The first thing I felt wasn't magic. It wasn't a "system" notification or a divine voice.
It was the smell of rot.
It was a thick, cloying stench of damp hay, unwashed bodies, and something metallic—blood? No, rust. I tried to open my eyes, but my eyelids felt like they had been glued shut with grit. My throat was a desert, every breath a sandpaper scrape against my lungs.
Where am I?
I remember the deadline. I remember the white-hot flash in my chest. I remember the flickering cursor on my monitor. I should be in my apartment in BGC. I should be hearing the hum of my PC fan.
Instead, I heard the rhythmic thwack of an axe hitting wood somewhere in the distance.
"Hey! Little rat! Get up!"
A sharp kick landed in my ribs. It wasn't "fantasy" pain. It was the kind of dull, nauseating ache that makes you want to vomit. I curled into a ball, gasping, my eyes snapping open.
The ceiling wasn't white plaster. It was thatched straw, blackened by soot. I was lying on a pile of burlap sacks in a corner of what looked like a communal barn. My hands—I stared at them, trembling—were tiny. They were the hands of a child, perhaps ten years old, covered in ingrained dirt and weeping chilblains.
"Still alive? Tsk. Waste of space," a man grunted. He was wearing a tunic of boiled leather so greasy it shone in the dim light. He walked away without another word.
I didn't move for hours.
I spent the entire day in a state of catatonic shock. I thought it was a vivid, lucid dream brought on by overwork. I pinched myself until my arm was bruised. I tried to "wake up" by slamming my head against the wooden post. All it did was give me a splitting headache and a lump on my brow.
By sunset, the hunger set in. It wasn't the "I missed lunch" hunger of my previous life. It was a predatory, gnawing beast in my stomach that made my vision swim.
I crawled out of the barn, my legs shaking. The village was a collection of perhaps twenty hovels huddled together against the edge of a dark, oppressive forest. In the center of the square stood a crooked signpost with a faded crest: a withered oak tree.
Oakhaven.
The name hit me like a physical blow.
Oakhaven. Borderlands of the Astraea Empire. Sector 4.
My breath hitched. I knew this place. I had spent three weeks researching medieval poverty just to describe how miserable this specific village was in the prologue of my novel, The Blight of Astraea.
I didn't write a "power fantasy." I wrote a "tragedy-porn" apocalypse.
In exactly three days, a mutated 'Blight-Wolf'—the first sign of the coming end—would wander into this village. It would kill fourteen people. One of them would be the father of the boy who lived in the manor on the hill.
"No," I whispered, my voice a pathetic, high-pitched crack. "No, no, no. This is impossible."
I looked up at the hill. There sat a crumbling stone house, barely a manor, but significantly better than the huts below. That was the home of the Valerius family.
The "Hero" lived there. Kael von Valerius.
In my story, Kael's father dies in three days. Kael spends the next decade as a traumatized mercenary, barely surviving, eventually becoming a cold-blooded killer who only cares about revenge. He eventually saves the world, yes, but he does it by the skin of his teeth, and everyone around him dies in the process.
I sat in the mud, staring at my trembling, small hands.
I wasn't a warrior. I wasn't a mage. I was Michael—a writer who hadn't done a single push-up in three years. If I stayed in this village, I would be one of the fourteen 'extras' killed by the wolf. If I ran away, I'd starve or be eaten by something else in the forest.
The "Author" knowledge I had wasn't a superpower—it was a map of a minefield.
Survival, I thought, the word echoing with a desperate, cold clarity. I need to survive.
I couldn't fight the wolf. But Kael's father, a retired low-ranking knight, could—if he was prepared. And Kael? Kael was the 'Protagonist.' He had the thickest "plot armor" in this entire miserable universe.
If I wanted to live, I couldn't be a lone wolf. I had to be the barnacle attached to the side of a whale. I had to make myself indispensable to the one person the "world" wouldn't allow to die.
I stood up, wiping the mud onto my rags. My stomach roared again.
"Mila," I muttered to myself.
The name felt like a weight. In the final arc of the book, Millica—the girl I'd modeled after my ex—would be sacrificed to stop the rot. But that was seven years away. I couldn't even think about her. Not yet. Thinking about her was a luxury for people who weren't starving.
Right now, I needed to get into that manor. I needed to meet Kael. Not because I wanted a friend, but because I wanted a shield.
I began to walk toward the hill, my mind racing through the chapters I'd written.
Chapter 1, Paragraph 4... Kael's father, Lord Hestor, always leaves the back gate open for the village children to bring water from the well in exchange for stale bread.
I didn't have strength. I didn't have mana. But I had the script. And in a world that was designed to end, the script was the only thing that could keep me breathing.
Status Check
Current Identity: Mikhail (10-year-old orphan)
Location: Oakhaven Village (3 days before the first Blight attack)
Immediate Goal: Secure a position in the Valerius household.
Primary Motivation: Survival.