Chapter 5: Chapter 5: Memory Fragments After losing consciousness, he didn’t exactly have a good night’s sleep. Heck, It didn’t even feel like a normal rest... it was more like getting hit by a file transfer or maybe a system update...You know, the kind that starts without asking, freezes your screen, and makes you question whether your PC’s ever going to turn back on. Except this wasn’t a computer. This was his brain. And whatever the heck was happening inside it felt... wrong. You see, normally, the human brain performs its own quiet maintenance every night... slowly rewiring itself, organizing memories, defragmenting thoughts. All calm and polite about it. But in this case? It was like someone crammed years’ worth of data into a single brutal download. Data flooded in. Images. Sounds. Smells. Everything all at once. Foreign memories continued pouring into his skull like someone trying to install a new operating system on an already rundown hardware. Somewhere in that deep, foggy half-dream, reality started rewriting itself. Various fragments of memory scrolled behind his eyelids, rearranging thoughts that weren’t his, mixing and merging like corrupted files trying to rebuild. A constant dull buzz seemed to fill his head, then— Flashes of color, like in those psycho movies, sounds, voices he didn’t recognize, began to cram into his head. At this point, his mind wasn’t even dreaming anymore. It was more like processing and downloading. He tried to think, to speak, to pull himself awake, but his consciousness was locked in. It felt like being trapped in a server reboot... aware of everything, but unable to do or stop anything. Slowly, the buzzing grew sharper and sharper, for a moment he thought he was gonna go insane, layers of whispering, talking, singing, screaming overlapped, like dozens, hundreds of people were talking out of sync, all at once. Slowly, he seemed to be able to understand something but at the same nothing, then almost make out words, names, emotions, in short everything. Then all at once, a surge of information slammed straight into his brain... and then... Language pack successfully installed. Or, well, that’s how his modern fried brain interpreted it. He couldn’t explain how, but the gibberish those two women had been speaking earlier began to make sense in fragments... soft vowels, sharp consonants, rhythmic and primal, like nature trying to form words. It wasn’t elegant, definitely not like English, Chinese or anything civilized. It was rough raw, or maybe raw. Every sentence sounded like it had been carved by nature itself, and every sound shaped by survival. He drifted in that space, caught between two languages, the one he had known before and one that seemed unfamiliar but still his own. One from a civilization that built skyscrapers and dopamine addictions. And the other from a world that didn’t even know what a wheel was. And with the words came memories. Memories, of course not his own, came rushing in... blurred and half-broken, slid into place like puzzle pieces. Faces. Names. Places, everything his self had ever experienced. And that’s when he realized that who those two women were. That black-haired hot milf? Her name was Lyra. His... aunt, yeah real aunt, apparently. Fierce, warm, and terrifying in the same breath. And of course, drop dead gorgeous. She was the type who could club a bear to death and still scold you for not eating enough. At least that’s the impression she had on his previous self. And the white-haired bombshell? She was Eira... the tribe’s only healer, respected and feared by everyone. She was the kind of woman who could mix random roots and leaves and somehow make death lose its schedule. Cold to the eyes, calm in her tone, steady in her movements. She had the kind of presence that could slow down panic just by simply existing. And finally, him... The body he was in... That was a whole other issue. He definitely wasn’t himself anymore... not the gooning legend of the modern world, not the degenerate scholar of smutty fiction. This body belonged to someone else. A young tribesman named Sol of the Osari Tribe... one of the many nomadic tribe, roaming the southernmost end of this world, a vast land known as Ossuaria. From what little the memories offered, the Osari weren’t much different from countless other tribes. They moved with the seasons, hunting, gathering, surviving, following prey, chasing warmth, living off the land like wild animals drifting through the wilderness. And of course, with no civilization and no cities, or anything like that. It was just people and nature in an endless tug-of-war. They had no tools beyond stone and bone or some household stuff made by weaving and pottery. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢 And Ossuaria itself? That was another beast entirely. Even in fragmented recollections, it’s scale was staggering, not like his primitive brain understood stuff like that. He remembered hearing from mouth of some elders about it, a world so massive that it had no end. Mountains that pierced clouds, forests stretching farther than sight, beasts so large that stories about them sounded like made up bullshit, but they were in fact real. No one knew this world’s true size, at least their tribe hadn’t. It was truly a world without borders, without maps... and without mercy. And then came the darker fragments. Sol’s eyes twitched in his sleep, but the memories kept flooding in without any reason or regard. And he finally got the answer, how his previous self had died. The body’s previous owner... the original Sol had died in the...well, wild. Not like he could die in a five star hotel. Ahem... Back to topic, it was a rite of passage that had gone wrong. It was supposed to be his first solo hunt, the kind every young man in the tribe had to complete to earn his right to go out of the tribe and hunt. But unfortunately (or fortunately for us) something had gone wrong. He didn’t know what that wrong was, as he didn’t find any memories related to that. He’d been found the next day, half-dead, and finally brought back by hunters who thought he wouldn’t last the night. Well, he technically did last, but at what cost...