1 Transmigration

"Dammit, Karl, wake up!"

The voice cut through the hazy fog of confusion that enveloped him. Karl's eyes snapped open, but for a moment, the world was a swirling mass of colors and shapes, like a painter's canvas caught in a tempest. Panic seized him as his senses struggled to make sense of the chaos.

As his vision slowly cleared, Karl realized he was lying on a cold, hard surface. The harsh fluorescent lights above him flickered, casting eerie shadows on the sterile white walls that surrounded him. Panic turned to bewilderment as he tried to sit up, only to discover that his body felt unfamiliar and heavy, like a suit that didn't quite fit.

"Karl! Are you okay? You look like you've seen a ghost!" The voice, now tinged with concern, belonged to a fellow officer, a burly man with a badge gleaming on his chest.

Karl's mind raced as he tried to piece together his surroundings. This wasn't right. He should be in his small apartment, not on some cold examination table in an unfamiliar room. And why did his body feel so strange, as if it belonged to someone else?

The memory of the accident flooded back into his mind—a dark, rainy night, screeching tires, blinding headlights—and then nothing. He remembered nothing after that, just this disorienting sensation of waking up in a foreign body.

"Where am I?" Karl finally managed to say, his voice rough and unfamiliar.

"You're at the precinct, Karl," the fellow officer replied, his concern turning into something else, something darker. "You don't remember? You took a nasty hit during that battle last night. Doc said you'd be out of it for a while." He said as he sized up Karl suspiciously.

Battle? Karl's head throbbed as he strained to remember. He'd never been in a battle. He'd never even thrown a punch before. This was all wrong.

As he struggled to sit up again, he noticed the others in the room, his fellow policemen and women. Their expressions ranged from curiosity to outright hostility, their eyes trained on him like he was some sort of freakish anomaly.

"Hehe, Karl, you don't look so good," another officer, a woman with a stern expression, commented dryly. "Maybe you should take a few more days off. We wouldn't want you to embarrass the force." She added with a hint of mocking in her tone.

The words hit Karl like a slap to the face. Embarrass the force? What had he done to deserve such disdain?

He tried to speak, to defend himself, but the words caught in his throat. He was a stranger in his own body, a man who had seemingly transmigrated into the life of someone else, and the people around him did not know it.

As Karl struggled to make sense of the impossible situation he found himself in, a chilling realization washed over him.

He was trapped in the body of a young African American policeman named Karl, and he had no idea how to navigate this new life, let alone uncover the mysteries of his own existence.

He was in a city, the most prosperous and powerful city in C state. This city was notorious for holding its secrets close, and Karl was about to find that out.

He pressed a hand to his forehead to calm his throbbing temples and seemed to recall more and more as the jumbled mess in his head began to calm down. It was then that he realized that this world was not a normal one… it had mutants!

Mutants was the derogatory term, but the more normal terminology for those 'people' were metahumans. Men, women, or even children who awoke extraordinary powers that allowed them to fly, punch cars, or fire lasers from their eyes dotted this world.

The chaos that ensued as the first batch of metahumans awakened caused the world to fracture and the landmass to shift. Countries and continents were displaced as war raged around the world since the metahumans who were once civilians now dreamed themselves as rulers.

Eventually, some sort of balance was eked out and a new world government came to being. Putting aside the political landscape which was confusing and honestly mind-boggling for Karl to grasp, what was important was that borders were redrawn and populations moved.

Countries were split into grades, from A to Z. A was the richest country with the most resources and the most powerful metahumans while Z country was the bottom, the third world of this new world.

This was not surprising. For human society to have a chance at working for a prolonged period, there had to be a ladder, allowing one man to climb to the top while one man struggled at the bottom.

The countries split their cities in the same manner, from A to Z in order of value, population size, and metahuman power level per area.

While this was theoretically fine, since the almost mechanical nature of this renaming and reallocation allowed the world government  to more easily monitor the populace, the problem was that this new world was far less peaceful than before.

The current peace was tenuous at best and could easily be shattered if enough chaos and anarchy were launched. As such, the world government had to conceive something that could achieve the necessary effect to maintain the basic structure of society and the social contract.

Enforcement.

And so, the police force of each city was born. Unlike the police of old who mostly spent their time pouring over cases and being prank-called for no reason, this police force had far fewer stringent rules and much, MUCH stronger staffing.

After all, their target was not to deal with the average citizen disputing with the other average citizen, there was a lesser governmental force for that. Their job was to deal with any violence or trouble coming from metahumans, and well, the simple fact was that only metahumans could deal with metahumans.

And then there was Karl, a young - and arrogant - man who got into the elite force of C state's number 1 city through nepotism and yet, unlike everyone else in this room, he was the only one without a special ability in this new world .