that I'd done. I will fully admit that I was happy to live in my home realm world whatever I would have gladly gamed for years without issue but now here I am sitting in the woods with no idea how I'd gotten here and I was literally regenerating my body if anything this was not what I had wanted to happen if anything I'd rather have stayed but here I was with the serious impression that I'd transmigrated which could have been nicer like why not bam I'm dead ok let's reincarnate in a new world like all the other transmigrators do instead I got the oh hey you died in the most excruciating way possible and you did it while watching yourself die in slow motion oh and hey here's the new world now regenerate your entire body.

I was a tad bit sour but then it hit me why can I even regenerate what did I become by transmigrating was I now a god or demigod maybe I became a demon either way I guess I don't have to worry about dying though where did I go because this is nothing like my old mmos. lost in thought I didn't even notice that my vision had suddenly switched to color and it was when I noticed movement and it was a small squirrel sized creature hopping into the bushes that I happened to be in. lost and incomplete I couldn't tell you how I was doing mentally but it wasn't great and then I saw the corpses and I nearly lost it. Laying next to me were two bodies one of a spell caster of some kind and the other appeared to be a woman wearing a highly fancy dress. These two bodies were clearly dead the woman had a stab wound through her chest about where the heart might be and the guy looked like something had eaten him from inside out and that was highly disturbing to say the least.