He wasn't doing anything important when it happened.Just walking home.
That was what hit him the hardest.
Raon didn't die saving someone from a fire, or standing up to some thug, or diving into traffic to catch a child's runaway ball like those stories sometimes went. There was no sacrifice, no last words, no moment of honor or courage.
He was reading.
His nose buried in his phone. Music blasting in his ears.
"The Blessed One's Chronicles — Chapter 37: The Fall of the Northern Wall."
Lucen had just manifested a second elemental affinity—fire and light. It was one of the biggest turning points in the entire novel. Raon had goosebumps just reading it. He'd paused mid-step, the street still buzzing around him, and reread the paragraph like it was gospel.
"Lucen raised his hand, and the flames didn't flicker. They bowed."
"Damn," he whispered, smiling to himself like a complete dork.
He was seventeen. Average grades. Bad at small talk. Too skinny for sports. He didn't hate his life, but he didn't particularly live it either. His world was pages and pixels, headphones and nightlights.
Books didn't judge you. Stories didn't care if you stuttered during roll call or forgot your lunch money.
And The Blessed One's Chronicles? That was the best of them.
Lucen Ashbourne—fire prodigy, heir to a noble house, the boy destined to save a continent. The novel was full of politics, powers, bloodlines, betrayal—it had it all. Raon read it religiously. He'd even made an alternate account online just to debate theories about it with strangers.
But he never thought he'd die reading it.
He didn't hear the honk.Didn't see the red light.Didn't register the screaming voices until it was already too late.
The truck hit him at full speed.
There was no pain. Just a crack, then a terrible stillness. The world spun in silence—glass and blood and pieces of thought scattering into the air like ash.
Time didn't slow down. It just stopped. As if someone had hit pause on the universe itself.
And in that void, his thoughts kept going.
"Wait… no. No, no, no, no—this isn't real."
But it was.
There was no sky above him. No ground below. Only cold.
And silence.
"I didn't even say goodbye. I didn't do anything. I didn't become anything."
Images began to bleed into the dark—fragments of a life already out of reach.His mother, hunched over the dinner table, laughing at something stupid he'd said.His father, grumbling about work while placing a soda can next to Raon's keyboard.His brother's voice—rough, but warm—telling him not to stay up too late.
And then, nothing.
"They'll find my body on the street. Just… just lying there.""My phone will be cracked. My screen probably still open to the novel.""They'll wonder what I was doing. Why I wasn't paying attention. Why I didn't come home."
The weight of that thought—it hurt more than the impact ever could have.
He hadn't done anything for them. Not really. He was the younger one. The one they worried about. The one with his head in the clouds and no clear plan. And now… now they'd have to bury him with questions. With guilt.
"I didn't get to say I loved them."
He curled inward, but there was no body to curl. No arms, no skin—just a soul folding in on itself, clutching grief in empty hands.
"I'm sorry."
It echoed in the dark like a prayer too late.
And then... something changed.
Not light. Not warmth.Just a presence—faint at first, like something breathing behind a curtain. It wasn't human. It wasn't demonic. It simply was. Massive and wordless and ancient. Something that did not speak with sound, but with meaning.
And it was watching him.
Raon didn't understand how he knew that. But he did. Deep down in the part of himself that still trembled.
Then came the flickers—burning cities, twin brothers, red sigils branded onto golden skin. People screaming a name.Lucen. Lucen Ashbourne.The Blessed One.The Firelight Heir.The boy who saved the world.
And another—always beside him, but never with him.A shadow.A whisper.A twin.
Draco Ashbourne.
"Wait..."
That name wasn't from the early chapters. No one talked about Draco. He wasn't even mentioned until Arc Two, and even then, barely.
He remembered reading it.
"Lucen's twin brother, long forgotten by the family. A dormant ember."
That was all the author had written. A side character. A placeholder.
And then everything went white.
The next thing he felt was pain.
A dull, bone-deep ache in his ribs. The heavy weight of warm fabric. Something crackling nearby—fire?
His lungs heaved. His skin prickled with sweat.
And for the first time since he died, Raon moved.
He opened his eyes.