As his consciousness began to settle into the new flesh, he felt a different sensation. There was no heat of a fire. There was no cold of a forest. There was a sharp and clinical smell that made his stomach churn. It was the scent of antiseptic and alcohol, a lingering, sterile aroma that felt like a haunting memory.
He opened his eyes to a world of white.
He lay in a bed, his vision blurry and his head spinning. He saw the glint of a needle in his arm, connected to a thin tube. He saw the sterile walls of a room that looked vastly different from the libraries, forests, or castles of his past lives.
This place was clean, mechanical, and cold. Above him, a small holographic screen displayed his heart rate in a steady, digital pulse.
It was happening again, but this was different from his other life.
But this time, as the memories of the new body began to trickle in like fragments of a broken mirror, he realized who he was. He was not a hero. He was not a monster. He was not a slave and he is not also in another world.
He was a Lucian Thorne, the eldest son of a prestigious and wealthy family. He was a man who had spent his life in a drunken haze of luxury, a man loathed by his father and mocked by his peers. To the world, he was nothing more than a piece of trash who had recently been dumped by his fiancée and tried to drown his sorrows in a bottle.
A weary and cynical smile touched his new lips.
The first thing that returned to him was not his sight, but his sense of smell. It was a sharp, clinical sting that bypassed his conscious mind and struck directly at the primal core of his soul. It was the scent of high-grade antiseptic mixed with the cold, metallic tang of mana-infused alcohol.
His eyes fluttered open.
The ceiling was a vast expanse of sterile white, illuminated by recessed lighting that hummed with a low, magical frequency. For a moment, the centuries of his previous lives the elven forests, the dragon hoards, the burning libraries melted away. The crushing weight of the present settled into his chest, cold and familiar.
'Again,' he thought.
The word was a sigh that never reached his lips. He shifted his hand and felt the unmistakable tug of a needle beneath his skin. He didn't need to look at it to know it was there. In his first life, that needle had been his constant companion for forty five years, a tether that fed him the chemicals required to keep his mutated body from collapsing. To see it here, in this hundredth life, felt like a cruel joke played by a universe that refused to let him go.
He did not call for a nurse. He did not ask where he was. With a slow, mechanical movement, he gripped the plastic tubing and ripped the needle from the back of his hand. He didn't flinch as a bead of blood welled up from the puncture. He simply swung his legs over the side of the bed.
The floor was cold. His new body felt heavy and sluggish, the muscles softened by a life of excess and the blood thick with the lingering toxins of alcohol. He stood up, his vision swimming for a brief second before he focused on the only thing in the room that mattered.
The window.
It was a large, floor-to-ceiling pane of glass that overlooked a sprawling, hyper-modern cityscape. From this height, the people below looked like ants scurrying between neon-lit monuments. He didn't care about the architecture or the advanced technology of this era. He only cared about the drop.
'Three storeys,' he calculated, his eyes hollow and analytical. 'For a body this weakened, it should be enough. I just need to hit the pavement before the mana-stabilizers in the building can react.'
"Just one more jump," he whispered to the empty room, his voice dry and hollow. "And then, finally, peace."
He moved toward the glass, his hospital gown fluttering around his thin frame. He reached for the latch, his breath hitching in his throat with a rare spark of anticipation. He could already see it the black space, the silence, the end of the noise.
He was halfway out the window, the cool night air hitting his face, when the door to the suite slammed open.
"Are you actually insane?!"
A pair of powerful arms wrapped around his waist and jerked him backward with a violent force. He hit the carpeted floor hard, the air driven from his lungs in a wheeze. He didn't fight back. He simply lay there, staring up at the man who had interrupted his exit.
The man was young, athletic, and dressed in expensive, form-fitting clothes that marked him as a member of the upper class. His face was twisted in a mask of pure, unadulterated disgust.
This was Michael Thorne, the third child of the Thorne family.
"Is this your new stunt?" Michael spat, his voice trembling with rage. "You're going to kill yourself because your fiancée called off the engagement? Do you have any idea what this is going to do to the family's reputation? As if being a drunken tyrant wasn't enough, now you want to be a pathetic martyr?"
The protagonist didn't answer. He simply sat up slowly, his gaze drifting back to the window. His eyes were not filled with the tears of a heartbroken lover or the fire of an angry noble. They were cloudy, like a stagnant pond.
'Ah,' he thought as the memories of the body began to click into place. 'I am a Thorne. The eldest. The disappointment.'
A flurry of images passed through his mind. He saw himself screaming at servants, throwing bottles of vintage wine against the wall, and the cold, mocking laughter of the social circles he frequented. He saw the face of his father, a man who looked at his eldest son with the same expression one might use for a piece of trash stuck to the bottom of a shoe.
He also saw the "second child," an adopted brother who was a genius hunter, the pride of the family, and everything the eldest Thorne was not.
"Say something!" Michael roared, stepping closer as if he were tempted to strike him. "The doctors said you almost died of alcohol poisoning, and the first thing you do when you wake up is try to jump? You're a disgrace."
At that moment, the door opened again. A flurry of nurses and a doctor in a white coat rushed in, their faces pale with panic. They began checking the monitors, their hands shaking as they realized the patient had pulled his IV.
"What happened?" the doctor asked, looking toward Michael.
"He was on the ledge," Michael said, gesturing wildly at the window. "He was trying to finish the job."
The medical staff turned their eyes toward the bed, expecting the usual explosion of foul language and arrogance that defined the eldest Thorne son. Instead, they found a man who looked like he had forgotten how to feel. He stood up without a word, ignored the doctor's reaching hand, and walked back to his bed with the gait of a man twice his age.
"I am tired," he whispered.
The voice was low, devoid of the jagged edge Michael was used to. It was so quiet it was almost a ghost of a sound. He climbed into the bed and pulled the covers up, turning his back on his brother and the bustling staff.
Michael stood there, stunned by the lack of resistance. He had expected a fight. He had expected to be cursed at. This silence was far more unsettling.
"Don't think this changes anything," Michael muttered, though his voice lacked its previous conviction. "Father already knows about the engagement. He told me to tell you that if you're going to act like an idiot, you should at least do it where the cameras can't see you."
Michael paused, waiting for a reaction. When none came, he let out a sharp, frustrated breath. "You know, I really wish the adopted one was the eldest instead of you. At least he knows how to carry himself like a Thorne."
The man in the bed didn't flinch. Behind the covers, his eyes were wide open, staring at the white wall.
"Me too," he whispered, so softly that Michael barely caught the words.
Michael froze. He looked at the shape of his brother under the blankets, a feeling of cold dread settling in his stomach that he couldn't quite explain. Without another word, he turned and stormed out of the room, leaving the nurses to tend to the silent patient.
Left alone in the dimming light of the hospital room, the man who was now a Thorne did not fall asleep. He began to analyze the latch on the window and the timing of the nursing shifts.
He didn't want to be a noble. He didn't want to be a brother. He just wanted to get this over with.