“No! Don’t kill me, please I’m begging you!”

  A voice called out, crying for help. It belonged to a gruff, stoic middle aged ‘Macho’ man, who at this moment was not exhibiting any one of those traits. Mostly because he was strapped down to a table, unable to move and unable to process what was going on.

  He had just awoken in this place, confused and disoriented, only to look down and find that his left leg… His whole left leg was missing. But he strangely couldn’t feel a thing, it was both odd and strangely confusing to him. This only added to the horror of the whole situation though.

  “Don’t worry, I severed your spinal cord from the rest of your body, so you won’t feel a thing.” A cold, emotionless voice responded to the man. The lack of any regard or emotion for the man sent phantom chills down his paralysed spine.

  Standing nearby, with many different tools and other devices at his disposal, stood a handsome, suavely dressed man with a lab coat covering up his stylish clothing. He looked like your typical scientist, the types who spent all day in the lab and barely ever socialised. The only difference being this man was almost too handsome…

  “P-Please… I’ll do anything!”

  But no matter what the terrified and confused man on the table said, the handsome man never even flinched or hesitated. It was like he had no emotions at all — which wasn’t that far off from the truth. In fact, it was as close to the truth as it could get.

  This mad scientist was, in fact, what was commonly known in this world as a sociopath. Sociopaths are commonly misunderstood and misrepresented. It’s become a common ‘fact’ that they lack the ability to feel emotions, which is factually untrue. It’s more like they lack the ability to feel ‘strong’ emotions like the average person can. Which is why a lot of sociopaths often turn to things like crime, murder or become top business elites — because the adrenaline rush from seeing their victims beg and cry, or seeing their company succeed was enough to actually make them feel something.

  “My head fucking hurts…”

  Suddenly the man on the table started feeling dizzy, with sweat beads pooling up on his forehead. He tried to resist the pain, but nothing he did could alleviate him of the throbbing headache he was now experiencing.

  “Ahh… That would be the hole I drilled in the back of your head, the acid should be working right about… now!” The suavely dressed handsome man spoke, as if it was just casual conversation.

  Right as he finished his sentence, the man on the table fell unconscious, with blood starting to pool and drip down the back of the table onto a conveniently prepared bucket underneath. This blood was strangely colored, with a mixture of ghastly green and black mixed within.

  ‘Test subject 08 — lasted 00:32:12 before succumbing to the acid’s effects. It seems we need to adjust the ratio for subject 09.’

  The scientist noted some words down on his notepad before turning away to focus on his computer screen. Data flowed across it like the ocean’s tide, it all looked like garbled numbers to the layman, but the handsome man understood it all fluently.

  He wasn’t like those murder/serial killer types of sociopaths, he found his thrill from doing scientific research, and because of his ‘unique’ traits, his superiors had assigned him to a more discrete, not so legal division of the company that others who actually had morals were more adverse to.

  And as a result, he excelled in his role even more.

  “They’re ready to see you now, Lucian.”

  But the handsome man, better known as Lucian Verdan, was pulled out of his thoughts by a sudden voice from the doorway of his laboratory.

  ‘Ahh, that’s right.’ He thought to himself, still absorbed in his own mind.

  He had almost forgotten that he was pitching a new research topic to the higher ups. Lucian was just so engrossed in his current research that his mind had completely filtered that out. Thankfully he had an assistant to remind him.

  “Thank you, that’ll be all Sylas.”

  Lucian nodded at his assistant, Sylas, in the doorway and made his way past, ignoring the disgusted look on Sylas’s face as glanced at the scene inside Lucian’s laboratory. The laboratory itself was impeccably clean, it was only the scene on the centre table that disgusted Sylas. The sight of a limp corpse with brains still dripping out the back of its head would be enough to make any mentally stable person queezy.

  ‘It truly takes a special kind of person to do this job…’ Sylas thought.

  As he was walking through the maze-like hallways, Lucian practised the pitch he had prepared for his new research project. It was something he found particularly interesting, even before he became a scientist. Souls. This was always something that had eluded not just Lucian, but the entire human race ever since the concept first came about all those thousands of years ago.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  That was the direction of his project. Not much was known about them, or whether they existed at all, but that was exactly what Lucian intended to find out. The prospect of finding an answer to a previously unanswered question was the very reason he became a scientist in the first place. Scientific research was one of the very few things Lucian could feel any emotion from.

  “Sir, you can’t go in there.”

  Elsewhere, near the entrance to the lab, a man covering his face with a hood barged his way past the main desk of the laboratory. The receptionist, a petite and small woman, would never be able to stop him with her small frame, so her next best option was to shout for help.

  But even though this did manage to gather the attention of other workers nearby, none of them actually took action. They were all like the young receptionist — skinny, not very built and frankly cowards. They weren’t security, most of them were normal research assistants, or scientists. Risking their lives for their job was not something on their agenda for the day.

  ‘There he is!’ The hooded man exclaimed inwardly, as he spotted the very person he had been looking for this whole time.

  He ignored all of the gawking onlookers as he increased his pace to a sprint and chased after the handsome man in the white lab coat, Lucian. Meanwhile, Lucian was completely engrossed in his thoughts, unaware of what was happening around him. But that wouldn’t last for long.

  “You killed my wife, you son of a bitch!”

  Out of nowhere, the hooded man pulled out a knife and leaped at Lucian. He wasn’t quick or aware enough to dodge, so he could only look on, confused, as the man, who’s hood had long fallen backwards, revealing his dishevelled appearance, lodged his knife in Lucian’s chest.

  *Cough*

  Lucian let out a cough and a groan as he fell to the ground, the dishevelled man still on top of him, holding him down. Lucian himself was well built and quite lean as he liked to take care of his body, but that couldn’t help him win a fight against the laws of physics. The man holding him down had to weigh at least 150kg, and that was a conservative estimate. That much weight was too much even for Lucian to handle.

  ‘Who is this man!?’

  Lucian started to feel some emotions he had never felt so vividly in his life. Like a torrent, they all came rushing into him at once, as if his brain was releasing one last ditch effort to try and save itself.

  Anger.

  Frustration.

  Fear.

  They were all bundled up together, raging through him for the first time in his 35 years of life. It was both the most excitement Lucian had felt ever since he was born.

  ‘Is this how I die?’

  Lucian couldn’t even feel his body anymore, as the disgruntled husband of the wife he had supposedly killed continued ramming the knife into his chest without end. He had long lost count how many times he’d been stabbed, but it was well into the dozens, and his internal organs were probably a mushy, bloody mess by now.

  ‘Shit, I didn’t even get to finish my research.’

  As expected of someone like him, Lucian was more concerned about his unfinished business in this world than the fact that his own life was being taken away from him. But that was just him, and it was the way he had always been.

  ***

  “Ugh…”

  Lucian let out a groan of pain as he awoke. He felt as if his head was splitting apart, a headache like he had never experienced before took over all of the pain receptors in his head. The resulting headache made him want to smash his head on the wall in hopes of taking it away.

  ‘I thought I died…?’

  The scene that opened up before him was not something he was familiar with. At first he thought he was hallucinating, as his eyes were still taking a while to adjust. Everything was blurry, and his ears felt fuzzy. Overall, apart from the splitting headache, he felt like he had just woken up from a very long nap.

  Then out of nowhere, an irritating voice in a language he didn’t understand started grinding in his ears, only worsening the effect of the headache he was experiencing. Lucian almost wanted to just reach out and grab for whoever was uttering such ear-screeching words, but he held himself back.

  He opened his eyes, disoriented. Half of him still believed he might be hallucinating, but things started to feel way to real to be fake.

  “Where am I?” He muttered to himself, ignoring the irritating voice completely.

  His vision was filled with walls made of wood, looking like they came straight out of the 17th century. The room was of a moderate size, with a row of windows to his left side and another wooden wall to his right, provided with a few doors on either side. At the front stood a podium looking object, with a chalkboard directly behind it.

  ‘A classroom?’

  Even more confusing was that there were quite a few youths with eccentric hair colours sitting around him with their heads buried in their work at each of their individual desks. They all looked quite young, some around 14 or 15 years old, with others looking closer to 17. Most of them were giving him some strange glances though.

  ‘Is this a classroom?’

  Lucian felt his head become clearer as the pain from the headache started to lessen slightly. His eyes started come into focus as well, allowing him to get a more thorough and detailed look at his surroundings. He was sitting at a desk, with some papers and books filled with some squiggly lines and other such symbols dotted across them. He looked around to find that it was the same case with all of the other students in the class room.

  ‘It’s clear I’m some sort of student he-‘

  “Arrghhh!!” Lucian let out a blood-curdling scream, startling himself and everyone else in the classroom.

  Just as he thought the pain from his headache was actually going away, a sharp and intense sensation assaulted his head, like everything he had previously experienced all came back at once. The pain arrived suddenly, bringing with it some unfamiliar memories, as well as filling his mind with all sorts of knowledge and languages he was forced to accept against his will.

  All Lucian could do was try his best to resist fainting, but even that seemed like quite a challenge for the present him. He was still somewhat disoriented after waking up, so trying to stay awake through all of this was like trying to set a world record in hurdles while simultaneously running through swampland!

  “@#!{#@”

  “Hey.. @~@#”

  However, after 10 seconds passed, it seemed the pain had finally gone away, hopefully for good this time. Lucian was more concerned about the fact that he could now somehow understand the words on the paper in front of him though. Even weirder was the fact that he was beginning to understand the person speaking to him. It was all very strange for him. He could understand what the person was saying, but it still felt foreign to him?

  “Is something the matter, Lucian?”

  ‘Did I transmigrate?’ This was his first thought upon seeing the smartly dressed middle aged man in front of him.