"Haaa… out of every world, every story, every halfway decent novel with a reasonable plot — why did it have to be this one?"
I sat there for what felt like a long time, just staring at the pale ground beneath me.
The emptiness around me hadn't changed. Still no wind. Still no sound. Still that deeply unsettling sourceless light coming from a sky that couldn't be bothered to have a sun.
But I had changed, slightly. The crying was done. The screaming was done. The dramatic fist-slamming against the ground was very much done.
What remained was something quieter and considerably more dangerous — the part of me that thinks.
And right now, that part of me was starting to piece things together in a way I genuinely did not enjoy.
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Let me tell you about myself first, because context matters.
My name is Max. Max Harlow — Japanese-British, born in London after my parents immigrated from Japan hoping for better opportunities. A decision that, to their credit, turned out to be an excellent one. My father's business found its footing in London in a way it never quite managed back home, and within a few years we had gone from quietly comfortable to genuinely well-off.
I grew up in a good house, in a good neighborhood, with parents who loved each other and loved me and were, by every reasonable measure, the kind of family that other people envied at school events without quite admitting it.
I was, by most accounts, annoyingly capable.Academics? Fine. Sports? Better than fine. Social life? Effortless, mostly. I was the type of person who made friends easily, adapted quickly, and rarely encountered a situation he couldn't navigate with a combination of common sense and the kind of stubborn optimism that looked like confidence from the outside.
The one area where fate consistently, cheerfully, and without remorse absolutely wrecked me was love.
Every relationship I had ever entered had ended. Not dramatically — no grand betrayals, no explosive arguments. Just quiet endings. Incompatibilities that revealed themselves slowly. People who were wonderful but not quite right. Timing that was never quite correct. I had been heartbroken more times than I was comfortable counting, and I had handled each one the same way — smiled through it, tucked it somewhere quiet inside me, and moved on.
My friends called me the "good guy." I had accepted that label with the same complicated feeling I imagine people feel when they're described as "reliable." Technically a compliment. Somehow also slightly sad.
Recently, though, things had genuinely been going well.
I had landed a position at Sapple — yes, that Sapple, the company that made the impossibly thin devices that half the world couldn't afford but bought anyway. I was making a name for myself there, climbing faster than expected, and an upcoming appraisal had me quietly confident about breaking into a seven-figure salary within the year.
Life, for the first time in a while, felt like it was moving in the right direction.
So I did what any sensible person does when things are going well — I took a holiday. Booked a trip to the Himalayas, summited a peak, planted a flag, ate something delicious at base camp whose name I still can't remember, and began the journey home feeling the specific, clean satisfaction of a man who had earned his rest.
And then I died.
Apparently.
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I looked down at my strange, pale, not-my-hands and sighed deeply.
There are people on earth who would kill for this chance, I thought. People who are suffering. People who have nothing left. People who read these exact kinds of stories and lie awake at night wishing they could be pulled into another world.
Why me? Why the person who was finally, genuinely happy?
I had no answer for that. The universe, in my experience, rarely explains its decisions.
"No point sulking," I muttered, mostly to convince myself. "You've already cried more in the past few hours than you did in the last five years combined. Get it together."
I took a long breath and forced my mind toward the facts.
I was in a different body.
That body belonged to someone inside a novel I had read.
Not a good novel, for the record.
Here's the thing about being an obsessive reader — and I was, genuinely, a deeply obsessive reader. Back in my previous life, between work and travel and the rotating tragedy of my love life, I had consumed novels the way some people consume television. Webnovel specifically had been my poison of choice for years. Fantasy, action, cultivation, reincarnation, political intrigue — I had read enough of it to recognize every trope before it finished setting itself up.
Within a couple of years, I had worked through nearly everything worth reading on the platform.
And then I'd run out of good things.
Which is how, about a year before my untimely and deeply inconvenient death, I had ended up reading The Chronicles of Axtor Lyshaan.
I want to be clear about something: I did not pick that novel because I thought it was good. I picked it because I had exhausted my other options and it was there, and sometimes that's the only qualification a story needs.
The premise was standard. Almost aggressively standard. A noble from a powerful family rises through the ranks of a fantasy world through a combination of talent, righteousness, and plot armor thick enough to stop a siege weapon. Axtor Lyshaan — the protagonist — was exactly the type of main character I had read a thousand times before. Good-hearted. Secretly powerful. Surrounded by beautiful and devoted women who somehow never lost patience with him regardless of what he did.
You know the type.
The world itself, though — that was different. That was where the author had put in the real work.
The world was called Sarcadus.
Originally, it had been home to five main races: humans, elves, dwarves, beastfolk, and beastkin. Five races sharing one world meant five races constantly at each other's throats over land, resources, pride, and the ancient art of holding grudges across generations. Tension was the natural state of things, and open conflict was never more than one bad decision away.
Then the war happened.
Not just any war — the War of Gods, which is what you call a conflict when it's catastrophic enough to reshape the entire world.
Four new races descended without warning: angels, demons, devils, and ghosts. They arrived like a stone dropped into an already unstable pond, and the ripples they created nearly shattered everything. The original five races, previously too busy fighting each other, suddenly had a much bigger problem.
The angels, cunning as they were terrifying, positioned themselves as saviors. They joined the original races, took command with smooth authority, and helped push the demons, devils, and ghosts to the far edges of the world.
Then, once the fighting stopped, they stayed.
And started building temples.
The original races, to their credit, eventually noticed what was happening. The angels weren't saviors. They were conquerors with better public relations. By the time the alliance fractured, angelic faith had already taken root across the continent, spreading through shrines and scripture and the very human tendency to worship whatever survives long enough to seem permanent.
The five original races expelled the angels from the alliance and formed the Pentagon — their own coalition, their own counterweight. They built Arcaneum Academy at the convergence point of all five empires, a symbol of unity and a practical institution of power.
The world settled into an uneasy, complicated, deeply political peace.
That was the backdrop.
Against it, Axtor Lyshaan rose.
And here is where I have to be honest about the novel's problems, because they are relevant to my current situation and also because I have nothing else to do.
Axtor was not a simple character. I'll give the author that much credit.
He had a dual bloodline — human and devil, which was already unusual enough to be interesting. His devil side manifested in what the story called rages — periods of complete loss of control, during which Axtor became something genuinely frightening. Violent. Merciless. The kind of creature that didn't leave survivors.
Then, layered on top of that, an angelic bloodline. Dormant for generations in his mother's line, awakened in him specifically.
Human. Devil. Angel.
A walking contradiction wrapped in a noble's clothing, surrounded by women who adored him and enemies who feared him, slowly becoming something the world had never seen before.
On paper, genuinely compelling.
In execution? Well.
Every time Axtor's devil bloodline took over — every time he slaughtered a village or drank someone's blood or committed an act so brutal it made my skin crawl just reading it — the story found a way to soften it. His harem members would gather around him afterward. Someone would say something about forgiveness. Someone else would invoke destiny. And Axtor would look regretful for approximately two chapters before the next arc began and the whole cycle repeated.
I had dropped the novel twice because of this.
I came back both times because the world-building was genuinely excellent and I had nothing better to read.
That is the story I had been reincarnated into.
I pressed my fingers against my forehead and exhaled slowly through my nose.
"So," I said to the empty white nothing around me. "This is where I am. Inside a novel I read out of desperation, in the body of a side character I barely remember, in a world that is simultaneously more interesting and more terrifying than I'd like."
A pause.
"Fantastic."
The body I was currently occupying belonged to Zhavrik Thalorein. The youngest heir of the Thalorein family — one of the most powerful and feared noble families in the human domain. A boy who had briefly appeared in the story, vanished for ten years, reappeared near the Devil Domain during an expedition arc, and then been killed by one of the dragon heroines in what amounted to a subplot.
His death had barely been two chapters.
He had existed in the story as what readers called an extra. A character with just enough background to feel real, but not enough importance to survive.
And that was now my body.
My bloodline.
My family.
My problem.
I looked at the ring on my finger — the storage ring, apparently, since that's what it had functioned as so far — and then at the letter sitting in my lap.
I hadn't finished processing the letter yet. I had read it. I had understood it. I had cried about it, which was a reasonable response.
But now, sitting in the quiet aftermath of all that emotion, I read it one more time.
It was an invitation from Arcaneum Academy. Formal, respectful, carrying the weight of an institution that didn't need to impress anyone. It addressed Zhavrik Thalorein directly, acknowledged his approaching eleventh birthday, and informed him that as a direct heir of the Thalorein line he was exempt from the entrance examination and expected to register at thirteen.
An invitation that most students on the continent would have sacrificed something significant to receive.
An invitation that was, I realized slowly, essentially the starting pistol of the story I was now trapped inside.
I folded the letter carefully and set it down.
"Well," I said.
The white nothing waited.
"I guess I should figure out how to get out of here first."
I stood up, brushed off the pale ground from the back of my — Zhavrik's — clothes, and looked around at the infinite emptiness with the specific expression of a man who knows his problems are enormous but has decided, at least for today, to deal with them one at a time.
Step one: find a way out of this eerie, silent, sun-less wasteland.
Step two: everything else.
I started walking.