Chapter 1 - Carl or Karl

Author: J. Arque

Editor: –

Proofreader: RagNarok

Many Thanks to RagNarok for PR'ing this chapter!

My name is Carl Sanders and I lived a life of seventy five years.

I was an Entrepreneur, Engineer, and Army Veteran.

I graduated from high school as valedictorian then I applied for ROTC scholarship to obtain My BE in Chemical Engineering and Master’s Degree in Material Science. I also married my first wife, Diane. But when the cold war broke out, I had to be sent to Southeast Asia for a five-year service term and I had to leave Diane with my four year old son, Jason, because of that.

Because of my bravery and diligence, I quickly rose up the officer ranks and become LTC Carl Sanders during that time period.

I was fortunate enough that all of my four limbs and every other part of my body was still attached perfectly by the end of my military career. I also got two silver stars and a medal of honor from the government for preventing a massacre of more than a hundred of my fellow soldiers that were ambushed by the enemy.

The army offered me a chance to continue my service and I would be given a promotion to Colonel. But I was tired with army business and still suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder after literally living through hell. I decided to go back and live with my family then look for a new more peaceful career.

It was tempting though, to gain a promotion and become Colonel Sanders. It would’ve been fantastic to have a similar name to the founder of a famous fried chicken restaurant franchise.

After I got out of my service term, I found out the reason why Diane hadn’t replied to my letters for the past two months. It was because she had changed her name and our son’s name then left the country without saying anything to our family and friends. Apparently she was having an affair with some Italian man for the past three years. But three months ago she had found out that she was pregnant with his child while still being married to me. She was afraid that I would’ve found out and decided to run away with him. I knew all that because Jason, my son, secretly contacted me with an email from an internet cafe in Milan. It crushed me when he said it was all my fault that he had to move to Milan and had to be away from his friends in Baltimore.

It was the worst year of my life since both of my parents died from a car accident, my wife had been cheating on me for the past three years, my son hated me and was raised by another man who I had never even met, and I also suffered from PTSD with no permanent job except a part time teaching job at a nearby college in Baltimore.

Few years after I filed for divorce with Diane, I married Helen, my former girlfriend from high school who was a General Practitioner in Baltimore at the time. It was her that over time helped me deal with my stress and depression. She motivated me to spend my time enjoying life more and not brood over the past.

Finally with Helen’s support and my expertise in Material Science, I started my first company with my former classmate, Paul Anderson. This company was later called Anderson-Sanders Steel International or ASSI. But only a year before ASSI went public, Paul decided to sell his share of the company to me to go back and focus in his scientific career. That made me the majority shareholder of ASSI.

ASSI after only a decade, slowly became a major player in the world’s steel industry because of its low price and high quality metal production. Then years later, as the demand from customers gained a significant increase, ASSI broadened its business into mining and processing other materials like aluminum, copper, tin, cobalt, silicon, and so on. By the end of 1990, ASSI entered the Forbes 500 list.

Then finally ASSI evolved into Sanders Group when ASSI acquired the license to open our own oil and mining industry in Africa and Asia. We also branched our company in various sectors like agriculture and home appliances.

I was the CEO of ASSI and Sanders Group for more than thirty years before I passed the chair to Arthur, my oldest son with Helen, who was also my CFO at that time.

After my retirement, my wife and I moved into my grandfather’s farmland just a few miles outside Baltimore city. There, I transformed my grandfather’s old two-story farmhouse into a large chateau and hired local farmers to rejuvenate the abandoned farm into a fully operational farm. I also took part on the designing and monitoring of the farm’s operations. After all, even after retirement, an entrepreneur would always be an entrepreneur.

I spent a great deal of my time reading books and monitoring the farm with Helen while occasionally our children would visit us in our chateau with our grandchildren to spent their summer vacation with both of us.

At the age of seventy five my life as Carl Sanders was over. Just two years after Helen had died from her breast cancer.

Yes, I had those moments of sadness, angst and despair but nonetheless that was the beauty of life. If you had a live a life where everything goes according to your expectations, you live a pretty bland life. Sometimes people learn the best life lesson when they are at their lowest point in their entire life.

And Yes, I also lived a happy life. However a part of me wanted the concept of reincarnation to be true. I didn’t want it to be over. I wanted to continue this wonderful adventure called life, I wanted new problems to solve, and new experiences. But I knew my wish was ridiculous, unscientific, and kind of misconceived if you consider that there was no concrete evidence for the existence of a soul to support the concept of reincarnation.

Anyway, I died while sleeping peacefully on my bed. When I was about to die, I saw an image of my late wife, Helen smiling at me and told me that my journey was not over yet.

When I was still thinking what she meant about my journey not being over, suddenly I felt a gigantic force pulling my consciousness out of my body then the force sent me into a crack in space-time continuum.

'Why can I see my own body sleeping right there? What is this?' After a few moments I felt the pull from the crack. In the inside of the crack, I could see that I was floating in nothingness except a large door with unknown letters written on top of it was there.

'Am I dead, am I?'

Yes, Indeed

The door suddenly opened but I could see nothing in the other side, I knew that somehow I needed to enter that door, so I did.

Not long after that, I felt a need to inhale some air. When I finally was able to breathe normally, I realized something. Clearly I knew I was died back then, but why could I still breathe? Was this what Helen mean about my journey not being over yet? And why the hell did I feel like I was sleeping on dirt?

After I opened my eyes I saw I was surrounded by countless pine trees. I was indeed sleeping on dirt. I also heard crickets singing and a green colored moon hanged in the night sky with a myriad of stars.

'Green?'

I had seen moon turned red and blue in my previous lifetime but it would never turned green. When I tried to examine the moon further, I realized even though the size was roughly similar with the one I saw on earth but this moon absolutely not the one I saw back then. There was even a thin dust ring circling around this moon like the one in Saturn. This moon was majestic compared to the bland dusty moon that I saw on earth.

At that moment, I realized that I didn’t wear my glasses and yet I could see the surface of the green moon in high definition. Then I felt my whole body was electrocuted and thousands of images flashed through my brain.

That moment, I knew I was not Carl Sanders anymore.

'I knew it!'

'My wish just became reality!'

I was able to not get overly excited, I tried to assess my situation.

It appeared that after I breathed my final breath on earth, my consciousness traveled through a mysterious black door and enter a new body in this unknown world. A cliché, I know, but it was what had happened to me.

This body that I now resided in was apparently the corpse of a kid named Karl son of Xander. It is spelled like Carl but with a hard ‘K’ sound.

This Karl was an orphan and had lived with his uncle who worked as a self-proclaimed metal worker or blacksmith in his home village, Exton. Because of poverty and hunger, this kid often played in the forest to eat berries.

Unfortunately for Karl, when he ate a huge raspberry, he was overly excited and because of that he choked and couldn’t breathe. Minutes later Karl died then not long after that I entered his corpse and revived Karl’s lifeless body. I wonder where the berry was gone because when I woke up I remembered I could breathe normally…

Anyway, I also obtained this boy’s memories when my own consciousness merged in his brain. Memories like who he was, where did he come from, why an eight years old boy like him was in the middle of a forest alone and so on.

I continued to process Karl’s memories until the moment of his death.

After I Finished examining Karl’s memories, I was dumbfounded that despite this world being different, its biosphere was fairly similar with earth. This world also has humans, deer, rabbits, horses, and even dogs who supposedly are animals that evolved from wolves because of being domesticated by human on earth.

The plants also almost completely replicated the one I saw on earth or at least the ones that had a natural habitat in the old world since Karl had never seen anything like Corn, Potatoes, tomatoes, peanuts or people walking around smoking tobacco because of the Europeans after the Colombian exchange. Maybe there is another ‘America’ out there somewhere across the ocean.

Then the most important question was ‘where am I?’

Well, apparently from what I had gathered from Karl’s memories, this kid lived in a small village with population of exactly 100 people, called Exton. It was about a mile from my current location.

This forest on the other hand was called Ramswood.

Exton village and the entire Great Extonian Forest which included Ramswood was under Markadia’s City-State jurisdiction. Markadia’s government would collect the taxes from Exton’s villagers for each year. Markadia itself was only one of many city-states that spread all over the Rohrkadian peninsula. Rohrkadia’s size was a bit larger than the Italian peninsula on earth. But the climate was similar with Germany or Northern France.

The language that people used here was called Rohrkish language and pretty much sounded like Scottish to me at first. This Rohrkish was a native language that commonly used by the Rohrken ethnicity.

People in Exton village or Exton’s mostly were descendants of the Ancient Extonian Forest tribes, but after the Markadia conquered the Great Forest, Exton’s also use Rohrkish language with a thick Markay accent for their daily conversation. There are a lot of similar words with English too, like ‘Old’ in English in here it was ‘Olde’. Dog to ‘Doege’. It was quite complicated since there are various connotation for each word too. They also had this thing called masculine words and feminine words. In a Masculine sense a ‘dog’ was called ‘Hounde’ but in a feminine sense they are called ‘Doege’.

Another useful piece of information that I got from Karl’s memories was the calendar used in this part of the world. Rohrkadian calendar was a solar based calendar in which a year would be divided into twelve phases. These twelve phases were derived from four seasons that were divided further into 3 phases: Early, Middle, and Late for each season. Originally this calendar was used by Farmers to decide the planting season. For example, Today was the 13th of Late Winter in Markadia’s Calendar. Some traveling merchants and mummers that had visited Exton said that the neighboring city-states like Paloph and Banthage also had a similar calendar but different names for each month.

When I tried to inquire about a complete world map or any other information about other area in this world from Karl’s memories, I couldn’t find anything. I only knew the name of several larger City-State that Karl’s had known from their coinage since all the Hegemons of Rohrkadia would have their own coin design with their City-State symbol on one side and their ruler’s face on the other side. Like Markadia’s City-State with their Boat of Markay, Paloph State with their Palos tortoise, Iene State with their Three-leaf clover, and Banthage State with their Bull face.

Sadly, this boy was not an educated kid. He couldn’t read or write. He was just a boy from the ‘Tanne’ caste, a caste of farmer, second from the bottom of the 7 caste that commonly used in Rohrkadia, only higher than freedman and Slaves or prisoners of war- and would never get any form of education like other kids from the ‘Dhabir’ caste a caste of Highborn, second caste after Royal Birth in the 7 caste in Markadia and Royal caste did. Because as far as I could recall in Karl’s memories, there were no such thing like schools for lowborn children in this part of the world. There were however things called academies in each large city but like I said before, it was only reserved for them who were born from the first two caste.

Only those who were able to attain merits in battle or fortune in their venture were able to upgrade their own caste. Since caste was hereditary, they could send their children into that kind of learning institution.

But thankfully, this boy was quite smart, despite him choking on a raspberry, for his age. He could remember lots of stories and general knowledge that was told by many bards and mummers who visited his village every now and then. Even though it was limited, but it was enough for me to adapt myself into this world.

Finally, I checked my new body. But what I found later was disappointment. This boy’s body was scrawny and wimpy. My new hands also looked like a pair of twigs. As an army veteran in my previous lifetime, this kind of body was really humiliating. I felt I couldn’t even lift a pound on each arm. This boy must have suffered a severe case of malnutrition to be this ‘weak’. I almost thought that this boy also suffered from anorexia but apparently that was not the case, since this boy even chocked himself because of a big raspberry.

It didn’t mean he was stupid or a gluttonous boy or anything, no. It just that in this peninsula, food was really scarce. I mean super scarce. Even the aristocrats could only enjoy a small amount of food each day let alone a lowborn. Most of the deaths in Exton and many other places in Rohrkadia were caused by starvation or hypothermia. If I was in Karl’s position at that time, It was normal for me to be excited when I suddenly saw a large raspberry right in front of me.

I suspected that the population boom after the end of the long war fifty years ago was one of the reason that might’ve caused the great famine in this part of the world. The production simply couldn’t feed the entire population.

Banditry was also a common occurrence. Four years ago a forest outlaws group called ‘The Red Swamps’ plundered Exton and killed so many people who refused to surrender their belongings. Xander, Karl’s father was killed and his mother Tatia was raped then mutilated by those bandits. Fortunately for Karl, his uncle secretly brought Karl into hiding in his secret basement.

Even though I felt no connection with Karl’s parents, I was furious and disgusted when the image of Karl’s mother was raped and mutilated replayed again and again in my brain.

Yes, I had seen such terrible things happen during my time in war on earth, but I never got used to it. I couldn’t imagine what sort of trauma this Karl had to bear after he saw his parents killed in such an inhumane way.

My blood was boiling. I looked up to the sky and said “Don’t worry Karl, as a thanks from me for using your body, I will bring those scum to justice once I have enough power”

With that resolution I stood up and search for food in this forest since I felt so hungry and weak. I had never feel so hungry in my life. Back in my time in the army I had once fasted for a week, I felt unbearable hunger and thirst but now when I think of it, what I felt back then was not so bad compared to what I feel right now. It also didn’t help that it was still winter and the temperature was around 4 or 6 degrees centigrade.

But after an hour, I only found two strands of wild asparagus and one thumb-sized oyster mushroom. I ate them raw since I didn’t have neither a container nor a fire starter to make a soup out of them. The asparaguses were juicy and the mushroom was quite tasty. It was not able to suppress my hunger, but at least provided me with enough calories to reheat my freezing body to be able to walk back into Exton.

I noticed it is already midnight and I needed to get home soon before Karl’s uncle became increasingly worried. Thankfully, there was no wild animals here apart from deer and foxes. It would be a disaster if I met a bear or a pack of wolves in this area. This body wasn’t suitable for engaging with those powerful animals and I couldn’t climb a tree to escape with twig like arms.

Along the way I found some wild strawberries, I decided to collect all of them so that I could put it in a jar later. I used the front side of my linen tunic to carry these strawberries back to Exton.

After I exited the forest I saw the wooden fence of Exton just in the horizon. It was easy to spot since Exton village was only surrounded by large farmlands and nothing except the Great Extonian Forest which included Ramswood in the east and Blakewood in the west.

Half way to Exton, I saw a person running towards my direction. Oh, this must be Karl’s uncle, Boban.

Boban was an older brother of Tatia. He was a short skinny man with a large nose and a goatee. He wore a ragged hood and undyed linen tunic like the one I used to wrap the wild strawberries. It was the standard lowborn attire in this part of the world.

Boban or Bob, had been taking care of Karl since four years ago. Boban was now 31 but he looked older than his true age. He appeared to be in his early forties. He also was a widower and had no child. His wife died when they lived in Trakken town a long time ago, but I didn’t know the details since Boban refused to tell Karl about his life’s history.

Based on Karl’s memories Bob worked as a self-proclaimed blacksmith in Exton. It was self-proclaimed since he was not a member of the smith guild after he failed the guild test in Trakken and did not attain a license to open a workshop in a larger town. With his wife died later that year, he move back to his hometown in Exton. However the pay for a blacksmith in Exton was really low because only few villagers wanted to order new tools or fix their old one.

People in the village after all did not have enough money. They chose to consume their own crops to survive rather than to sell it in the city. This caused the shortage of currency or ‘strung’ in Exton. If a villager needs something from other villager, they often revert back to the bartering system instead of using their coins.

Anyway, when Bob arrived in front of me, he grab both of my shoulders with his big hands.

“Boy! Why in hells ya roam outside the village in the middle of the nite!” Bob yelled at me with anger but when I saw his eyes I only saw worries and anxiousness.

Even though it was not entirely my fault, but I still felt terrible to make this good young man worried.

But before that I remembered that I need to act and speak like Karl.

“I am sorry Uncle Bob, I fell asleep in the wood”

Oh boy, was it weird to act like a normal eight year old when you were seventy five.

Bob’s face twitched when he heard my words. I saw a glint of guilt and sadness in his eyes. I knew he often saw Karl search for wild edibles in Ramswood when no food was available in their home.

He put his hand on top of my head.

“Sorry Karl, if I have…”

“Uncle Bob it is fine, and look! I got tons of strawberries!” I said with a proud expression while I showed him a handful of wild strawberries warped in my linen tunic. Hah apparently my acting skill was not so bad. If I wasn’t an entrepreneur back then, I probably could’ve gotten a job or two as a cameo or something in Hollywood!

“Good job boy, but next time be sure to come home when the sun is down. It’s dangerous out ‘ere. We don’t know when those bastards could come back” Bob said “Well, let us go home, it is cold ‘ere”

I nodded and walked into Bob’s house. When I didn’t look at Bob, I could hear him whispered something while looking at the sky.

“Sorry Tatia, I failed yer son”

Author Note:

Dear readers,

This is my first story in Royal Road and English is my third language. So if you find any issue like inconsistencies, grammatical error, punctuation, plot-hole or anything that bothers you about this story, please don't hesitate to contact me or comment below. I would greatly appreciate any of your input even if they aren't relevant to the story.

Cheers!