It was a cold and rainy day, the sky was painted in the monotone grey of thick clouds and to top it all off, a freezing wind was creeping into every crevice and every opening it could find, set on extinguishing any last traces of remaining comfort or warmth. It wasn’t a pleasant weather, but at least it did well to capture the general mood of the few people out on the streets today. It was late September of 2008 and while yes, it certainly wasn’t a good day to be outside, what did it even matter? It wasn’t a good day to be anywhere anyway.

  Out onto these sorrowful streets stepped a middle-aged man in a wrinkly grey suit with an equally wrinkled face, the right hand clutching a worn briefcase. The deep rings beneath his eyes and the gritted teeth might have given onlookers, had there been any, a hint about the fact that this man felt very much welcomed by the somber atmosphere outside.

  Jonathan had just been informed that he was among the many victims of the next of the countless ‘restructurings’ that his company had been going through. He had been let go, effective immediately. In other words, he was now just another lost soul in the endlessly growing sea of unemployed Americans. He had worked his ass off for this company for the better part of the twenty years he had been out of college and the second things got dire for those corporate assholes at the top, he had been thrown away, discarded like an empty piece of packaging.

  How was he supposed to explain this to his wife? He had told her that everything was fine, that she didn’t need to worry about his job. The company needed him and they wouldn’t let him go, he would get their family through this, their daughter wouldn’t need to grow up in poverty. And now this.

  Useless little liar. He had failed her, failed his daughter, failed his parents. How were they supposed to go on without his support? Their pensions were gone, as was the bulk of his savings, consumed in the blink of an eye by the whims of those rich assholes at the top. And he had just lost them the last net they had left.

  Jonathan got moving. He wasn’t going home, couldn’t go home, couldn’t face his wife, not yet. But he needed to walk, couldn’t stand around, couldn’t continue thinking, no longer. Before he even realized, he had walked into a bar, sat down at the front and ordered a glass of vodka. There was a part in him that reasonably argued that the last thing he could use right now was an expensive new addiction. All the other parts didn’t care, they wanted to forget, wanted to numb. And those parts were far stronger.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Jonathan awoke on the pavement outside, suit stained by his own vomit. He didn’t know how much he had drunken; didn’t know how long he had been out. But he did know one thing: It wasn’t enough. The thoughts were already creeping inside his head, were already starting to torment him again, stronger than ever. He started walking again, or rather stumbling forward. He needed to find a bar that would let him in, let him drink his worries away for a little longer.

  And then another one.

  And then another one.

  And so it was that when Jonathan crossed that particular street at roughly four in the morning, he barely even understood what was happening to him. He saw lights, saw them grow brighter and bigger, faster and faster, then a jolt of pain, then darkness. Only darkness.

  When Jonathan came to his senses next, he wasn’t Jonathan anymore, though he didn’t know that. Neither did he know that his soul had, by pure chance, been carried by an extremely rare and unlikely phenomenon, into another dimension where it had settled into the body of a newly formed embryo.

  What he did know though, was that his situation was very strange. He couldn’t see anything and he couldn’t move, yet everything around him felt… right. In fact, he had rarely ever felt this comfortable. A feeling sharply contrasted by the fact that he couldn’t feel his limbs. Even more alarming, at least in theory, was the fact that his memories were slowly but surely starting to fade away. Somehow, he couldn’t bring himself to care, even though he knew he should.

  The first thing to go was his education. His knowledge of math and economics, of culture and tradition, of philosophy and religion. Then came his knowledge of earth. Countries and peoples, history and politics. Then came the people around him. His friends. His family. His wife. His parents. His daughter. Then his personal life. His preferences. His dislikes. His opinions. His morality. His personality. His name. Then his general knowledge. Gender. Humans. Life.

  Soon, the only thing that remained of… it was the knowledge that somehow, in some way, it was different.

  And then, in a final moment, that too was gone, lost irreversibly and forever to the stream of time. The soul that had once been the middle aged American by the name of Jonathan had fully accustomed itself to its new surroundings.

  The soul, now fully unaware of its surroundings had no idea that it would one day rise to challenge the most powerful beings in this new world for lordship over it and that the people living in it would forever remember it under its new name: Zixin.