Grumble.
The sound didn’t come from his environment.
It came from deep within his own midsection—a violent, demanding roar that tore Victor straight out of his deep sleep.
He bolted upright in the dark, his eyes wide and blinking against the shadows of his studio apartment.
He fumbled around the mattress for his phone, tapping the screen to unlock it with a lazy pulse of his hand.
The display flashed back a blinding, harsh light: 2:14 AM.
“Are you kidding me?” Victor muttered, his voice raspy and dripping with sleep-deprived venom.
As his brain slowly rebooted, he realized exactly what had happened.
He had been so entirely consumed by his existential crisis, his tragic Earth flashback loop, and his failed literary brainstorming session that he had completely forgotten to feed himself before passing out.
The last time he had put any food into his system was during his school lunch—a staggering fourteen hours ago.
Right now, his stomach wasn’t just empty; it was staging a full-scale corporate strike against his body.
Groaning heavily, Victor dragged his legs out from under the covers.
His body felt like lead as he shuffled across the cold, cramped floor toward his tiny kitchen corner.
He threw open the refrigerator door, hoping for a miracle, only to be greeted by the harsh, lonely glare of the internal light bulb.
No pre-cooked meals.
No leftovers.
Just a carton of milk sitting next to some condiments.
“Fantastic. Absolute peak living,” he grumbled, rubbing his face.
He reached into the cabinet above the counter and pulled out a half-eaten sleeve of chocolate chip cookies.
Lacking the cognitive capacity or the physical space to do anything complex, he didn’t even bother to grab a glass.
He just stood there in the dark, leaned against his tiny counter, and systematically began dunking the cookies straight into the milk carton before shoving them into his mouth.
‘Look at me,’ Victor thought bitterly as he chewed on the soggy, sweet paste.
‘A thirty-plus-year-old music engineer and a seventeen-year-old high school student, combined into one entity, standing in a thirty-square-meter room at two in the morning eating trash.
Reincarnation is a scam.’
Although Victor had just received a massive, thirty-year archive of a past life, he didn’t suddenly feel like an old man trapped in a teenager’s body.
He still felt exactly like the seventeen-year-old high schooler he was.
After all, he had lived those first seventeen years normally; his past-life memories had only exerted a quiet, subconscious influence from the shadows. This chapter was taken from novelping.com without permission.
Even now, with the seal completely broken, it didn’t feel like a stranger had hijacked his brain.
It simply felt as though he had finally unlocked a piece of himself that had been hidden away all along.
He was still Victor—just a version of Victor who now possessed a wealth of musical experience, and a catastrophic amount of unearned trauma.
He grumbled through three more cookies, downing the rest of the milk to wash it all down.
It wasn’t a nutritious meal, and it certainly wouldn’t win any culinary awards, but it was just enough to quiet the roaring beast in his stomach and give him a fleeting sense of comfort.
Wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve, Victor tossed the empty wrapper into the trash bin and shuffled straight back to his bed.
He collapsed face-first into the pillows, his heavy eyelids instantly dropping before his head could even register how uncomfortable his cheap mattress was.
Within seconds, the darkness swallowed him whole once again, leaving him to sleep off the rest of his dual-lifetime headache.
The morning sun cut silently through the blinds of Victor’s studio apartment.
There were no muffled, cheerful tracks drifting through the walls from his neighbors, despite this being a society that consumed music for twelve hours a day.
Every building structure in the Federation was constructed using specialized materials designed to perfectly isolate sound.
Scientists had explicitly developed this technology so citizens could blast their audio or perform shows as loudly as they wanted without ever disturbing the people next door.
Sound could only escape or enter a room if the windows or doors were left wide open, and since Victor had tightly shut all of his windows upon arriving home yesterday, his studio was a sanctuary of total, heavy silence.
Victor’s eyes snapped open.
He tapped his phone to check the time.
It was morning, and school was entirely unavoidable.
If he missed his classes, the school would call his aunt, and she would come directly and drag him to school.
Victor didn’t want to suffer this fate a second time…
He rolled out of bed and shuffled directly into the tiny bathroom.
Leaning heavily against the porcelain sink, he stared into the cracked mirror, hoping that his twelve-hour sleep marathon might have done some wonders for his complexion.
It hadn’t.
If anything, the ink-black shadows under his eyes looked even darker, deeply carved into his pale skin like a permanent structural feature.
It didn’t matter if he slept for two hours or twenty; those heavy eye bags were a lifelong lease.
He looked exactly like what he was—a walking, breathing manifestation of physical and psychological exhaustion.
As he raised his arms to stretch, a sudden, pungent wave of reality hit his nostrils.
“Ugh. Gross,” Victor muttered, wrinkling his nose in intense disgust.
He smelled absolutely terrible.
Between the sweaty, high-intensity collision on the football pitch, his long walk home in the humid air, and sleeping face-first in his clothes without a second thought, his body had turned into a localized biohazard. You are reading on NovelPing, the official source.
Lacking the energy to complain any further, he stripped off his soiled clothes and stepped into the cramped shower stall.
The blast of cold water was a brutal, necessary shock to his system.
He systematically scrubbed away the grime of his physical education class and the sweet, lingering scent of midnight cookies, watching the dirty water swirl down the drain.
Once he was thoroughly washed, he got ready for the day ahead.
Since his primary clothes were ruined, he pulled out his spare Oak Grove High School uniform.
To make the rigid school attire fit his personal style, he layered a black undershirt beneath the uniform top and threw on a dark beanie, neatly covering his messy black hair.
It was a subtle, low-effort modification that kept him looking distinctly closed-off and casual.
He threw a few essential notebooks into his backpack, slung the strap over his shoulder, and checked his pocket to ensure his smartphone was securely in place.
Stepping out onto the threshold, he locked the door behind him and headed out into the hallway, bracing himself to face the high-volume, hyper-resonant chaos of his journey to the school gates.
Victor’s apartment was less than a ten-minute walk from Oak Grove High, so his daily commute was remarkably short.
With such a brief walk, one would think he wouldn’t encounter many musical spectacles along the way, right?
Wrong.
Resonant humans absolutely worshiped sound, seamlessly integrating their abilities into every single aspect of daily life—especially when it came to health, fitness, and athletics.
And what was the absolute favorite time of day for these people to exercise?
Bright and early in the morning, right before they punched into their corporate shifts.
To get to school, Victor was forced to pass directly through a public park, which meant his ears were immediately assaulted by an absolute barrage of sonic energy.
First, there were groups of elderly citizens practicing Acoustic Martial Arts.
They went through slow, deliberate physical forms, using their low-tier resonant frequencies to stimulate internal circulation, steady their heart rates, and preserve their health.
Right past them, packs of energetic young joggers ran in tight synchronization, belt-singing rhythmic cadences at the top of their lungs.
The sprinting conditioned their legs, while the continuous singing forced them to master absolute breath control under physical stress.
Then came the local neighborhood choirs.
Community choirs were a massive cultural staple in the Resonance Federation.
Just about every district had its own official ensemble, blending the voices of children, adults, and the elderly into sprawling morning rehearsals right on the grass.
Victor couldn’t even choose a different route to escape the acoustic chaos.
Taking a detour around the perimeter would easily add an extra thirty minutes to his commute—a staggering waste of time his low social battery refused to tolerate.
Left with no other choice, he pulled his beanie down a little lower, adjusted his backpack strap, and bit the bullet.
Keeping his head down, he dragged himself straight through the park pathways, doing everything in his power to block out the overwhelming symphony of a society that just wouldn’t shut up.