For the next week, Ryo became a prisoner of his own sleep.
Each night, he returned to the burning hall—or to somewhere near it. Sometimes he watched Caius from a distance, a silent witness to a life collapsing under betrayal. Other times he saw through the duke's eyes. He felt the pull of a sword in a calloused hand, the sting of cold rain on armor, and the hot shock of a wound opening beneath his ribs.
The dreams never gave him enough to understand. They gave him just enough to make forgetting impossible.
During the day, Heaven's Wrath kept changing. Caius vanished from one chapter and returned under a different name in another: Caelum Veyne. The rewritten character still carried the outline of a doomed antagonist, but his history had been reshaped. Ryo took screenshots, copied paragraphs into a notes app, and compared versions. Each time he tried to prove what he had seen, the evidence changed or disappeared.
Only his memories remained.
He stopped telling Kenji about the dreams. The teasing had been harmless at first, but Ryo could not stand hearing the same explanation—too little sleep, too many novels—when he knew neither fit the growing terror in his chest.
One night, the dream changed again. Ryo stood on a battlefield beneath a sky the color of old ash. The bodies around him wore unfamiliar armor. A faceless shadow waited at the far end of the field.
"You do not belong here," it said.
The words struck him like a physical blow. He tried to run, but his borrowed legs would not move. The shadow crossed the distance in a single step. Pain burst through his chest. The battlefield cracked like glass.
Ryo woke—except he did not wake in his own room.
The ceiling above him was made of dark stone. A row of torches burned in wall sconces, filling the chamber with the smell of wax and smoke. Heavy curtains framed tall windows. His nightshirt had become an embroidered black coat, and his hands were larger than he remembered, rough with old calluses.
He stumbled toward an ornate mirror.
A stranger stared back: long crimson hair, aristocratic features, and golden eyes that seemed to hold a private storm. The face was handsome, almost unnervingly so, but Ryo recognized it from the dreams.
Caius Veyne.
"No," Ryo whispered. "No, no, no."
He pinched his arm, struck the desk, and pressed both palms against the cold mirror. Nothing changed. His reflection breathed when he breathed. When he lifted a hand, the stranger lifted his.
An envelope lay on the desk. His real name was written across it.
To Ryo.
His fingers trembled as he broke the wax seal. The letter began with a sentence that made his stomach knot.
I know you're panicking. Breathe first. You were brought here for a reason. Your survival depends on what you do next.
The writer claimed to have left him a helper. Before Ryo could read the final lines again, a translucent panel appeared in the air.
[Initializing System…]
For one bright instant, hope surged through him. A system meant rules, information, perhaps a way home.
Then the panel flickered.
[System Error: Required sacrifice not met.]
[Emergency Protocol: Administrator's lifespan used as fuel.]
[Unauthorized access detected.]
[Connection severed.]
[System shutdown.]
The interface shattered into blue fragments and vanished.
Ryo stood motionless. The message had mentioned an administrator's lifespan. Someone had paid a price to bring him here—and the attempt had failed before it could help him.
He searched the desk. Beneath a stack of documents, he found a formal sheet bearing a name in elegant script.
Caius Veyne.
He was in Heaven's Wrath. He had become one of the novel's earliest villains, a talented noble whose pride and bad choices led him to a brutal death. In the original story, Leon had barely needed to struggle to defeat him.
Ryo sat on the edge of the bed, trying to breathe. He had read countless stories about people waking up inside novels. He had always thought he would make better decisions than the characters.
Now he understood how easy it was to become a fool when fear was real.
A sharp pain drove through his skull. Memories flooded in: a childhood of strict lessons, the cold attention of a powerful father, sword practice before sunrise, political gatherings where every smile concealed a calculation. The memories belonged to Caius, yet they arrived with the force of his own life.
Ryo collapsed.
When he woke, a stern maid stood nearby, watching him with concern.
"My lord," she said, "the healer has been summoned."
Ryo looked at the woman and found her name surfacing from the memories. Elise. Housekeeper. Trusted by the family, feared by lazy servants.
He swallowed. "How long was I unconscious?"
"Only a short while. You frightened everyone."
He nodded, unsure how to imitate a man he barely knew.
After Elise left, Ryo looked at his hands. The system was gone. The letter offered no useful instructions. The administrator was apparently dying—or had already begun to pay for his arrival.
He was alone in the body of a doomed villain.
The next morning, he tested his memory with a list. Leon's regression, the academy's opening ceremony, the names of the principal allies, and the early conflict with the Echo Chamber—he wrote down each detail before opening the novel. When he checked the chapters, several lines disagreed with his notes. It was not a simple edit; even comments he remembered leaving had disappeared. The author's account now showed no profile picture. Ryo sent a private message asking whether the story had been changed intentionally. It returned an error before it could be delivered. He stared at the notification, then placed his phone face down, afraid that the next thing erased might be his own proof that he had ever existed.
For the first time in his life, he wished he had paid more attention to the endings of the stories he read.