King of the Pirates: The Rise of the Red - Chapter 001

Chapter 1 — Before the Blood Dried

The question arose even before he opened his eyes.

Not as an articulated thought, but as a visceral disturbance—a displacement so profound that the body reacted on its own, muscles contracting in instinctive protest before the mind could name the cause. The ground beneath him was wrong. Too hard, too uneven, radiating a cold that seeped through his clothes and lodged in his bones as if it had always been there, waiting. The air carried a strange weight, dense with smells that didn’t belong to the ordered world he had known. And the silence—this particular silence—wasn’t the slumbering murmur of a city, but an absolute stillness, broken only by the distant creak of something organic yielding to the weight of years.

He took a deep breath, carefully.

The smells arrived in layers. First, the damp mold of aged wood. Then, fine dust suspended in invisible currents. Deeper down, a sour smell of decay lay beneath it all like sediment. And beneath it all, persistent like a warning, the metallic taste of blood.

He opened his eyes.

The ceiling above was a mosaic of uneven, poorly fitted planks, twisted by time, with gaps between them through which the morning light filtered in pale, hesitant threads. Some sections bore the blackened scars of old flames—scorched and smoky edges—while others bent slightly under the accumulated weight of years. There were no light fixtures. No fans. Nothing that whispered even the remotest familiarity with the life he had left behind in the interval of sleep. Only raw wood and the patient erosion of abandonment.

The pain came when he tried to move.

A sharp explosion, erupting from his temple. His hand instinctively rose, and his fingers found something warm and sticky. When he withdrew them, he saw what he expected and didn’t want to see: dried blood embedded along his eyebrow, now streaked with fresh hairs that descended across his skin in thin, deliberate trails. His vision wavered. Nausea churned in his stomach like a waking animal.

“Shit…” he murmured, and the word sounded strange even to himself. Hoarse, flat, echoed back off the walls in the wrong acoustics.

It took several seconds—slow, costly—before he managed to sit up. Each movement was a careful negotiation with protesting limbs and a body that felt simultaneously his own and someone else’s. When he finally straightened his torso and leaned his back against the rough wall, he stood still, breathing sparingly, letting the dizziness recede into the distance. Only then did his most recent memory emerge with merciless clarity.

He remembered the previous night in vivid fragments.

The familiar weight of weariness—not the honest kind, born from physical exertion, but the mental exhaustion of endless columns of numbers, piling up deadlines, the sterile glint of spreadsheets merging into one another under the cold office light. He was an accountant. Competent in his mediocrity, without acclaim or undue attention. A man who found small anchors in routine: the glass of water faithfully placed beside his bed each night, a ritual of control in a daily life that slipped away shapelessly.

Without thinking, the hand moved to the side. The fingers sought that desired smoothness.

Instead, they found something cold, rough, and uneven. Porous. It yielded slightly under pressure. He frowned and held the object up into the dim light. A cracked coconut shell, yellowed from prolonged use, its surface etched with the patina of repeated hands. Inside, only a damp residue clung to the bottom—the evaporated trace of old water.

No glass. No filtered water waiting for the day to begin.

Only that primitive container remained, and the immense absence of everything that had once been familiar.

He stopped.

The shock didn’t come in frantic panic, but in heavy, successive waves of clinical understanding. Something irreversible had happened in the invisible interval between closing his eyes in the familiar bed and waking up here, in this place that defied all expectations. He forced himself to stand, measured movements against the persistent throbbing in his head and the instability in his legs.

The room—if that was what it could be called—was modest in its dimensions: too narrow for true comfort, but spacious enough to suggest deliberate, albeit humble, construction. Walls of reused wood rose around it, some planks still displaying the ghostly impressions of old nails and previous joints, the grain darkened by smoke and weather. The floor was packed earth, cool and slightly damp under bare feet, compacted by countless passages but still yielding delicately to weight. Everything spoke of use, not abandonment: objects worn by hands, surfaces marked by the passage of days, nothing left simply to rot.

He moved through the small space with deliberate attention, his fingertips brushing against the textures that defined it.

A length of coarse fabric, stiffened by age, served as a pillow. In one corner, a shallow depression held the remains of an improvised campfire—grayish, brittle ashes, surrounded by stones that the repeated heat had blackened and broken. On the walls, faint marks caught his attention: charcoal scratches forming rudimentary symbols and counts, lines intersecting in patterns that awakened in him a strange, half-buried sense of recognition. They weren’t his—and yet, they resonated somewhere deep inside, like echoes of a dream that hadn’t been entirely his.

That’s when the change happened.

Subtle at first. Then, undeniable.

Memories that weren’t solely his began to intrude, overlapping the ordered recollections of spreadsheets and fluorescent-lit rooms. Images erupted without warning: narrow paths he had never traveled, skies vaster and more merciless than any he remembered, the persistent sea breeze of winds blowing in uninterrupted threads. The insistent knowledge of an island—not assumed, but known as a foundational fact. He had been born amidst such a landscape. This certainty anchored itself without invitation or explanation.

And yet, no clear image of childhood accompanied her. No vivid scene of a youth in that place. Only the abstract conviction that that world had existed for another—a predecessor whose presence now shared the dark chambers of her mind.

He took a deep breath, trying to bring order to the chaos.

Thirst then overtook him. A deep, persistent pain that dried his mouth and weighed his tongue down like lead. The gourd returned to his gaze—the residue at the bottom mocking his need. There was no clean water here, nor any guarantee of safety. But the dampness suggested recent use. A reluctant promise amidst the scarcity.

Standing up, he stepped beyond the threshold of the cabin, and the outside world opened up with equal strangeness.

Makeshift shelters dotted the surroundings—structures assembled from salvaged wood, fragments of twisted metal, and faded fabric stretched over frames. Everything bore the marks of survival and reuse: frayed edges, patched surfaces, the uneven ground imprinted with the overlapping footsteps of lives long accustomed to such harshness. Between two sloping dwellings ahead, a crude reservoir caught his eye—an improvised trough channeling a slow-moving stream from higher ground, the collected water murky with suspended particles that drifted lazily in the dim light.

He understood the risks with a clarity that felt both instinctive and borrowed. That water could bring illness—fever, cramps, the slow draining of strength. But refusing it would invite an even quicker defeat. With careful hands, he filled the gourd, letting the sediment settle as much as possible, and drank in measured sips. The taste assaulted him: metallic acidity with earthy edges, a slightly burning sourness that went down his throat. He grimaced, forcing each sip, the liquid settling heavily in his stomach.

“Just for today…” he murmured, the words a fragile pact with whatever fate had placed there.

Back in the gloomy interior of the cabin, he let his thoughts coagulate—no longer as the accountant he had been, but as the survivor that place demanded. Safety first. Not grand defenses beyond his present means, but a simple guard against intrusion. From scraps of wire, torn cloth, and the gourd itself, he assembled a rudimentary alarm: wires stretched across the entrance, the container suspended so that any disturbance would knock it to the earthen floor with a clear, unmistakable crash. It was crude, fragile in the face of real threat. But enough to steal a moment of grace—a fraction of a second of advantage in a world that seemed not to offer them freely.

When he finished, he lowered himself to the floor, his back pressed against the unforgiving support of the wall.

His body barked with accumulated tension—the persistent throbbing of the wound, the profound weariness of the displacement. His mind overflowed with contradictions: the unfinished spreadsheet whose columns now seemed laughably trivial; the untouched glass of water in a life that sounded increasingly like a distant echo. He thought of the fragile rituals that had once defined him, now severed as cleanly as a blade’s cut. And he turned his gaze to the world pressing against him from all sides, its demands already sharpening.

He still didn’t know how to last here. He didn’t know how to navigate the silent rules that governed that place. He couldn’t name who—or what—had delivered him to this body, to this cabin, half-drowned in borrowed memories. Questions circulated without resolution: the nature of the wound, the identity of whoever might have caused it, the exact moment when his existence had been rewritten.

And yet, one truth remained unshaken amidst the uncertainty.

He was awake now. Fully and inescapably. The world beyond the cabin walls would not pause for his understanding. It would demand its price anyway, indifferent to the blood that was already drying on his forehead.

He closed his eyes once more.

The first day had begun.