The first thing Mark Miller felt was pain.
Not the dull, distant ache of sleep—this was something alive. It radiated from his eyes outward, as if someone had driven needles through both sockets and was slowly twisting them deeper. He tried to lift his hands to his face. They didn't move. He tried to open his eyes. He couldn't tell if he had.
There was nothing. Not darkness—nothing. No shapes, no shadows, not even the faint glow that exists behind closed eyelids. Just an absolute, suffocating void.
After several agonizing minutes, the pain began to pull back. His arms responded weakly. He forced himself upright, palms pressing against a surface that was flat, hard, and ice-cold—like a floor carved from a single slab of stone. His hands found a wall. Same temperature. Same texture. Smooth and indifferent.
Mark's mind was chaos.
The last thing he remembered: finishing another cliché isekai novel, pulling on his jacket for the night shift, and then—a crushing weight in his chest. He had reached for his phone. Consciousness had slipped before his fingers found it.
He was clearly not in a hospital. The floor alone ruled that out.
Reincarnation? The thought felt absurd. It also felt like the most logical explanation available, which said a lot about his current situation. He cycled through the alternatives—morgue, kidnapping, organ trafficking—and dismissed each one. Bodies weren't stored on dry stone floors. His family had no money worth ransoming. And organ traffickers didn't leave their inventory conscious and sitting up.
He was still working through the logic when a voice spoke directly into his skull.
Not through his ears. Into his mind. Clean, mechanical, utterly certain of itself.
[Host, congratulations. You have been reborn in the world of the novel The Great Hero. However, by the demand of this world's deity, you must live in this dungeon for the next five years—until the main hero defeats the Demon King. Your reborn body was in a terrible state; it has been minimally restored within the System's capabilities. Do not worry. You are now in the dungeon's safe zone, and the most essential living conditions have been provided here.]
A sharp Ding echoed somewhere behind his thoughts. Then a panel materialized—not in front of him, but inside him, projected onto the back of whatever passed for his vision now.
Mark read it twice. Then he sat very still.
Is this real? Or has my mind finally cracked?
He set the question aside. Existential crises could wait. He needed information.
The Great Hero. He knew the novel. He'd finished it the same night he apparently died—an average story, not brilliant, not terrible, saturated with every isekai cliché in existence. A chosen hero, a destined battle, a Demon King waiting at the end like a final boss in a game nobody asked to play.
Five years. A dungeon. A deity who apparently had opinions about where dead men from other worlds should spend their time.
He could spiral about all of that later. Right now, he needed to understand his situation.
"System," he said. His voice came out rough, like something scraped across gravel. It echoed in the dark. "Who did this body belong to? And what exactly did you mean by 'a terrible state'?"
The panel dissolved. Another Ding. A new screen replaced it.
[Before its death, this body belonged to Thaddeus von Lightborn. Following the demise, primary structural damages were repaired. Internal organs are healthy and functional. Physical integrity has been restored. However, the eyes could not be saved. Additionally, the left leg is 2 cm shorter than the right. The reproductive organs also sustained severe trauma; while structurally intact, their functionality remains critically low.]
Mark read it again. Then once more.
Blind. And impotent.
He sat with that for a moment. In his old world, either condition alone would have been enough to break most people. Together, delivered in the same cold paragraph as a system notification—it was almost impressive in its efficiency.
Thaddeus von Lightborn.
The name landed with a familiar weight. Of course. Of all the bodies in all the fantasy worlds he could have woken up in, it had to be this one.
Thaddeus was a villain—not even a compelling one. A third-rate obstacle the protagonist tripped over on his way to greatness. He'd been handed everything: genuine talent, old money, a noble lineage, and a fiancée named Anastasia who was, by every account in the novel, far better than he deserved.
He had wasted all of it.
From age twelve onward, Thaddeus had substituted flattery for effort and debauchery for growth. He treated Anastasia not as a person but as a possession, and the moment he realized she was beginning to look elsewhere—toward the protagonist, a commoner with more raw potential than Thaddeus had bothered to develop—he'd responded with harassment and spite instead of self-reflection.
The duel was inevitable. The loss was humiliating. And rather than absorb the lesson, Thaddeus had pursued a forbidden technique to reclaim what his laziness had cost him. The result was catastrophic: deformed bones, lost sight, sterility. His family disowned him. The protagonist—the very man who defeated him—was adopted in his place.
Thaddeus had walked into a frozen river and let the cold finish the job. The guards watching him hadn't even tried to pull him out.
When Mark had first read it, his reaction had been simple: what an idiot.
The man had been handed everything and chose, at every single fork in the road, the worst possible direction. Even after the duel—even broken and humiliated—he could have rebuilt something. Trained properly. Become a genuine rival instead of a footnote. Instead, he'd taken a shortcut that destroyed him and called it ambition.
Mark had found it infuriating. The waste of it. The sheer, spectacular waste.
He sat in the dark now, in Thaddeus's ruined body, and recognized the particular flavor of that infuriation.
It was the kind you only feel when something hits too close to home.