Chapter Text
It was an amazing feeling.
The strangely blue night sky was illuminated by myriads of stars, which scattered like beads on the velvety surface. Somewhere on the street, the leaves rustled, growing everywhere.
A floorboard creaked in response to the quiet sound of a step.
There was no one in the apartment, except for a man who had resembled a ghost for several years now. Restless, he simply existed, and did not live, not even trying to die, which anyone else would have done in his place. An old, forgotten, useless thing.
The man lay down on the sofa and opened a book that he had recently found in the library. The yellowed pages smelled pleasantly of dust and old age. Such, in soft or hard covers - it does not matter, no one needed them for a long time.
Kim Rok Soo opened the book with great tenderness and looked at the first lines:
Nelan Burrow
“Birth of a Hero”
His brown eyes carefully examined every letter, every symbol, gradually becoming imbued with a story that no one but him would want to read. Things that no one needs are drawn to each other.
Plunging deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of words, Kim Rok Soo did not notice how he fell into the Abyss.
Prologue. Falling into the Abyss. Birth.
When all that surrounds you is impenetrable darkness, it is extremely difficult to maintain calm and rationality. You really want to scream, twitch, kick. Tired, having spent all your energy, you catch your breath, taking a big gulp of moist and blood-smelling air, but a sticky, thick liquid pours into your mouth. And, feeling suffocated, you again try with all your might to get out, to break the tight, viscous wall that locked you in absolute darkness.
There was a crack, and the strange creature fell with a crash onto the stone floor. Formless, as if it had no bones, it writhed on the ground, trying to cough up a non-existent liquid. It had no eyes, no ears, no nose - only a mouth resembling a hole. Instead of limbs, the creature had appendages, randomly twitching in different directions. It was covered in a haze the color of the night starry sky, in which you can see amazingly beautiful galaxies, similar to fog. After shuddering a few more times, the creature finally calmed down.
The race that was destroyed many thousands of years ago, when mana first appeared in the wild world, again received a chance to exist. The first of the "Mimicry" family was born into the world of sword and magic.
***
Opening his balsam-colored eyes, Kim Rok Soo looked around uncomprehendingly. What was that just now? A dream? It looks like this: the man woke up in a room that did not look at all like the dusty bedroom that had become his home, where he had fallen asleep the day before.
It was a small, completely empty room. The floor was paved with stone slabs, the walls were empty, made of the same material. But the strangest thing is that the man did not see any windows or doors.
But as soon as he thought about their existence, the picture in front of his eyes swam for a second, and then revealed powerful, oak, carved doors, which Kim Rok Soo could only see in European films. An arched window appeared on the wall.
'This is definitely a dream...'
But something inside his mind was telling him uneasily that this was not the case. That everything is real. And that he can rule this place easily and freely, causing walls and floors to deform, furniture to appear, rooms to be created. This is his domain.
The room quickly acquired a completely new look. The floor became wooden, varnished, the walls were decorated with smooth silk wallpaper lined with meter-high carved boiseries. A warm fire danced on the twisted candelabra on the wall, casting weird shadows. The arched window was covered by a heavy maroon curtain with fringes. The patterned carpet pleasantly warmed the body of a man who had not yet managed to get to his feet, a deep plush armchair was located nearby, beckoning him to sit down and enjoy peace. On the wall opposite the window there was a closet too bulky for this little room, which did not in the least disturb the atmosphere of comfort and silence.
Kim Rok Soo, realizing what was happening, got to his feet and mentally put a full-length mirror in front of him.
Not only his place of residence has changed, but he himself has changed. Before getting into this strange situation, he was one meter eighty-seven centimeters tall, and now, on a flip, he did not reach even one meter sixty. But he looked about fifteen. His normally pale skin has become lighter by a few more tones. His straight black hair had changed its color to dark blue, and its length had obviously become too long: the end of his hair rested in rings on the floor. Previously, brown eyes had lightened to the shade of balsam flowers.
Kim Rok Soo's naked body became fragile in appearance, and, as something in the depths of his consciousness suggested, not only. His arms and legs were frankly thin, as was his waist. The ribs stuck out, covered with thin skin, through which blue veins shone through. But the most striking features were his small face. The man, or rather the young man now, could see that his eyes were disproportionately larger, his nose was tiny and sharp, and his mouth... But there was a problem with him: he looked small, his lips were thin, and his mind assured him that it only seemed that way. Opening his mouth, Kim Rok Soo did not understand why his nature was trying to convince him of the illusory nature of his own new appearance.
But the reason why the young man did not doubt at all that this was his old body, in which he had lived for thirty-six years, was the multitude of scars that covered almost every centimeter of his body. The evidence of his hard life that is forever imprinted in his memory.
Closing his eyes, as his instinct told him to do out of nowhere, Kim Rok Soo imagined how his skin was being cleansed of disgusting scars, and when he looked in the mirror again, he found that they had disappeared.
'I must have died after all...' the young man managed to think before his body weakly sank to the carpeted floor. Newborns get tired quickly and fall asleep...