A man sat on a bench in the park, his phone gripped in his hand. He was eagerly waiting to read the novel he had been following for more than two years, "The Hero's Will."
Finally, he received the notification that a new chapter had been released. He immediately opened the chapter to start reading.
Suddenly, he saw another man appear near him holding a knife. The stranger told him to hand over his phone.
The reader felt reluctant to give it up. The situation had caught him completely off guard; he just wanted to read the novel in peace. Seeing his hesitation, the robber got panicked. He suddenly stabbed the reader, grabbed the phone, and ran away.
The man collapsed onto the ground as his life faded away. He thought about how stupid it was to die for such a reason, just because he wanted to read his novel in peace. Just like that, the man died.
When he opened his eyes again, he found himself in a room with multiple beds. He was shocked to find himself here after getting stabbed. He checked himself and realized there was no sign of the stabbing on his body. Furthermore, he noticed that this was not his body at all.
He felt a sudden headache. With the pain came memories of this body: he was an orphan named Leo Vance, and he was 10 years old.
By the knowledge he now had of this world, it looked like a world with superpower abilities, just like the novel he had read. He found himself in shock and a little denial about this sudden situation he found himself in.
He stumbled towards a small mirror on the wall to look at himself. The reflection wasn't the man who had died in the park. It was a scrawny kid with messy dark hair and a thin, malnourished face. He looked weak, the kind of kid who would be easily overlooked or pushed around.
The headache started to fade, but the memories of Leo Vance settled in. He knew he was currently in an orphanage. It wasn't a big place; it housed around thirty children of various ages all crammed together.
As the shock began to wear off, his adult mind started processing the information he had about this world, combining Leo's memories with the knowledge from "The Hero's Will."
This was a world defined by abilities. People here had superpowers, and they varied wildly from person to person. Some had minor, harmless tricks, while others possessed power that could cause massive destruction.
The society was structured around this reality. There were those who used their abilities for their own selfish benefits, harming others to get what they wanted; these people were called villains. To counter them, there was an opposing force known as heroes, whose job was to protect the citizens.
It wasn't just humans, either. Some animals in this world also possessed abilities, making them dangerous beasts that heroes also had to deal with.
As the reality sunk in, a cold feeling settled in his gut. Having read hundreds of chapters of the novel, he knew exactly what kind of place this was. It wasn't a peaceful fantasy land. This was a world where there was always some villain scheming in the shadows, plotting something terrible. Danger was a constant presence.
And he was now a scrawny, ten-year-old orphan stuck right in the middle of it.
He sat back down on the edge of the lumpy bed, burying his face in his small hands to gather his racing thoughts. He needed to utilize the one advantage he had: his knowledge of the novel. He racked his brain, desperately trying to access the encyclopedic memory he had built up over two years of obsessively reading "The Hero's Will." He searched for the name "Leo Vance."
Nothing.
Not a prominent side character, not a tragic victim meant to motivate the protagonist, not even a named background extra in a single scene. He realized with a sinking feeling that he had transmigrated into a complete nobody. His character was so insignificant that the author hadn't even bothered to write his name down.
Furthermore, a horrifying realization hit him: he had absolutely no idea where he was on the novel's timeline. Was the main plot about to start tomorrow? Had the original protagonist, Nathan Reed, already begun his journey? Or was he years in the past, long before the main events took place? Without a frame of reference, his knowledge of future events was dangerous. He didn't know which villains were currently active or which disasters were imminent.
Questions buzzed in his head like angry wasps. How did this happen? Was it magic? A glitch in the universe? Why him, a random guy who died in a park?
He took a deep, shaky breath, forcing his thirty-year-old mind to take charge of his ten-year-old body's panic. He decided to pause these useless thoughts. They were questions that couldn't be answered right now, and dwelling on them wouldn't help him survive the night. He needed to understand his immediate surroundings first.
He got up and decided to wander around the orphanage. It didn't take long; the building wasn't big. It was a grim, functional place that wore its lack of funding like a badge of dishonor. It was clearly a government-run facility operating on the barest minimum budget possible.
The paint on the hallway walls was a depressing shade of beige, peeling away in long, dry strips. The floorboards creaked loudly under his small weight, and the air smelled faintly of stale cabbage and cheap industrial cleaner. Despite his memories confirming that this world possessed technology very similar to his old world—he knew people drove cars, used advanced smartphones, and worked on high-speed computers—none of that modernity was present here. The orphanage had no modern equipment for the children. Everything was old, worn out, and barely functioning.
As he walked through a small common area, a few other children glanced his way before immediately losing interest. He noticed a harried-looking caretaker tapping away impatiently on a cracked smartphone near the office, proving the technology existed, just not for them.
Leo realized with a grim certainty that he was truly alone. Scanning Leo's memories, he found no one he could call a friend, not even a well-wisher. The original Leo had been quiet and withdrawn, easily ignored by the overworked caretakers who only paid attention when trouble started. He didn't get along well with the other children, either. They formed tight-knit little cliques for survival in the rough environment of the orphanage, and Leo had always been on the outside looking in. Now, possessing an adult mind, the prospect of trying to integrate himself into groups of noisy, immature ten-year-olds felt exhausting and pointless.
He was a ghost in his own home, isolated and powerless in a world teeming with earth-shattering power.