In a world far away from burning kingdoms and ancient runes, the air was filled not with the scent of smoke, but with the low hum of a desktop fan and the lingering aroma of instant noodles.
A young man sat hunched over his desk, his eyes bloodshot from hours of staring at a monitor. He had been following this web novel for three years, and tonight, the long journey finally reached its end. On his screen, the final chapter of The Fall of World was reaching its grim, inevitable conclusion.
Inside the digital world of the novel, the protagonist, Kaelen, was kneeling on a desolate, ash-choked battlefield. Around him lay the broken, lifeless bodies of his comrades and friends. The horizon was blotted out by millions of monsters—a terrifying hierarchy ranging from F-rank beasts to the legendary EX-rank entities that had systematically dismantled human civilization.
Kaelen clutched his shattered sword, his voice a broken whisper that seemed to vibrate through the reader's speakers. "If I were strong enough... if I had just been stronger... I could have stopped the destruction of this world."
Just then space tears open like wet parchment. A humanoid monster stepped out of the darkness, its presence so cold it seemed to freeze the very words on the page. The creature looked at the mountain of human and monster corpses with casual disdain and muttered, "They did not find the artifact on this world. Yet they died so pathetically by the hand of a mere human."
With a casual flick of its wrist, the monster reached out. Before Kaelen could even blink, and asked the sentence ended with his death. Beheaded. The monster turned and vanished back into a portal, leaving a dead world behind.
The young man reading the screen let out a long, heavy sigh and leaned back in his creaking chair. "In the end, even the protagonist died," he muttered, rubbing his tired eyes. "Three years of reading for a depressing ending like that? What a waste."
Frustrated and looking for some kind of closure, he flicked his mouse to the very last section of the site: the Epilogue. He expected a list of survivors or perhaps a final tribute to the fallen world.
Instead, the screen flickered with a static pop.
There, in the center of the stark white page, lay a single name: Aether Valencrest.
The reader frowned, leaning closer to the monitor. "That name... Aether Valencrest. It wasn't even important in the story. Just a side character who died in the first chapter to show how high the stakes were."
As he stared at the name, a sudden, searing warmth blossomed in the center of his chest.
"What—?"
He gasped, clutching his shirt. A faint, rhythmic pulse of light began to throb against his skin. With trembling fingers, he pulled his collar aside.
Runes.
Ancient, unfamiliar symbols were etching themselves across his chest, glowing softly at first, like dying embers. But then they began to move. They crawled across his skin like living light, moving through his veins and carving their geometry into his very marrow.
"W-What is happening to me?!"
The glow intensified, turning from a soft amber to a violent, blinding gold. His heartbeat grew louder in his ears—a thundering drum that drowned out the hum of his computer. Faster. Stronger.
The room around him began to distort. The walls stretched and warped like a reflection in moving water. The air itself trembled with a low, vibrational hum that rattled the windows. On his desk, the pages of his notebooks and the dust on his keyboard flew upward, caught in an invisible, swirling storm.
The name on the page—Aether Valencrest—suddenly burned with a light so fierce it began to melt the pixels around it.
"Is this… because of that name…?!"
The runes spread further, spiraling down his arms and climbing his neck, his entire body now radiating an otherworldly brilliance. He tried to move, to stand up, to run—but his body wouldn't respond. He was a passenger in his own skin.
Then—the light consumed him.
Completely.
In a silent explosion of white, the young man vanished. As if he had never existed, the apartment fell still. The fan continued to spin, the half-eaten noodles grew cold, and the monitor flickered once before turning pitch black.
Only the faint echo of a heartbeat remained in the empty room.