"Cold... it's cold. Freezing. It hurts... I'm hungry... ngh."
"My head... ugh, why—?"
The frigid morning air of Iron Cross Street bit mercilessly at the skin of a youth no older than sixteen. Delicate skin, dirty and bruised, stretched thin over a scrawny frame — not just skinny, but malnourished. Like he'd never eaten a full meal in his life. Which, to the boy, wouldn't be far from the truth. His body, weak and trembling from hunger, couldn't even muster the strength to shiver. Even that — the act of surviving the cold — felt like a slow path to death.
"Why the hell is it so cold? Did Nisha leave the heating off or what? What the hell... and why is my bed so... so uncomfortable? Huh? My bedsheets—?"
He grasped at empty air. His frail limbs flailed like the arms of a hairless baboon, pitiful and lost.
Slowly, the boy pushed himself up from his fetal curl into a wary sit. His eyes cracked open, half-sealed by sleep and the icy moisture clinging to his lashes. They burned. His head throbbed, the pain pulsing like a second heartbeat as he took in his unfamiliar surroundings.
"What the... where am I? I'm in Tingen. Iron Cross Street."
A pause.
"Wait, what the hell? How do I know that? Where even is Tingen? It's in... the Kingdom of...? What the hell's going on? Why do I feel so confused... but not, at the same time? I know where I am. I know who I am. Right?"
His muttering echoed down the quiet alley, barely louder than the distant footsteps of early risers from the Iron Cross district — all from backgrounds not so different from his own.
He was Inutilis Vita. Sixteen years old. Born to two working-class parents, both employed at the Tingen Iron & Steel Complex. Both dead.
His father had died a few months after he was born — lungs ravaged by the brutal conditions in the factory. His mother, already weakened from her own illness and drained by pregnancy, had barely made it through the delivery. She'd passed not long after.
It was his older brother, Julias, who had raised him. A boy playing father. He was even the one who named him. "Inutilis Vita." Half because it sounded cool. Half because Julias didn't know long dead linguistics— he'd just overheard two well-dressed men saying the words while discussing Emperor Roselle's obscure books, the kind that threw around dead languages like confetti.
Julias worked in a small coffee shop on Golden Indus Street. It cost him dearly to travel there, but Vita had never understood that. A child couldn't grasp the weight of money or sacrifice. Julias worked day and night, took every shift, and skipped every meal — just to keep Vita fed. He gave everything. And in the end, he gave his life.
Overworked. Undernourished. Dead.
And Vita? Homeless. Penniless.
"I'm Vita... yeah. But I'm also Arin, aren't I? Right?" the boy murmured, probing the foggy corners of his mind.
"I've been transmigrated. That's it. This is Lord of the Mysteries — that webnovel I read years ago. The details are blurry, but I know enough. I'm in the same city as the MC..."
He paused again, clutching his throbbing head.
"What the hell do I do now? No money, no place to stay, no realistic way to become a Beyonder. And this headache is... damn it!"
Grrrgle.
His stomach interrupted — louder than his thoughts.
No matter how existential the crisis, one truth remained:
He was starving.
"I could kill for some peri-peri chicken right now..."