The Void and the Gutter

He dreamt of silence before he dreamt of sound.

He dreamt of pressure before he dreamt of pain. And before memory came, there was only the weight of not being.

There was no heaven. No tunnel of light. No warm embrace from long-lost souls.

There was only the void.

A place where time didn't move forward or backward where names meant nothing and thought felt like drowning in smoke.

Daniel Varga floated in it. Not asleep. Not awake. Just... suspended.

And then.

He awoke with a gasp his first breath in a new world. And it hurt like hell.

He woke up choking on the stench of rot

This wasn't metaphorical rot, it was raw, actual decay.

The air was thick with the sharp stench of piss and the profound reek of death. His chest convulsed, his lungs felt small. Too small.

He was lying on hard ground, the hard, cold ground pressing into his back. He tried to sit up and collapsed instantly.

His arms were thin.

Bone and skin.

No fat, no strength.

He blinked rapidly, his vision blurred. The frailness of his own body felt profoundly wrong, a stark contrast to the strength his mind still expected.

But then he looked at his hands.

Small. Dirty. Trembling. Not his.

No wedding ring. No scars. Just the grime of poverty and fingers belonging to someone maybe five years old.

"...What the hell " But his voice didn't say that.

It came out high-pitched, hoarse. A dry rasp in a language that didn't belong to him.

German.

He didn't know how he knew, but the words came anyway.

He blinked. Once. Twice.

"No, this isn't real!"

It has to be some kind of psychotic break.

Hallucination. Some twisted fever dream playing out in the final moments of oxygen-starved death.

He dug his fingernails into his forearm, sharp, shallow. It hurt. Not much, but it did.

He breathed harder.

Faster. His chest pumped, desperate for air. Everything felt wrong. The unfamiliar way his limbs lay. The pitch of his breath. The way his voice sounded thin, small, not his.

I'm dreaming. I'm dying. I'm drugged. I'm-

The thought shattered under the weight of the cold air slicing through his throat.

"This isn't possible..."

His voice trembled in that unfamiliar tongue, and yet, it was fluent. Natural. As if the knowledge had been poured into his skull and stitched to his brain without asking.

He looked around again. The alley. The filth. The sky. No buzzing machines. No tall skyscrapers. No clean anything.

This wasn't hell. It was worse.

It was real.

He wanted to scream. Not out of fear, but out of insult.

He had died. Not in glory. Not in defiance. But like something abandoned and left to rot. He, Daniel Varga, dismantled for his debts.

And now? Now he was some half-dead gutter rat in a world that smelled like ash and piss?

"No. No. No, No, No."

He slammed his small fist against the stone. The pain was real. The tears that followed? Real too, though he'd never admit it.

What kind of afterlife was this? Was this punishment? Rebirth? Some joke from a god he'd never bothered to believe in?

"If this is hell," he whispered bitterly, Then I'm the devil now."

He curled in on himself, shivering against the wall, fury brewing under the surface of his fear. It was too much to accept. Too much to process.

But Daniel had survived worse.

And even if the universe had dealt him the cruelest hand imaginable, he would play it.

He coughed until his throat hurt. A rat scurried past his hand. A real one. He didn't even have the strength to flinch.

His stomach roared, not from hunger, but starvation. His mouth was dry. His throat cracked when he swallowed.

Wherever this place was, it was dying. And so was he.

He looked around.

He was in an alley barely wide enough to call one. The stone walls around him were moist, coated with mold and dark, unsettling stains.

It was here, in this dirt and grim.

The truth came like a punch to the ribs. He wasn't just in a child's body. He was in this body.

Whoever this boy had been, he was dead. And Daniel Varga had taken his place.

Panic hit him next, hard. He was a grown man in a five-year-old's shell, in a world he didn't know, with no money, no connections, and no name.

No one would save him. There was no hospital. No social worker. Just Prussia.

Cold, harsh, unflinching 1715 Prussia.

And if this alley was any indication, he wasn't reborn into nobility. He was born in the gutter.

The kind of place where children die quietly and no one notices. The kind of place where the strong survive. And the weak get buried in the mud.

Hours passed. Maybe a day. He couldn't tell.

He crawled from the alley on hands and knees.

He found himself in a city, a big, dirty maze that certainly wasn't home.

The air bit with a sharp chill, thick with the smell of wet dirt and the never-ending, stinging smoke from countless fires.

Where he might have envisioned open fields, he found instead buildings squashed close together everywhere, creating a confusing mix of wood and plaster

The paths under him were a mix of rough stones and packed dirt, often slippery with mud or dusty when dry.

They twisted and turned, narrow in the older parts where houses leaned heavily over the walkways, almost blocking out the sky.

Further on, he saw wider, straighter roads, hinting at bigger plans, but even these felt raw and unfinished.

Noises hit him from all sides: the constant rumble of heavy wooden carts, the steady clank of a metalworker's hammer, the shouts of sellers he couldn't see, and the ever-present clopping sound of horses on the uneven ground.

The smells were a strong, overwhelming mix: the sharp bite of horse waste and human waste, the comforting smell of fresh bread from hidden bakeries, the metallic tang from workshops, and the constant dampness that seemed to stick to everything.

He felt lost by how many things were packed into this place, where just staying alive each day was a fight, and having dreams was something almost no one could afford.

He watched as people passed him without a glance.

Peasants. Merchants. Dirty boots and finer shoes. Cloaks. Hoods. One man stepped over him and cursed.

"Get out of the way, rat."

That was the first sentence he understood. Not from translation, he knew the language. Fluently. Somehow.

Something about this body... it was giving him more than just flesh.

Eventually, he found a broken wall near a bakery and collapsed beneath it.

He watched people trade coins and bread. Watched children laugh in the street while others stole food and ran.

He even saw a man beating someone senselessly. No one spared a glance.

This world was unforgiving. And he had nothing. No name, no family, not even clothes that fit.

He was afraid, but he knew he shouldn't be.

He is Daniel Varga. A man who'd built wealth from nothing, a man who knows value. A man who has died once already.

This world now didn't scare him. Poverty didn't scare him. Powerlessness... didn't scare him.

"This time," he whispered, "I will own the street that tried to bury me."

And in that moment, Johann was born.

Not as a boy.

But as the ghost of a dead man, learning how to crawl again so he could one day rule. 

That ambition, however, was immediately tested.

The first three days were the hardest. Starvation did strange things to the brain.

He imagined voices. Faces. He swore he heard an elevator ding once. He laughed at that, dry and bitter.

The kind of laugh that made old men turn their heads and mutter prayers.

He drank rainwater from a gutter. It tasted like copper and ash. He threw up after. Then drank again.

He dug through filth. Not garbage bags, there were no such luxuries. He found bones. Crumbs. Once, half a cooked potato covered in something green. It was a victory.

He cried when he ate it. Not because it tasted good. Because it stayed down.

He learned quickly that no one gave out kindness here. Kindness was currency. And he had none.

Other street kids ignored him. Some jeered. One tried to take the piece of cloth he used as a blanket.

Johann held on. Bit the boy's hand. Got punched for it. Worth it.

He slept in a stack of crates near a tavern. It was loud.

Smelled of beer and sweat. But it was warm. He listened to the men talk.

Caught snippets of their speech. Names of lords. Talk of trade routes. Taxes. Rumors of war.

His German sharpened by the hour.

Not learned, remembered. This body, for whatever reason, remembered things it shouldn't have.

He didn't question it anymore.

By the end of the week, Johann had found his routine. He woke at dawn.

Walked with the merchants until someone shoved him away. Waited behind the baker's shop for crusts.

Listened. Always listened.

The hunger never left. But it became part of him. Like a second spine, bending him just enough to keep him humble.

He grew quieter. Sharper.

Learned where to sit so he wouldn't be stepped on.

Learned how to cough so it sounded worse than it was. Learned how to look pathetic without looking like a target.

Most of all, he learned that he wasn't special here.

No chosen one. No prophecy. Just another mouth in the dirt.

And yet, each day he survived was a win. Each crumb was a bargain. Each bruise, a lesson. He stopped asking why this happened. Stopped searching for logic or divine purpose.

This wasn't punishment.

It was a test.

And Johann had always been good at passing tests.

Now, in this desolate existence, the true measure of his success wasn't grades or achievements, but something far more fundamental.

Time.

That was his true currency now. Not the paper, not the digital phantom of wealth, but the slow, agonizing tick of each second in this filthy, dying world.

He lay against the cold stone, the smell of street grime clinging to his tattered rags, and thought to himself.

A week already? he thought, I've been in this goddamn world for a week already, huh? I've been eating barely any food for the past days and I feel like I could die from hunger.

"I really need to find a way to make money." He said

He tried to summon the past.

Not the recent past, the one where he'd been Daniel Varga, dismantled for his debts.

No, he clawed at the future.

He tried to map out industries that hadn't been born yet.

Steam power. Factories. The relentless hum of machinery.

He tried to remember the precise chemical compositions, the metallurgy breakthroughs, the revolutionary agricultural methods that had fed a burgeoning world.

His mind, once a steel trap for market data and client profiles, now felt like a sieve.

Fragments. Glimpses. A word here, a formula there, dissolving before he could grasp them.

Joint-stock companies, national banks, the very concept of futures trading, he saw the ghostly outlines of these complex systems, but the specific mechanics eluded him, buried under the trauma of his rebirth.

The frustration was a bitter taste, sharper than any starvation stab.

He was a man who'd built empires out of algorithms and leveraged buyouts.

But then, the broker in him clicked.

What was the core principle? Value. Finding it where others saw none. Creating it from nothing. And leveraging it, however small.

His "asset" was a handful of fish scales.

His "market" was a city of impoverished, uneducated people.

His "capital" was the very air he breathed. Ridiculous. And yet, the game had to start somewhere.

He had no reputation, no network, no name of consequence beyond the one he'd given himself in a moment of defiance.

His immediate goal was simple: survive, yes, but more importantly, observe with intent. Find the inefficiencies.

Find the hidden needs. Identify the key players, however small their current domain.

He was starting at zero, worse than zero, in a world that operated on rules he barely remembered from dusty history books.

But he was Daniel Varga, and he knew how to play.

He just needed to learn the new rules of the board.

And the first rule of this board, he realized, was that information was currency, and perception was power.

Armed with this brutal clarity, Johann's observations sharpened further.

He had a path, however faint.

He saw it in the grime, near the bustling fish market.

It wasn't the clean, sterile market of his past life, but a chaotic, vibrant organism of smells and shouts.

Here, the air vibrated with the guttural calls of fish vendors selling their daily catch – "Fresh pike, straight from the Spree!" and "Eels! Still wriggling!".

The ground was greasy with brine, guts, and the constant tread of heavy boots.

Discarded fish scales, glistening like tiny, dull pearls, lay everywhere.

Most would ignore them, or sweep them into the gutter.

Here's where the broker in him stirred.

Daniel Varga had always seen potential where others saw waste.

He suddenly pulled from the depths of his fragmented modern memory a forgotten fact, perhaps from a quirky historical market analysis or an odd news segment.

Old dyes, specialized glazes, he recalled, used finely ground fish scales for their unique shimmer and pearlescent effect.

From his twenty-first century perspective, it was a minor, obscure application, long rendered obsolete by industrial chemistry and synthetic materials.

But that was precisely the point.

What was lost to time in his era was a potential goldmine in this one.

It was a long shot. A desperate one.

But it was value, raw, unrecognized, waiting to be exploited.

He, a scrawny boy, began approaching the local fish vendors, giving them an unnervingly direct gaze.

His first attempts were met with suspicion.

"Get lost, urchin! No charity here!" one burly vendor snarled, brandishing a cleaver.

Another, a toothless old woman, simply spat near his feet.

But Johann, in his past life, had negotiated with ruthless corporate titans.

These were just fish vendors.

He learned to be patient, waiting until the end of the day when their stock was low, their energy flagging, and their desire to simply clean up was paramount.

"Sir," he'd rasp, his high voice surprisingly firm, "The scales. The ones you sweep away. Could I... have them?"

Most disregarded him with a wave. "Take the trash if you want it, boy! Just don't get underfoot."

Others, perhaps amused by the sheer oddity of the request, or simply too tired to care, would nod towards the glistening heaps near their stalls.

He was often given strange looks, and occasionally, kicks from boys who thought him playing a foolish game.

But Johann was no longer just a mouth in the dirt.

He was an accumulator.

He was a thinker.

Patiently, meticulously, over one chilly morning, he collected the discarded scales.

The smell clung to him, stronger than anything before, but he ignored it.

He began to stash them inside a tattered piece of clothing he discovered on the streets.

He'd now gathered a small bucketful of scales, which, once ground, would likely produce enough powder to fill a pouch the size of his fist.

Finally, he had a shimmering pile.

Now, what to do with it? He needed to find a way to ground these fish scales into powder and find someone willing to buy

Someone who might see the glimmer in his scales.

Someone desperate enough, or visionary enough, to buy.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Author's Note:

Fish scales weren't used to create color in dyes, but for their iridescent, pearlescent effect when finely ground. This material, sometimes called "pearl essence" or "essence d'orient," was historically used as an additive.

Applications included:

Cosmetics: For a pearly sheen in creams or polishes.

Artificial Pearls: Coating glass beads.

Decorative Arts & Glazes: Adding luster to ceramics, lacquers, paints, and inks.

From Johann's 21st-century perspective, this was an obscure, pre-industrial application, largely replaced by synthetic materials. However, this forgotten knowledge becomes his unique advantage in 1715 Prussia