“Well, what about books then?” Victor wondered aloud, shifting on his bed.
Just like every other creative medium in this society, literature was profoundly shaped by the universal Sound-to-Image capability.
Back on Earth, listening to audiobooks was certainly a growing trend, but it was nowhere near as ubiquitous as traditional reading.
The overwhelming majority of people still preferred to ingest their stories visually through text.
In the Resonance Federation, however, that ratio was entirely flipped.
The split between traditional readers and audiobook listeners was a massive, dead-even 50/50 split.
Of course, plenty of people still read physical books and e-books; after all, literature was an art form with thousands of years of established history.
Even in a civilization biologically hardwired for sound, individual preferences still dictated daily life.
A tiny minority of eccentric citizens rarely listened to music at all and actively disliked audiobooks.
They were rare, but they did exist—which was the exact reason Victor’s strange childhood behavior of avoiding music had managed to fly completely under the radar for seventeen years.
People just assumed he was one of those rare, quiet-loving anomalies.
In fact, the musical market in this world was so incredibly expansive that entire genres had been engineered specifically for people who craved silence and isolation.
But right now, Victor’s focus was strictly on the literary market.
Over thousands of years of cultural evolution, the publishing industry had developed entirely unique ways to captivate its audience.
Because of this, both physical novels and audiobooks operated on principles completely alien to anything found on Earth.
Physical books in the Federation were a beautiful, tactile blend of traditional paper text and subtle, low-tier projection technology.
The pages or the spine of a novel were embedded with basic, non-musical sound-imagery crystals.
When a reader held the volume and naturally pulsed their standard Citizen-level frequency into it, the crystals responded in real time.
The book projected a soft, shifting, indistinct atmospheric aura just above the pages or around the reader’s hands.
If a character in the story was currently navigating a misty forest at night, the book’s crystals would project a faint, blurry swirl of charcoal-gray shadows and soft emerald light.
It didn’t dictate exactly what the forest looked like; it merely established the perfect color palette and emotional mood.
It acted as a visual catalyst, providing just enough sensory input to help the reader’s own imagination build the rest of the scene effortlessly.
While this kind of technology sounded incredibly complex by Earth’s standards, it was shockingly cheap and easy to mass-produce with the Federation’s advanced manufacturing.
This beautiful sensory enhancement was the exact reason physical books remained completely irreplaceable; even digital e-books couldn’t compete with the tactile experience of a physical spine.
In fact, if a citizen wanted to consume a book on a digital screen, most of the time they chose not to read text.
And they did so for one simple reason: this world’s audiobooks were nothing short of magical.
Naturally, audiobooks in this world did far more than just play back a voice—they physically projected the scenes of the text.
It functioned similarly to a movie, yet it wasn’t quite the same, as every single visual was generated directly by the human narrator voicing the manuscript.
Over thousands of years of evolution, vocalists had developed a refined technique that allowed them to speak with a melodic cadence, weaving the book’s world into physical reality through their vocal pitch.
It was precisely because of this specialized magic that professional book narrators were celebrated celebrities across the Resonance Federation.
While authors acted as the creative masterminds behind the plot and the written word, audiobooks themselves were treated as collaborative, multi-tiered studio productions.
Technically, once an author signed a contract with a publishing house, they could sit in the recording booth and narrate their own manuscript if they wanted to.
However, writing a compelling story required a completely different cognitive skill set than maintaining a perfect, high-level vocal frequency for hours on end.
Furthermore, most writers simply lacked the high-tier resonance required to bring their worlds to life through raw sound.
Because of this hurdle, publishing houses employed a dedicated roster of Professional (Tier 4), Expert (Tier 5), and even Grandmaster (Tier 6) narrators.
After all, these people had high tiers for a reason; their ability could be seen as magical to anyone seeing it and listening to it.
Once a book’s manuscript was finalized, the publishing house passed it down to its audio department.
A director would carefully select a studio narrator whose specific vocal frequency perfectly matched the genre of the book—such as a warm, low-frequency narrator for a cozy slice-of-life romance, or a sharp, high-pitched narrator for a fast-paced thriller.
As the narrator read the text, the recording equipment captured the high-tier audio waves alongside the exact holographic images being manifested in real-time.
When a citizen purchased the final file online, they weren’t just buying audio; they were purchasing a fully synchronized, dual-sensory experience of the author’s world.
To facilitate this massive consumption without causing public chaos, the Federation’s scientists had engineered highly specialized personal tech.
When citizens were relaxing at home, they utilized Home Projectors.
These multi-functional appliances read the encoded audio files and projected the synchronized 3D environments into any designated space, whether it was a blank wall or the middle of a room.
For those commuting or reading in public, where open audio would disturb others, the solution lay in Resonance Glasses or specialized Projection Helmets.
These devices looked like elegant, lightweight reading glasses or sleek, comfortable sleep-helmets lined with advanced sound-isolating materials to prevent audio leakage.
The moment an audiobook loaded, the high-fidelity track fed directly into the user’s ears while built-in micro-projectors read the narrator’s embedded frequencies.
The glasses then mapped a synchronized, external holographic overlay directly onto the lenses.
To the wearer, the text of the book, beautifully animated character silhouettes, and shifting background landscapes appeared floating crisply within their field of vision, perfectly synced to the narrator’s voice.
Every artistic industry of the federation was complex and huge.
Yet, as Victor systematically ruminated on the mechanics of the literary market, a sudden realization sparked through his mind.
It wasn’t anywhere near as impossible to penetrate as the music or film industries.
While audiobooks and physical print required massive corporate backing, high-end studio tech, and professional narrators, standard digital books still commanded a reasonable market share.
More importantly, an author didn’t need to be a certified legal adult, nor did they require a high-tier resonance rating just to type out words on a screen.
If a writer could deliver a genuinely brilliant, addictive plot, the sheer quality of the storytelling could bypass every physical and biological obstacle in this world.
For the first time since he arrived at home, a genuine light shone in Victor’s ink-black eyes.
He leaned back against his pillow and began eagerly scouring through his thirty-year archive of Earth memories, searching for the books that he had read in his past life.
But as Victor eagerly perused the massive archive of his past-life memories, his expression rapidly darkened.
“Damn it!” he barked, slamming his fist down into his mattress.
The harsh reality of his previous existence had just smacked him right in the face.
Because he had been so completely, single-mindedly obsessed with music on Earth, the vast majority of the literature he had actually consumed was strictly technical or historical.
His mental library was overflowing with dense music theory textbooks, dry biographies of dead nineteenth-century composers, and deep-dives into music history.
There was absolutely no way to plagiarize a college textbook on acoustics and turn it into a bestselling fictional web novel.
Worse yet, the few works of fiction he had actually read for entertainment—legendary titles like The Hobbit, Sherlock Holmes, and even high-octane web novels like Swallowed Star—were practically a blur.
He could recall the basic premises, sure, but who on earth remembers the exact word-for-word dialogue, structural pacing, and intricate subplots of a book they read years ago?
Unless a person had a literal photographic memory, it was a completely impossible task.
“Am I seriously this pathetic?” he asked the empty ceiling, a wry, self-deprecating laugh slipping from his throat.
“What garbage reincarnation. How I wish the universe had given me a cliché, copy-paste cheat code.” He murmured.
He lay back down, staring blankly ahead as he desperately tried to squeeze any usable narrative thread out of his brain.
But as he daydreamed, trying to piece together forgotten storylines, the sheer physical and mental exhaustion of the day finally caught up to him.
Between taking a brutal hit to the football field mud and forcefully unpacking two separate lifetimes, his battery was officially at absolute zero.
Before he could curse the universe one last time, his eyelids grew heavy, and Victor plunged into a deep, dreamless sleep.