William Page didn't scare easy, but the woods weren't right.
No birdsong. No flies. Not even the wind stirred the ponderosa tops. The quiet pressed in, thick as a wool blanket. His grandmother's words came back to him, soft with Oklahoma drawl: world don't hush for no reason, Will.
He shifted his pack, boots crunching on damp soil. Hiking the hills east of White City was supposed to clear his head, not crawl under his skin. He almost turned back—almost—but then he saw it.
Between two mossy trunks, the air buckled.
It wasn't sunlight or mist. More like a seam in the world itself, vertical and trembling, the forest bending wrong on the other side. Letters shimmered faintly across it: Enter.
William froze.
His first thought wasn't magic. It was analysis. No tracks in the mud, no smell of chemicals or fire. If it was a trap, it was patient. If it was a hallucination, it was stubborn.
He pressed a hand forward. The air resisted, like pushing against unset gelatin, then yielded.
The forest vanished.
Marble spread under his boots. Black sky stretched above, not sky at all but a dome of glass filled with crawling constellations. Arches lined every horizon, each pulsing with text that blurred too fast to read.
A voice etched itself inside his skull:
Welcome, Challenger. Select your Dungeon.
His stomach knotted. Then the message shifted.
Select your System first.
Words unspooled into the air, a torrent too vast to count. They cascaded like ticker tape, names strange, grand, or downright absurd.
Dream Swimmer. Bone Singer. Ink-Blood Cartographer.
The list poured on. Starfire Adept. Fossil Gardener. Whispered Anatomist. Too many to follow. Too many to matter.
And then one sat plain among the chaos:
Omnivore.
William's mind clicked. If this was a dungeon, survival mattered first. Fire he could fake, tools he could learn, but food? If he couldn't eat what was here, he'd starve. Omnivore meant no starvation. Simple logic.
"Practical beats pretty," he muttered, and made the choice.
The cascade folded, then branched again. Options spidered outward, stranger than before: Wood Eater. Stone Eater. Metal Eater. Dozens more in words that looked half-Latin, half-nightmare.
One caught him.
Book Eater.
William stilled. It wasn't glamorous, but it was… pointed. Paired with a dungeon of books—if one existed—it might mean more than calories. Knowledge had always been the sharpest survival tool.
He scrolled through the dungeon list. Names flared and dissolved: Crimson Quarry. Garden of Knives. Furnace Pit.
And there it was.
Library Labyrinth.
The archway gleamed steady gold.
He frowned. Too convenient. Suspicious as hell. But logical, too. Omnivore to Book Eater. Book Eater to Library Labyrinth. If this place worked on patterns, the match was no accident.
"Guess that settles it," he said, dry.
He squared his shoulders and walked toward the arch. Fear gnawed, but his grandmother's voice steadied him again: A man's got to eat, Will.
The marble trembled under his boots. Hunger—new, strange—tightened in his gut.
And then the labyrinth swallowed him whole.
The marble floor vanished beneath his boots, and William staggered into the dark.
Shelves rose around him—impossible towers of books, crooked and leaning, some bound in leather, others in paper so thin it seemed they'd dissolve if he breathed wrong. Dust drifted in light that had no source. The air smelled like paper rot, ozone, and the faint tang of metal.
Silence pressed harder than it had in the woods.
Then a chime cracked in his skull.
[System Selected: Unbound Bookeater]
William flinched. His gut twisted, not from nausea but from something deeper, something hollow, like fasting too long. His mouth filled with saliva at nothing at all.
The message spread again:
Consume books to extract sustenance and growth.
Each book influences your body and mind according to its content.
Choice dictates power. Hunger ensures progress.
His stomach growled, loud in the cavernous aisles. He pressed a hand to it, scowling. "Great. Now I'm a man with an eating disorder for paper."
The ache sharpened. His eyes dragged toward the nearest shelf.
Another chime.
Status: William Page
Age: 18
System: Unbound Bookeater
Class: None
Strength: 8
Speed: 8
Durability: 8
Mental: 10
Social: 5
Luck: 4
Traits:
– Hunger for Knowledge
– Synesthetic Cognition
– Rational Mind
Skills:
– Survival (Basic)
– Mycology (Basic)
– Cooking (Basic)
– Knife Use (Basic)
William stared at the floating screen.
No Class. Of course. He hadn't earned one yet. Just a kid in Oregon with a knack for surviving on the cheap, thrown into… whatever this was.
The traits weren't shocking. Synesthetic Cognition? He knew that one already. Tastes had colors. Always had. Steak was maroon, lemons pale gold, coffee a kind of swamp-dark green. Weird brain wiring, mostly useless. Rational Mind? Maybe. People called him calm. He called it being stubborn when fear wanted to push.
But Hunger for Knowledge—that one made his teeth ache.
The gnawing in his stomach swelled again, dragging his gaze back to the shelves. Spines whispered titles in languages he half-recognized. A thin field manual. A leather tome with cracked binding. A cloth-wrapped journal with loose threads.
His mouth watered.
William clenched his jaw. He'd eaten lunch back in Oregon—real food, protein bar and jerky. His body wasn't starving. This was something else. Something layered into him now, riding his nerves like static.
"Alright," he whispered, voice bouncing too loud in the vastness. "So that's the game. Books or bust."
The shelves loomed. A billion choices, maybe more.
Which one to try first?