1 Chapter One

"Ugh..."

I let out a groan, as my conscience begins to return. My head throbbed with pain, but it didn't bother me much. With the amount of experiments and days of working, simple things such as headaches were a normal occurrence that I got used to it.

I slowly open my eyes, but I was quickly met with a quite weird scene. A person that had a heavily decorated Venetian masquerade face covering their entire face. But what was even more shocking was when they opened their mouth. The mask moved it moved, it was as if the mask was its face. I couldn't see any pupils, just mere darkness in its eyes.

"Oh goodness, I thought you died there for a moment."

Its voice was feminine, and its body further proved that. Although, if the face wasn't weird enough, her body seemed to be naked, but I couldn't see any of the private parts, her areola were nowhere to be seen. Her whole skin was snow-white, but when nearing the ends of her limbs, it's a deep shade of red. It almost made me think it was blood, but I quickly noticed it was not. At least, I hope not. She had long, white hair, but it was of similar nature to her other body parts as well. In that, the tips of her hair were red. The only seemingly piece of clothing she had was a long, gray cape.

The first thing I unconsciously muttered was;

"Wow."

The woman's head tilted a bit, before forming a smile, and went sitting on the wooden floor a small distance away from me, simply staring at the ground. Had it been anyone else, they probably would've freaked out at the sight of that woman, but not me. I was weird, I guess. That's what most people told me.

Anyways, that was odd. Kind of expected more from her.

From the looks of things, and the obvious bumps I keep feeling every few moments, It seems I was in some sort of wagon. An old one, at that. Wagons were long obsolete even before I was born. I don't think I've ever seen one, even.

It seems I am currently laying on the floor of the wagon. I slowly stood up, and observed my surroundings.

Five people. Excluding me, of course. Three men, and two women.

Two of the men looked human, but one of them was in a similar nature to the white-skinned woman. One of the women were human like as well, although she had pointy-ears.

I had no idea where I was going, and I could obviously tell from outside the wagon, and the weird people here, that I wasn't in my country, nor was I in any other country, for that matter.

How did I get here, anyways? The last thing I remember was...

Doing my usual routine of checking the Time-stopping machine, telling my closest peer, Jasmine, that she sucks at her work, and finally activating the machine, and It worked. But then, the machine malfunctioned and...

Oh.

Ah, right.

Aha... Ahahaha!

The machine exploded, and everything around me ceased to exist but I. And then, I saw it. A massive, eldritch creature, with many arms and many eyes, and a sickening grin. It had its rib-cage in the open, and massive ribs were coming out of its back as well. Something similar to what happens to a poor victim when they executed the Blood Eagle torture on them back in the viking era. It was a torture method known for being used to separate the victim's ribs from their spine, pulling their bones and skin outward to form a set of "wings". Quite disgusting, if you ask me. But it was like that.

The first thing that came to my mind, was God. But I quickly discarded that thought, and tried to think of a logical conclusion. I felt my body was ceasing to exist with every millisecond.

Before I could've muttered a single word in front of that monstrosity, I remember everything turning black, and here I was.

There are two possibilities.

Either A, I'm in the afterworld, and in my way to meet whatever judge there is. Probably god.

Or B: I've been transported into another world, as these creatures looks were way too realistic to be cosplay.

Both of these conclusions are equally ridiculous.

If it was the first case, then I could only wait for whatever's coming for me. But if it was the latter, then there's a small chance it was because of that explosion, or that eldritch abomination. I have no idea how it did, but then again, that abomination was a mystery by itself, so something like this might not be out of the realm of possibility.

So if it was the latter...

I turned my head left, towards one of the men sitting down a small distance away from me. His eyes were stuck to the ground, and he seemed tense. As I was about to open my mouth, something strange happened.

[Ting!]

A strange, holographic window appeared in front of me. It was similar to the Holographic AI we had in my world. Except this one was way, way, way different, and perhaps worse?

The only thing this thing had was something called "Info" Section, and an "Abilities" section. While the AI in my world didn't have this, it did have quite a lot of other things instead, like blood-pressure, the amount of current blood-cells in your body, any potential disease and any known disease you had, as well as how many breaths you've had in a day, how many miles you've run, how many grams of sugar you've taken along with all the other values, as well as how many times you've "pleasured" yourself in a day, and much, much more. To the point it had 250 statistics about your body. It even had the capability of calculating the distance you are from an object.

In other words, the AI I had was filled with way more stuff.

But regardless, I was intrigued. I slowly pressed the Info section.

[Name: Edward James.

Age: 17

Race: Human

Current Strength: 1]

And that was it. The first thing that caught my eye was the name. I'm not Edward James, ain't no way about that. I'm Victor, the world renowned scientist, and alcoholic. Although, that means I probably took the body of someone else, or something of that sort. I wonder what happened to the original soul of this body?

Ah whatever, and the second thing, I'm not 17. I'm 32, although I don't mind that change.

Deciding to ignore the name part for now, I looked at the "Current Strength" parameter. One? In comparison to what? An average human?

You'd think it'd be logical that it's in comparison to a normal human, but considering that weird woman I just met, and the guy that looked like her, it could be in comparison to anything. And honestly, I don't know why, but I feel a strange vibe from them. As if they could easily tear me apart.

Ah, whatever. I don't really give that much of a damn, as they don't seem interested in me. I just hope this wagon doesn't take me to some sort of prison, or an execution site, like a certain famous, open world game.

As I was about to press the X button, I noticed the gazes everyone was giving me. They looked at me as if I was insane.

Can they not see the holographic window in front of me? If so, then I can definitely understand the looks.

I gave out an awkward laugh, and ran a hand through my hair. I quickly gave a half-assed excuse.

"Man, I'm so tired that I think I'm hallucinating." Whether that weird excuse worked, or if they just lost interest, they all went back into staring at the ground.

Great, how am I going to interact with this then? I looked at the system in front of me, and I remembered that the AI back In my world could be implemented into your brain, even though it was dangerous, but you could interact with it via thought.

So I tried the same here, and walla! It worked. The system interface turned back to the main menu of Info and Abilities section.

The next obvious thing to do was check out the abilities section, and my eyes glittered in both confusion and excitement at what I saw.