The Failed Author: The Life of Akira TsukiharaThe Chains of Mediocrity
Akira Tsukihara was, on the surface, just another failed author.
Her name never sparked excitement in the literary world. Her books never made it onto bestseller lists. She was never nominated for awards, never hailed as a literary genius. At best, her stories were disposable entertainment—cheap romance novels meant to be devoured in an afternoon and forgotten by morning.
It wasn't the failure that stung the most. It was the realization that she had never even been given a chance to succeed.
She saw it in the way editors dismissed her manuscripts with polite rejection letters, how readers skimmed past her books in favor of bestsellers filled with the same tired tropes. Even when she tried to innovate, to twist the genre, her efforts were met with indifference.
She was trapped in a world where love was the only thing that mattered.
And she hated it.
The Darkness Within
Beneath the flowery words of idealistic love stories, beneath the sickeningly sweet confessions and teary-eyed happily-ever-afters, Akira harbored a truth far darker than the novels she was forced to write.
She loathed the very genre that paid her bills.
Every sugary declaration of love, every cliché misunderstanding, every contrived obstacle keeping two lovers apart—it all made her stomach churn. It was a mockery of real life, a disgusting fantasy that led people into believing love was anything but an illusion.
Because love was a lie.
The world didn't run on romance or destiny. It ran on power, deception, and manipulation. The strong devoured the weak. The cunning twisted fate to their advantage. That was the kind of story she wanted to write. Tales of betrayal, raw ambition, and darkness.
But no one wanted that from her.
So she sat at her desk, night after night, shackled to a fate that she despised. Forced to churn out stories of perfect, insipid love while her true desires rotted inside her.
Until the night she snapped.
The Curse
It began with a whisper.
A venomous thought. A seed of malice.
"What if I didn't have to write these stories anymore?"
Her fingers trembled over the keyboard. Her latest manuscript sat unfinished before her, a lifeless, soulless husk of a story. The protagonist—a beautiful, noble-hearted maiden—was about to confess her love to a handsome nobleman, just as her audience expected.
Akira felt something inside her crack.
She was so sick of it.
A bitter, manic laugh bubbled up from her throat.
"If I have to write one more story about love," she muttered, voice trembling with fury, "I'll tear this world apart."
The words hung in the air.
And then—
Her screen flickered.
The lights in her apartment dimmed, shadows stretching unnaturally along the walls. The room felt wrong, like reality itself had held its breath.
Akira's heart pounded. The temperature plummeted. An unnatural chill wrapped around her like a phantom's embrace.
Then—
A blinding light swallowed her whole.
The Fall into Nothingness
She couldn't scream.
She couldn't move.
Her body was weightless, plunging into an endless void.
Memories twisted, shattered, and reformed as an unbearable force pulled her through something beyond human comprehension. The laws of reality no longer applied—there was no up, no down, no sense of time. Only the feeling of being ripped from existence and forced into something new.
Then—
Everything stopped.
Awakening in Another World
Akira's first breath was a struggle.
The air was thick, damp, and filled with the scent of mud, rot, and decay. It clawed at her lungs, heavy and oppressive. Her body trembled, her limbs weak.
She was not in her apartment.
She was not in Japan.
She was not Akira Tsukihara anymore.
Panic surged through her as she scrambled to her feet, her body frail and unfamiliar. She reached for her face, expecting the sharp features she had always known—but the hands she felt were small, rough, and calloused. Her hair was no longer sleek and smooth—it was matted, uneven, and dirty.
A sickening wave of dread washed over her.
Then she saw it.
The world around her was wrong.
She stood on the outskirts of a dilapidated village, where shabby huts leaned against each other like broken bones. The sky above was a sickly gray, drained of life. People moved sluggishly, thin, hollow-eyed, barely alive.
There was no splendor, no beauty, no grand romances like the ones in her books.
Because she was not in a world of love stories.
She was in the world of her darker tales.
The ones that were never published.
The ones that were too cruel, too unforgiving, too hopeless.
And she?
She was a nobody.
A nameless peasant girl in a kingdom she had once built with ink and paper.
The name surfaced in her mind, alien and yet undeniably hers.
Aira.
She had written this world. She had written the wars, the betrayals, the suffering.
But she had never written Aira.
Because Aira did not matter.
The Harsh Truth
Then it hit her like a slap across the face.
She was no longer Akira Tsukihara.
She was Aira, a nameless peasant girl born to an insignificant farmer in a nameless village in the land of Seraphis—a kingdom she had once woven with threads of political intrigue, war, and betrayal.
The world around her was a prison.
The characters she had created, the rulers, the warriors, the assassins—they were real. But they were not hers to control. They had their own ambitions, their own fates.
And Aira?
She was nothing.
A footnote in someone else's story.
A pawn in the world she had designed.
Aira's Resolve
But Akira—no, Aira—was not one to accept such a fate.
If this world was hers, then she would carve her name into its pages.
Even if it meant burning everything to the ground.