The room stank faintly of instant noodles and old laundry. A dim desk lamp flickered, barely pushing back the shadows that clung to every corner. At the center of the mess, a boy sat hunched over his computer. His shirt bore stains of uncertain origin, his hair stuck up in tired clumps, and the dark circles beneath his eyes looked permanent.
He scrolled furiously through the last chapter of a novel he had long since started hating.
The Power of Heaven.
The title alone was grand enough to be promising. A world in the twentieth century plagued by dungeons, gates opening like wounds to other realms filled with monsters. Hunters, ranked from F to SS, were humanity's shield. And at the top, of course, stood the male lead—an SS-ranked prodigy blessed with the so-called Power of Heaven.
The boy read the last lines in silence. The great hero who had risen from tragedy. The strongest hunter alive. The founder of the mighty Lion Guild.
Marrying his best friend.
That was it. The end.
The boy slammed his hand against the desk, rattling an empty can of soda. "WHAT THE HECK!" His voice cracked in the stillness of the room.
He glared at the screen. "That's it? He marries his childhood friend? After all that? Shouldn't he, I don't know, do something useful like stop the dungeons from appearing? Isn't that the obvious goal?"
His words fell flat against the clutter. No one answered.
Grinding his teeth, he yanked open his email and typed with reckless speed. Paragraphs of complaints, questions, and thinly veiled insults flew from his fingers. He hit send with more satisfaction than he should have felt.
Not two minutes later, a reply popped up.
The boy blinked. That was… fast.
That's a mystery you'll have to solve yourself.
He read it once. Twice. The words refused to change.
"What is wrong with this author?" His mutter came out strangled with disbelief. Slumping back in his chair, he stared at the glow of the monitor, but it gave him no answers.
Eventually, exhaustion won. With a sigh, he dragged himself across the cramped room and collapsed onto his bed, pushing aside shirts that had never made it to the laundry. Sleep took him quicker than expected, though it was anything but peaceful. His dreams twisted with images of gaping dungeons and monsters with too many teeth.
When light seeped through his eyelids, he groaned and rubbed at his face. Something felt wrong. Too wrong.
He sat up.
The air smelled different. Clean. Crisp. Not the stale musk of his dorm room. The sheets beneath his hands were soft, almost silk-like, and the room around him was impossibly tidy.
He froze.
A mirror on the wall stared back at him with someone else's face. A tall young man. Black hair neatly combed. Eyes an unsettling shade of red, sharp and alert. His nightwear looked more expensive than his entire apartment lease.
"What… in the world?" His pulse hammered. That wasn't him. That couldn't be him.
Stumbling out of the room, he found himself in a sleek, modern apartment with glass windows that offered a view of a sprawling cityscape. For a moment, he just stood there, mouth dry, the enormity of the situation pressing down on him.
Then the sound of a television drew his attention.
"…the Lion Guild, led by SS-rank hunter Baek Hyeon, continues its domination…"
The boy's head snapped toward the screen.
A news anchor spoke cheerfully, the words flowing past his ears in a blur. What mattered was the photograph displayed on the screen. It was his new face. Black hair. Red eyes. The caption beneath it read:
Beom Seok.
The name sent a chill through him. He racked his brain, flipping through every scene of The Power of Heaven he had endured.
There had never been anyone called Beom Seok.
He whispered the name, testing it, hating how foreign it felt on his tongue. "Beom Seok?"
And then, with a sudden, crushing realization, his stomach dropped.
"I'm… I'm just a background character."