No Mana. No Mercy. Alchemy System: Rise of the Poison Sovereign

The first sensation was cold. A raw, piercing cold that clawed through thin rags and gnawed deep into his bones. It was worse than any Siberian winter he'd ever joked about with colleagues, worse than the sterile chill of a morgue. This was the cold of death clinging to life by a thread, sharp enough to scrape at the edges of consciousness and drag him back, against all instinct, into a searing, unimaginable pain. "No..." A raspy gasp ripped from his throat, not his own voice, not familiar. It felt like someone else’s, high-pitched and strained, scraping against a raw, tearing pain deep in his chest. His own lungs, had they collapsed again? Was he still on that damned operating table, lights blazing, the world spiraling? No. This wasn’t right. This wasn't sterile. A foul stench invaded his nostrils, cloying and heavy – decaying refuse, stale urine, something metallic and sickly sweet that might have been old blood. His medical brain, a lifetime's training, immediately started running diagnostics, despite the chaos. Lungs struggling, severe respiratory distress. Pulse weak, thready. Hypothermia, bordering on… well, what exactly? His eyes fluttered open, heavy and gummed shut with what felt like grit and dried discharge. He blinked, fought the searing in his vision. Dimness. Gloom. Grimy walls rising on either side, like a narrow, stone-walled canyon. Overhead, a sliver of dark, bruised sky. No fluorescent lights. No hospital ceiling. Definitely not the ER. "Where... what the hell?" The question barely left his lips, a breathy wheeze. Every fiber of his body screamed, protesting the effort. His head throbbed, a dull ache that flared into white-hot agony when he tried to move it. Broken ribs. That was his first thought, the immediate, clinical assessment. Probably multiple. Internal bleeding? Unlikely if he was still alive. Shock, definitely. Dehydration, judging by the sandpaper feel of his tongue and the weakness in his limbs. Malnourishment. My God, malnourishment. He was a doctor. A top-tier surgeon. The kind they called a prodigy, a miracle worker with a scalpel. He could patch up bullet wounds, restart failing hearts, reconstruct shattered limbs. His hands were his tools, his mind a steel trap of anatomical knowledge. But these hands... they were small, trembling. Filthy. Covered in grime and... dried blood. Child-sized. Too small. Way too small. Panic began to prickle, cold and insistent, underneath the pain. "Okay, Kael. Breathe. Deep breaths." He tried, but his lungs hitched, refusing to expand properly. Every shallow inhalation sent waves of agony through his torso. "Right. Shallow breaths. Good." It was a bizarre, clinical assessment of his own dire state. A professional habit, refusing to die even as his new, weak body insisted on it. Memories flickered, disjointed and cruel. The operating room. A patient, crashing. Then... not that. Not his operating room. A road. Headlights. The roar of an engine. Impact. A scream. His own? A jarring, brutal sensation of everything ending. And then, this. This wretched, frozen awakening. Am I dead? Is this... some twisted purgatory? His modern, scientific mind wrestled with the absurd. He didn't believe in the afterlife, certainly not like this. No pearly gates, no fiery pits, just... this festering alley. The world spun gently as he tried to shift, every movement a betrayal by his own weak musculature. Muscles atrophied, skin pale and taut over bone. He felt like a skeleton draped in tissue paper. His doctor's eye scanned the visible parts of his arm, already assessing the prognosis for someone in this state. Bleak. Horrifically bleak. "This isn't happening," he whispered, a phantom warmth of denial blooming in his frozen chest. "This is a nightmare. I’m going to wake up. My alarm will go off, and I’ll be late for morning rounds. Dammit, Dr. Lee is going to kill me." The words felt foreign, echoes from a life suddenly distant, separated by an unbridgeable chasm. Dr. Lee. His mentor, his rival, his friend. What was she doing now? Drinking awful hospital coffee, probably, bitching about the interns. A fresh wave of confusion washed over him. The sounds around him were… strange. Not the familiar urban symphony of car horns, distant sirens, chatter. This was quieter, more primitive. The drip-drip of unseen water, a scuttling sound in the shadows, faint, high-pitched laughter that quickly turned into a whimper. And underneath it all, a hum. A faint, ethereal thrum that resonated in the air, a whisper against his eardrums. He hadn't noticed it before, masked by the pain and fear. It felt... magical. Impossible. His scientific brain rebelled. "Magic? What the hell?" He chuckled, a dry, bitter sound that only deepened the pain in his chest. "Yeah, right. I bumped my head, probably bleeding internally. Delirious." But even as he dismissed it, the hum persisted, subtle yet distinct. It felt... powerful. Like an invisible force current in the air. A feeling that raised the hairs on his weak forearms.