Prologue

We've all read the novels. Transmigration, reincarnation, time traveling to the past, it's a popular trope that offers a lot of intrigue. However, even the dozens of novels John read in his spare time couldn't have prepared him for what happened on that fateful day. June 29th, 2026. The day the entire population of the Earth was forcibly brought to a higher plane. John was just sitting at his desk, reading as he liked to do in his spare time, when all of a sudden it felt like all of his senses had turned off. Pitch blackness covered his vision and a deafening silence washed over him for several minutes before he slowly awakened.

The first thing he noticed was the overwhelming stench. Used to a sterilized room protected from nature, the strong smell of flora and fauna overwhelmed him. He opened his eyes and found himself to be nowhere near the desk he was just sitting at. Instead, he was laying in the dirt in front of a fantastical tree. The tree was hundreds of feet tall, taller than any tree known on Earth. The tree felt like it came right out of a high quality painting. The roots were a shining blue, with glowing white veins crisscrossing the surface. The roots led to a trunk the width of a house, which took up much of John's vision.

Sitting up, John slowly craned his neck upwards to take in more of this tree. The leaves were a strange shade of bronze, shooting off the blue branches. Before he could take further note, one of the thinner branches lightly swayed, bending down and slowly reaching towards John. 'Could this be... my fortuitous encounter? will eating one of these leaves give me ungodly talent, or perhaps each leaf has some kind of profound inheritance in it?!' Eagerly, John slowly reached out his hand towards the branch, entranced. However, before John could even get a chance to touch the leaf, the branch suddenly shot forward like a snake. Before John could react, it punched through his chest and ripped his beating heart to shreds.

He immediately coughed up large globs of blood which splattered onto the leaves and branches. The glowing white veins seemed to react to the blood, lightly throbbing. Before John's eyes, his blood was slowly absorbed, and where there was once blood a new budding leaf was growing. His vision fading, he looked back to the canopy of the tree only to see a small, gray, humanoid creature. It's facial features twisted in a mocking smile, it started muttering in a strange language he'd never heard before. The tree branch immediately lifted John into the air, and brought his dying body over to this small gray creature. The creature opened its mouth revealing a horrifying set of wicked teeth and fangs, spoke a sentence, and then proceeded to devour John's head whole. Had he been able to speak the language, John would have heard the humanoid say "Who would have thought there'd be a day I wasn't the bottom of the food chain.."

Humanity's greatest crisis had just begun.