As Max read through the notification boxes, he had an inkling of what was going on. During his prolonged stay at the hospital, Max did a lot of reading to pass the time. A genre that he frequented was centered around the average everyday person getting transported to a new world. To escape the boredom of his confinement, he had often fantasized about being so lucky as to travel to another world and being the hero of his story.

  When Max had finished reading and acknowledged the blue boxes, they closed automatically. When the last box was gone, Max was plunged into darkness once again. The first time he had lost his sight due to IDK-25, an instinctive, primal human fear of the dark had gripped his chest making it hard to breathe. He had come a long way from then, working some of the fear out with the on-call therapist, Max was now much more comfortable with darkness. He had also learned several meditation and breathing techniques. There was only one that worked well for him, which he employed now.

  Taking deep breaths until he felt his heart rate start to slow down, he acknowledged that he had likely died and he had passed on to the next world. He recognized his emotions but didn’t let them overwhelm him. He slowly let the emotions fill him, there was sadness, grief, anger all mixing. Uncontrollable tears began to free fall, but he kept his breathing steady. He learned that in this life, there were many things that he couldn’t control, like how he got IDK-25 and even now his apparent transmigration. He needed to first accept reality and move on. When he felt his emotions start to boil over, he forcibly pushed away his thoughts and refocused on the deep breathing.

  Again and again, this cycle went on. He felt every emotion and slowly accepted them until he felt they no longer threatened to break him.

  Max opened his eyes, multiple new notifications were waiting for him. He wasn’t surprised by the notification, while he was cycling through his emotions he felt small tugs on his awareness, somehow he instinctively knew they were notifications and easily ignored them. The content of the notification did surprise him.

  After spending so much time reading novels, Max knew the magic word.

  “Status”

  Looking through his status sheet, Max wanted to see if he could get any additional information out of it. Max tried tapping the screen, but his finger went right through it with no resistance at all. After trying to poke each part of the screen with no success, Max was satisfied that it was likely not the way to interact with it.

  Next Max tried focusing on each part of the screen.

  ‘Unsurprisingly, that felt accurate. He had been hooked up to IVs and life support for weeks’

  Moving into his titles.

  ‘Hm, nothing new’

  As Max continued his way down, more blue boxes started appearing.

  ‘Okay, that explains the 1.3x stat multiplier.’

  Moving into his skills, two more boxes appeared.

  ‘Ah, the Isekai starter pack’

  ‘Kinda stingy with the information here.’ Max had played a lot of video games when he was younger and HP and SP were fairly straightforward for him.

  ‘It looks like they just replace Mana with Chi’

  ‘Mm, that’s a handy breakdown’

  Looking at his stats, Max couldn’t help but feel a bit bamboozled. He didn’t get any of the fraction stats and they were all rounded down.

  Frowning, Max let out a small sigh, all his physical stats were abysmal, which made sense, he was bedridden for several months.

  ‘My priorities should be security, water, food, and shelter.’ Panning his eyes, he wanted to see if he could see anything in the darkness. While he didn’t see anything, he could hear drips of water in the distance, in fact, that was what had originally woken him up.

  ‘Worse comes to worst, I could use this cave as a shelter. So the only thing that I really need is food and some clothes.’

  Whatever force that had transmigrated him here, didn’t care enough to also bring along a set of clothes.

  ‘But before that, I should meditate and try to cultivate some more. It didn’t take long for me to get to the 1st Stage of Body Tempering, maybe 30-45 minutes. And the gains were pretty good. I should also decide on how to spend the Free Stat Points.’

  Slipping into meditation again, he focused on his breathing again. This time, Max didn’t close his eyes. He watched to see if he could discern anything new. Not having to wait long, he could see a faint purple haze coming from below him and entering his body. It looked like most of it followed his breath and traveled down his lungs. He could feel the new energy disperse throughout his body. With each breath, he could feel that his body was being infused with something.

  Another 30 or so minutes had passed when the anticipated notifications popped up.

  Fighting the urge to look at his status again, Max closed his eyes and continued the breathing exercise.

  In

  1,2,3,4,5

  Hold

  1,2,3,4,5

  Out

  1,2,3,4,5

  And repeat.

  …

  After what felt like hours a second set made this existence known to Max.

  Just as Max was about to continue, he felt sudden weightlessness, and his stomach dropped. He was falling. A few seconds later, Max looked around and he couldn't see much. The last remnant of the purple light disappeared. But for a split second, he could make out that he was in a hole that was about arm span wide and deep. There were small dust particles everywhere flowing away.

  Focusing on the dust particles, a new notification appeared.

  “Oh, that makes sense now…”