"Hmm…" Silas muttered in excitement. 'Did I succeed?'.
Ignoring his splitting headache. Silas took notice of his surroundings; he was in a dark alley, lying in a heap of garbage.
He stood straight in the mound of garbage with great difficulty and started observing his body.
Seeing his now young skin, he was beyond excited. It seemed he had succeeded.
But catching his reflection in a puddle of water left Silas shocked. This was not his face.
"Hmm, it seems there was a complication. I seem to have switched bodies with someone. Is that even possible?"
All of Silas's research indicated that it shouldn't be.
In that puddle of water, he saw his current appearance. The face that stared back at him was that of a young man with disheveled hair and gunk on his face.
"What else has changed?" he wondered. He tried to move out of the mound of garbage, but he stumbled, trying to take control of his body.
Smelling the pungent stench of alcohol and seeing the bar sign to his left. He figured that the original body got too drunk and was thrown out of the bar.
Finally, after great effort, he got out of the dark alley. He traversed through the streets while ignoring the gazes of contempt and disgust from the people around him and picked up a newspaper from a nearby stand.
He didn't really blame them. He was wearing patched clothes with an unkempt beard and hair. His body was dirty, and he smelled like sewage.
Ignoring the gazes of contempt, he took in the unique atmosphere—the shiny cars, the chaos, and the gritty, alive city that seemed to pulsate with its own distinct culture—he instinctively knew that this was New York in the 90s—a time and place he particularly enjoyed.
Looking back at the newspaper, he noticed the headline' New Roman Empire declares war on the White Crescent Empire'; his eyes widened in disbelief.
'It seems I am in a different world. But how and why am I here?' Silas thought.
He had to get to the bottom of this.
"Let's list out all the reasons I can be in this universe:
There was an error in my calculations, or I didn't take all variables into account... There could have been an energy surge or an instability in the time machine's quantum displacement engine that caused the quantum tunnel to collapse".
Silas was supposed to go back in time, but he seemed to have arrived in a parallel universe instead.
"That makes sense, so this all could just be an accident," Silas thought. But what if there's more than meets the eye?
"Maybe I died, and this is some sort of illusion in hell where I will continue to torture myself. Eternally torturing myself with my delusions. Who knows, maybe this is not even the first time I've said this", he thought.
It could be possible; after all, Silas never found any proof of a hell dimension, but he never found any conclusive evidence of its absence, either.
"Or maybe some omnipotent god liked me or hated me. So he sent me to this universe to fulfill my goals", he mused.
But he was more inclined to believe the next possibility, though, simply because he didn't want to imagine the ramifications of being involved with such a being.
"By time traveling, I should have broken the laws of the universe. So maybe, while time traveling, I was expelled from my universe and arrived here".
"Well, whatever…" Whether real or false, he couldn't do anything about it currently. With time, Silas was sure he would find out.
'Even if this is an illusion, I should be able to break out. Perhaps the process will be far more complicated in that case.'
Silas was confident of that much. Suppressing this line of thought. Silas thought of something else.
Knowing that he had chosen to believe he was in another universe, what should be his plan? Did he have a golden finger? It wouldn't make sense, but what if?
He called aloud with barely hidden glee, "System, open, status, open sesame," but much to his disappointment, nothing happened except a young couple crossing the street to the other side.
He stepped on a passing rat. But the result left him disappointed.
The rat did not give him experience points or life essence. It seemed he didn't have a cheat.
So, he began thinking again, quickly finding a quiet corner and sitting down.
He had no advantage here, so he thought of all his current skills and tried to formulate a plan around them.
"This doesn't make sense at all. There was always a good chance I would fail, but how is it possible that I was thrown into another universe? I need to retrace my steps and see where things started going wrong." Silas said, deep in contemplation.
He was not sure if what he was seeing was even real. Clearly, at some point, things went out of his control.
So, he wanted to retrace his steps to see where things started going wrong.
His last 'complete' memory was of him standing in the sky above his previous Earth, watching the destruction he had wrought.
---
Silas remembered looking at the planet swallowed by darkness. There was no sun anywhere; all he saw was a world decaying under the darkness.
Hours ago, his lab, buried deep beneath the ocean, had exploded. This explosion was so horrific that it took most of the Pacific Ocean with it. With this explosion came the nuclear fallout and energy poisons. This fallout was responsible for the darkness that engulfed the world.
He remembered his complicated feelings as he slowly landed on the blackened surface of what was once the Pacific Ocean.
He remembered his excitement and glee. He was beyond happy, but the finality of the destruction he had caused was still a bitter pill to swallow.
He was happy because he had managed to save his latest creation—the time machine. Right at the moment of the explosion, Silas had taken the machine and teleported to Mars, saving both himself and the machine.