Chương 1: Tung Tung Tung Cyber

Something wet was pressing against his—no wait. That was the metro. Piss. Probably. Fuck it. Didn't matter. Ben was standing because all the seats were taken by people who looked, frankly, like they had earned it more than him. His thumb was scrolling on its own. Tung tung tung sahur. Tung tung tung sahur. Capybara eating a watermelon. Dubai fridge guy. Girl crying about her situationship to sped-up fucking phonk music. Tung tung tung again. Different account. If I see one more I'm yeeting myself under the train.

They'll find my body and the last video on my screen will be skibidi italian whatever fucking piece of garbage and my mom will cry. He swiped out. Opened another app. Closed it. Opened a third. Nothing. The internet was over. He had seen everything ever posted and now he was just waiting for new content to be uploaded in real time, which was a sad fucking way to exist. Webnovel site, then. Fine. He was a literature student, he was allowed to slum it. Research. Whatever. He wasn't writing an essay about it.

He just wanted his brain to shut up for two stops. Top of the rankings. The Ascendant Codex of the Shattered Academy: Volume I—Kael's Awakening. Lmao. He tapped in.

Kael DarkVeil was not like the other students at Ravencrest Academy, in the world of Valoria. He was something more. Something deeper. They saw a quiet boy in the back of the lecture hall—frail, withdrawn, his obsidian hair falling across pale, sculpted features. But what they failed to see—what they could never see—was the storm that raged within him. It was not anger. It was not sorrow. It was something older—something the world had forgotten how to name.

"Kael," Professor Vexandros said, his voice cutting through the silence like a blade through silk—sharp, precise, final.

"Perhaps you would care to demonstrate the Third Sigil for the class." Kael rose slowly. Deliberately. The other students watched—some with curiosity, others with contempt—as he made his way to the front of the hall. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. He did not speak. He did not need to. He raised one hand—not in arrogance, but in inevitability—and the air around him trembled.

Ben stared at the screen. Obsidian hair. Obsidian. Fucking. Hair. The metro lurched. He grabbed the pole without looking up because some part of his body was still functioning even as the rest of him was getting lobotomized in real time by the phrase not in arrogance but in inevitability. He kept reading. Every paragraph had at least three em dashes. Every sentence did that thing. The thing. Where it set a noun, negated it, then offered a slightly more dramatic noun, like the author was getting paid per antithesis.

Kael was not a student. He was a vessel. He was not afraid. He was waiting. He was not in the room. He was beyond it. He was not a student. He was a full blown dumbass piece of AI slop shit garbage poop— Fuck this. This is AI. This fucking garbage's one hundred percent AI. This was generated by a machine that has never had a feeling in its entire life and someone posted it and it has fourteen thousand followers and his teacher would probably love this dogshit.

He spat his teacher's name in his head with full disrespect. Sarah fucking Witterspoon. Cayenne is too vulgar, Ben. Cayenne lacks interiority, Ben. Cayenne talks about dildos seventeen times in chapter two, Ben. Yeah. Because Cayenne was a person. Cayenne talked the way a twenty-year-old girl actually fucking talked. Kael DarkVeil had obsidian hair and was gathering himself and Sarah probably wept from her pussy reading it. He hated this so much. The doors opened at his stop. He didn't notice for a second.

Then he did. He slipped out between the closing doors like a guy who had done this exact maneuver eight hundred times. Because he did that shit eight hundred times. Maybe eight hundred thousand. Well, maybe not, considering the outrageous number of classes he skipped. He was still reading. Kael was now doing something with a sigil. The sigil had a name. The name had a colon in it. Fucking hell. Escalator. Thumb already moving to the review section. ok. ok ok ok ok. He typed with very angry fingers. this is ai slop.

this is so obviously ai slop. obsidian hair?? OBSIDIAN HAIR. every sentence is "not x—y." every paragraph has nine em dashes. nobody talks like this. nobody writes like this. nobody has ever in the history of the english language said "not in arrogance but in inevitability" with a straight face. the protag is named KAEL DARKVEIL. you didn't even try. you asked chatgpt for a fantasy protagonist and didn't change the first suggestion. i hope your laptop gets stolen. He hit post. Felt nothing. Felt worse, actually.

The slop was still out there. Multiplying. Every minute he spent not writing his own thesis was a minute Kael DarkVeil was gaining followers and Sarah Witterspoon was somewhere chewing on a sentence about the interiority of a teacup and feeling intellectual. Top of the escalator. Cold air. He fished his wax pen out of his jacket because he had earned this. He had endured. He was a survivor of the Kael DarkVeil Incident and survivors got to rip a blinker on a Tuesday afternoon. He hit it. Held it.

Held it longer than he meant to because he was thinking about em dashes again. Em dashes aren't even bad. Em dashes are a beautiful piece of punctuation. Cormac McCarthy didn't even use quotation marks and his prose was—fuck. Too much. Way too much. He exhaled. The world went sideways in that specific way. Buildings doing the thing where they were still there but somehow further. Ears a seashell. Legs a rumor. Oh. Oh that's a lot. He stepped off the curb because the light said walk. Or maybe it didn't.

He wasn't really reading the light. He was reading the memory of a light. The platonic form of a light, which sounded like something he'd write in an essay to make Sarah hate him. Somewhere to his left there was a sound like a refrigerator getting angry. He turned his head. The Cybertruck was very close and very stupid looking. Like a kitchen appliance that had decided to become a vehicle. The driver had a hat with an AI logo on it. Ben had time to register the hat. He had time to think of course.

of fucking course it's a fucking tech bro— Ben died.