"Ugh, what the hell."
A black-haired boy groaned into his pillow, one arm thrown over his face like the morning had personally offended him. His alarm hadn't gone off like it usually would have. There was just light, a wrong light, coming from the wrong direction — pressing against his eyelids with complete disregard for his feelings.
He laid there for another few seconds, fully prepared to go back to sleep.
Then his brain caught up with him.
He sat up.
The room was wrong. Not wrong like messy or rearranged but wrong like it belonged to someone else entirely. The ceiling was too low and the mattress he laid down on felt too thin. The curtain on the window was a shade of beige that no person with any self-respect would have chosen voluntarily. He looked at the desk, the half-shut wardrobe, the bare walls with their single faded rectangle where a frame used to be.
He looked down at his hands.
They hooked tbinner than he remembered. He flexed them once, slowly.
"...Huh."
He got up, crossed to the small desk, and picked up the cracked phone sitting on top of a stack of textbooks. It had a battery percent of three and the date read 3rd of Coldmonth. He set it back down and kept scanning.
He found a jacket on the chair, instant coffee that had given up on life, and sitting on top of everything like it had been waiting for him specifically:
A cream-colored envelope with an embossed seal on the front.
He picked it up.
(Star Rising National Academy of Ascendants.)
He stared at it. Then at the room. Then back at the envelope.
"...Oh," he said quietly. "Oh, that's what happened."
He knew this envelope. He knew this academy. He knew the name of every first-year instructor, the date the protagonist would awaken his system in the third week of term, and exactly — in painful, well-documented detail — how the world ended.
Outside, beneath the city's half-awake quiet, the distant thrum of thunder train rails rolled through the walls like a heartbeat.
He sat back down on the edge of the bed.
So. He was inside GodsFall. He was in the body of a disowned noble's forgotten son who happened to share his name, who had never mattered in a single chapter of that story, and who had died along with everyone else when the final loop fell apart.
He turned the envelope over in his hands.
The world of GodsFall ended. Every loop and every regression. The protagonist gave everything he had and it was never enough, and the regressor kept coming back trying to fix what couldn't be fixed, and every single reader including Moon himself had spent months arguing in comment sections about whether it was beautiful tragedy or just bad writing.
He had never reached a conclusion on that debate.
He was, however, reaching one now.
He opened the envelope.
(We are pleased to inform you of your acceptance—)
He didn't finish reading it. He already knew what it said. He already knew the original Moon had been quietly accepted on a general enrollment slot — the kind of polite, low-priority acceptance that large academies extended to noble-adjacent applicants before the noble family in question stopped being relevant to the applicant's life.
He set the letter down.
Then something shifted — at the very edge of awareness, like a sound too low to hear properly. Light bloomed in the air in front of him, clean and stark and completely impossible.
[System initializing.]
[Host confirmed: Moon]
[Welcome. You may begin.]
He looked at it for a long moment.
Then, for the first time since waking up in the wrong room with the wrong ceiling and the wrong hands, Moon smiled.
"Took you long enough."
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