For a long time after Thomas left, Suhoo did nothing but listen.
The silence of the laboratory was not silent at all. Water dripped somewhere in the distance, each plink echoing like a countdown. Glass tubes hissed faintly as strange fluids bubbled through them. Runes etched into the stone floor pulsed in dull rhythm, like a heartbeat that wasn't his.
He hated it. Every sound reminded him he wasn't home. He wasn't in his filthy little apartment with cheap cigarettes and loan sharks banging on the door. He was here. In a dungeon. In a pod. In the body of a monster he'd written as disposable trash.
He wanted to laugh, to scream, to beg that [ForgottenTruth] guy or girl on that cursed website to take it all back. But no — he was Park Suhoo no longer.
His reflection in the glass told him that every time his mind wandered. Fucking Kappa out of all the people he could have possessed.
Yes, Kappa was technically a 'boss' level character but that was only in ACT I - his version of Volume 1 - and right now, Kappa was weak. By the way, he had written 10 volumes in total, so basically, he was pretty fucked.
His Status Window replayed in his mind's eye, that translucent sheet of runes and light. Every stat blank, every field void. Only one word marked him as anything more than meat:
[Interdimensional Wanderer]
A title that made him "sensitive to surrounding energies." Whatever that meant. This title, Kappa didn't have, and it was also something he needed to experiment with.
Suhoo let his awareness drift. He shut his eyes and focused, searching for… something. And slowly, he felt it: threads in the air, faint currents of power brushing against his skin. They were everywhere — the humming circuits carved into the walls, the unstable aura pulsing in the potions on Thomas' desk, even the sluggish flow of his own artificial veins.
He shuddered. It wasn't comforting. It was like being dumped into the ocean and suddenly knowing how many sharks circled just beneath the surface.
Still… it was a start.
Alright. I'm sort of getting a hang of this now.
He replayed his own novel in his head. In canon, Kappa — the "perfect homunculus" — wouldn't awaken fully until Professor Thomas' ritual. And by then, Leon Cromwell, the Hero of this novel and his merry band of idiots would be storming the lab. Cue dramatic boss fight, holy power, purification, boom. Curtain call for Kappa.
That meant right now, in this early stage, he had one advantage the "canon" Kappa never had: awareness.
If I play this right… I can get ahead. But if I slip even once, that beady-eyed bastard pulls the lever and flushes me like yesterday's trash.
The thought alone sent a tremor through his limbs. The pod hissed. Suhoo froze, panic rising — but this time the machine didn't inject him. Not enough stress, maybe. He forced his heart to slow again.
Gotta keep it together. I can't afford to panic every time I breathe.
He let out a slow bubble of air, glaring at his reflection.
"Park Suhoo is dead," he whispered to himself, though the sound was swallowed by liquid. "So who am I, now?"
Kappa? Immediately, Suhoo shuddered. "I'll be damned if I go through this whole story with that name."
If he was going to live in this body, he wasn't keeping the name of a disposable villain.
He shut his eyes, sifting through every name he'd ever envied. The great protagonists, the titans of the regression webnovels that had carried him through his teenage years. His mind kept circling back to one.
Adam.
Adam Godwin.
The name of a protagonist who had once clawed victory from the jaws of endless regression, someone who had started in a very similar situation as him, in the novel - [The Great God Of War]. Yeah, pretty flashy title for the novel, but it was also his favourite.
Yes, he liked the name. Adam Godwin. A name that screamed survival, a name that resonated with him deep to his core.
As the thought crystallized, a chime rang in his head. A faint, synthetic pulse that wasn't sound so much as sensation.
[SYSTEM PROMPT]
Name registered: Adam Godwin.
Confirm?Y/N
"Yes," he intoned within his mind.
The window pulsed.
[SYSTEM UPDATE]
Name: Adam Godwin confirmed.
The Status Window flickered back into view.
[STATUS SCREEN]
Name: Adam Godwin
Race: Homunculus (Artificial Lifeform) (Near-Completion)
Path: Null
Titles: [Interdimensional Wanderer] — Heightened sensitivity to surrounding energies. [New!]
Attributes
Strength: Null
Endurance: Null
Vitality: Null
Agility: Null
Wisdom: Null
Intellect: Null
Mana: Null
Aura: Null
Core: Null
Skills: Null
Equipment
- Inventory: Null
A wave of relief washed over him, absurd and fleeting. Adam Godwin. That was his name, and anchor to this world now.
"Better," he muttered. "Way better."
But relief was a luxury he couldn't afford. He replayed the canon events in his mind like an old movie reel:
- Right now, Professor Thomas hadn't been contacted by Loki yet.
- Leon Cromwell, the so-called Chosen Hero, hadn't received the Mark.
- That meant he had maybe a week before the first domino fell. A week before Loki's whispers would twist Thomas' mind, and a month before Adam — Kappa in canon — would be destroyed.
He glanced through the murky glass. On Thomas' desk, a calendar lay open. The dates lined up exactly as he remembered.
One week. One week to escape.
But even if he escaped… what then?
If Leon never fought him, never purified the perfected homunculus, never survived that blast… would the story still progress? Would the gods still descend earlier? Would the whole world collapse before Act II even began?
If I disrupt the canon, the timeline could go to shit. And if the Ten get the upper hand too soon… everyone dies. Including me.
It was a loop with no good exit. Escape meant survival, but survival might doom the world. Playing along meant death, but it might preserve the script long enough for humanity to fight back.
His hands curled into fists, useless against the liquid.
"No," he hissed. "There's another way."
The thought snapped sharp through him.
He replayed Act I again and again, stretching it forward, scanning every major point all the way to Act X — the end. One detail resurfaced: Professor Thomas, for all his genius, was a purist. He refused to admit fault. He refused to acknowledge imperfection. If Adam escaped but left behind the "clues" for Thomas to repeat the process, the professor would inevitably build another perfected homunculus.
The canon would proceed. Leon would fight, Thomas would fall, and the script would hold.
And Adam could live.
The only condition: he had to erase his own identity. Never let anyone know he was the homunculus.
That's it… Hide who I am. Vanish into the world. Let the story keep turning.
The realization was equal parts liberation and despair. Sure, he'd lose out on the near-endless aura reserves granted by the grotesque ritual sacrifice of a hundred virgins, but… did he really need that? There were other cheats in the world, relics and systems he'd buried in the narrative as bones for Leon to dig up. He could dig them up instead.
Yes. He could survive.
But first, he had to get out.
The moment the thought fully formed, alarms prickled suddenly along the pod. It must have sensed his thoughts of breaking out. Fuck. Tubes hissed. The liquid in his veins chilled.
"No—shit, not again—"
The machine had detected his spike of intent, his restless energy. A fresh flood of numbing drugs poured into him, dragging him down into the dark.
Adam cursed with his last breath of awareness.
"Damn you, you fat little bastard…"
And then he sank, vision dissolving into black as the dungeon swallowed him whole once again.