Chapter 1: You have got to be kidding me
"Are you even aware of what you have done?"
It was a voice he had never heard before, asking an absurd question to which he wanted to answer no, but he didn’t.
Because that wasn’t the first thing he noticed.
The first thing he truly registered was the cold bite of the floor. The stone beneath his palms was unnaturally cold, like pressing his flesh against the surface of a frozen lake. It was a sharp, grounding pain that made him realize that this was no hallucination.
Jin slowly raised his head.
A middle-aged man sat at a heavy oak worktable. He possessed broad, immovable shoulders and a mane of silver-grey hair that caught the flickering torchlight. His presence was so sharp it felt like a blade was held to Jin’s throat. He continued to write with a quill, the scratching of nib against parchment the only sound in the suffocating silence.
Jin caught a glimpse of the man’s eyes. They were pale blue and as vast as an arctic sky. He immediately averted his gaze because the sheer weight of that look made him feel small and insignificant.
Jin didn’t know who the man was.
He looked around him.
Iron torch-holders lined towering stone pillars that vanished into the shadows of a vaulted ceiling. One wall was swallowed by ancient, leather-bound tomes, while the opposite side displayed banners of a regal white griffin, crowned in shimmering gold.
It was a completely unfamiliar place.
"I will ask you once more."
The man’s voice resonated again, vibrating in the very marrow of Jin’s bones.
"Are you aware," he said slowly and deliberately, "of what you have done?"
The way he asked it, it wasn’t really a question. It was as if they both knew the answer, and this was just a ceremony to make it known.
But Jin did not have any answer.
To be honest, he was in confusion.
’What kind of nightmare is this?’ he thought, his mind reeling as he blinked at the impossible reality.
He had fallen asleep in his cramped apartment after finishing the latest Chapter of his favorite web novel. Now, he was kneeling in a fortress that was straight out of a fantasy novel?
And the hands... he looked down at them.
’Whose hands are these?’
They were thick, soft, and unfamiliar. His own hands were thin and calloused from years of work. These were the hands of someone who had never known a day of true labor.
They were attached to his body, sure, but those weren’t his.
’Am I dreaming?’
The pounding headache behind his eyes felt like a hangover from a week-long drinking spree. The chill of the room was also too vivid for a dream.
’Then where am I?’
The banner caught his eye again. Something about it kept pulling him to him, but he couldn’t quite name what.
"A Gannon," the man said, finally setting down the quill, "does not skulk through the servants’ quarters at midnight to harass the maids."
Jin went still.
The man let the sentence breathe before continuing.
"A Gannon does not raise a hand against the sworn knights of this household like some common street thug."
’Gannon...’ The name struck a chord, and he felt a bell ring in the fog of his confusion.
"A Gannon does not drain three bottles of Veltieren Red before noon and conduct himself like a thug in public."
Beads of cold sweat formed on Jin’s brow. He was listening, and with every word, a horrific realization began to take shape. He prayed he was wrong.
"But those things," the man continued. "I could tolerate. I have tolerated them." A Pause. "For years, I have tolerated them, because you are my blood. Because I believed - foolishly, it seems -that you would eventually find your path."
Silence descended between the two.
"I was mistaken."
The man’s eyes locked onto Jin’s. There was no anger there-only a profound, icy disappointment that was far worse.
"You dared to lay hands on Lady Esther?" He pronounced every syllable clearly, implying the seriousness of the situation. "The daughter of Count Sinclair. The daughter of the Royal Counselor. My oldest friend’s only child."
Something cold moved through Jin’s chest. He knew this scene. He knew these names.
And he was beginning to understand.
Not just the situation but the shape of the person he had apparently become. And it was not a flattering shape.
"Encrid."
The name was a death knell.
"You are no longer worthy of the Gannon name."
And that was it. That was the key turning in the lock.
Encrid.
Encrid Gannon.
The details flooded back with cruel clarity. Encrid Gannon. The fourth son. The disappointment. The degenerate noble whose only role in the fifteen volumes of ’The Last Age of Radiance’ was to serve as a footnote and a reason for the Duke to show his unyielding allegiance to the royalist faction.
One single sentence defined his entire existence in that world.
|| To appease the influential Sinclairs, Duke Gannon, one of the empire’s four pillars, formally disowned his youngest son, Encrid, after the boy drunkenly harassed Count Sinclair’s daughter, Esther. ||
That was one of the only few sentences in the entire fifteen volumes of ’The Last Age of Radiance,’ where the name Encrid Gannon was mentioned.
Jin stared at the stone floor
’I’ve transmigrated into a novel.’
And not as a hero. Not even as a villain. He was a piece of trash destined to be discarded before the first Chapter even properly began.
As a character mentioned once in the entire novel, to make someone else look powerful.
The silence in the room stretched.
’You have got to be kidding me.’
He was about to lose everything-his title, his wealth, and likely his life in the harsh world outside- before he even realized anything.
Just as he was processing that information, and despair began to take root, a shimmering light flickered in his peripheral vision.
[ System Initialization Complete. ]
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Volume 01 - The Wall and the Watcher