CHAPTER 1: One More Novel
— —
The light from the monitor was the only thing keeping Han Seojun's eyes open.
It was 2:47 AM, and the rest of the apartment had gone quiet hours earlier. His roommate, a biology student named Park Junho, who could sleep through a car alarm, had turned out his light at eleven. The refrigerator hummed softly. Rain tapped against the window in irregular patterns, the kind that never quite became rhythmic.
Seojun then refreshed the page.
The website loaded slowly, and its white background bled into the edges of the dark room. He scrolled past the banner ads, past the trending titles, past the comments section of the last novel he had finished three hours ago, and stared at the search bar.
He typed: best novels similar to The Author's POV.
He had already performed this search 11 times in the past two weeks. He knew the results by heart. The same Reddit threads, the same forum recommendations, and the same curated lists on Novel Updates. He read eight of the top suggestions. None of them had given him the same feeling.
There was a specific quality to The Author's POV that he could not articulate precisely. However, it was not the power progression that was satisfying. It was not world-building, although the post-Cataclysm setting was one of the better ones he had encountered. It was something to do with the narrator. The way Ren Dover inhabited the story from the inside — not as a hero, not as a chosen one, but as a man who simply knew too much and had to decide what to do with that knowledge.
Seojun had reread the first arc twice. He had caught details on the second read that completely changed how he understood the third arc. Entrail_JI was doing something subtle with foreshadowing that most readers missed. The author was not just writing an isekai; they were writing about the psychological experience of living inside a story you did not create.
He clicked on the first result. A novel about a doctor who transmigrates to a fantasy world. He read three chapters, felt nothing, and then closed the tab.
He clicked on the second result. A cultivator who obtained a system that granted him infinite skills. He read one chapter, skimmed the second, and decided that it was not what he was looking for.
He returned to the comment section of The Author's POV and read through the most recent chapter discussions. People were arguing about whether Ren should have intervened in the Gilbert-Kevin confrontation or stayed out of it. Someone had posted a theory about the mysterious red book and whether it was actually connected to the original manuscript that Ren had written in his previous life. Seojun had thought about that theory before and had his own opinion, but he did not create accounts on these sites. He just read.
Reading was what he did.
He had started reading web novels in high school, during the period after his parents' divorce when the apartment his mother rented felt too small and too quiet, and the only place he could genuinely be somewhere else was on a screen. He read through eleven thousand chapters of various novels across three platforms before starting university. His reading speed was approximately thousand words per minute, with full comprehension retention. It was the only thing at which he was genuinely exceptional.
He was not exceptional at university. He was studying computer science because his mother suggested it was practical. He wasn't failing, but he wasn't thriving either. He attended lectures, completed assignments, ate convenience store meals, and waited for the next chapter update on whatever series had caught his attention.
The Author's POV was the first one in a long time that made him feel something close to genuine excitement.
He had now caught up to the latest chapter — chapter 312 — and the weekly update schedule felt like a slow death.
He closed the search results page.
He opened the chapter list for the fourth time and scrolled all the way back to chapters one, two, and three. He hovered over chapter one.
He'd read it before. He knew that he had read it before. But there was something about starting from the beginning again, about going back to where Ren first opened his eyes in that one-bedroom apartment and saw the floating status screen that felt different from reading for the plot. It felt like visiting a place.
He clicked chapter one.
The page is loaded. He adjusted the brightness on his monitor — down a notch, easier on the eyes. He pulled the blanket up to his chest. The rain outside shifted into a more steady rhythm.
He started reading.
— —
He did not remember falling asleep.
This was the first step. One moment he was in chapter three, his eyes tracking the line where Ren's body was stumbling with that specific lag of soul-to-flesh adjustment, and then he was somewhere that was not his bedroom.
It was not a gradual fade. It was not a dream sequence where things bled into each other with soft edges. One moment he was in his chair, the monitor light on his face, rain on the window. In the next moment, he was on the floor.
A concrete floor.
Cold.
He registered the temperature before anything else was done. The cold came through his palms, through his knees, and through the thin fabric over his shins. It was the specific cold of a building that had been aired out — not outdoor cold, not storage cold, but the cool, slightly stale air of an institution with its ventilation running too efficiently.
His face was on the floor. Cheek flat on concrete.
He lay there.
His first thought, which was coherent and specific, was: I fell out of my chair.
His second thought, arriving approximately two seconds later, was: This is not my floor.
He pushed himself upright and sat up. The motion felt wrong. Not wrong in the way a pulled muscle felt wrong, but wrong in the way that a marionette moving for the first time might feel wrong — there was a fraction of a second between his intention to move and his body's execution of the movement. This is similar to a transmission delay. Like input lag.
He sat on the floor and placed his hands flat on the concrete in front of him.
His hands were wrong.
They were too thin. The knuckles were different from each other. The nails were cut differently for each experiment. He turned his hands over, and the palms had calluses in places where his palms had never had calluses — along the inside of the fingers, at the base of the thumb. Sword calluses. He recognized them because he had read enough novels to know what sword calluses looked like.
He remained still for a moment.
Then he looked up.
The room was small. A single bed with white sheets. A wooden desk. A wardrobe. A narrow bathroom with a half-open door. Morning light through a window to the left — pale and early–the kind of light that came just after dawn. A tablet-shaped device on the desk with a dark screen.
His heart was beating very fast.
He knew this room.
He had never been in this room, but he knew it well. He knew the position of the desk relative to his bed. He knew that the wardrobe would have two drawers at the bottom and three shelves above. He knew that the bathroom would have a basic shower stall with a shelf that held exactly two items. He knew all of this because he had read the description of this room four times across two read-throughs of chapters two and three.
This was Ren Dover's room.
He sat on the floor of Ren Dover's room, in a body that was not Ren Dover's, and tried to breathe normally.
This took approximately 30 s. Breathing did not fully normalize, but it reached a functional level.
He stood up. The motion had the lag again — that half-second delay — but his legs held firm. He was shorter than expected. Or rather, he was exactly the height he expected given that this was the body of a sixteen-year-old, but his frame of reference was his own body, which had been twenty-three years old and 178 centimeters. This body was — he glanced at the window glass — shorter than his. Maybe 170. Slender in a way that carried some muscle but not much muscle. Dark hair. Pale skin. The eyes that looked back at him from the window were brown, not the blue he had expected.
Not Ren Dover.
Ren Dover had blue eyes. He remembered that clearly — jet-black hair and blue ocean-like eyes, as described in chapter two. The eyes looking back at him from the window were brown. Dark brown, ordinary.
He was not Ren Dover.
This thought landed with a specific kind of weight.
He walked to the desk. His steps were careful, each one deliberate, waiting for the lag to cause him to stumble. It didn't — the lag was fading as he moved, the way chapter two described it, the way a soul slowly synchronized with its vessel. He sat down in the chair in front of the desk. He touched the tablet.