I was bored.
It wasn't even a tortured "I'm so bored" tooting of the nose kind of thing. It was a resigned, "Yeah, I'm just wasting my time" kind of mood. The world felt gray, and I was stuck in it, a typical 20-something-year-old with no direction in life.
When I lay down in the bed, I fixated the screen of my phone. Another web novel, of course. Why should one leave the house when there is an entire universe of cliches available at the touch of your fingertips?
"Another reincarnation story, huh? I muttered to myself, clicking on the link. "This is going to be fun... or not."
some average Joe dies and ends up in a new world. In the ordinary way, some superhuman, or sometimes, if the author is feeling adventurous, a villain.
Blah blah blah, winning character, blah blah, revenge on the victor, blah blah. .
It was almost like a comfort at this point. Predictable, yet somehow satisfying in a way I couldn't really explain.
The main character wakes up in some random world, in a random body, usually as the son of a king, or a rich noble, or just someone with the power to become ridiculously strong. The plot twists are always the same—except I already know every single one of them.
I was going to scroll through my feed, when my eyes just stopped at a specific part of the text I was reading. That was the moment that Valerian Thorne, the protagonist, and the antagonist, became the subject of the 'guilt-trip moment', and he began to think back about his life decisions.
"Man, it's the same every time", I sighed and looked at the clock. "I need to sleep. No more of this."
But for some reason, I just couldn't stop. My thumb continued to scroll down the pages, every word lazily impressed into my mind.
"Let's see how this guy is going to fail spectacularly….
While I was reading those lines, my mind was only partially engaged in the words. It was just background noise—something to keep me distracted.
Until the screen started to flicker.
"Wait, what?"
I blinked, rubbing my eyes as the text in front of me began to distort, the font changing into something… unfamiliar.
I tried to shake it off. It was just a glitch in the app. I think I was probably too sleepy to be interested in reading at this hour of night.
But the glitches didn't stop. The letters stretched, then collapsed, and before I knew it, the entire screen was glowing, like a bright, shining light surrounding me.
"What the hell?"
I could feel my head starting to spin, and before I knew it, everything went black.
---
I woke up with a jolt, gasping for air.
"Ugh..."
I rubbed my forehead, in an attempt to overcome the feeling of dizziness in my head. I didn't know I had fallen asleep, but it didn't matter. Something felt… off.
I wanted to get out of bed, but the moment I tried to sit up, I got the feeling of something exceedingly soft under me. The fabric under my fingers wasn't the familiar sheets from my room. It was more luxurious—like something out of one of those fantasy novels.
"Hold on…"
My voice was strangely… different.
I quickly checked my hands, my heart racing. They were thinner, more delicate than I was used to.
"No... no way…"
I leaped out of bed and lumbered towards the first thing that looked like a well. The reflection which looked at me almost made my heart stop.
It wasn't me.
It wasn't even close.
I was staring at a face I knew all too well—one I had seen countless times before in the novel I'd just been reading.
[Valerian Thorne]
The third-rate villain.
A character who, frankly, was destined for failure from the very beginning. He was a rude, conceited delinquent with nothing good about him. That enemy about whom every person was supposed to be in the wrong, the one who would later be outshined by the "real" hero of the tale.
I could feel the blood drain from my face. I felt my chest tighten backing away from the mirror while my heart pounded.
"What the hell is going on?!"
I hit my face hard, as if, it was some kind of weird dream or that I bumped my head, on impact. But no matter how hard I hit myself, the face in the mirror stayed the same.
"Valerian... Thorne?" I muttered to myself, still in disbelief. "The third-rate villain? How did I... no, wait, this can't be real!"
I stared at my reflection, my mind racing as I tried to piece together what the hell had happened.
I had been reading about him. Valerian Thorne—the guy who was engaged to Lyra Duskfall, the story's female lead, but was destined to become a failure. He was one of those guys who would always screw everything up, lose his future wife to the real hero and perish in some terrible way, an ideal example of a character stuck on a wasted track development.
"Wait a minute..."
I froze, my brain finally catching up. "This is it. This is what I've been reading all along... This is the world. This is the freaking plot!"
I couldn't believe it. By some freak of fate, I had reincarnated in the body of a character I already knew, not just any character. I had become the villain.
The third-rate villain who was doomed to fail.
I leaned against the wall, my mind reeling. This was insane. What kind of cosmic joke was this?
"It's impossible…"I murmured, the puzzle pieces falling one by one. "I'm Valerian Thorne." The one who is meant to cause mayhem and be outshined by the ultimate hero. The one who's going to lose his fiancée and die a tragic death.
I stared at my new body, then back up to look at my reflection.
"Great. Just great. How do I even fix this?"
I fell onto the bed's side and all of a sudden it felt like the entire world was turned around. I was Max—a regular guy who somehow got reincarnated into the world of a web novel. And the body I now inhabited? Well, it wasn't going to give me much of a chance to do anything other than fail.
But. ..
Maybe that was exactly why I was here.
Maybe it wasn't just some cruel twist of fate. Maybe, just maybe, I had a chance to rewrite this guy's story.
I wasn't going to let Valerian Thorne's pathetic fate define me.
If there was one thing I'd learned from reading hundreds of these kinds of novels, it was that fate wasn't some fixed thing. It could be bent. It could be rewritten.
I was going to change everything.
"Yeah. I'm definitely going to change this, I muttered, determination creeping into my voice. Anyhow, [that is] the most essential thing to do, [to begin with I need] to try to understand objectively what the f*'s all about."
I wasn't about to sit and play the part of the tragic hero, for starters.
Not when I met the opportunity to clean up this mess.