"...What the fuck."

I couldn’t move my body.

It felt like it was rejecting me.

"Ahhh"

I tried to move.

But even the smallest twitch sent waves of pain crashing through me. Then, as abruptly as it began, it faded, leaving me trembling and drenched in sweat.

My chest heaved as I struggled to breathe, my senses sluggishly returning.

"What... what the hell was that?" I muttered, my voice weak and unfamiliar.

My limbs felt disturbingly light, as if they were hollow. Fragile. When I tried to stand, my legs wobbled beneath me, threatening to give way.

Slowly, my eyes began to take in the surroundings.

"Where the hell am I?"

I dragged myself out of the bed and looked around.

The room itself made my jaw drop. It was extravagant like something straight out of a movie.

Gold trim, high ceilings, furniture that looked like it had never been touched by someone ordinary. Heavy velvet curtains framed tall windows, letting in streaks of pale moonlight.

It didn’t feel like a place I should be in.

Then I spotted a mirror. Seven feet tall, framed in dark wood, standing against the far wall.

I walked toward it.

The face staring back at me was not mine. The body was not mine.

"Who the hell... are you."

Then I looked lower.

Fat. Not a little.

Obese.

I pinched my hand to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.

The pain was real.

I thought of June at that moment, things she told me.

No one knew what happened to the people who went missing.

Is this what they experience?

The Lucid Dreamers.

Then it hit me, a flood of memories, dense and overwhelming, belonging to someone I had never been. They crashed into my mind all at once.

I passed out.

When I came to, the room was quiet.

Two thoughts were waiting.

Can I go back?

What happens to Rin?

I lay there for a moment and didn’t answer either of them.

The memories I’d received were frustratingly thin. I had a name, a face, a vague sense of how this person carried himself, his habits, his attitude toward others. That was most of it.

But it was enough.

I was Kael Ardyn.

The only son and heir of the Ducal House of Ardyn.

In my previous life, my name was Ren.

I had a normal family once. My father was a teacher. My mother was a doctor. A twin sister who shared everything with me, including a birthday.

Ten years ago that ended.

I never liked talking about it. The accident took both my parents the same night. Rin never woke up. She had been in that hospital bed ever since, and I had been going back every day, sitting in that chair, talking about the day, because it was the only thing I could still do for her.

I had been alone a long time.

And now I was in someone else’s body, in someone else’s world, and she was back there.

I looked down at myself.

Obscenely, humiliatingly fat.

The irony wasn’t funny.

I pulled myself to the window.

For a moment I forgot everything else.

The moonlight fell over mountains that didn’t look real. Dark forests stretching to the horizon. The kind of scenery that didn’t exist in the world I came from.

This was the Northern Region, a territory that covered a third of the entire empire, ruled by the tenth Swordmaster of the empire, Duke Lucian Ardyn. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

My father. In this body anyway.

The name tugged at something. Then the tugging became recognition.

I knew this world.

This was the novel I had reviewed.

"Why this body," I said to the window. "Why me."

Kael Ardyn was barely a character. An heir who never mattered. Mentioned only twice in the novel and forgotten both times.

When Kael’s parents adopted a girl and brought her into the family, everything changed. Her talent was extraordinary, the kind that made people stop and stare. And they did. They compared her to Kael constantly, openly, without a second thought.

He couldn’t stand it.

The humiliation festered into obsession. And obsession became something darker.

On the night of her 18th birthday, Kael tried to kill her.

He failed.

He was cast out. Stripped of his title. And she, the girl he had tried to destroy, became the sole heir of House Ardyn.

In the future that the novel had laid out, she would go on to earn a title that made entire kingdoms tremble.

The Ice Empress.

And I had woken up in the body of the man she had every reason to hate.

By the look of things, the disownment hadn’t happened yet. I was still here, still inside the northern estate.

I had time.

The second and last time Kael appeared in the novel was the final page of the academy arc.

He was killed.

The novel revolved around one place, the Astral Academy. Finest institution in the empire. Where geniuses and prodigies went to become something the world would remember.

Where the hero’s journey began.

But what does it have to do with me?

I just need to find a way home.

***

"Pop."

A small burst of white smoke startled me and I stumbled back a few steps.

Then, out of thin air, a girl appeared.

Before I could react, a blue transparent screen materialized in front of me.

[Congratulations, Host. You have been chosen as a toy of entertainment for a higher being.]

"...Huh."