  Collective excitations of bound electron-hole pairs -- known as excitons --
are ubiquitous in condensed matter, emerging in systems as diverse as band
semiconductors, molecular crystals, and proteins. Recently, their existence in
strongly correlated electron materials has attracted increasing interest due to
the excitons' unique coupling to spin and orbital degrees of freedom. The
non-equilibrium driving of such dressed quasiparticles offers a promising
platform for realizing unconventional many-body phenomena and phases beyond
thermodynamic equilibrium. Here, we achieve this in the van der Waals
correlated insulator NiPS$_3$ by photoexciting its newly discovered
spin-orbit-entangled excitons that arise from Zhang-Rice states. By monitoring
the time evolution of the terahertz conductivity, we observe the coexistence of
itinerant carriers produced by exciton dissociation and the long-wavelength
antiferromagnetic magnon that coherently precesses in time. These results
demonstrate the emergence of a transient metallic state that preserves
long-range antiferromagnetism, a phase that cannot be reached by simply tuning
the temperature. More broadly, our findings open an avenue toward the
exciton-mediated optical manipulation of magnetism.
