Consciousness was submerged in a chaotic darkness, sightless and deaf, feeling only a muddy confusion, with almost no retrievable fragments in the blurry shards of memory.
Who am I?
Karl.
A soul in a shattered state.
Gradually, Karl began to recall that he used to be not Karl, but "Shen Ling," from a completely different world.
Am I a transmigrator?
In the endless darkness, Karl, as a fragmented soul, gradually remembered his past life.
He had just graduated from a key university not long ago, held a job in business sales, and ran around every day for a living, talking big, until one night after work he was forcibly escorted on his way by a client who had finished drinking.
Memory about his past life halted there; it seemed he truly had been sent on his way by the client.
Karl realized his current predicament was extremely bleak; the only memories he could recall were just a small part, and in the deepest part of his soul, there were ten distinctly different and exceedingly heavy "things" suppressing his memories.
A deep subconscious recognition was that they should be "seals" from different beings, as if unlocking the seals would restore more memories.
Initially, he wandered in the dark for a long time, not knowing how to change the situation, until he accidentally absorbed a trace of faint Spiritual Power into his body, which showed signs of restoring his soul.
The least heavy of the ten seals finally showed signs of loosening.
Karl greedily and frantically absorbed the source of this Spiritual Power, continuously restoring and strengthening his soul.
As the power was drawn, his senses gradually returned, and he noticed the source of the Spiritual Power was a completely transparent glass bottle.
Subconscious cognition told him it was a "Mysterious rare artifact" of extraordinary nature, and the Spiritual Power contained within was just what Karl needed to replenish his soul.
Suddenly, it was as if he had walked out of the dark, lightless world and could finally "see" the things around him.
An old, dilapidated wooden hut, damp, with only two wooden plank beds on either side, covered with straw mats, the room narrow, all sorts of items still arranged neatly and orderly.
The transparent bottle containing Karl's soul was on one of the plank beds, the transparent glass bottle only slightly larger than a palm, unremarkable, placed next to some old clothes with a faint smell, washed bowls, spoons, and other miscellaneous items.
Looking out from the open door of the wooden hut, the night sky was visible, with sparse constellations, the air very fresh, and two moons hanging high in the star-studded night sky were distinctly visible.
One crimson, the other pure and bright.
Indeed, this place was not the world he once knew, Karl sighed to himself.
He missed his homeland; being confused like in a dream was one thing, but feeling uncomfortable all over now that he was conscious and could not go online was another.
Bad news, he was so weak that a mere breeze could extinguish him, no doubt a difficult mode, a hellish beginning.
Karl began to explore what he could do and soon discovered his vision was not limited to the surroundings, but he could rise and extend his view from the bottle as a center, up to a range of five kilometers at the highest and farthest.
Outside the wooden hut to the north was a rather large subtropical forest, covering an astonishingly vast area with no visible boundaries.
To the south lay light brown land that had been tilled, at the end of the cracked stone paths was a seaside town on the East Coast, full of weathered white-ash buildings, with sea breezes carrying a hint of saltiness.
Through interactions among the townspeople, Karl quickly learned he was in the port town of Nasir on the East Coast of the Cyart Kingdom, where people mainly lived off fishing and sea transport, leading self-sufficient lives with many never having left this place in their lifetimes.
As for the inhabitants of the wooden hut, they were two young children.
The older sister, Irene Fischer, was about thirteen or fourteen, resilient, with long black hair, bright eyes, and a glowing, healthy complexion.
Her baby brother was still in swaddling clothes, needing goat's milk brought from the town by his sister to survive, able to eat and sleep.
Their parents had left over ten days ago and had not returned, and life for the siblings on the edge of town grew increasingly difficult.
Irene was a very strong and principled girl, never pleading with the townspeople for help, but rather picking wild fruits from the forest or helping the townsfolk with chores, trying to exchange for supplies as fairly as possible.
Even when starving, she would not let her brother suffer from hunger. At night, she sometimes hid in the corner crying silently before feigning a smile to lull her brother to sleep.
The swaddled baby was well-behaved, with faint silver hair and eyes, plump cheeks, never crying or fussing, but often watching his sister's face intently.
Karl gradually realized something, the Fischer siblings' parents were probably not coming back, most likely dead already.
The outside world was definitely not safe, perhaps even utterly harsh and dangerous.
The young siblings managed to scrape by for now, but if they didn't receive help from others, they wouldn't survive the coming winter.
As time went by, he was about to finish absorbing the Spiritual Power from the transparent bottle, which slowly transformed into a rune deep in his soul.
It was a rune shaped like green grass with a strong vitality, emerald-colored, emanating a sense of soft, warm spring.
But the heavy seal on his soul showed no further signs of loosening.
Karl realized that the Spiritual Power in the bottle was far from enough to completely break through the first seal.