Thursday Morning, January 28th, Year 3113 Federation Calendar.
(Some people might be wondering how this world has the same names for weekdays and months as Earth’s; it doesn’t. I am using this because it is easier to tell the story.)
Victor only woke up because his high-fidelity alarm rang loudly right next to his ear, dragging him brutally out of his deep sleep.
He opened his ink-black eyes, his vision blurred by the glowing standby light of the terminal screen, and immediately realized he felt like absolute garbage.
His entire body was staging a full-scale mutiny, aggressively complaining about the fact that he had spent the night slouched over a hard wooden desk instead of lying flat on his mattress.
“Ahhh…” he groaned, forcing himself to stand up.
The moment he straightened his posture, a series of sharp, loud cracks echoed from his spine and neck, his muscles protesting the brutal lack of ergonomics.
He stood there for a moment, a pale, miserable figure blinking in the dim morning light.
“I really should have just gone to bed,” he grumbled sleepily to the empty room.
Massaging his stiff neck with one hand, he dragged his feet across the cold floor toward the bathroom, preparing to stand under a blast of cold water to wash away the grime of his late-night research session and brace himself for another inevitable day of high school.
The rest of Victor’s Thursday passed in a blur of structured, low-energy focus.
He didn’t let himself get entirely distracted by his novel; he reminded himself that until his book actually made a single point of income, he was still a seventeen-year-old student who needed to pass the upcoming college placement exams.
And even if he made money with this book, he would still have to continue studying as he wanted to go to college.
Just because Victor had received thirty years’ worth of past-life memories, it didn’t magically transform him into an academic genius.
In his past life on Earth, he had single-mindedly studied and worked only with music, meaning those unlocked memories offered absolutely zero help when it came to his high school coursework.
But even if he remembered some subjects, the only one worth remembering would be mathematics, as it was the same in both places.
But subjects like Biology, Geography, Philosophy, and others were completely different.
In this life, Victor had always been a perfectly decent, reliable student.
He consistently ranked within the Top 10 of his specific classroom and maintained a position in the top 50 of his entire graduating grade.
It wasn’t an elite, earth-shattering standing, but he knew how to study.
He held realistic hopes of achieving a score on the entrance exams high enough to secure a spot at a solid, second-tier university.
During the morning blocks, he kept his head down through a rigorous review of Advanced Linguistic Syntax, forcing his mind to master the clean, frictionless articulation rules of the Base Chord rather than daydreaming about horror subplots.
When the noon bell rang, he endured another loud lunch session with Dylan and their regular classmates.
He quietly navigated the cafeteria lines, ordered a balanced meal, and sat at their usual table, expertly nodding along to Dylan’s nonstop chatter about local sports tracks while maintaining his favorite role as a silent, unbothered observer.
By the time the afternoon periods commenced, Victor was right back at his desk, his ink-black eyes fixed firmly on the front board as the mathematics instructor mapped out a complex matrix of geometric algorithms.
He systematically logged the formulas into his notebooks, his standard student intelligence working efficiently enough to absorb the data.
It was an exhausting, mundane routine, but Victor executed it flawlessly, methodically ticking off his academic obligations block by block until the final dismissal bell of the day finally rang out through the isolated walls.
Victor stood in front of his locker, meticulously reclaiming his high-end acoustic smartphone and sliding it safely into his uniform pocket.
He packed his notebook, snapped his locker door shut, and turned around—only to find a massive, uniform-clad wall blocking his path.
“Vic! My brother! My absolute favorite older sibling!” Dylan beamed, his golden-retriever energy radiating so loudly it practically breached the hallway’s acoustic insulation.
“No,” Victor deadpanned, not even waiting for a pitch.
“Come on, I didn’t even say anything yet!” Dylan whined, throwing his arms up dramatically.
“Look, the team is heading out to the pitch right now. The coach said if you just come sit on the bench and look brooding, it’ll boost our tactical intimidation by at least fifty percent. Just one little practice, Vic. For the squad?”
Victor slowly adjusted the strap of his backpack, staring at Dylan with an expression of pure, unblinking numbness.
“Dylan, less than two days ago, I took a hit to the skull so severe that I forgot my own name and started to speak sewer demons. I am deeply traumatized by that field. If I so much as smell wet mud right now, my brain might actually factory-reset.” He finished with a fake fear expression.
Dylan froze, his lower lip actively trembling as Victor shamelessly weaponized his fresh trauma.
He looked at his best friend with a profoundly sad, utterly heartbroken expression, as if Victor had just personally insulted his entire lineage.
“Bro… you’re really using the trauma card on me? That’s cold. That’s basketball-mom cold.”
“I am a delicate casualty, Dylan. Plus, you heard Nurse Brenda’s orders that I shouldn’t exercise these days,” Victor said, completely straight-faced as he casually stepped around the towering athlete.
“Have fun running in circles.” He said with a happy smile, as if dodging a terrible fate.
Leaving a completely devastated, mourning Dylan standing frozen by the lockers, Victor slouched his way down the corridor toward the exit.
He felt absolutely zero shame for manipulating the situation; after all, if a concussion couldn’t get a depressed teenager out of high school sports, then what was the point of having one?
Victor returned to his studio apartment while the late afternoon sun was still visibly bathing the city streets in a warm, low-frequency glare. This chapter was copied from novelping.com without permission.
Having successfully sidestepped Dylan’s sports traps, he found himself with a rare abundance of daylight.
He tossed his backpack onto the linoleum floor; it was still too early for dinner, so he immediately woke his terminal interface with a quick tactile swipe.
He wanted to start researching early.
His primary objective tonight was to uncover the strange, bizarre, and deeply uncomfortable regional traditions of the Elysian Highlands.
He couldn’t recall the specific characters or the fine details from the original Earth novel Wylding Hall, but today he remembered one specific, incredibly creepy motif that had served as the narrative’s psychological anchor: a primitive, localized tradition where village locals ruthlessly hunted small birds—specifically wrens—and paraded their dead bodies through the town in a solemn, ritualistic procession.
It was a deeply unsettling, real-world custom that built an instant layer of subtle, slow-burning gothic dread.
Victor needed to find an acoustic equivalent native to Lumina’s history that could evoke that exact same skin-crawling discomfort in his readers.
He sat hunched over the glowing monitor, pulling up the deep cultural anthologies of the Highlands stored within the database.
‘Let’s see what kind of unsettling habits these people had in ancient Lumina,’ Victor thought lazily, his fingers clicking through old regional law texts and societal logs.
Victor sat at his desk, staring blankly at the glowing monitor.
Finding an acoustic equivalent to Wylding Hall’s bird-parade tradition was proving to be a massive pain.
For over two hours, he searched through documents, dissertations, and books about variations of animal rituals, mountain sacrifices, and highland folklore, but he didn’t find anything relevant.
He kept finding out generic, sanitized historical thesis papers or grand, heroic legends about ancient warriors training majestic beasts.
‘Nothing is ever that easy,’ Victor grumbled internally, his fingers lazily scrolling through a tedious three-hundred-page dissertation on agricultural cycles in the Highlands.
He had to actively filter out anything involving high-tech sound-crystals or advanced SII components.
As Mr.
Goodwill had explained in history class, some parts of Lumina in that time were extremely backwards and isolated; the Elysian Highlands were one of these places.
And as he researched the place, Victor discovered that indeed during that crumbling era, the Highlands were completely cut off from the main corporate grid.
It was a bleak, low-tech frontier plagued by faulty energy grids, flickering incandescent bulbs, and fragile, analog telephone lines that hissed with heavy static.
Victor was happy when he discovered this detail, as this was the perfect place for a supernatural horror story to happen.
Victor looked through the documents with renewed focus.
If the locals had a creepy tradition, he was sure that he would eventually find it.