The main character is a former KGB operative who has retired. While dying, he finds himself in the body of a fifteen-year-old boy—the younger (and unloved) son of the head of an otherworldly clan of warrior-mages. The boy is a bookish “nerd” who prefers books and doesn’t want to hear the ringing of blades or the rasping of dying men. Unfortunately, his consciousness dies after falling down the stairs in an old library—leaving the body and seventy years of knowledge to a seventy-year-old earthly killer.