After spending another five minutes on the line reassuring his aunt that his vision wasn’t blurry and that he could still remember his own name, Victor finally managed to hang up.
He set his phone back down on the desk, rubbed his temples, and looked back at his half-eaten dinner, which was now noticeably cooler.
He didn’t waste any time wallowing in the emotional residue of the phone call.
Shifting back into his usual routine, Victor picked up his fork and tapped his fingers lightly against the edge of his desk console.
A sleek, borderless SII display screen rose smoothly from the back of the workspace, humming softly into the quiet studio as it read his tactile resonance signature.
The display converted the low-frequency acoustic data from his hand into a crystal-clear, glowing interface floating in midair.
Victor didn’t navigate to any music forums or regional audio charts.
Instead, he pulled up a popular video streaming platform and searched for a highly generic, amateur category he never in two lifetimes thought he would browse: “Introduction to Fiction: How to Start Writing.”
He chose a trending video hosted by a Tier 3 Scholar specializing in literature, hit play, and began chewing on his dinner in absolute silence as he paid extra attention to it.
Victor watched the presentation intently as he ate, focusing entirely on chewing his food and soaking in the information without bothering to take any immediate notes.
Once his dinner tray was completely empty, he set it aside, slid closer to his study desk, and restarted the video from the beginning.
This time, his approach was entirely methodical.
He brought up a blank scratchpad file on his terminal interface and began carefully logging the instructor’s advice as the video replayed.
He noted down the exact visual layout of a narrative hook, writing a reminder to ensure his first chapter dropped the characters straight into a tangible problem rather than a massive wave of historical exposition.
When the instructor detailed the mechanics of narrative milestones, Victor meticulously charted a step-by-step roadmap to break his skeletal plot down into small, digestible chunks so he wouldn’t freeze up when facing a blank text file later.
He rewound the segment on sensory pacing twice, logging technical shorthand on how to alternate between brief, punchy fragments and descriptive paragraphs to effectively steer the reader’s mental rhythm.
Narrative prose was still entirely foreign territory to him, but Victor put a genuine, quiet effort into the task, filling his digital scratchpad with precise structural guidelines as he prepared to master the basic tools of the craft.
It was only after he had watched the tutorial twice and had absolutely nothing left to add to his scratchpad that Victor paused the screen and ruminated on the task ahead.
He didn’t harbor any wild fantasies that a single instructional video would magically turn him into a brilliant novelist overnight.
‘Everything has a starting point, right?’ he told himself, leaning back in his chair.
With the fundamental rules of prose fresh in his mind, Victor decided it was time to look through the historical documents he had pulled from the school library database regarding the Elysian Highlands on Lumina.
It was a massive archive.
Every single digitized dissertation, historical log, and research paper spanned hundreds of pages, making it perfectly clear that a thorough research process would take days, if not weeks, to complete.
Plus, he still had to learn how to write a book, so Victor predicted that he would take a few weeks to finish writing this book.
‘Hmm, let’s research for a couple of hours at first,’ He said to himself as he opened one of the documents on his SII Screen.
As the night grew deeper, Victor scrolled past dense geographical statistics and entered an archival historical log that documented traditional, ancient folk songs from the Elysian Highlands.
His eyes tracked the bizarre text lines; he couldn’t understand a single word of the original lyrics, as they were written in the old, obsolete regional language of the mountains.
Fortunately, the university student who had compiled the dissertation had meticulously included an accurate translation into the Base Chord directly beneath each stanza.
At first, the log was filled with completely ordinary, mundane pieces—standard, low-frequency tunes about the local highlands, the changing of the mountain seasons, and the quiet loneliness of herding cattle in the valley.
They were simple, traditional cultural artifacts.
But as Victor scrolled further down the digitized pages, the tone of the archive shifted into something far more unsettling.
He stumbled upon a sub-section explicitly labeled “Residual Fragmentations of the Highlands.” The translated lyrics here were genuinely creepy, completely deviating from the peaceful nature of the earlier ballads.
Victor leaned in, his ink-black eyes reflecting the cold blue light of the terminal screen as he read the chilling stanzas over and over.
The first was a nursery rhyme meant to warn families about the unnatural properties of the regional masonry:
“Hush the throat and dim the lamp, Lest the cold stones catch the damp. When the midnight breathing sighs, The cellar wall will lift its eyes. It steals your hum, it steals your air, And sings your mother’s evening prayer.” The source of this chapter is g.com.
The text notes explained that old highlanders believed certain ancient stone houses would absorb a family’s daily casual resonance and repeat a distorted version of it back to them in total darkness.
Right below it, Victor found another verse, a warning track traditionally sung by lone mountain travelers:
“If the shadows start to grow, Let your vocal currents slow. Do not scream and do not cry, Do not push your pitch too high. For every note that leaves your head, Will give a body to the dead.”
These lyrics were kind of creepy, but he didn’t feel any fear; instead, his pragmatic mind began analyzing how these exact lyrics could serve as a piece in the unsettling background lore for his novel.
The sheer, quiet creepiness of the highland songs was the substance he needed to breathe life into the skeletal framework of his gothic mystery.
Victor noted down these lyrics in his notepad and continued his research.
Victor became so completely absorbed in the archival logs of the Elysian Highlands that the quiet ticking of the digital clock on his terminal vanished entirely from his awareness.
He didn’t check the time, nor did he look toward his inviting, comfy bed.
For hours, his eyes systematically traced line after line of ancient data, sifting through localized weather anomalies, architectural schematics of pre-Federation mountain structures, and the fragmented footnotes of long-dead historians.
His mind quietly processed how to intertwine the technical constraints of the Silent Monopoly Era with the parasitic weight of the “Echo-Eater” legends.
He didn’t experience a sudden flash of brilliant inspiration, nor did he feel like a passionate creator working on a masterpiece.
He was just a deeply tired seventeen-year-old with a massive cognitive load, processing data like a machine simply because his instinct told him it was a viable path forward.
As the early hours of the next day arrived in the heavy quiet of his sound-isolated studio, the sheer physical and mental fatigue of his dual-lifetime headache finally won the battle.
His eyes grew increasingly heavy under the cold glare of the monitor.
His hand, which had been lazily clicking through text links on the touchpad, went completely limp.
Victor didn’t even bother to shut down the terminal or pull himself across the room to his bed.
With his head resting heavily against his crossed arms right on top of his study desk, his breathing slowed into a steady, rhythmic cadence.
The glowing blue light of the SII screen continued to hum softly in the dark room, casting a faint shadow over his pale skin and permanent dark eye bags as he plunged back into a deep, dreamless sleep.