Victor spent the next hour scrolling through the library’s digital database, ignoring the standard historical timelines to hunt for something more specific: local Lumina folk myths, ancient superstitions, and forgotten regional stories.
He remembered that the eerie, supernatural tension of Wylding Hall on Earth hadn’t just been made up out of thin air; it had been deeply rooted in the ancient, haunting folklore of old England.
If his adaptation was going to have any real psychological weight, he needed to know if the federation’s birth planet possessed a similar cradle of dark myths.
He leaned back, his ink-black eyes scanning the holographic text files floating over his desk.
‘Every planet should have myths and folklore where early civilization explained natural events,’ he thought.
‘Lumina shouldn’t be an exception.’
Logging into the central database terminal didn’t instantly solve Victor’s problems, either.
The computer’s screen hummed to life under his fingers, displaying a vast, intricate network of data folders, but it quickly became apparent that finding usable, localized historical ghost stories was going to be an uphill battle.
He initially began typing broad search queries like Ancient Lumina Superstitions and Pre-Federation Folklore.
One misconception Victor had held before his memories unlocked was that the introduction of the Base Chord had completely wiped out the regional cultures of their birth world.
But as he scanned through introductory academic data sheets, he discovered the exact opposite was true.
The standard engineered language hadn’t destroyed the old ways; rather, it had acted like a linguistic sponge, absorbing and preserving the vibrant idiomatic characteristics, rhythmic nuances, and historical idioms of thousands of pre-existing subcultures.
As he researched, he found that the rebel scientists implemented this to gather the collective society’s harmony to be able to strike down the OPIC Reign.
And they managed to achieve that as the new language managed to unify society to rise against the oppression.
Because of this, the database was incredibly dense, overflowing with a chaotic patchwork of global heritage that had been carried over across the stars.
For the next hour, Victor sat hunched over the glowing interface, methodically filtering out one dead end after another.
He found dozens of localized records, but none of them felt like a proper fit for the atmospheric, psychological horror skeleton of Wylding Hall.
He pulled up a digitized anthology about the Sinking Isles of Varna—tales of phantoms that manifested as beautiful, low-frequency choral hums near deep water trenches to lure fishermen off course.
‘Good imagery, but too oceanic,’ he thought, dragging a shorthand note of the file into a temporary scratchpad.
Next, he dug up an archived study on the Glow-Blight of the Iron-Steppes—a folk belief that certain unrefined mineral deposits would violently react to high-pitched acoustic scales, projecting terrifying, jagged geometric visual glares that would drive miners to madness.
‘Interesting mechanic, but too industrial.
It lacks that quiet, slow-burning gothic dread.’ He logged the details into his notepad regardless, his cynical producer brain refusing to throw away free world-building material.
He waded through endless files detailing cheerful folk festivals, triumphant regional ballads, and historical myths of grand artistic warriors, his eyes growing increasingly weary under the constant glare of the monitor.
He wasn’t tracking down a standard legend of glory; he was explicitly hunting for a dark, parasitic myth that could seamlessly interface with the isolated, unpowered dread of the Silent Monopoly Era.
His fingers lazily traced the touchpad, adjusting the search parameters back toward the older, geographic sectors of the birth world, stubbornly determined to see if his vague gut instinct could find a tangible anchor in the historical dark.
As Victor continued to sift through the archival files, his attention was drawn away from the raw ghost stories and pulled into the actual sociological data of that pre-Federation era.
Reading the historical logs through the dual lens of his current identity and his newly unlocked Earth memories, he felt a profound sense of familiarity.
This specific period in Lumina’s history wasn’t just old data—it was a near-perfect mirror of the exact societal situation he had left behind on Earth.
‘It’s exactly the same,’ Victor thought initially, his face remaining completely deadpan as he scrolled through a digitized socio-economic report from that era.
‘The same greedy corporate executives, the same exhausting grind, and the same absolute drain on anyone who actually cares about the art.’
But as he dug deeper into the logs, his absolute certainty began to falter.
Amidst the dense reports of corporate greed and systematic exploitation, Victor stumbled upon various archived case studies of independent artists from that exact same era.
They weren’t backed by grand budgets or shielded by legal teams, yet they had stubbornly used their raw, unpolished musical gifts to touch people’s hearts in a deeply profound way.
These musicians had managed to weave raw, authentic emotional frequencies that cut straight through the cold, commercialized noise of the conglomerates, offering a strange comfort to a crumbling society.
Victor blinked slowly at the glowing monitor.
He shouldn’t be so certain about things—he was realizing that his own cynical worldview wasn’t an absolute, universal truth.
Even on a planet undergoing a corporate apocalypse, true art still had a way of surviving the cracks.
They are the ones who would eventually rise in rebellion against the oppression.’ He commented to himself, ‘Maybe I can use this plot…’ He thought as he continued his research.
And his persistence was rewarded when Victor’s fingers tapped on the touch-pad, pulling up archived documents from a historical territory known as the Elysian Highlands—a desolate, perennially fog-heavy mountain region on the federation’s birth world.
According to the local archives, before the mass production of Sound-to-Image Instruments, the early clans of the Elysian Highlands believed in things called “The Echo-Eaters.”
The folklore was surprisingly grim.
Long before humans figured out the reason and mechanics of how to project clean geometric squares or solid color blocks, ancient highlanders claimed that certain dense forests and decaying stone structures possessed a natural, malicious resonance.
If a person sang or cried out in those isolated places, the walls wouldn’t just bounce the sound back.
They would swallow the frequency entirely, leaving the singer in an unnatural, suffocating silence.
The myth warned that once a place ate your voice, it would slowly use your own acoustic energy to manifest twisting, indistinct phantom silhouettes in the dark—illusions that didn’t come from a machine, but from the raw, corrupted memory of the land itself.
Victor stared at the ancient, hand-drawn digital scans of the highland ruins, a slow smile finally touching his lips.
It was absolutely perfect.
In the context of the Silent Monopoly Era, where the corporation was behind-the-scenes extending its claws through all sectors of society.
Victor could send the group of naive musicians into an old, abandoned manor situated right on the edge of the Elysian Highlands.
He could build a story filled with horror based on real historical facts.
The characters would assume the malfunctions in their equipment were just normal signal failures, completely oblivious to the fact that the ancient stone walls were actively feeding on their music.
Victor wasn’t sure about this setting, but it was a start, and later he could make some changes and adaptations.
Victor quietly dragged the folklore files into a private digital folder on his phone.
He didn’t have the grand confidence of a seasoned novelist, and after researching for hours, it was already over 7 PM, so his energy was running low.
So, he looked for all documents about the Elysian Highlands and transferred them to his phone, as he would look into them later at home.
As he packed his notebooks back into his backpack and prepared to finally leave the quiet library, he had a distinct feeling that the skeletal frame of his book was starting to form.