Chapter 1 : Prologue
The night Lucus Martin died was, by any measure, unremarkable.
That was the thing about death—it arrived without fanfare, without narrative weight, without the dignity of a properly foreshadowed ending.
The universe didn't pause. Cars still honked on the rain-slick streets below his apartment window. A convenience store door chimed every few minutes from the building across the alley.
The rain came down in those thin silver curtains particular to late autumn in Seoul—cold and indifferent and utterly unconcerned with a man's personal catastrophe.
Lucus sat at his desk at 11:47 PM staring at his laptop screen. The email from his publisher had arrived forty minutes ago.
He'd read the subject line—'RE: Blue Star Chronicles – Final Decision'—and had spent the intervening forty minutes doing absolutely nothing except existing in the specific, hollow silence of a door being permanently closed.
He was thirty-one years old. He had one moderately successful web novel to his name, a romance-fantasy hybrid from his mid-twenties that had ridden a trend wave before the tide went out and left it stranded. "Blue Star Chronicles" was supposed to be different. Three years of work.
Three years of late nights and cold coffee and notebooks filled margin-to-margin with world-building notes, character psychology sketches, arc structure diagrams.
He'd built a magic system from foundations. Developed a history that stretched back thirteen thousand years. Populated a world with races and kingdoms and ancient threats.
He'd written sixty-three chapters. Seven arcs planned. Two arcs partially drafted. And now a polite but final rejection email, because the market had shifted, and the first two arcs didn't hook readers fast enough, and Lucus reached into his desk drawer and pulled out the physical notebook.
The one he kept for handwritten character sheets, because something about writing character notes by hand made them feel more real to him.
He flipped past the early pages: Ethan Von Sliverstel's sheet, dense with notes about his awakening at fifteen, his dual lightning-space affinity, his Swordsman path, the Soul Weapon he'd eventually forge.
Past Selena Starborn's page—he'd drawn a small sketch of her silver hair and those pale amber eyes that shifted to gold when she used light mana.
Past Rosilia Braveheart's entry, which had the word PRIDE underlined three times as a character note, with a question mark after it that he'd never resolved.
He stopped at a page near the back.
Lucas Martin. Minor noble. Western province family, third son. Enrolled NEXUS Academy on minimum-qualifying score. Personality: unremarkable. Fate: KIA, Year One Dungeon Trial. Body recovered. Mentioned in Ethan's internal monologue as a reminder of the stakes..
He stared at that entry for a long time.
He'd named the character after himself without thinking. One of those unconscious choices you make at two in the morning when you need a filler name and your own name is the first thing that surfaces.
He'd always meant to change it. Something more fitting for a minor noble. Something with gravitas.
Never got around to it.
Lucus closed the notebook. Got up to get a glass of water, because his mouth had gone dry in that specific way it did when anxiety had been sitting in his chest too long without anywhere to go.
He didn't notice the puddle near the sink.
The leaking pipe under the counter had been on his to-do list for six weeks.
His left foot found the water. His weight shifted wrong. His hip hit the counter edge, and then the back of his head found the kitchen floor with a sound that the universe, indifferent as always, did not pause to acknowledge.
Lucus Martin, author, ceased.
He woke to birdsong.
Not the distant, filtered, half-choked birdsong of a city park sitting between two arterial roads. This was layered and immediate multiple species calling across what sounded like actual canopy, the kind of acoustic richness that exists only when there are no car engines to compete with.
Lucus opened his eyes.
Stone ceiling. Old wooden beams with a faint carving he couldn't read from this angle.
The smell of dried herbs and something smoky, like a hearth that had been banked overnight. Morning light came sideways through a window with actual shutters the wooden-slatted kind.
He sat up.
His body felt wrong in the way that took him several seconds to process: lighter, smaller, different center of gravity.
The sheets pooled around a torso that belonged to a teenager, not a man in his thirties.
And behind his sternum—a vibration. A low, sustained hum that he could almost feel in the roots of his back teeth.
He knew exactly what that was. He had written exactly what that was.
Mana veins resonating. The early-awakening period. Mana beginning to circulate through newly opened pathways.
The recognition landed in his chest like a stone dropped into still water.
He looked at his hands. Young. Narrow. His old writing callus—the one on his right index finger from seventeen years of pressing pencils and pens was gone.
On the side table: a pewter-framed mirror.
He picked it up with the careful movements of a man who was fairly certain he didn't want to look, but looked anyway.
The face in the mirror was seventeen at most. Dark hair worn slightly long and somewhat unkempt. Grey eyes—lighter than he'd expected, with a quality of stillness that didn't quite match the rapid breathing the face was currently doing.
An angular jaw that would probably be more defined in a few years. Not remarkable. Not ugly. Not the face of a protagonist.
Not his face.
He said, to the empty room, in a voice that cracked slightly on the second syllable: "Oh no."
__________
The window showed him Nevus City.
He recognized it the way you recognize a place from detailed descriptions you've written and rewritten across hundreds of pages.
The broad avenues paved in layered cobblestone, with the newer bluish-white mana crystal paving in the main thoroughfares.
The guild district towers visible to the east, marked by the crossed-sword-and-staff emblem of the Combined Awakener Registry.
The layered city walls in the distance, white stone embedded with mana crystal veins that would glow faintly blue at night—he'd spent an entire chapter describing that glow through Ethan's eyes during his arrival scene.
He was in his novel. In the body of Lucas Martin, minor noble's son, the character he had written to die.
Lucus sat on the edge of the bed and went through the stages of processing this with what he privately considered admirable composure: disbelief, then a kind of hysterical calm, then a long moment of simply breathing and watching a wagon drawn by something horse-adjacent—four legs, right shape, but with a faintly bioluminescent mane that flickered when the animal shook its head—pass through the street below.
Then he found the letter.
It was on the table, sealed with the signet of House Martin—a falcon on a blue field, which he had designed himself in a worldbuilding note three years ago and immediately forgotten.
The letter was from the House steward. It congratulated Lucas Martin on passing the NEXUS Academy entrance examination with a minimum-qualifying score.
It noted that family funds had been provided for two nights of accommodation at the Solent Inn, after which dormitory residence would begin. It wished him well.
It was dated the 14th of Solent, Year 442 of the Imperial Calendar.
In his planning document, the story of "Blue Star Chronicles" began on the 16th of Solent, Year 442. Two days before the opening ceremony of NEXUS Academy.
He had landed with exactly enough runway to orient himself before the plot began.
That's either a mercy or a trap', he thought. 'And I don't know which yet.
To be Continued...