Chapter 1: The Author's Curse
Akira Tsukihara was, on the surface, just another failed author, a name that never quite carved its place in the literary world. Her pen had crafted novels about love—perfect, idealistic love—stories that readers devoured with a hunger for sweetness. Love triangles, tearful confessions, and happily-ever-afters; Akira wrote them all, and yet, nothing ever caught fire. Her work was dismissed as predictable, clichéd, and mundane.
Beneath this thin veil of romantic idealism, however, Akira harboured a dark, twisted soul. She loathed the genre that paid her bills. The saccharine sweetness of love stories felt like a personal insult, a mockery of everything that fueled her true creativity: stories of raw power, manipulation, betrayal, and darkness.
In the quiet hours of the night, when the world was asleep, Akira's frustration boiled over. It wasn't just the mediocrity of her novels—it was the very concept of love itself. Love was a lie. It was the distraction that kept people from seeing the true nature of power. In an angry outburst, she muttered a curse to the empty room as she typed her last line for the night.
"If I have to write one more story about love, I'll tear this world apart."
Her hand trembled with seething hatred as she scrolled through the manuscript, and before she could fully absorb her own dark thoughts, the room was swallowed by a blinding light. In the midst of her fury, she felt the ground beneath her feet vanish, her vision blur, and her world collapse into nothingness.
When Akira's eyes opened once more, she was no longer sitting at her desk. She was in a place she had only imagined in her darkest fantasies, a world she had created—but there was no room for her as the heroine. There was no room for her at all.
Akira's first breath in this foreign world was shallow, the air thick with the stench of wet earth and animal dung. Her body felt different, alien—frail, weak, and small. She instinctively reached out to touch her face, expecting the sharp features of the confident woman she had once been, but instead, her hands were smaller and rougher. Her hair, once a long cascade of dark, glossy strands, was now untidy and unkempt. Her body was not her own.
And then it hit her like a slap across the face: she was no longer Akira Tsukihara. She was Aira, a nameless peasant girl born to an insignificant farmer in a dilapidated village in the land of Seraphis, a kingdom she had once woven with threads of political intrigue, war, and betrayal in her novels.
The world around her was a mockery of the stories she had meticulously crafted—a world that was now her prison. The land of Seraphis, once a stage for grandiose battles and noble heroes, had become a cage. The characters she had created, her puppets, were real, and they were not here to serve her. They had their own lives, their own paths, their own destinies.
And Aira? She was a footnote in their story—just a poor, insignificant tool, destined for nothingness. In all her novels, in all her meticulous world-building, Aira had never even been mentioned. She was a nobody. A commoner. A pawn in the grand scheme of the world she had created.
But Akira—no, Aira—was not one to accept such a fate.
If this world was hers to write, then she would carve her place into its pages.
Even if it meant burning everything to the ground.