"ugh... What the..." A hoarse voice mumbled as the figure on the bed slowly tried to make out where he was.
The last thing he remembered was dying while heading to his girlfriend's house then...
"Fuck! I died!" Ethan mumbled in a depressed tone, all his life Ethan had only wanted to know what it felt like to have sex but he wasn't allowed that right.
He stared at the ceiling, the unfamiliar texture of it doing nothing to distract him from the wave of misery that crashed over him as the memories flooded back. Twenty three years. Twenty three whole years of being alive and he had died a virgin. Not just a virgin either, a guy who had never even held a girl's hand romantically. The universe really had it out for him.
It wasn't like he hadn't tried. He had downloaded every dating app known to man at some point, swiped until his thumb was practically numb and got maybe three matches total, two of which were bots and one was a girl who unmatched him after he said hello. He wasn't ugly, at least he didn't think so. Average looking, average height, average everything. Maybe that was the problem. There was nothing to grab anyone's attention.
His love life, or lack of one, had been a long running joke he only laughed at alone in his room. He remembered being sixteen and thinking surely by eighteen things would change. Eighteen came and went. He thought college would be different. It wasn't. The closest he had gotten to a romantic experience was when a girl in his second year borrowed a pen from him and said he smelled nice. He had thought about that for three weeks.
And through all of it, through every dry spell that was really just one continuous drought, there had been only him and his right hand and occasionally his left when he wanted variety. He had a whole system. Specific times, specific content, a carefully cultivated routine that was frankly more disciplined than anything else in his life. His search history was something he would have taken to the grave, which apparently he now had since he was dead.
He had been going to her place too. Jessica. His girlfriend of two months, the first girlfriend he had ever had, and she had texted him that her parents were out for the weekend. He knew what that meant. He had showered twice that day, bought new underwear, watched a thirty minute video on things women actually liked because he was nothing if not thorough. And then some idiot in a truck had run a red light and that was it. Story over. Credits rolling. He didn't even get a kiss goodbye.
"Worst timing in the history of all timings," he muttered bitterly, still staring at the ceiling.
All he had wanted was to know what it felt like. Just once. Just to understand what everyone else seemed to have figured out effortlessly while he had been sitting on the sidelines like the universe's favorite punching bag.
And now he was here. Wherever here was.
Quickly he moved to the bathroom only to find the face staring back at him awfully familiar. This was not his face but he couldn't help but feel like he knew who it was....
Alister Von Draguhn?!
He was responsible for this character art even though it was years ago he could still remember the face details. He had drawn this face himself during a phase where he was way too invested in a web novel he had stumbled onto during a particularly boring semester. He remembered spending an entire weekend getting the jaw line right.
He had smooth black hair and a handsome cold face that stared at everything like they were trash.
Ethan leaned closer to the mirror almost involuntarily. The bone structure was ridiculous, genuinely unfair in a way that made him feel secondhand irritation on behalf of every average looking person who had ever existed. Sharp jaw, high cheekbones, eyes that carried this permanent half lidded look of total disdain for everything in their line of sight. He remembered adding that detail specifically because he thought it would make the character look cool. Looking at it from the inside was a different experience entirely.
If he was right he was inside Crimson Academy, a novel he used to read back then.
And that was not a good thing.
It was more of a degenerate novel, the type where the female leads all wanted to get into the bed of the protagonist but he would be too much of a battle freak and too dense to notice. Every single arc followed the same pattern. Girl falls for Alister. Alister ignores girl completely because he just unlocked a new combat technique and finds that significantly more interesting. Girl either pines endlessly or becomes a villain because she got rejected so hard she snapped. Meanwhile Alister kept powering up and collecting women the way someone might collect stamps, completely by accident and with zero awareness that it was happening.
Ethan had complained about it loudly and at length in the comments section multiple times. He had written entire paragraphs about how the protagonist was a waste of every opportunity handed to him, how the writing was lazy, how the romance was going nowhere and the author was clearly just stringing readers along for coins. He had called it brain rot. He had used the words criminally stupid at least twice.
He had also paid for every single locked chapter without hesitation.
Look, the fight scenes were incredible and he had already gotten invested in whether the cold villainess Lilith was going to get a redemption arc or not and at that point the sunk cost was real. It wasn't like he enjoyed the frustrating romance, he just needed to see how it ended. That was completely different from actually liking it. Completely.
He had dropped it eventually, around chapter three hundred and something when Alister had a girl confess to him directly, look him in the eyes and tell him she loved him, and Alister had responded by asking if she wanted to spar. Ethan had closed the app, put his phone face down on the table and sat in silence for a full minute. Then he uninstalled it.
But he remembered enough. He remembered the world, the academy, the characters, the power system, the way the plot moved. He remembered Alister's reputation, his backstory, the cold and lonely life the character lived surrounded by people who wanted him and never getting anything real from any of it.
Ethan looked at the face in the mirror for a long moment.
All those girls. All those missed opportunities. All that power and status and looks and zero results.
Not on his watch.
"Heroines or villanesses, they will all bow before me!"