Chapter 2: The First Hit
Big Mike's fist connected with Jake Turner's face.
If you've never been punched by a man who could bench-press a horse, let Jake provide a consumer report: it was, in a word, comprehensive. The fist covered everything — nose, cheek, a meaningful portion of his left ear, and what felt like a surprising amount of forehead for a punch that was supposedly aimed at his jaw. The impact had a sound quality to it, too. Not the cinematic crack you hear in movies. More of a wet, dense thud — the sound of a melon being introduced to a very opinionated brick wall.
Jake's head snapped sideways. His body followed. His bare feet left the muddy ground entirely, which was impressive given that he hadn't been jumping. For one brief, almost graceful moment, Jake was airborne — a full six inches off the ground, tumbling sideways through the alley entrance with all the dignity of a bag of laundry thrown from a moving car.
He hit the cobblestones. The half-eaten bun fell out of his tunic. The crowd on the street — a dozen merchants, two cultivators carrying swords, an old woman selling something that might have been radishes or might have been small, angry demons — went silent.
Jake lay on his back. The sky above Jade Creek Market was a deep, impossible orange, streaked with clouds that were moving in the wrong direction. One of those clouds appeared to be shaped like a fish. Jake stared at it. His nose was definitely broken. He could feel it — the warm, wet spreading across his upper lip, the slightly wrong angle of things. In Chicago, this would have been a trip to the ER and a six-week story about how he "got into a thing." Here, in a world where people threw lightning at vegetables, it was—
A translucent blue screen materialized in his vision.
STRIKE RECEIVED
Attacker: Big Mike Cultivation: Foundation Building, Early Stage Damage Dealt: Moderate +50 EXP
STAT CHANGES:
- Defense: 1 → 3
- Pain Resistance: 1 → 2
- EXP: 0 → 50
- Level: 1 → 2
Jake read the notification. He read it again. He read it a third time, because the words "STRIKE RECEIVED" and "+50 EXP" were sitting next to each other like they belonged there, and Jake's brain — still rebooting from the whole "died and came back to life" thing — needed an extra cycle to process.
Then something happened that Jake did not expect.
It started in his chest. A warmth — not pain, not exactly, but something that lived in the same neighborhood as pain and had borrowed its car. It spread outward, through his ribs, up his spine, into the places where the impact had landed. It wasn't pleasant, exactly. But it wasn't unpleasant either. It felt like cracking your back after a long day, or that first sip of coffee when you've been awake for thirty hours — the body recognizing that something it needed was being delivered, even if the delivery method was unorthodox.
The broken nose didn't hurt anymore.
Jake sat up. Blood was still on his face, but the warm feeling was doing something to it — tightening, closing, knitting. Not fast enough to look supernatural. Just fast enough that the worst of it was settling.
He looked at Big Mike.
Big Mike was standing at the alley entrance, fist still extended, wearing the expression of a man who had expected a specific outcome and was reviewing his expectations. The expected outcome was: person falls down, person stays down, person pays tribute. The actual outcome was: person fell down, person sat back up, person was smiling.
Jake was smiling.
He couldn't help it. The smile arrived on his face without permission, the same way a sneeze arrives — involuntary, unstoppable, and deeply inconvenient for everyone in the vicinity. It was not a sane smile. It was the smile of a man who had just been punched in the face by a giant in a fantasy world and discovered that it was, against all reason and probability, exactly what he needed.
"Thank you," Jake said.
Big Mike lowered his fist slowly.
"What?"
"Thank you. Seriously. That was — can you do that again?"
The crowd, which had been preparing for various reactions (crying, bleeding, calling for help, dying), collectively adjusted its expectations. The old woman with the radish-demons whispered something to the cultivator next to her. The cultivator looked at Jake, looked at Mike, and took a step backward.
Mike's brow furrowed. When a man whose forehead had its own gravitational field furrows, it's an event. "You... you want me to hit you again?"
"If it's not too much trouble," Jake said. He was still sitting on the cobblestones, still bleeding from the nose, still barefoot and muddy and wearing a tunic that smelled like a barn's autobiography. "I'm new in town. I don't have the tribute money yet. But if you're open to a barter arrangement — you hit me, I feel better, and we revisit the financial conversation when I've had time to—"
Mike hit him again.
This time it was a left hook — slightly less powerful than the first, more of a follow-up than a statement, but still very much the kind of punch that would have hospitalized a normal person. The fist caught Jake on the temple. His head snapped sideways again. The cobblestones rose to meet him for the second time.
STRIKE RECEIVED
Attacker: Big Mike Cultivation: Foundation Building, Early Stage Damage Dealt: Moderate +50 EXP
STAT CHANGES:
- Defense: 3 → 4
- Pain Resistance: 2 → 3
- EXP: 50 → 100
- Level: 2 → 3
LEVEL UP!
Host has reached Level 3. Defense +1. HP +20. Pain Resistance +1.
Current HP: 120/120 Next skill unlock: Level 10 (Iron Skin)
Jake lay on the ground for a moment. The warmth was back — stronger this time, flooding through him like someone had turned a dial. He could feel the difference in his body. Subtle, but real. His skin felt slightly thicker, like the difference between regular paper and cardstock. His nose was no longer broken. His head was no longer ringing. His bare feet, pressed against the cold cobblestones, didn't feel quite as cold.
He sat up again.
The smile was back. Bigger this time. Not because Jake wanted it to be — because the System had just rewarded him for getting punched, and his face had apparently decided that was worth celebrating.
"Oh, that's nice," Jake said, and meant it.
Big Mike took a step backward.
This was, for Jake, a more significant data point than the System notifications. Big Mike was the kind of man who did not step backward. Big Mike was the kind of man who made other people step backward. Big Mike's entire personality was a forward-moving object — fists first, opinions second, questions never.
And right now, Big Mike was looking at Jake Turner like Jake was a math problem that didn't add up.
"You're—" Mike started.
"I'm Jake," Jake said, standing up. His legs wobbled for a second, then steadied. The Defense increase was doing its work. "Jake Turner. I sell buns. Well, I'm going to sell buns. I don't have a cart yet, or a stall, or any money, or shoes, but the bun-selling is really more of a long-term—"
"You're not hurt," Mike said.
The way he said it made Jake pause. It wasn't a question. It was a statement of fact that Mike clearly wished was not a fact — the verbal equivalent of finding a spider in your salad and trying to convince yourself it was a crouton.
Jake considered his options. He could lie. He could pretend to be injured. He could play the sympathy card, the scared-new-guy card, the anything-other-than-the-truth card.
Jake said: "I heal fast."
This was technically accurate, in the same way that saying the ocean is "a little wet" was technically accurate.
Mike stared at him. Jake stared back. Between them, the half-eaten pork bun lay on the cobblestones, overlooked and slightly trampled, which Jake felt was disrespectful given that it had survived interdimensional travel.
"You're crazy," Mike said finally.
"That's fair."
"You smile when you get hit."
"I do."
Mike's eyes narrowed. Jake could practically see the gears turning behind them — gears that were not accustomed to turning and were making some concerning grinding noises. Mike had been running this protection racket for three years. He had a system. The system worked. You found someone new, you hit them, they paid, you left. Simple. Elegant. Time-tested.
Jake was breaking the system by not being afraid, and Mike did not know what to do with a variable he couldn't intimidate.
"You owe me five silver," Mike said, because retreating to a familiar script was easier than confronting the fact that a scrawny bun vendor had just thanked him for breaking his nose.
"I don't have five silver," Jake said. "I don't have any silver. I literally arrived in this world approximately four minutes ago, and prior to that, I was dead."
Mike blinked.
"Dead," he repeated.
"Choking on a bun. It's a long story."
Mike looked at Jake's face. Jake looked at Mike's face. Neither face was particularly helpful.
"Get me the money," Mike said, in the tone of a man who needed to leave before his understanding of reality deteriorated further. "One week. Or Big Mike comes back."
He turned and walked away. Not ran — walked. Big Mike did not run. Big Mike was a walking kind of man. But he walked quickly, and he did not look back, and Jake noticed that Mike's shoulders were slightly hunched in a way that suggested the Market Bull was experiencing something he hadn't felt in years.
Uncertainty.
Jake watched him go. He stood in the middle of the street, muddy and barefoot and smiling at the back of a retreating thug like a man watching a taxi meter tick away.
"Come back anytime!" Jake called after him. "I mean that! Anytime! Even Tuesdays!"
Mike walked faster.
The old woman with the radish-demons tapped Jake on the shoulder. Up close, the "radishes" were definitely alive. One of them bit her finger. She didn't flinch.
"You're either very brave or very stupid," she said.
"I'm a bun vendor," Jake said.
The old woman looked at the trampled bun on the ground. She looked at Jake. She looked at the retreating Mike. She made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a cough, then shuffled away, dragging her basket of angry root vegetables behind her.
Jake spent the next hour exploring Jade Creek Market with the wide-eyed bewilderment of a tourist who had taken a wrong turn at the airport and ended up in a completely different dimension — which was, if you thought about it, exactly what had happened.
The market was massive. Not Chicago-Magnificent-Mile massive. More like "someone had taken a small city, removed all the boring parts, and filled the gaps with swords and spiritual energy" massive. Stalls lined every street, stacked two and three deep, selling things Jake couldn't pronounce and wasn't sure he wanted to understand. Spirit stones glowed in glass cases. Pills sat in neat rows on velvet cloth, each one promising to "enhance your cultivation" or "unblock your meridians" — Jake didn't know what meridians were, but he suspected unblocking them was painful, which meant he was theoretically interested.
A man at a weapon stall was demonstrating a sword that could cut through sound. Jake watched the man swing the blade at a passing bird call, and the sound literally split in half — the high notes went one way, the low notes went another, and the bird flew away looking personally offended.
At a food stall three rows over, a chef was cooking with fire that came from his hands. Not a flame thrower. His actual hands. He was stir-frying something that might have been chicken and might have been a small bird that had wronged him in a past life, and the flames were blue-white and hot enough to make the air shimmer. The smell was incredible.
Jake's stomach growled. The half-eaten bun in his tunic pocket was not going to sustain him forever, and he had no money. This was a problem. In Chicago, no money meant ramen noodles and creative interpretations of expiration dates. Here, it meant—
A sound behind him. Not footsteps. Something heavier. Something rolling.
Jake turned.
Sitting in the middle of the cobblestone street, exactly three feet behind where he'd been standing, was a cart. A steamed bun cart — wooden frame, canvas awning, a steamer stack on top still faintly wisping steam, and a hand-painted sign on the front that read:
JAKE'S BUNS We Rise to the Occasion
Jake stared at it.
The translucent blue screen appeared:
SYSTEM NOTE: Host's primary livelihood asset has been integrated.
The Bun Cart is a System-bound item. It is indestructible, self-sustaining, and will respawn within 10 feet of the Host each morning if separated.
The cart contains:
- Fresh steamed buns (quantity: 50)
- Raw ingredients (sufficient for 200 additional buns)
- Steamer, rolling pin, cutting board
- One (1) apron
NOTE: The buns have no cultivation-enhancing properties. They are just buns.
"'They are just buns,'" Jake read aloud. "Thanks for the vote of confidence."
He approached the cart like it might disappear. It didn't. It sat there, solid and real and gently steaming, looking like it had always been there — like the market had simply made room for it the way water makes room for a stone. The awning was clean. The wood was smooth. The sign was hand-painted in neat letters, which raised the question of who had painted it, which raised the larger question of how a bun cart had materialized out of thin air, which raised the largest question of all, which was: why did the System think it needed to specify that the buns had no cultivation properties? Was that something people were going to ask?
Jake put on the apron. It fit perfectly, which was suspicious.
He opened the steamer. The buns were perfect — golden, round, steaming, fragrant. They looked like the platonic ideal of a steamed bun, the bun that all other buns aspired to be. Jake picked one up and bit into it. Pork filling, properly steamed, with a hint of ginger and sesame.
"Oh," Jake said, with his mouth full. "Oh, that's good."
He chewed. He swallowed. He looked at the fifty remaining buns. He looked at the crowd flowing past his cart — merchants, cultivators, children, a man carrying what appeared to be a small thunderstorm in a jar.
Nobody stopped.
Of course nobody stopped. He was new, unknown, shoeless, and had a bruise on his face the size of a small country. In a market full of established vendors and spiritual energy-enhanced snacks, a random guy selling pork buns from a cart that had appeared out of nowhere was about as compelling as a fire hydrant.
Jake sold zero buns for forty-five minutes.
He was beginning to understand the concept of "rock bottom" in a way that transcended his previous understanding, which had been formed during a particularly bleak stretch in 2019 when he'd eaten gas station sushi for three consecutive meals and called it "meal prepping."
"You look sad."
The voice came from his left. Jake turned.
She was young — sixteen, maybe seventeen — with a round face, dark hair pulled back with a strip of cloth, and the kind of eyes that saw everything and judged nothing. She wore a simple dress, stained at the hem with soil and something that might have been flower dye, and she carried a basket on her arm filled with chrysanthemums, jasmine, and one flower Jake didn't recognize — small, blue, and faintly glowing.
She was standing behind a stall two carts down, surrounded by flowers the way a normal person might be surrounded by friends — comfortably, naturally, like they belonged to each other. Her stall was modest. Her smile was not.
"I'm not sad," Jake said. "I'm contemplating."
"You've been staring at the ground for a long time."
"The ground is interesting."
"It's cobblestones."
"Cobblestones have layers."
The girl tilted her head. She studied Jake — the bruise, the mud, the apron, the cart, the lack of shoes — with the frank, unhurried assessment of someone who spent her days reading people the way other people read books. She did not look away from the bruise. She did not flinch from the mud. She just... saw him.
"First day?" she asked.
"First day," Jake confirmed. "And potentially last day, depending on how the bun sales go."
She laughed. It was a good laugh — short, genuine, the kind that arrived before the person could decide whether to let it. She came around her stall and walked toward him, and Jake noticed that she moved through the market the way water moves through a river — easy, familiar, with the confidence of someone who knew every crack in the cobblestones.
"I'm Lily," she said. "I sell flowers. Badly, usually, but consistently."
"Jake Turner. I sell buns. Currently also badly, and with zero consistency."
Lily looked at his cart. She looked at his sign. She looked at the stack of perfect, steaming buns, and something in her expression shifted — not suspicion, exactly, but the quiet recognition of someone who noticed when things didn't quite add up.
"That's a nice cart," she said.
"It appeared out of nowhere. About an hour ago. Just... popped into existence behind me."
Lily blinked. Then she smiled, because the market was full of strange things and a man claiming his cart appeared from thin air was, on a scale of one to ten, maybe a four.
"Well," she said, "at least it appeared near a good spot. This corner gets morning traffic from the east road. You'll get the dawn shoppers — cultivators heading out for the day, laborers, the early crowd."
Jake had not considered the strategic implications of where his cart had materialized. He had been mostly focused on the fact that he was alive, in a fantasy world, with no shoes.
"You know a lot about the market," he said.
"I've been here since I was ten. My mother sold flowers before me." She reached into her basket and pulled out a chrysanthemum — golden, full, perfect. "Here."
She held it out to him.
Jake looked at the flower. He looked at Lily. He looked at the flower again.
"What's this for?"
"New vendor gift. It's not a rule or anything. I just — you looked like you could use one."
Jake took the flower. It was warm from her hand. He held it carefully, the way you hold something valuable when you haven't held anything valuable in a while — in two lives, if you were counting.
"Thank you," he said, and his voice did something strange on the words — caught on them slightly, the way a car catches on a speed bump, not enough to stop but enough to notice.
Lily noticed. She didn't comment. That was the first thing Jake learned about Lily — she noticed everything and said only what needed saying.
"Listen," she said, leaning against his cart like they'd known each other for years instead of minutes, "you should know something about this market. There's a man — Big Mike, everyone calls him. He runs the protection racket. If you don't pay him, he—"
"He already found me," Jake said. "He punched me in the face. Twice."
Lily's smile faded. Concern replaced it — real concern, the kind that reached her eyes and tightened her shoulders. "Are you okay? He can be really—"
"I'm great, actually."
She paused. People who had just been punched twice by Big Mike were not typically "great." They were typically bleeding, or unconscious, or in the process of renegotiating their financial obligations through tears.
"You're... great."
"Never better." Jake held up the chrysanthemum. "I got a free flower, I have a cart full of buns, and a very large man demonstrated this world's unique approach to conflict resolution. All in all, solid first day."
Lily studied him for a long moment. The same frank, unhurried assessment — but this time, underneath it, something else. A flicker of curiosity. Not the dangerous kind. The kind that makes you want to stick around and see what happens next.
"You're strange," she said.
"I get that a lot. And I've only been alive here for about an hour."
Lily shook her head, still smiling. She pointed down the street — toward the area where Jake had seen Mike disappear. "You should pay him. Five silver a week. He hits people who don't pay, and he doesn't stop at twice."
Jake's eyes lit up.
It was a subtle thing — not a cartoon lightbulb, not a dramatic glow. Just a brightening, a sharpening, the quiet ignition of an idea that was forming in the back of his mind like a plan that knew it was stupid but also knew it was going to work.
"He hits people who don't pay," Jake repeated.
"Jake, it's not funny. He broke Old Gregor's arm last month."
"I'm not laughing. I'm noting. For future reference." Jake tucked the chrysanthemum carefully into his apron pocket. "Where does he usually... you know. Do this?"
Lily looked at him.
He looked at her.
"Jake," she said slowly, "are you asking me where to find the man who just punched you in the face?"
"I'm asking for a friend."
"You don't have any friends here. You've been alive for an hour."
"The friend is me. I'm the friend. I'm asking on my own behalf."
Lily opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Jake could see the calculations happening behind her eyes — the same calculations everyone would eventually make when they met Jake Turner. The math of a man who should be afraid and wasn't. The equation of a person who smiled when the smart thing to do was scream.
"Down Merchant's Row," she said finally, because Lily was honest and Jake had asked and those two things, for Lily, were enough. "He's usually near the fountain at noon. But Jake — please don't go looking for him. He's Foundation Building. He could really hurt you."
"I appreciate the concern," Jake said.
He meant it. He meant it in a way that surprised him — not the casual, surface-level gratitude of a person being polite, but the deeper, heavier gratitude of a man who had died alone on a sidewalk in Chicago while a pigeon watched and did nothing, and was now standing in an impossible world where a girl he'd just met gave him a flower because he looked like he needed one.
Two lives. Two worlds. And the nicest thing anyone had done for him in both of them was hand him a chrysanthemum and tell him to be careful.
"I'll be fine," Jake said. "I'm very hard to break."
Lily gave him a look that said she found this statement both ridiculous and, somehow, true.
She went back to her flowers. Jake leaned against his cart, the chrysanthemum warm in his pocket, the sun dipping lower over Jade Creek Market, and the translucent blue screen floating quietly at the edge of his vision — patient, persistent, and waiting.
He brought up his stats one more time:
THOUSAND STRIKES BODY — STATUS
Level: 3 HP: 120/120 Defense: 4 Pain Resistance: 3 Attack: 0 EXP: 100 Next Level: 200 EXP needed
Skills: None Next Skill Unlock: Level 10 (Iron Skin)
Two punches. Level 1 to Level 3. Jake did the math. If he could find Big Mike every day — once in the morning, maybe once after lunch — he'd hit Level 10 in... what? A week? Two?
He looked down Merchant's Row, toward the fountain, toward the massive retreating back of the only man in this world who had so far been kind enough to punch him in the face.
"Okay," Jake said to no one. "Okay. So this is my life now."
He picked up a bun from the steamer, took a bite, and watched the sun set over a market full of people who could fly, a cart that had materialized from thin air, a flower girl who thought he was strange, and a future that was, for the first time since he'd died, starting to look like something worth living for.
Tomorrow, he decided, he would sell buns in the morning.
And at noon, he would find Big Mike.
For the second helping.