The coffee had gone cold almost an hour ago.
I drank it anyway.
At some point, reheating it had become more effort than the improvement was worth. That happened often. Food, sleep, conversation, most things really. I understood what would make them better. I simply couldn't convince myself to care enough to do it.
The mug left a damp ring beside my laptop. Three others marked the desk beneath it, each one slightly darker than the last. I'd noticed them weeks ago and decided I should clean the surface.
I still intended to.
There were many things I still intended to do.
Laundry had taken over the chair near my bed. Two books lay open on the floor, both facedown in ways that would've horrified anyone who respected book spines. My phone had been charging beside me for hours, though I'd ignored the last four messages that appeared across its screen.
None of them were urgent.
I'd checked.
One was from my mother asking whether I'd eaten. Another was a friend sending me a video I'd probably find funny. The other two came from a class group chat where people were pretending not to panic about an assignment due tomorrow.
I'd answer later.
Later.
A useful word. It could hold almost anything without breaking.
By the time I turned twenty, I'd been asking myself the same question for so long that it had become part of the background.
What was the point of living?
The first few times the thought came, it frightened me.
I'd lie in bed with the lights off, listening to the apartment settle around me, and become aware of every small process keeping me alive. My breathing. My heartbeat. The pulse in my wrist pressed against the mattress.
My body worked constantly.
It repaired damage, regulated heat, moved blood through thousands of vessels, and kept every organ functioning with no instruction from me. An entire system had dedicated itself to preserving my life.
That seems like a lot of effort.
Then came the second thought.
I'm supposed to keep this going for another fifty or sixty years?
That was usually when I got out of bed.
I'd turn on a lamp, find something to read, and let my mind disappear into it. History worked well. So did unsolved crimes, obscure religious movements, dead languages, and any argument complicated enough to demand my full attention.
Other people found those topics exhausting.
I found them restful.
Facts stayed where you put them. If something didn't make sense, there was usually another document, another witness account, or some overlooked detail that explained why. Even when no answer existed, the shape of the missing answer could still be studied.
My own feelings were less cooperative.
They changed without warning, contradicted themselves, and became harder to understand the longer I examined them. Whenever I thought I'd finally identified what was wrong, the answer slipped away and left me with a list of symptoms.
Tired.
Distracted.
Restless.
Empty.
All accurate. None especially useful.
After a while, the question stopped frightening me.
It remained in the back of my mind beside unfinished assignments, unanswered messages, and every other problem I'd quietly decided could wait.
I still got out of bed.
Most mornings.
I went to class. I finished my work. I spoke when someone expected an answer. I laughed when something was funny. Sometimes I laughed because everyone else had, and asking what I'd missed seemed more awkward than pretending I'd heard it.
I ate when hunger became distracting. I slept when exhaustion finally won.
From the outside, I probably looked fine.
Nobody looked at a quiet twenty-year-old with dark circles beneath his eyes and thought, He's gradually losing interest in being alive.
They thought, College student.
I couldn't blame them. I'd become rather good at appearing normal. People rarely investigated explanations that already seemed sufficient.
Nobody asked whether I wanted to be alive. There was no obvious reason to ask. I wasn't crying in hallways or sending goodbye messages. I wasn't standing beneath the rain in a black coat, waiting for someone to recognize the terrible depth of my suffering.
I usually looked bored.
Sometimes tired.
Occasionally annoyed.
All normal enough.
I'd become good at giving people answers they could accept.
"I've got a lot of work."
"I didn't sleep much."
"I'm fine."
The last one worked especially well. People rarely questioned it unless you said it too quickly.
There was nothing unusual about my exhaustion anyway. Millions of people woke up every morning feeling worse than I did and still went to work, paid rent, remembered birthdays, and bought groceries before the refrigerator became a collection of sauces nobody remembered purchasing.
They kept living.
For years, I assumed they knew something I didn't.
Maybe everyone else had found a reason and simply forgot to mention it. Maybe they woke up wanting something badly enough that the rest of life arranged itself around that desire.
A career.
A family.
Love.
Money.
Faith.
I understood all of those in theory.
The feeling never arrived.
I could explain why people loved each other. I could identify the hormones involved, the social bonds, the evolutionary advantages, and the patterns of attachment formed during childhood.
That didn't explain why hearing my mother's voice sometimes made my chest ache.
It didn't explain why I could ignore her message for hours while still feeling guilty every time I looked at it.
I picked up my phone.
Her message remained at the top of the screen.
Mom: Did you eat dinner? Don't just drink coffee again.
I stared at it for a moment, then typed:
Me: Yeah, I ate. Don't worry.
The lie took less than five seconds.
Three dots appeared almost immediately.
Mom: Good. Sleep early today.
I set the phone facedown before she could ask anything else.
The room felt quieter afterward.
I took another drink of cold coffee.
It tasted terrible.
Eventually, I started to suspect that most people stayed alive for reasons much smaller than the ones they talked about.
Their parents would cry.
Their friends would blame themselves.
Their dog needed to be fed.
They had work in the morning.
They'd already taken something out of the freezer for dinner.
None of those answered the question. They kept postponing it.
You got through Monday because something had to happen on Tuesday. Tuesday arrived with its own obligations. By the time you dealt with those, Wednesday was already waiting.
You continued like that until years had passed, your back hurt for no clear reason, and you'd developed strong opinions about office chairs.
I used to resent how small those reasons were.
Living took effort. Waking up, eating, speaking, caring, failing, recovering, trying again. The explanation should've matched the cost.
I wanted something grand enough to justify all of it.
Instead, the reasons were usually ordinary.
A message I hadn't answered.
A chapter I still wanted to read.
A joke I wanted to send someone.
Instant noodles at two in the morning.
There was one thing I still cared about with an intensity that occasionally embarrassed me.
It was a web novel.
Lord of the Mysteries had stopped being simple entertainment years ago.
I returned to it whenever my own life felt too thin to hold my attention. The world had enough depth that I could keep digging and always find another layer. A casual sentence from hundreds of chapters earlier could turn into the foundation of an entire mystery. A minor historical detail could expose a lie everyone had accepted as truth.
Nothing was wasted.
Everything connected eventually.
I liked that.
Reality rarely had the same courtesy.
Sometimes people suffered because of choices made years before they were born. Sometimes they died without meaning anything. Sometimes there was no hidden pattern, no final reveal, no clever explanation waiting beneath the surface.
Things simply happened.
The novel felt more honest about horror while still allowing horror to have structure.
Knowledge mattered there. History mattered. Attention mattered. Curiosity could save a life or destroy a mind, often within the same afternoon.
I reread it constantly.
I spent hours following discussions about pathways, potion formulas, rituals, hidden organizations, honorific names, historical contradictions, and cosmology. I memorized details that had no conceivable use in real life.
I could forget where I'd left my keys while recalling the advancement rituals and weaknesses of fictional murderers across several Sequences.
Everyone had talents.
Mine were difficult to include on a résumé.
Eventually, translations and summaries stopped being enough. I learned Chinese because I wanted to read the original text, understand the phrasing properly, and follow discussions without waiting for someone else to explain them.
That decision could still be defended.
Learning Hermes and Ancient Hermes could not.
I knew they were fictional languages. I'd spent hundreds of hours studying words that would never help me find work, order food, or speak to anyone who didn't share the same very specific obsession.
I did it anyway.
The work kept my mind occupied.
The progress felt real.
A new word stayed learned. A grammatical structure could be understood. A difficult passage became clear if I spent enough time with it.
That was more than I could say for most parts of my life.
The world of Lord of the Mysteries was horrifying.
People died because they opened the wrong book, drank the wrong potion, spoke the wrong name, or happened to stand too close to someone during a particularly unfortunate afternoon.
A person could survive poverty, war, and disease, then lose his mind because he glanced at the moon at the wrong moment.
Somehow, I found the setting comforting.
Suffering there belonged to something larger. The world could be cruel, though the cruelty followed rules. Those rules might be hidden, absurd, or impossible for an ordinary person to understand, yet they existed.
My own misery mostly came from sleepless nights, unfinished work, and the growing suspicion that I could understand almost anything except how to live my own life.
That night, rain tapped softly against the bedroom window.
My laptop was the brightest thing in the room. The screen had been open to the same Reddit thread for nearly an hour.
It had started with a question about transmigration.
Someone asked how much meta-knowledge would actually help if a reader woke inside the body of a person living in the Lord of the Mysteries world.
The discussion remained serious for approximately three minutes.
u/TheFoolishOne I'm praying to The Fool immediately. I already know the honorific name. Get pulled above the gray fog, join the Tarot Club, let Miss Justice finance my entire life, and avoid anyone wearing a monocle. Survival solved.
u/PraiseTheSun You'd get the ritual wrong because you're panicking.
u/TheFoolishOne I know Ancient Hermes. I'll be fine.
u/BigStress99 Knowing the words won't keep your hands steady when you realize the moon is red and everything you read was real. You'd also have to explain why the person whose body you inherited suddenly talks differently and knows things they shouldn't.
u/TheFoolishOne Easy. Head injury.
u/PraiseTheSun Your family brings you to a psychiatrist Beyonder. Run over.
u/DefinitelyNotAmon There are easier ways to solve identity problems. 🧐
u/TheFoolishOne I'm deleting my account.
I smiled despite myself.
The conversation continued beneath it.
u/BigStress99 People keep treating knowledge like courage. You can memorize every pathway and still panic when someone points a revolver at you. You can know corruption exists and still think about the exact thing you're trying to avoid. Most readers would last until the first real supernatural event.
u/ReaderOfTooManyBooks Honestly, waking up in someone else's body might already break half of us. Imagine looking in the mirror and seeing a stranger move when you move.
Nobody in the thread had a good answer to that.
I leaned back and stared at the ceiling.
They were right, which was irritating.
Everyone imagined the clean version.
You woke up with your memories intact. The body was healthy, the identity was useful, and nobody close to the original owner noticed anything strange. You avoided the dangerous organizations, found the right ingredients, chose a pathway with manageable risks, and climbed through the Sequences using knowledge of the future.
The fantasy usually skipped the first hour.
Waking inside another person's body.
Hearing a voice come from your mouth and knowing it belonged to someone else.
Seeing unfamiliar hands.
Meeting people who loved the person you'd replaced.
Then came the supernatural problems.
Knowing about corruption wouldn't stop fear from making your thoughts run in the worst possible direction. Knowing an honorific name didn't guarantee you could speak it calmly. Knowing which people were dangerous wouldn't help if one of them had already taken an interest in the body you inherited.
Knowledge gave you options.
You still had to choose correctly while terrified.
I knew an absurd amount about that world. Pathways, Sequence formulas, rituals, organizations, historical secrets, and enough dangerous names to get myself killed several times before breakfast.
From behind a laptop screen, all of it felt useful.
Inside that world, I'd still have to wake up, look into a stranger's face, and convince everyone around me that nothing had changed.
I glanced at the Reddit thread again.
TheFoolishOne had replied.
u/TheFoolishOne Still think I'd make it.
u/BigStress99 Of course you do.
I let out a quiet breath that was almost a laugh.
Fair enough.
Confidence was easy when the danger belonged to fiction.
I leaned back and rubbed my eyes.
The rain kept tapping against the window. My laptop fan hummed. The coffee waited beside my hand with the patient certainty that I'd eventually drink it anyway.
Then the pain hit.
My hand jerked into the mug.
Coffee spilled across the desk, soaked into my notes, and ran toward the keyboard.
For one stupid second, irritation came first.
Oh, come on.
Then something tightened inside my chest.
I tried to breathe.
Air came in, but nowhere near enough.
The pressure grew so quickly that I couldn't make sense of it. It felt like something had closed a fist around my heart and kept squeezing.
No.
I grabbed the edge of the desk.
No, no. Come on.
My left arm went numb.
I stared at it, waiting for the feeling to return.
It didn't.
The pain spread into my shoulder and jaw.
The answer came before I wanted it.
Heart attack.
At twenty.
That seemed unlikely.
My body didn't care.
I looked for my phone.
It was on the other side of the desk. Less than a meter away.
I reached for it.
My arm barely moved.
Fear cut straight through the fog in my head.
No. Move.
I tried to stand. My hand slipped through the coffee, the chair rolled backward, and my legs folded under me.
I hit the floor hard.
The carpet pressed against my cheek. Somewhere above me, coffee dripped from the edge of the desk.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
My laptop was still open.
The forum thread glowed in the dark.
Seriously?
My heart gave a violent, uneven beat.
This is how I die?
The thought had barely formed before the pain flashed white across my vision.
I clawed at the carpet and tried to pull myself toward the desk.
The phone was still visible above me.
It might as well have been across the street.
Come on.
My fingers dug into the carpet.
Move.
My arm shook.
Nothing.
"Help."
The word came out so softly I almost didn't hear it.
Nobody answered.
Of course nobody answered.
I lived alone.
I'd spent years telling myself I liked it that way.
My heart stumbled again, and something inside me finally broke through the distance I'd kept from everything.
I was afraid.
Not the quiet fear that came at two in the morning and faded once I found something else to think about.
This was wild and humiliating and completely beyond control.
I didn't want to die.
I didn't want someone to find me here days later because I'd missed enough calls for them to worry.
I didn't want my parents to get that call.
I didn't want my friends reading through old messages and wondering whether they'd missed something.
I didn't want my last sight to be a group of strangers arguing about fictional gods.
I don't want this.
My breath caught.
Please.
I thought of my mother.
I wanted her so badly that it hurt.
I wanted another morning. I wanted to replace the keyboard. I wanted to complain about the coffee. I wanted to finish the thread and read a story I already knew almost by heart.
All the little things I'd dismissed came rushing back at once.
None of them felt small now.
Please, I don't want to die.
My vision narrowed.
The rain grew distant.
My heart beat once.
Then nothing.
The silence inside my chest was worse than the pain.
And then my mind opened.
Pathways.
Sequences.
Formulas.
Rituals.
Symbols.
Hermes.
Ancient Hermes.
Names.
Everything I'd ever learned about Lord of the Mysteries surged forward at once.
Not vaguely. Not like memories flashing before death.
Clearly.
Perfectly.
Details I hadn't thought about in years returned as if I'd read them seconds ago. Pathways separated into branches. Sequence names settled into order. Formulas, rituals, symbols, and authorities connected themselves in my mind.
What's happening?
The knowledge kept arranging itself.
No.
That wasn't right.
I wasn't arranging it.
Something else was.
ꙮ
The symbol appeared somewhere inside my thoughts.
I didn't see it with my eyes. It was simply there, pressed into a part of my mind that had never held an image before.
Another followed.
ꙮꙮ
A fear colder than the fear of death moved through me.
Stop.
The knowledge continued opening.
Layer after layer.
It felt like someone was turning pages inside my head.
Every memory laid itself bare.
The room disappeared.
The pain vanished.
There was only everything I knew, spread open in perfect order.
And then something noticed.
I felt it before I understood it.
Something's looking at me.
There was no face.
No voice.
No shape in the dark.
Only attention.
It came from somewhere so far away that the word far stopped meaning anything. There was no direction to it. No place I could point toward.
It was simply there.
Looking through me.
Its attention moved over the pathways.
The formulas.
The rituals.
The names.
Slowly.
Carefully.
It was reading me.
No.
I tried to stop thinking.
Forget the pathways. Forget the names. Think about the room. Think about the rain.
Nothing changed.
The knowledge stayed open.
More memories followed.
My childhood bedroom.
My father driving me to school.
My mother laughing during a phone call.
They opened just as easily as everything else.
The attention passed over them.
Those are mine.
The thought came out small and desperate.
The attention moved deeper.
My memories began to come apart under it. My mother's laugh became a sound without a face. The kitchen became colors, shapes, the position of objects on a counter.
Information.
Everything was turning into information.
No.
I tried to remember my mother's voice.
I knew I had one.
I knew she loved me.
For one horrifying second, I couldn't hear her.
Mom?
Nothing.
Panic tore through me.
No, no, please.
ꙮ ꙮ ꙮꙮ ꙮ ꙮꙮ ꙮ ꙮꙮ ꙮ ꙮꙮ ꙮ ꙮꙮ ꙮ ꙮꙮ ꙮ ꙮ
The marks spread through the darkness.
The attention pressed closer, and I understood what it was doing.
It was reaching for whatever remained beneath the memories.
For the part that made them mine.
I tried to pull away.
There was nowhere to go.
I was dying on the floor of my room, and something beyond the world had found me open.
Don't.
The word meant nothing.
Please don't.
The pressure grew.
I felt myself coming loose.
My name was still there, but it no longer felt connected to me. My memories remained, though they could've belonged to anyone. A life reduced to facts. A person becoming a record of someone who had once existed.
I tried to scream.
There was no sound.
Then the attention stopped.
Something stood between us.
I couldn't see it. I only knew it was there because, for the first time, that gaze failed to pass through.
The barrier was thin.
So thin I could feel it bending.
The pressure against it made every part of me shake.
Please hold.
I didn't know what it was.
Please.
Something vast shifted beyond it.
The knowledge inside me twisted.
⸸ ꙮ ⸸⸸ ꙮ ⸸⸸ ꙮ ⸸
⸸ ꙮ ⸸
⸸ ꙮ ⸸
⸸ ꙮ ⸸
⸸ ꙮ ⸸
The barrier bent further.
I waited for it to break.
It didn't.
The attention pulled back.
Relief hit me so hard I almost lost myself in it.
Then something touched me.
Deeper than thought.
Deeper than memory.
Cold spread through a place I hadn't known existed.
It wasn't the cold of the floor or the rain outside. It had no temperature. It felt like the moment before a door opened, when you already knew something was standing on the other side.
A shape pressed into me.
Slowly.
Carefully.
A mark.
Stop.
It sank deeper.
Please stop.
There was no anger behind it.
That would've been easier.
Anger would've meant I mattered.
This was a decision made without me.
My fear, my pain, my refusal, none of it reached whatever was doing this.
The mark settled into place.
For one instant, I felt what stood behind it.
Something impossibly vast.
An eye looking down through layers of reality.
A shadow falling from somewhere the world couldn't reach.
My mind should've broken.
Instead, the pressure eased.
My memories rushed back.
My mother's voice.
My father's face.
My name.
The room.
The rain.
The cold coffee dripping from the desk.
I was still here.
Relief rose so quickly that I almost cried.
Then I understood.
It had kept me intact.
It could've erased me.
It hadn't.
It wanted something from me.
The fear that followed was quieter than the panic before it.
Deeper, too.
Something settled around my mind. I could feel it even as the attention began to withdraw.
A connection.
A claim.
It held me together, and I knew with the same certainty that it would never let me go.
The knowledge folded back into memory. Every detail remained unnaturally clear.
The room returned in pieces.
The pale glow of the laptop.
The carpet against my face.
Rain tapping softly against the window.
My heart gave one last, weak beat.
Please.
The darkness closed in.
For the briefest moment, that distant attention turned toward me again.
ꙮꙮ
ꙮ
ꙮ
ꙮ
ꙮ
There were no words.
Still, I knew it had heard me.
Then the world disappeared.