The night I died, my shoes had holes in them. My phone was at three percent, and the rain felt like the sky was personally trying to wash me out of existence. I had just been fired from a job I hated by a manager who called me replaceable while standing under a poster that said everyone mattered. My rent was late.
My bank app kept sending me those cheerful red alerts that looked like tiny digital punches. The girl I liked had left me on read for eleven days. Even my umbrella betrayed me. One gust of wind hit it, flipped it inside out, and turned me into the wettest loser on the sidewalk. I stood in the middle of the street, soaked to the bone, laughing like a man who had officially run out of ways to be sad.
Then my phone died. That was the final insult. I looked up at the storm and said, "Fine. Hit me with everything."
The sky answered. A spear of white lightning dropped straight down from the clouds and struck me so hard the whole world vanished. I did not see my life flash before my eyes. I saw every outlet, every street light, every wire, every battery, every blinking screen in the city light up in my mind like a map.
For one tiny second, I understood electricity the way a fish understands water. Then my body was gone, my name was gone, and there was only thunder.
I expected darkness. Instead, I woke up choking on blue sparks in a city I had never seen before. My eyes opened to neon skyscrapers, floating billboards, delivery drones, and a moon split by a glowing crack in the sky.
Rain hissed off my skin, but I was not cold. I was lying in an alley between two vending machines, and both of them were bowing toward me like metal servants. Their lights flickered in rhythm with my heartbeat. At first, I thought I had survived. Then I raised my hand, and lightning crawled between my fingers. Not a static shock. Not some party trick.
Real lightning, bright and hungry, bending around my knuckles like a pet dragon.
I should have screamed. I should have panicked. I should have asked where I was and why the sky had a giant glowing wound in it. Instead, I grinned, because for the first time in my life, the world had given me something back.
A group of thugs appeared at the mouth of the alley before I could enjoy my miracle. They were dragging a terrified delivery guy between them, laughing while his drone hovered above with a broken wing. One of them saw me sitting in the rain, barefoot and smoking like a cheap toaster, and decided I looked like an easy target. He told me to empty my pockets.
I looked down at myself. No wallet, no phone, no shoes. I was wearing a torn black hoodie and pants that looked like they had survived a monster attack.
"I just got hit by lightning," I said.
He laughed and swung a metal pipe at my head.
That was when I learned my body had changed. The pipe touched my shoulder, and the thug instantly became a human firework. Blue current blasted through the pipe, up his arms, and out of his hair. He screamed, danced, and collapsed into a puddle like a badly cooked noodle.
The others froze. I froze too. Then one of the vending machines launched a soda can into my hand. I caught it without thinking, popped it open, took a sip, and said, "Okay, that was new."
The thugs attacked together. They had knives, stun batons, and one cheap pistol that looked like it had been stolen from a cartoon villain. Before they reached me, the alley lights exploded awake. Wires ripped out of the walls. The broken delivery drone lifted off with a twitch, spun around, and pointed its little camera at them.
My thoughts moved faster than fear. Every battery in the alley became mine. Every circuit listened. The stun batons jumped from their hands and shocked their owners. The pistol jammed as I magnetized its tiny parts into a useless knot. A street light bent down like a metal palm and smacked two thugs into a dumpster. The last one tried to run. I snapped my fingers. His shoes, which had cheap glowing soles, betrayed him. They flashed, locked, and glued him to the wet ground with tiny arcs of electricity.
The delivery guy stared at me like I had descended from heaven. I stood up, lightning dripping from my sleeves, and tried to act calm even though my brain was screaming.
"Where am I?" I asked.
He said the city was called Aster. Then he asked me what rank I was. I had no idea what that meant, so I said the most honest thing possible.
"Unemployed."
He laughed so hard he cried.
That was how I found out I had not come back to my old world. Aster was Earth, if Earth had decided to mix smartphones, skyscrapers, monsters, magic gates, celebrity raiders, underground fight clubs, flying scooters, and convenience stores that sold anti-monster pepper spray. People awakened powers from rift storms, fought creatures that crawled out of glowing cracks, collected crystal cores, and got judged by strength testers like living video game characters without the polite little menus.
And me, according to the delivery guy, I had woken up in the body of a failed awakened named Ryan. Same first name as my old life. Same tired face. Same talent for attracting problems.
This Ryan had been considered a joke. He had weak sparks that could barely charge a toothbrush. He had been mocked, robbed, and left in an alley after trying to stop a small gang. Nobody expected him to survive.
They were right. He did not survive. I did.
The first place I went was a public awakened training yard, because I needed answers and also because the delivery guy told me they gave free food to anyone willing to test their abilities. I would have walked into a dragon's mouth for free food at that point. My stomach felt like it had been dead for longer than the rest of me.
The training yard was full of people showing off. Fire users burned targets. Wind users sliced foam pillars. Strength types punched metal plates. Every one of them had nice gear, shiny boots, and that confident look people wear when life has been clapping for them since birth.
I walked in smelling like wet pavement.
The laughter started before I reached the testing machine. Someone recognized Ryan's face. They called me a dead battery, a walking phone charger, a spark bug. One guy asked if I could maybe warm his coffee if I tried really hard.
I almost got mad. Then I remembered I had just turned an alley into a thunder trap with my bare hands. So I smiled.
The instructor pointed me toward a black pillar covered in copper rings. It measured raw power by absorbing a hit. People gathered around, because everyone loves watching a loser embarrass himself. The screen above the pillar showed low scores from earlier tests. I could tell they expected mine to be even lower.
I placed one finger on the pillar. Nothing happened. The crowd laughed. The instructor sighed.
I kept smiling, because I was not sending power into the pillar yet. I was listening to it. I felt the wires inside, the sensors, the storage cells, the calibration chip, the hidden safety limit. It was not a magical tool to me. It was a nervous little machine begging not to be fed too much.
So I gave it one percent.
The pillar screamed. The screen flashed. The copper rings glowed red, then white. Every light in the yard flickered. The vending machines behind the bleachers shot snacks into the air like confetti. The score climbed so fast the numbers blurred. Then the machine coughed smoke and displayed a single sad message telling everyone to please step back.
The crowd went silent. I leaned toward the smoking pillar and whispered, "Sorry."
Then the entire training yard lost power. For three seconds, nobody moved. Then a tiny emergency light clicked on above my head, shining down like a cheap halo.
That was the moment I understood something important. Power was not just about blasting harder. Anybody could throw a fireball and call themselves special. My gift was control. I could touch the hidden nerves of the modern world. Doors, cameras, cars, drones, phones, lights, weapons, elevators, speakers, screens, medical devices, bank vaults, monster traps, city trains, anything with current inside it. The world had wrapped itself in electricity, and I had become the hand inside the glove.
Of course, the first thing people did was accuse me of cheating.