The Failed Author: The Life of Akira TsukiharaThe Chains of Mediocrity
Akira Tsukihara was, on the surface, just another failed author.
They called me a writer.
A creator of love stories—those sweet, forgettable little things that lined the shelves of bookstores only to be swept away by the next wave of generic paperbacks. I wrote dozens of them. Maybe even more. I stopped counting after a while.
Akira Tsukihara.A name that meant nothing.Not to critics. Not to readers. Not even to me.
My stories never graced the bestseller lists. No awards, no critical acclaim. No invitations to literary panels or book festivals. Just polite rejection letters and deafening silence. Disposable entertainment, they called it. The kind of stories meant to be devoured in an afternoon and forgotten by morning.
And the worst part?It wasn't the failure.It was the fact that I was never given a real chance to succeed.
I remember the way editors would skim through my manuscripts, smiling with that strained, almost apologetic expression, as if they were doing me a favor just by reading the first page. I tried to breathe something new into the genre—bent the rules, twisted the tropes, challenged the expectations. But no one cared. Not really.
Readers wanted more of the same.More idealized love.More picture-perfect endings.More of the lies.
I was trapped. Not just by the industry, but by the genre itself. A world where love was the only thing that mattered.
And God, did I hate it.
Not just the stories. Not just the fake romances and the sugary dialogue.I hated myself—for writing them.
Because in real life, love was a joke.
No one gave a damn about true connection. No one waited for fate to intervene. Relationships were just transactions. Power dynamics. Compromises dressed up as passion. I saw it every day. In the news. On the streets. In my own reflection. People didn't fall in love—they settled, manipulated, tolerated.
The world didn't run on love.It ran on leverage.
So why did I keep writing stories where love conquered all? Why did I continue feeding the lie, chapter after chapter, book after book?
Because that's what they wanted from me.Not truth. Not grit. Not reality.Just fiction wrapped in a pink ribbon.
And so, I kept writing.
Night after night, I sat at my desk, shackled to this false ideal. Smiling through clenched teeth as I typed out another confession scene, another magical moment of clarity, another hollow happily-ever-after.
But deep down, something inside me festered.A rot I could no longer ignore.
And I didn't know it then, but the night I decided I couldn't do it anymore—that was the night everything would change.
That was the night my story really began.
The darkness inside me… it didn't explode all at once.
No. It was quieter than that. Slower. Like a leak in the ceiling during a storm—drip by drip, day by day, soaking into the wallpaper of my mind until mold took root. Until everything inside me was damp, rotten, unlivable.
It grew with every page I wrote, every happy ending I faked.Beneath all the flowery prose and contrived drama, I was choking.
I poured lies onto the page—dozens of them.I wrote of fated meetings under cherry blossoms, confessions under starry skies, couples overcoming impossible odds to find each other in the end.I made people cry with love.And I hated every second of it.
You know what no one tells you? That it's entirely possible to build your own cage—decorate it even—while slowly starving inside. My novels were that cage. Beautiful, romantic, hollow as hell.
I loathed the very genre that paid my bills.
Every sugary declaration of love made my fingers itch. Every cliché misunderstanding, every tear-stained apology, every miracle reunion—I wanted to scream. I knew it was garbage. Manufactured nonsense designed to make lonely people feel less alone for a few pages. A fantasy no more real than a dream about flying.
It wasn't just fiction. It was propaganda.
Because love?Love is a lie.
You want the truth? Fine. Here it is.Love is nothing more than a glorified brain chemical cocktail designed to trick animals into humping and not letting their species die out. Dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin—biology's version of waving shiny keys in front of a baby and saying, "See? This is purpose."
Romance?Soulmates?Don't make me laugh.
It's biology gaslighting you with mistakes. A con job built on hormones and wishful thinking. That whole soulmate crap was just evolution wearing a fancy hat. Love wasn't eternal—it expired faster than milk left in the sun.
And yet… it sold.
It sold like sugar, like poison wrapped in candy.And people bought it—over and over again—like addicts chasing the high.
But me? I wanted to write something else.
I wanted to tell the kind of stories that lived in the shadows.The ones with no saviors, no red strings of fate.I wanted betrayal. Ambition. Hunger. Despair.I wanted to paint the world the way it really was—brutal, cold, indifferent.
A world where power won.Where the weak were trampled.Where love was a weakness, not a virtue.
But no one wanted that from me.
They didn't care that I had depth. That I had a fire inside me screaming to be set free. They just wanted another sweet romance with a happy ending. Something they could consume and discard without thinking too hard.
So I sat at my desk, night after night, choking down the bile in my throat, forcing my fingers to type out another perfect lie. All while the real me withered—rotted—inside.
And then…One night, I snapped.
"The Curse That Changed Everything"
It began with a whisper.
A thought so small, so quiet, it almost went unnoticed. But it was there. Coiled in the back of my mind, like a snake warming in the shadows.
"What if I didn't have to write these stories anymore?"
I froze.
My hands hovered above the keyboard. The screen glared back at me with its blinking cursor, waiting for me to finish the scene. The protagonist—a pure-hearted maiden with bright eyes and dreams of true love—was about to confess her feelings to a dashing nobleman under the moonlight.
The same scene I had written a hundred times before.
And I couldn't do it.
Not again.
A laugh—sharp, bitter, broken—slipped from my lips."If I have to write one more story about love," I muttered, voice trembling with rage, "I'll tear this world apart."
I didn't plan the words.They just came out—raw and ugly.
And that's when it happened.
The screen flickered.
At first, I thought it was just a glitch. Maybe a power surge. But then the lights dimmed—just a little too slowly. The shadows in the room began to stretch, creeping across the floor like spilled ink. The air shifted. Heavier. Colder. Like the pressure dropped and the world forgot how to breathe.
I sat there, paralyzed.
Reality itself felt… wrong.Like something ancient had just opened its eyes.
My heart pounded against my ribs like it was trying to escape. My breath caught in my throat. My skin prickled with static. It was like being watched—but not by a person. By something else. Something that had been waiting.
And then—
My screen flickered.
At first, I thought it was just a glitch. Maybe my laptop finally decided to die on me after years of loyal suffering. But then… the lights dimmed. Not just dimmed—they sank into the kind of gloom that no apartment lightbulb should ever produce. Shadows stretched across the walls like they were trying to crawl toward me. The corners of the room twisted ever so slightly, like they didn't belong where they were.
The air went still.So still it felt like reality itself had stopped breathing.
And then I felt it.That presence.
It's hard to explain—how do you put into words the feeling of being watched by something that doesn't have eyes? But I swear to whatever god might have been listening… something was in the room with me.
No—everything was watching me.The walls.The floor.The ceiling.Even the screen of my laptop.
It was as if some ancient, invisible entity had decided to stare into the deepest cracks of my soul… and it was enjoying what it found.
My skin crawled. My heart hammered in my chest.I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe.
And then—A blinding light came from my laptop and it swallowed me whole.
I didn't even have time to scream.I didn't even know how to scream anymore.
The Fall into Nothingness
There was no ground beneath me. No gravity. No sound.
I was falling—weightless, meaningless—through an infinite black void. My body didn't feel like my own. My limbs—if I even had them anymore—drifted without direction. I couldn't tell if I was floating or if the universe around me was spinning.
Memories fractured. I could see pieces of my life—flashes of them—breaking apart like stained glass. My first rejection letter. My tiny, cramped apartment. The smell of burnt coffee. The blinking cursor on a blank document. My name, printed on covers no one bought.
Akira Tsukihara.
And then those fragments shattered into nothing.
An unbearable pressure closed in, like I was being pulled inside out and compressed into something I didn't understand. Time had no meaning here. There was no past, no present. Only transition. A violent, cosmic rewriting of my existence.
And then—
It stopped.
The darkness peeled away.
A light—soft and warm, almost golden—wrapped itself around me like silk. I couldn't see my body, but I felt it, piece by piece, being stitched back together. Reformed.
Like I had been torn into billions of fragments… and now, something—someone—was carefully putting me back into a shape.
But it wasn't the same shape.
I wasn't the same.
Awakening
My first breath hurt.
It clawed its way down my throat, thick and heavy, like I was inhaling water instead of air. I choked on it, gasping, coughing, blinking hard against a dim, flickering light.
The first thing I saw was… hay.
Piles of it. Strewn across a dirt floor. Some of it poked me through a thin, scratchy fabric that clung to my skin. I looked down—my dress was dull, rough-spun, frayed at the edges. The kind of thing a poor peasant girl might've worn in the 1700s.
And then the smell hit me.
Mud. Dung. Wet wood. Greenery.A mix of earth and rot and something so organic it made my nose twitch.
I sat up slowly—my limbs trembling, unsteady. My head spun. The walls around me were wooden, uneven. The windows were tiny slits in the structure. I wasn't in my apartment. I wasn't in Japan. I wasn't anywhere I recognized.
"What the hell…" I whispered, my voice hoarse and strange.
Was this some kind of farm? Did someone drug me? Did I get kidnapped and dumped in a countryside pigsty?
I couldn't make sense of anything.
My heart pounded like a war drum in my chest. I tried to calm myself, told myself this had to be a dream. A coma. A psychotic break. Something. Anything.
So I did what every idiot in every movie does.
I tried to pinch myself.
But when I raised my hand…My breath caught in my throat.
It wasn't my hand.
It was too small. Too thin. The skin was rough, sun-kissed and dirt-smudged. The fingers were delicate, but calloused—like they belonged to a girl who had never known a desk, only fields and hard labor.
And then I saw my arms. My legs.Little. Frail. Wrong.
I scrambled toward the nearest mirror—no, not a mirror. A half-polished bronze plate nailed to the wooden wall. The reflection was murky, distorted… but I saw enough.
My hair—once black and straight—was now a mess of pale white strands, tangled and unkempt. My face… it wasn't my face.
The eyes that stared back were too large. Too glassy. Too young.
"What… what the hell is this…?" I whispered. My voice cracked—lighter, softer than it used to be.
A sickening wave of dread crashed into me.
That's not me. That's not my face. That's not my body.
I wasn't Akira Tsukihara anymore.
I was… someone else.Some peasant girl in a world that reeked of medieval misery.
What the hell is happening to me…?
I pressed my hands to my face, desperate to wake up. But no matter how hard I tried, nothing changed.
This wasn't a dream.This wasn't some metaphor.This was real.
I had fallen out of my world…And into another.
I wasn't… me anymore.
The panic hit me like a crashing wave. Not gentle. Not a nudge. No, it slammed into me, swallowed me whole and dragged me under. I scrambled to my feet—if you could even call them mine anymore. My legs were weak, unsteady like they'd never known anything but dirt roads and hard living.
My hands fumbled over my face. I expected sharp features—my nose, my cheekbones, the familiarity of a face I'd seen in every mirror for decades. But what I touched wasn't mine. My fingers—small, rough, calloused—brushed over skin that felt too soft in places and too worn in others. My cheeks were sunken. My skin was dry. And my hair—
God.
My hair.
No longer sleek. No longer black. It was matted, tangled, uneven, and white. Not the beautiful silver kind of anime protagonists, no. White like stress. Like rot. Like I had been drained of youth and identity all at once.
My stomach twisted into knots. My breath caught in my throat. I wanted to scream, but I couldn't. The dread settled in my bones, thick and immovable.
And then I looked outside.
I wish I hadn't.
The cottage door creaked open like it hadn't been touched in years. And outside…
The world was wrong.
The air was stale, heavy with a quiet that screamed in silence. I stood on the edge of a village—no, not a village. A corpse pretending to be one. Shabby huts leaned into each other like broken ribs. Roofs sagged. Walls were patched with straw and desperation. The streets weren't streets. They were dirt paths soaked with old blood and older sorrow.
The sky above was a sickly gray. Not cloudy—drained. Like the color had been sucked out of the heavens and replaced with despair. The sun was nothing but a weak pulse behind the gloom. There was no warmth.
And the people…
God, the people.
They moved like shadows of themselves—hollow-eyed, skin stretched thin over bone. Their faces were blank, drained of any hope. Like they had accepted misery as routine. No smiles. No chatter. Just lifeless trudging toward survival.
There were no lovers under blooming trees. No sparkling banquets. No poetic confessions of eternal affection.
There was no love.
There was nothing.
I clutched the doorframe, my legs nearly giving out beneath me.
This wasn't a dream. This wasn't a twisted fantasy.
This was my story.
Not the ones that sold—no, those were the ones I had to write. The cheap romance novels with perfect couples and laughable obstacles. The sugary lies that made editors smile and readers swoon for a heartbeat before forgetting my name entirely.
No. This place… this nightmare…This was from the other stories.The ones I wrote when I was angry.When I was broken.When I was real.
The twisted tales I poured out in secret, bleeding bitterness onto every page. Stories of betrayal, of hollow victories, of kings who slaughtered their heirs, of cursed lovers who murdered each other in the dark.
The ones that were too cruel.Too bleak.Too hopeless.
The ones I wrote in defiance—when I couldn't stand one more forced happy ending, when I wanted to scream at the world that love was a goddamn lie.
They were never published.
They were never meant to be.
And now?
Now I was inside one of them.
I had been reborn as a nobody. A dirty, forgotten, nameless peasant girl on the outskirts of the kingdom of Seraphis. A kingdom I had created with my own two hands. A setting I'd built from rage and cynicism, painted in blood and ashes.
I stared at my hands—these unfamiliar hands—and the name slipped into my mind like a snake.
Aira.
It wasn't my name. But it was.
I had never written her. Never named her. She had never mattered. She wasn't a protagonist. She wasn't even a background character. She was one of the invisible masses, the kind of person the story stepped over and left behind.
And now… I was her.
And it hit me.
I was no longer Akira Tsukihara. I was Aira—just Aira. Born to a nameless farmer in a nameless village that no one remembered. No past. No status. No power.
And the world I once ruled as creator?It was now my prison.
The characters I had forged in madness—the warlords, the traitors, the beautiful monsters of ambition—they were all real. They walked these lands. They drew breath. But they were no longer mine. I had no control. No influence.
I was just a peasant girl standing at the mercy of people I had created.
I was nothing.
A footnote in a tragedy.
A pawn in a kingdom of despair.
I fell to my knees, fists clenched into the cold earth. My mind screamed in protest, but a part of me… deep down… already knew. This was my punishment. My curse. My twisted karmic retribution for every awful thing I had written in the shadows.
But even so—
Even so.
I wasn't going to die in the dirt. Not like this.
If this world was mine once, then I'd take it back. Word by word. Page by page.
I would write myself into its history—not as a footnote, but as the flame that burned down every lie I had ever told on paper.
If I had to become a villain to survive…
So be it.
I'd rather become the monster in the story than die forgotten as a victim.
If I was Aira now, then I would make the name echo like thunder through the halls of Seraphis.
Even if it meant tearing every page apart to do it.