The kettle had stopped boiling ten minutes ago, but Elias Mercer hadn't moved from the floor.
His back was pressed against the peeling wall of his studio apartment, legs stretched out beneath a pile of unopened instant ramen packets. The lights had gone out earlier. He hadn't bothered to check why. He didn't really care. A storm, a grid failure, some local construction screwing with the power lines—it all blurred together.
A thin coat of dust clung to his laptop screen, which still displayed a tab he'd left open for days:
"Divine Rift Chronicles — Chapter Finale Updated."
He hadn't clicked it.
Not because he wasn't curious. But because he didn't care anymore.
He knew the story. He'd followed it since the second year of university, read every update, watched the cast rise and fall, suffered through the arcs that dragged and gasped through the ones that soared. He had cheered for the underdogs, hated the villains, memorized stats and skill evolutions like a lifeline.
And in the end, he knew exactly how it would finish.
The hero wins.
The gods descend.
The world ends in glorious ruin, and a handful of survivors escape to fight another day.
That was how they always ended.
It should have made him feel something. Closure. Nostalgia. A twinge of loss.
But right now, Elias was just tired.
His breath rasped in his chest, shallow and uneven. The buzz of neon from outside filtered through cracked windows. The rain had started again, faint, rhythmic. A steady drip, drip, drip against the rusted AC unit wedged into the wall.
The room smelled like old fabric and unopened food. His phone battery had died days ago. No one had called. No one would.
He wasn't sad. He wasn't angry. He was just...done.
He looked down at his hands. Pale. Unscarred. Empty.
"Maybe that's it," he muttered, his voice dry with disuse. "No tragedy. No accident. Just… nothing."
No one to miss him. No one to notice.
The pain came sudden and sharp—a jolt in the chest, violent and deep. His fingers twitched. His legs kicked once, involuntarily. His head struck the wall behind him.
Then stillness.
No screaming. No last words. No messages scheduled to send.
Only silence.
The cursor on his laptop blinked steadily in the dark:
[Finale Updated]
[999 Comments]
It wasn't the end.
He was floating. Maybe. Falling. There was no gravity here. No up, no down. Only endless black—a weightless void that pulsed gently around him, like he was inside something alive.
Elias tried to scream. Nothing came out. He had no mouth. No lungs. No body. Only thought.
And something else.
Something massive was watching him.
It had no face. No form. But it was there—just beyond the veil of perception. He couldn't see it, but he felt it, like a second heartbeat that wasn't his. It pulsed around him, ancient and quiet.
Then, a voice. Not loud. Not quiet. Just final.
"Hm."
Not a greeting. Not curiosity. A statement.
"You drift. But not cleanly."
Elias tried to respond. A question, a thought, anything. But he couldn't even form the words.
"Strange. You shouldn't be interesting."
The space rippled. Like a curtain blowing in windless dark.
"And yet... you watched. So many endings. So carefully."
The voice didn't echo. It threaded through him. Like it was thinking through him. Or with him.
"One of them noticed."
One of what?
The darkness coiled tighter. Like a fist closing around his mind.
"Wake up."
No deal. No bargain. No contract.
Only that.
Wake up.
Pain slammed into him like a train.
Searing heat. The smell of ash and old blood. Symbols. Red light. Carved stone beneath him. Something wet and warm dripping from his mouth.
Elias gasped—or tried to. His arms were bound. His chest was bare. Symbols pulsed around him, etched in glowing runes across stone.
There was a circle beneath him. Crimson. Complex. Ancient.
And something was coming.
He felt it in the air. The static. The pressure. The twisting pull at the edge of his soul.
Across the chamber, a black-bound book lay open on a pedestal. Its pages shimmered. Bleeding smoke. Glyphs twisted and curled on their own.
Whispers filled the space, crawling across his skin.
Your blood. Your name. Your will.
A low growl. Somewhere behind his eyes. Like something gnawing through a wall.
This was a ritual.
No—a summoning.
Elias didn't know how he knew. But he knew.
This wasn't a hallucination. Not a dream. Not an illusion. This was real.
And he was in the middle of it.
His head swam. Thoughts flickered. Memories surged.
The novel.
Divine Rift Chronicles.
Demons. Summoning circles. Blood rites. The early chapters.
The villain who tried to trade his soul.
The first one to die.
No. No. No.
He looked down.
The body wasn't his.
Older. Broader. Scarred. Familiar and wrong.
Kael Virein.
The bully. The coward. The idiot who tried to summon a demon to reclaim lost power—only to get stabbed in the back for it.
The first stepping stone.
His hands trembled. The circle flared.
Something was rising. Crawling through the space behind the symbols. Claws of shadow. A maw of gnashing fangs. A being not meant for flesh.
It was almost here.
His body moved before he could think.
He jerked his arm. Bone cracked. Pain flashed white. The binding runes flared, but he slammed his palm against the circle.
Blood.
He dragged his fingers through the glyphs, distorting the pattern. Breaking the symmetry.
The demon shrieked.
The space tore open—a scream in a hundred tongues.
And Elias—Kael—whoever he was now, drove his hand into the ritual spike on the altar and drove it backward, into the forming shadow.
A flash of light.
A roar.
Then darkness.
Real, crushing, absolute darkness.
His thoughts flickered as consciousness slipped. Just before it broke completely, a final phrase burned through his mind.
[System initializing… Kill confirmed. SP awarded: 500.]
Pain came first.
Not a sharp pain, but something deeper. More primal. Like his soul was trying to regrow around a hole.
Elias floated in it. Through it. Every second burned, like thoughts were being carved into him with a needle.
Light. Then dark. Then nothing.
Then a room.
It wasn't a room in any normal sense. There were no walls, no floor, no ceiling. Just an infinite dome of pages, like a library had folded in on itself across every direction.
Scrolls floated by, curling in and out of view. Books wrote themselves midair. Parchment burned, reversed, and rewrote its contents in flickering ink.
Elias stood in the middle of it, barefoot on an invisible surface. Breathing hard. Clutching his chest.
He looked down.
Still not his body. Older. Taller. Heavier. Barely clothed, skin marked with faint burns and the remnants of glowing runes.
"What is this?" he croaked.
The voice returned. But this time, it came from a figure.
Tall. Shadow-wrapped. Robed in drifting script, face obscured by a veil of shifting letters. The figure did not move. It simply appeared where it wished to be, and now it stood before Elias with hands folded calmly.
"Between stories," the being said.
Its voice was layered. As though a dozen versions of the same sentence were being spoken at once—some older, some younger, some not human at all.
"What are you?"
"Not what you need to know. Only that you caught the eye of one who sees endings."
Elias stepped back. "Am I dead?"
"Yes. And no."
Of course.
"You put me in someone else's body."
"He no longer needed it."
Elias felt bile rise in his throat. The memory returned in flashes. The circle. The shadow. The spike. The blood.
The demon.
"That wasn't supposed to happen," he whispered. "He died. That's how the story goes."
The figure tilted its head.
"Not anymore."
Elias opened his mouth to demand more, but a glowing pane appeared in front of him—a glowing violet screen of translucent energy, humming with symbols and a jagged sound of static.
Then came the words:
[System Online]
[User: Kael Virein - Soul Signature Confirmed]
[Title: Survivor of Collapse - Temporary]
[SP Balance: 500]
He read them again. And again. The words didn't change.
A menu formed beneath it. Pages of options, prices, and categories.
[ Weapons
Skills
Bloodline Traits
Mutation Stabilizers
Potions and Elixirs ]
A single blinking message hovered at the bottom.
Welcome to the Survival Shop. Kill to Adapt. Adapt to Survive.
Elias looked up slowly.
"Why me?"
The figure didn't answer. Instead, it raised a single hand. A book formed in its palm—leather-bound, etched with a symbol Elias didn't recognize.
The cover opened. Pages flipped.
Inside, words began to burn themselves into the parchment.
Not elegant script. Not divine glyphs.
Typewritten. Familiar.
It was his old laptop's font.
And the words on the page were forming in real time.
Elias Mercer stared at the book that now bore his name. He felt the weight of a story that had not been written—not fully. A blank map of chaos, waiting to be charted.
No prophecy. No guidance. No safety.
Just one law: Survive.
The book snapped shut.
The figure vanished.
The world shattered like glass.
He awoke to agony.
This time, it was real. The smell of blood. Burned stone. His body ached everywhere. He was on the floor of a scorched ritual chamber, light flickering from torches knocked from their holdings.
The circle was broken. The summoning book incinerated.
And the shadow that had tried to rise? Gone. Utterly.
But so were the bindings.
Kael—Elias—forced himself upright, using the pedestal as leverage.
He gasped in the chill air. Coughing hard.
Then he looked down at his hands.
Still not his.
They were his now.
A violet pane hovered before him again.
[Survival Shop: Active]
[New Trait Acquired: Demon Resistance (Lesser)]
[Body Condition: Critical]
[Recommendation: Purchase Basic Medical Kit - 50 SP]
He stared for three full seconds. Then he blinked. Wordlessly tapped the blinking option.
A flash.
A box of glowing light materialized beside him. Clattered to the floor. Elias stared at it.
He had read about systems. He had read about Kael.
But he had never expected to become part of either.
He unsealed the box.
And so, it began.