Episode 1: The Awakening
They Gave Me the Useless [Harvesting] Skill, So I Decided to Reap Their Souls Instead!
Page eighty-seven of a thesis no one would ever read.
His fingers trembled from too much caffeine and far too little sleep.
Six years of his life spent studying dead mythologies and forgotten rituals.
Deadline is 8 AM. No extensions this time. Good luck with that.
“I have been awake for thirty-one hours straight writing about dead shamans and their rituals.”
His heart did something terribly and irreversibly wrong.
Not wrong like a skipped beat. Wrong like a machine that was never supposed to stop — stopping.
He was twenty-five years old when his heart gave out for good.
He died writing about the dead, alone in a dark apartment in Kraków.
His thesis was never submitted. His coffee went cold on the desk.
The cold hit first — sharp and merciless, like a blade drawn across bare skin.
The fragments collided in his skull — the blue screen, the espresso, his heart stopping mid-beat.
“Same hands. Same fingers. But something about them felt completely different.”
He stood in a world he did not recognize, wearing clothes he had never owned.
Welcome, Reincarnated Soul. Class: Guślarz (Spirit Weaver) — Rare.
Passive Skill: [Basic Harvesting]. Warning: Cardiac deficiency detected in host body.
The System did not respond. It never did. It simply hung there in the rain, indifferent.
“HP: pathetic. Stamina: barely a sliver. Intelligence: the only stat worth anything at all.”
It felt absurdly inadequate for survival — but it was all there was to grab.
“Guślarz. Hexer. Spirit-worker. In the old texts they were feared and respected throughout the land. In the System's classification — Rank F.”
His heart lurched inside his chest. Not metaphorically — it actually stuttered and seized.
Then the water erupted with a sound like the earth itself was choking.
Utopiec. The Drowner. One of the drowned dead that crawled back from wherever the dead go.
“He had read about this creature. Moszyński's ethnographic surveys. Kolberg's field notes. The drowned dead who always came back wrong.”
It did not go down. Of course it did not go down. Nothing was ever that simple.
His vision tunneled to a narrow point. His heart was stopping again — just like in Kraków.
“I am going to die again. The exact same way. Heart just stops and that is the end.”
“At least this time around there is no coffee involved in my death.”
[Basic Harvesting] activated on its own. He had not triggered it consciously.
Something deep inside the monster pulled free — and flowed directly into him.
His heart beat — strong and clear and real. Fueled by something that was never meant to be inside a human body.
Silence returned. Then rain. Then the ragged sound of his own labored breathing.
KILL CONFIRMED: Utopiec (Level 3). Irregular use of [Basic Harvesting] detected. Recalculating... No rule violation found.
He laughed because the only alternative was screaming until his throat gave out.
“The stolen vitality had a timer ticking down. When it ran out, his heart would remember that it was supposed to stop beating.”
Stop reaping, and his heart stops with it. That was the deal he never agreed to.
In the dark water far below the surface, something ancient watched him walk away.
“A heart condition, a stick, and a gathering skill that was not actually a gathering skill. What a magnificent start to a second life.”
He walked deeper into the forest because there was nowhere else to go.
The air tasted of iron and old magic, the kind that seeps up from the earth itself.
Somewhere ahead through the mist — a structure that should not have been there.
“A shrine. A pagan shrine. The kind I spent six years writing about in a thesis no one will ever read.”
Older than anything he had ever studied. Older than any text he had ever translated.
His heart beat with stolen strength. Every pulse was borrowed time, and he knew it.
And the Guślarz's harvest had only just begun.
