The last thing Park Junho remembered was his phone.
Specifically: the final panel of Hero's Chronicle, chapter 312, the hero standing on a cliff with his sword raised and the villain dead at his feet. White hair fanned out across black stone. Red eyes open and empty. The kind of ending that was clean and a little sad and ultimately fine, the way most things were ultimately fine when you weren't the one dying.
He'd closed the app. Set his phone down. His ramyeon had gone cold. He'd pulled his blanket up and gone to sleep.
That was the last thing he remembered.
This was not his ceiling.
✦
The first thing that hit him was the smell.
Stone. Old wax. Something metallic underneath it all, faint and copper-edged, like the air itself had a taste. Then the cold — not the dry recycled cold of his apartment AC but real cold, seeping up through whatever he was lying on, working its way into his spine.
Junho opened his eyes.
High ceiling. Stone arches. Candlelight.
That's not my ceiling. That is extremely not my ceiling. My ceiling has a water stain shaped like Jeju Island and one strip of peeling paint in the corner that I've been meaning to fix for seven months. That ceiling has never had a stone arch in its life.
He sat up.
Wrong. Even that felt wrong — the weight of it, the way his arms pushed against the floor, the length of his legs when they shifted. His center of gravity was different. His hands when he held them up in front of his face were pale and long-fingered and completely, entirely not his.
Okay. Okay, okay, okay. Don't panic. Well — panic a little. You're allowed to panic a little. These are not your hands. What the fuck happened to your hands.
He looked around.
A chamber. Large — stone walls hung with dark tapestries, a window cut into the far side showing sky the colour of a bruise, too purple to be daytime and too light to be true night. Candles in an iron fixture overhead, most of them burned to stubs. A desk covered in maps and papers. A chair — enormous, dark, carved with symbols he didn't recognize — that looked less like furniture and more like a statement.
I know this room.
Why do I know this room.
He got to his feet. His body did it easily — more easily than his own body would have, fluid and certain in a way that felt borrowed. He crossed to the window and looked out.
Mountains. A valley below wreathed in low fog. In the distance, the silhouette of towers that weren't any tower he'd ever seen outside of a screen.
No.
No, no, no. Absolutely not. This is — no. This is a dream. This is a very detailed, very cold dream and I'm going to wake up and my ramyeon will still be on the desk and I will be in Seoul, South Korea, in my actual body, with my actual ceiling.
There was a mirror on the wall beside the window. Tall, framed in black iron, the glass slightly warped at the edges the way old glass always was.
Junho looked at it for a long moment without moving.
I don't want to look in that mirror.
I already know what's going to be in that mirror and I don't want to see it.
He looked in the mirror.
White hair — silver-pale, falling to his jaw, slightly disheveled. A face that was sharp and angular and deeply, aggressively not his own. Skin pale enough that the candlelight barely warmed it. And the eyes — he'd known about the eyes, he'd read about the eyes, he'd seen them in 312 chapters of panels — but seeing them on his own face, in his own reflection, staring back at him from a face that was performing total calm while he was internally screaming, was something else entirely.
Red. Not dark brown in the right light. Not hazel that could be mistaken. Just red, the colour of something that had already decided it was dangerous.
I'm in the villain's body.
I'm in Vael Duskmoore's body. I'm in the villain's body in the world of the webcomic I finished reading three hours ago. I am standing in Ashenveil Keep, looking at the face of the man who dies in chapter 241, and that man is now me.
Fuck.
He said none of this out loud. The body had a default expression and the default expression was composed, and even in full internal catastrophe mode his face in the mirror just looked cold and faintly contemptuous, which was honestly insulting.
"Okay," he said quietly. His voice came out low and smooth and completely steady. "Okay. Think."
Think. What do I know. I know this world. I read the entire story — all 312 chapters. I know the plot. I know the characters. I know who betrays who and when and I know that Vael Duskmoore is supposed to die on a burning bridge in volume seven with a monologue I remember finding genuinely well-written for a villain death.
I am not doing the monologue. I am not dying on the bridge. I need a plan.
A knock at the door. Three sharp raps, precise and waiting.
"My lord." A voice from the other side — low, careful. "The council convenes within the hour."
Junho stared at his reflection. His reflection stared back, red-eyed and unhelpfully calm.
The council. Six people. I know two of their names for certain. I know what they're going to ask about if chapter nineteen holds any reference. I have less than an hour to figure out how to walk into a room full of actual villains and convince them that I am their leader and not a twenty-year-old Korean guy who is currently having the worst morning of his life.
No pressure.
"I know," he said.
His voice didn't shake. The body wouldn't let it shake.
Okay, Junho. Okay. You read the whole story. You remember almost all of it. These people follow Vael because Vael is composed and certain and never explains himself. You can do composed. You can do certain. You've been faking confidence your entire academic career and this is just that but higher stakes and with more candles.
You can do this.
You absolutely cannot do this.
You're doing it anyway.
He turned from the mirror, straightened the coat he hadn't noticed he was wearing — black, heavy, lined in deep red, the Covenant's crest worked into the collar in silver thread — and walked toward the door.