Hey, you.
Yes, the one reading this.
My name is Noctis Vale, and reality has feared me since the day I was born.
Do you know what the worst part of omnipotence is?
Most people would probably answer loneliness.
They would imagine an all-powerful being standing above everyone else, isolated from the rest of existence.
It sounds poetic, doesn’t it?
But they would still be wrong.
The worst part is boredom.
Real boredom.
The kind that slowly destroys your ability to feel excitement, fear, anticipation, or even desire itself.
But I guess I should start from the beginning.
When I was a child, I thought I was simply lucky.
Not normal lucky, of course.
The terrifying kind.
Whenever I opened Pokémon booster packs, I always got the card I wanted.
Not most of the time.
Not “almost always.” Every single time.
At first my parents laughed about it, but eventually it stopped being funny.
I still remember the day my father jokingly bought twenty lottery tickets after seeing me pull another impossible card from a pack.
All twenty tickets won.
After that, he never played again.
At the time, I didn’t understand why he looked at me differently afterward.
Now I do.
Humans are terrified of things that ignore probability, especially when those things look human.
And as I grew older, the strange incidents only became worse.
Games always favored me.
Arguments somehow ended in my favor even when I was objectively wrong.
Teachers liked me too much.
People trusted me too easily.
Every gamble succeeded.
Every investment exploded in value.
Every risk somehow turned into an opportunity.
Life felt scripted.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
As if reality itself had already decided I would win before events even happened.
The first time I realized something was truly wrong with me happened when I was eight years old.
A truck lost control near an intersection while my mother and I were crossing the street.
I still remember the sound vividly.
Screaming tires.
Metal grinding against concrete.
People yelling in panic.
My mother grabbed my arm so hard it hurt.
And for the first time in my life, I felt fear.
Real fear.
I remember thinking one simple thing.
I don’t want to die.
The truck stopped instantly.
Not naturally.
It didn’t skid.
It didn’t hit another car.
It simply stopped moving, as if reality itself had been paused for a brief moment.
Everything became silent.
No wind.
No sound.
Nothing.
Then the world suddenly resumed.
The truck collapsed sideways and crashed violently into a traffic pole while people screamed around us.
Everyone called it a miracle.
But miracles are random.
There was never anything random about what happened around me.
That was probably the first moment reality itself started frightening me.
Of course, I still tried to live normally after that.
At least for a while.
I went to school, made friends, played games, dated, and did everything a normal person was supposed to do.
The problem was that normal life stops feeling normal very quickly when the universe constantly bends itself around your desires.
Do you know why humans enjoy victory?
Because they can lose.
Failure gives value to success.
Uncertainty gives meaning to achievement.
Without the possibility of failure, victory becomes empty.
I understood that far earlier than I should have.
By the time I turned sixteen, I had already stopped believing in coincidence.
There are only so many impossible events a person can witness before their brain gives up trying to explain them rationally, and for me those events happened almost daily.
I made my first million before most people my age had even chosen a university.
Not through hard work.
Not through intelligence.
Certainly not through effort.
Reality simply refused to let me fail.
Every investment I touched exploded in value.
Stocks rose for no reason after I bought them.
Cryptocurrency projects that should have collapsed somehow survived just long enough to make me absurd amounts of money before dying immediately afterward.
Once, during a sleepless night, I randomly invested in a company because I liked the sound of its name.
Three weeks later, it became one of the biggest technological breakthroughs of the decade.
At first, I tried convincing myself I was simply gifted.
Then I realized something terrifying.
Gifted people can still fail.
I couldn’t.
That was the difference.
Even when I made terrible decisions, reality corrected them for me.
Mistakes transformed into opportunities.
Problems solved themselves before becoming dangerous.
Consequences bent unnaturally to avoid touching me.
Life no longer felt real.
It felt edited.
Like existence itself was desperately rewriting events to keep me satisfied.
People often fantasize about unlimited luck.
They imagine wealth, influence, beautiful women, luxury, and power.
What they fail to understand is that desire only has value because it can remain unattainable.
The moment every wish becomes guaranteed, the emotional reward disappears completely.
I learned that painfully early.
At seventeen, I entered underground poker circles out of boredom.
I wasn’t there for money.
Money had already stopped meaning anything to me long ago.
I simply wanted to feel uncertainty again.
I wanted to lose.
Instead, I became a nightmare.
Cards aligned themselves perfectly every single game.
Dealers became nervous around me without understanding why.
Dice rolled impossible combinations repeatedly.
Roulette wheels ignored probability itself.
At one point, a man sitting across from me suddenly stood up and accused me of cheating.
I remember staring at him in genuine confusion because I truly wasn’t cheating.
How could I cheat when the universe itself had already decided the outcome before the cards were even dealt?
Security searched me anyway.
Of course they found nothing.
The casino owner personally apologized afterward and offered me money, private rooms, expensive alcohol, and enough privileges to satisfy almost anyone on Earth.
I declined everything.
Not because I was humble.
Because I was bored.
That was always the problem.
No matter what I obtained, the satisfaction disappeared instantly.
A new car became meaningless after ten minutes.
Luxury apartments became empty rooms.
Relationships became predictable.
Even pleasure itself started feeling mechanical.
There was no tension left in my life.
No uncertainty.
No risk.
Nothing resisted me.
Do you understand how horrifying that actually is?
Humans are not designed to live without resistance.
Struggle gives meaning to existence.
Without obstacles, life becomes hollow.
And slowly, I began realizing something even worse.
Reality wasn’t merely helping me anymore.
It was adapting to me.
The first truly disturbing incident happened shortly before my eighteenth birthday.
I was walking home late at night after leaving another private poker gathering when I noticed a man following me through the street.
Normally, I wouldn’t have cared.
But something about him felt wrong.
He wasn’t trying to hide his presence.
He simply walked behind me at a constant distance, matching my pace perfectly no matter how fast or slow I moved.
Eventually, I stopped and turned around.
“So,” I asked calmly, “are you going to keep following me all night?”
The man froze instantly.
For a few seconds, neither of us spoke.
Then he asked a question I still remember perfectly.
“What exactly are you?”
Not who.
What.
I laughed at the time because it sounded absurd, but the man didn’t laugh back.
He looked genuinely terrified.
Not nervous.
Not intimidated.
Terrified.
As if standing near me triggered some instinctive fear buried deep inside him.
“You should not exist,” he whispered.
The moment he said those words, every streetlight around us exploded simultaneously.
Glass shattered across the road.
The entire street fell into darkness.
And for the first time in years, I felt something.
Excitement.
Not because I was scared, but because reality itself had reacted emotionally to the conversation.
The man ran away immediately afterward, disappearing into the darkness without looking back once.
I never saw him again.
But things became stranger after that night.
Much stranger.
Clocks stopped functioning properly around me.
Animals avoided eye contact with me.
Electronic devices glitched constantly in my presence.
Sometimes strangers stared at me with visible discomfort before suddenly leaving without saying a word.
And then the dreams began.
At first they were fragmented and difficult to understand.
Massive oceans filled with floating stars.
Infinite black skies.
Structures larger than planets.
Endless libraries stretching through empty space.
Thrones suspended above collapsing universes.
I thought they were nightmares.
Then I started remembering details that no human mind should have been capable of imagining.
Mathematical structures I had never studied.
Languages I had never learned.
Concepts beyond human understanding.
And somehow…
I understood them instinctively.
Not through intelligence.
Not through learning.
Through memory.
That was the terrifying part.
It felt less like discovering something new and more like remembering something ancient, as if a part of me had always known these things.
One night, while standing alone on the balcony of my penthouse apartment, I stared at the city skyline in silence.
Millions of lights illuminated the darkness below while cars moved through the streets like veins carrying blood through a living organism.
People laughed.
Worked.
Fought.
Dreamed.
Lived.
And suddenly, I realized something horrifying.
The world itself felt small.
Not physically.
Conceptually.
Like I was staring at something unfinished.
Incomplete.
Artificial.
Then it happened.
For a single instant, reality peeled back.
That’s the only way I can describe it.
The sky above me distorted unnaturally, and I suddenly saw something hidden behind existence itself.
Not a god.
Not a creature.
Not a person.
A structure.
An invisible framework supporting reality itself.
Rules.
Laws.
Systems.
The mechanisms controlling existence.
And somehow…
I understood them perfectly.
The moment that happened, I realized a truth that completely shattered my understanding of reality.
The laws of the universe were not absolute.
They were merely rules.
And rules could be broken.
And the moment I understood the rules of reality… something beyond reality noticed me.
Chapter 1 — Author Note Thanks for reading the first chapter of Lord of Rules.
This story is an academy progression fantasy with a sealed overpowered protagonist, team battles, tactical fights, humor, familiars, tournaments, ancient calamities and a larger mystery behind the rules of the world.
If you enjoy the concept, adding the story to your library / follow list helps a lot.