I can’t see, hear, smell or taste anything. I can feel something, it feels like I’m slowly drifting down a lazy river. I slowly drift along the river for an unknown amount of time. It could have been minutes or months but it was impossible for me to tell. It feels like I’m being pulled underwater but since I can’t breathe, it’s only more comfortable. I’m slowly pulled down until it feels like I hit the bottom of the river.

 

 My feelings start to recover and it feels like I’m rapidly expanding. The sensation of feeling expands until it’s in the shape of a person.  It’s impossible for me to move, I struggle to move my hands and feet but nothing happens. Trying to pry my eyes open with willpower but still nothing. I put all of my effort into moving my index finger and it finally moves. The feeling of me drowning is now overwhelming. My body instinctively breathes in.

 

As if that was the switch to activate control over my body it jolts to life. I can feel my blood starting to warm in my body. My lungs fill with the smell of dirt and blood. Finally the feeling kicks in. Pain! Intense pain covers my entire body. The pain that racked my entire body starts to focus down to a few areas. Slowly but surely the pain continues to shrink down.

 

The intense pain starts to dull. I try to open my eyes but only one of them does. My left eye must either be missing or swollen shut. My arm is in bad shape as well, it might be broken. I move my fingers and pain shoots through my body. I wince and breathe in again but that hurts too. Most likely a broken rib but it’s impossible for me to know for sure since I’ve never had a broken rib before. 

 

I also realize I have many things wrong with me besides injuries. I’m dizzy like I was struck very hard in the head and it’s still not been long enough for me to completely recover. Mucus runs down my nose and my body is hot from a fever. My stomach feels like there’s something else wrong with it but it’s just completely empty and I’m starving.

 

Suddenly a thousand memories come rushing back into my head. They were of the previous person who owned this body's memories. I knew this person wasn’t me but I wasn’t sure who I was exactly either. I knew that the person who’s body I now inhabited was a massive coward. So many negative interactions made me start to dislike the person I was.

 

When children hit ten they’re tested for magic and if they have any it can affect the future of that person. This body… Who’s name is Kai had an affinity for light magic which was fairly rare and wind magic. One out of every four people could use magic and only one out of every six of those would be light mages. Being in a frontier village this gave Kai leeway to be somewhat of an ass.

 

I was being prepped to become the village's doctor so I was being trained by the aging current doctor to replace him. It would have been a fairly cushy job compared to those who had to hunt for food or protect the village. Even if the village was taken over by bandits I would most likely be spared and used as a doctor by them. That would be the normal path most would take but this jackass decided to become a beast tamer at class selection when he turned sixteen.

 

Looking back and judging all the mistakes this person made in his life should have made me feel slightly guilty but that one decision ended up costing my previous incarnation their life. He was given seven options for classes all being common, two mage classes and ended up choosing the uncommon class instead because he didn’t know any better. Except he did know better and chose it because it was more rare even though it didn’t suit him at all.

 

Just by increasing the rarity of a class doesn’t necessarily make it better and beast tamer was the perfect example of that. Most classes would give you an advantage at what they were good at, especially the mage classes. Choosing beast tamer was the village's decision because it took a village to make a good beast tamer.

 

Beast tamers could become very powerful if given enough time to tame the right beasts. Doing so requires a tremendous amount of food and effort to keep the beasts happy. That is only for the low tier beasts as well, higher tier could take far longer than that in which case you’d need to have people constantly helping get food so the tamer could focus solely on taming during that time.

 

That one decision turned the entire village against Kai. Everyone was already sick of his attitude, people had to deal with his temper tantrums and placate his silly demands because not doing so might have cost them their lives in the future if he refused to heal them. Short of straight killing him, they essentially did by banishing him towards the frontier. Either he would come back with a beast tamed or die and he didn’t disappoint them by managing to die very quickly.

 

This coward couldn’t even kill a slime, the first wolf he came across ate the rations he was given before chasing him for a short while causing him to trip down a hill and tear a hole in his pants. He found an abandoned homestead or he’d have died that night most likely. Without knowing the lay of the land he ended up eating some mushrooms that made him hallucinate and berries that gave him diarrhea.

 

The last memory he had was being smacked by a goblins club twice before running away. The only reason he managed to make it away from that group is they were attacked by something else as he fled. He didn’t even look back to see what saved his life. This bastard sat in the homestead for the remainder of his life only leaving to use the bathroom and get water from the nearby stream until he starved to death.

 

And that’s where I came in. One of the only restrictions with light magic is it couldn’t be used to heal oneself. He wasn’t a good enough healer to heal the broken bones either. The surface level memories started to fade and I realized something. I was in no condition to try and survive with a broken arm, ribs and smashed eye socket. 

 

As I thought this life would be a short one I looked at my swollen arm where I was struck and watched the egg shaped bump slowly shrink. Well, that’s convenient. With a sucking noise my sealed over eye popped open. A wave of exhaustion passes over me but before I can go to sleep another set of memories comes to my mind.

 

Unlike the clear ones I had about the previous body like those you’d see through an old video these memories were heavily distorted. They’re only flashes and glimpses of memories. I felt more connected to these memories but at the same time I didn’t feel like this person anymore. While I could look through the lens of the previous memories in almost a third person view, these memories I felt and experienced more than remembered. 

 

I looked up at two faces looking down at me I couldn’t clearly make out. A green field with children playing in it. A game of baseball, another separate game of baseball, yet another game of baseball. Preparing for a trip I was really excited to go on. Me playing something called a video game. When I remembered the excitement from the video game I was playing, a flood gate opened for other memories.

 

Me playing different video games. Me playing mario, halo, or playing wow. A huge period where most of my memories involved halo and world of warcraft. Memories of school were more foggy than the others during this time. It seemed the more the person cared for something made those memories clearer. Most of his memories were covered in a fog of apathy. People's faces were hard to distinguish and very few memories were hard to differentiate from each other.

 

All except the memories involving video games. I could clearly remember killing the second boss in mogu’shan vaults and cheering over mumble that we were the first guild on our server to clear it. I remember fighting the lich king or deathwing or a dozen other bosses. I could remember the rotation of my hunter or every single ability my resto druid had. I remembered the flood and covenant from halo perfectly. Mario and Luigi’s names were clear but I couldn’t remember a single teacher's name except the sole teacher I hated.

 

As if another door of memories opened I could more easily make out the memories when I was angry over something. Being a child and having something taken away from me. Slightly older still and chasing my cousins through the neighborhood. I remembered attacking someone in school for saying something unimportant and getting in a lot of trouble over it. I remembered my death, I was mad at the world for letting me die and fought against it with all my might.

 

I think that’s how I ended up here, the frustration of dying before I was ready I fought against so hard. I think I ended up in an entirely different world. At least until I get more empirical evidence that’s the most believable story. Without much thought my head fell back down on the bed I briefly woke up from. When I woke up the next day nothing had happened. I still slept in that same bed, the bed I had slept in for almost a week until I starved to death.

 

There was no fanfare or god didn’t whisper a goal in my ear but I knew what I wanted to do now. I wanted to not die like a dog again. That is enough. For now I need to just focus on surviving and maybe taming a beast. I went to sit up and realized something. When I died I happened to have pissed and shit myself. 

 

I started to make a quick trip to the river about five minutes away from the building. I felt weaker. Not just weaker but slower, less strong and more feeble all together. I check my status the same way I had hundreds of times before. The game style blue text screen pops up with a few alerts in front.

Jesus! That would explain the sudden feeling of weakness. I processed everything that happened. The gigantic text and superfluous information bothered me so I hid my name race and age then strunk the stat readout to all be on a single line instead of seperated. My class upgrading rarity made it go from an uncommon to a rare class. I’ll have to check the changes to my skills page to see the full changes but it might be even more difficult to use than beast tamer.

 

Upgrading my magic was most likely a huge boon. Magic could be learned but it was mostly instinctive. I could already feel the changes happening in my mind as I thought about healing. I knew that this type of magic didn’t have the pesky problem of not being able to heal myself. Most of the utility spells I knew suddenly had slightly better effects or I could even use them as offensive magic. I’ll have to practice them before I attempt to fight something for real.

 

The final heavy change was that of the title. I wasn’t aware of anyone in the village having a title beside the mayor and the sheriff. The sheriff gained one through years of fighting constant battles and the mayor through constant delegation. I didn’t hear an exact description of either, since the previous owner of this body was foolish enough to not care but I knew they made huge changes in the way the world perceived them.

 

Each was noticeably different from other people and even if they were mixed in with a crowd you would quickly be able to spot them. All I knew is it made them better at what they did so I clicked on my own new title.

Hmm. I’m not sure how I feel about that. On one hand gaining skills is extremely important but on the other hand I knew that acquiring new skills was fairly difficult and it was sometimes better to just level the skills you had. I didn’t like the lackluster training the previous owner did with his skills. When I clicked on the skills and traits page I was greeted with several new pop ups again.

I was extremely happy over the loss of both of my traits. The thought of both negative traits sometimes kept my old self up at night. While I’m half tempted to look at everything new right now I still need to see if any of my skills changed from the pseudo death I went through. 

 

From what I remember, most people had dozens if not close to a hundred skills since almost everything gave skills. Someone in our town had a high level spitting skill and could spit almost fifty feet. Most people only had a handful of useful skills with most making no difference to how they would live or survive. I looked through my skills and selected the ones relevant for surviving while marking my other skills as unimportant enough to not be shown.

I truly hated my skills. The previous me spent zero time training up anything that I would use outside of the town. If I had learned to fight even a little I might have ended up surviving. Most people believe that the skills you’re born with are things you’ll be better at than most if they learned the skill afterwards which made not training more than half of them piss me off towards my past self even more.

 

Not only that, but the moron who lived in this body previously heavily neglected learning from the healer as well. Using skills in combat raises them faster but the years he spent learning enchanting and healing magic should have put them at least above thirty if he had taken it seriously at all. Now that I think back he spent most of his time day-dreaming and trying to instigate other people into fighting.

 

I cringed at my past self. I needed to remember that I wasn’t my previous self. For a brief moment I had a sense of doubt about who I was. I was something different than either of them. I was more driven by the Earthlings feelings and set of values but with the knowledge of the Theran to fall back on. I had a lot to do if I wanted to survive and the first of those things would be cleaning this piss and shit out of these pants.