Before starting, let me make things clear for you. →(....)\= The character is thinking. Now! let’s start...💙

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The exam hall was dead quiet except for the soft scratch of pens and the occasional nervous cough that echoed a little too dramatically off the walls. Caelum Reid stood at the front with his arms folded, eyes scanning the rows of students like a hawk who had seen every trick in the book and was frankly tired of it. He was twenty eight years old, sharp jawed, the kind of handsome that made first year students whisper about him in the hallways before they actually sat in his class and realized very quickly that his face was the only soft thing about him.

A boy in the third row tried to peek at the paper beside him. Caelum's gaze landed on him like a stone dropped in still water. The boy immediately straightened up and stared at his own paper as if it had personally offended him.

"Sigh."

Twenty eight years old and already this tired of people.

He collected the papers at the end without a word, stacked them under his arm and walked out. The students collectively exhaled behind him like they had all been holding their breath for two hours straight. Which, honestly, most of them had.

By the time Caelum got home and dropped the thick stack of exam papers onto his desk, the sky outside had turned that deep bruised purple of late evening. He sat down, uncapped his pen, and looked at the first paper.

Failed.

Second paper.

Also failed.

He flipped to the third one with a small and painful amount of hope.

Failed.

He set the pen down and pressed two fingers against his temple. (Out of forty students, how many of you actually studied? Be honest.) He counted the remaining unchecked papers. Roughly twenty five left. He stacked them neatly to the side and decided that they would still be failed tomorrow morning and nothing about that was going to change overnight.

His stomach growled.

"Right, food."

He opened the fridge and stood there for a moment staring into it like it owed him answers. There were some vegetables on the second shelf, a few eggs, leftover rice from two days ago that he was going to pretend he didn't see. He grabbed the eggs and looked back at the vegetables.

(Should I make vegetable noodles or just egg noodles?)

He looked at the vegetables. He looked at the knife on the counter. He thought about the chopping and the washing and the peeling.

"Egg noodles," he said to no one. "Too lazy to cut anything."

He boiled the noodles, fried them in the pan with a cracked egg, and plated it in about seven minutes flat. His father would have had something to say about that. His father who had run a small restaurant in their village for thirty years and treated every single meal like it deserved respect and patience and proper seasoning. Caelum had inherited the skill and absolutely none of the patience.

He sat on the couch, plate balanced on his knee, and had eaten maybe four bites when his phone buzzed.

The contact name read: Maya 🌸⚠️

The warning emoji was added by him. For good reason.

He picked up. "What."

"Wow, hello to you too," Maya's voice came through bright and entirely too energetic for this hour. "How were the exams? Did everyone fail again?"

"Most of them."

"Classic. Okay listen, forget that, I have to tell you something." There was rustling on her end, like she was moving around. "So I've been reading this manhwa right..."

Caelum ate another forkful of noodles.

"...and okay before you hang up just listen, it's actually really good, it's about this omegaverse university setting and there's an Alpha and an Enigma"

"A what?"

"An Enigma! It's like a rare designation, kind of unpredictable, very mysterious, and the dynamic between him and the Alpha main character is actually so.."

"Maya...?"

"There's a character with your name in it."

Caelum paused mid chew.

"Same name?" he asked.

"Same name," she said, and he could hear the smile in her voice. The specific smile she made when she knew something was going to bother him.

"Is it the main character?"

A pause. Then a small giggling sound that she was clearly trying to suppress. "Hehehehe."

"Maya...?"

"So the thing is," she said, composing herself with great effort, "the character is really well written actually. Very layered. Very compelling. Morally speaking he is not great but...."

"He's the villain...?"

"He's the villain," she confirmed. "But! He's an Alpha and he's very cool about it and honestly the dynamic between him and the ML is kind of the best part of the whole story even if..."

"Send me the link," Caelum said flatly.

"Really?!"

"If I'm a villain in someone's manhua I want to see it with my own eyes."

"OKAY I'm sending it right now but I have to go somewhere so read it and tell me tomorrow what you think, okay? Read it properly, don't just skim..."

"Go. Goodbye."

"Byeeee!"

He hung up and a moment later the link arrived. He looked at it. He looked at his noodles. He ate the rest of his noodles first out of principle, then opened the link.

He was still reading at midnight.

By chapter fifteen he had opinions. By chapter thirty he had grievances. By the final chapter he was sitting cross legged on his couch with the plate long abandoned on the coffee table, staring at his phone screen with the expression of a man who had been personally wronged by a story he had not asked to be emotionally involved in.

The ML, Sylvian Ashcroft, was golden haired and infuriatingly calm in every panel. An Enigma who hid what he was from everyone at the university. Sweet faced, soft spoken, and somehow always five steps ahead of everyone around him. The kind of character that made readers lean closer to the page.

And the main character, the actual protagonist, was being treated like a footnote in his own story half the time. The ML clearly had feelings. It was obvious. It was so obvious that Caelum wanted to reach through the screen and shake him.

(If I were the MC I would have kicked his teeth in by chapter ten. What does he think he is?)

He scrolled back to a panel where the villain, his apparent namesake, one Caelum Voss, had cornered the protagonist again with that sharp smile of his.

Caelum Reid stared at the name.

Caelum Voss.

Same first name. Different surname. And yet he felt a very specific and unreasonable irritation about it anyway.

(Why does the villain have to be charming on top of everything else. This is unfair to the readers.)

He set the phone face down on the couch cushion.

"She said I'd love this," he muttered. "I feel more exhausted than when I started." He glanced at the stack of exam papers on the desk. "I'll check those in the morning."

He turned off the lamp and went to bed.

The first thing Caelum noticed when he woke up was that his bed felt different.

Softer, Wider. The pillow under his cheek smelled faintly of something clean and cool, like morning air after rain, which was strange because his apartment faced a main road and smelled like nothing poetic whatsoever.

The second thing he noticed was the hair.

Golden hair. Spread across the pillow beside him like something out of a painting, catching the early light coming through curtains that were definitely not his curtains.

Caelum went very still.

He knew that hair.

He had just spent two hours staring at that exact shade of gold on a phone screen.

(This is a dream,) he thought. (I fell asleep on the couch and this is a dream and I am going to wake up and the exam papers are going to be exactly where I left them.)

He sat up slowly. The room was unfamiliar. University dormitory style, two beds, two desks, textbooks stacked on both sides. Morning light soft and quiet through pale curtains.

His eyes found the mirror on the wall across from him.

He looked at it.

The face looking back was not his.

It was sharper. Younger. The jaw was familiar in structure but the eyes were darker, the expression colder even in confusion, and somewhere in the back of his mind a name surfaced like something dredged up from deep water.

Caelum Voss.

He was looking at Caelum Voss.

(Of course,) he thought, very calmly, the way a person thinks when their brain has decided that panic is too much effort. (Of course my best friend's reading taste has done this to me.)

A soft sound from the other side of the bed. The golden haired boy stirred, long lashes fluttering, and then those eyes opened. Clear and unhurried, the kind of eyes that looked at the world like they already knew everything it was going to do.

Sylvian Ashcroft looked up at him.

And Caelum, standing there in the body of a villain in a story he had read four hours ago, said the first thing that came to his mind which was absolutely nothing because his mouth had stopped working.

Sylvian blinked once. Then the corner of his lips curved, slow and unbothered, like a cat that had just been woken up and found the situation mildly amusing.

"You look a little different today," he said, voice still soft with sleep. He tilted his head just slightly. "Did you fall in love with me after last night?"

End of Episode 1. Seeu at the Next! Episode! Bye Bye.

"Did you fall in love with me after last night?"

The words hung in the air like smoke that refused to clear. Caelum stood there looking at Sylvian with an expression that could only be described as a man whose brain had quietly packed its bags and left the building.

Sylvian tilted his head, still lying there against the pillow, golden hair fanned out, looking unbothered in the way that only truly dangerous people manage to look unbothered. Like nothing in the world could surprise him. Like he had already seen every possible reaction and found them all mildly entertaining.

"Are you trying to flirt with me?" Caelum said. His voice came out flatter than he intended.

Sylvian's eyes curved softly. "Is it working?"

"No." A pause. Then Sylvian glanced downward, just briefly, and said in the same gentle tone, "You should probably get dressed. Unless you plan to attend class like that."

Caelum looked down.

His face went red so fast it was almost audible.

He was not wearing anything. Not a shirt. Not pants. Not even socks. Absolutely nothing between him and the morning air and the quiet judgment of this golden haired boy who was looking at him with an expression of pure, patient amusement.

Caelum grabbed the first thing within arm's reach which turned out to be a pair of short pants and what appeared to be a loosened tie hanging off the bedpost, clutched them to his chest, and walked to the bathroom with the straightest back and the most dignified stride he could manage given the circumstances.

He locked the door.

Then he stood in front of the sink and gripped the edge of the counter and had a very quiet and very intense conversation with himself in the mirror.

"Hey. Hey. Hey." He pointed at his own reflection. At Caelum Voss's reflection. "Wait. I am a grown adult. I am a professor. I have a mortgage and a stack of exam papers on my desk at home and I only like women. I am not... this is....I don't even know what happened last night and I am not going to think about it." He took a breath. "I only like girls. I am not gay. This is a fictional world. None of this is real. I am fine."

The mirror stared back at him with Caelum Voss's sharp dark eyes and said nothing.

He got dressed.

Shirt. Pants. Tie knotted properly at the collar because some habits were apparently stronger than dimensional travel. He came out of the bathroom looking composed and found Sylvian already fully dressed, sitting at the edge of his bed, textbook open on his knee. He looked up when Caelum walked out and just looked at him for a moment with that small, unreadable expression of his.

"What," Caelum said.

Sylvian smiled. Slow and warm, like sunlight coming through a window that you weren't expecting. "So, darling. Come out with me today."

Caelum's eye twitched. "No."

"You didn't even think about it."

"I thought about it. The answer is no. I don't like you." He grabbed his bag from the desk. "I'm going to class."

He stepped outside and stopped.

He had forgotten about the bike.

It was parked right there at the dormitory entrance, sleek and dark, clearly belonging to Caelum Voss because of course the villain had a motorcycle. Of course he did. Caelum stood looking at it for a moment and then looked at the time on his phone.

Twenty minutes before class started.

(I don't know how to ride a bike,) he thought. (In my real life I take the bus. I have never once sat on a motorcycle voluntarily.)

He looked at the bike again.

He looked at the campus gate in the distance.

(If I crash I won't have to go to class today. That is genuinely a reasonable outcome. I could just crash a little bit. Nothing serious. Just enough.)

He put the helmet on and got on the bike.

He did not crash.

That was the most surprising part. The moment he gripped the handles something in Caelum Voss's muscle memory took over and his hands just knew what to do, his body leaning into turns before his brain had processed them, and he pulled out of the dormitory parking area smoothly like he had been doing it for years.

(It's the body,) he thought, slightly stunned as the campus road blurred past him. (I'm using it because of this character. His body just knows.)

He arrived at the university building and parked.

And immediately wished he hadn't.

Sylvian was already there, standing near the entrance, and around him was what could only be described as a small and devoted crowd. Omegas and betas, boys and girls alike, hovering at a respectful but hopeful distance, some holding out folded notes, some with small boxes, a few with flowers. Because apparently the entire university believed Sylvian Ashcroft was a beta, and betas were safe and approachable and not terrifying, and today was Valentine's Day.

Sylvian was accepting everything with that same gentle smile, saying something quietly to each person, and somehow managing to look like he was giving each of them his complete attention while also clearly thinking about seventeen other things.

Then Caelum walked through the gate.

The shift in the crowd was immediate.

Heads turned. Omega boys and betas who had been orbiting Sylvian suddenly redirected like a weather system changing course. Someone shoved a red rose at him. Then a box of chocolates. Then another rose. Then a folded letter with his name written in careful handwriting and a small drawn heart in the corner.

"Cal!!"

"Good morning, Cal!"

"Cal, this is for you."

Caelum stood in the middle of it holding two roses and a box of chocolates with the expression of a man watching a natural disaster approach from a very short distance. (What is happening. Why are they doing this. I have done nothing to deserve this. The villain has done nothing good in this entire story. Why do they like him.)

He looked up and found Sylvian watching him from across the courtyard with quiet, knowing eyes.

And then Sylvian turned and walked toward the building.

Caelum followed him.

Not because he wanted to. Purely for practical reasons. He didn't know which class he was supposed to be in, he didn't know this campus layout, and the one person whose schedule he had spent two hours memorizing from a manhua was currently walking away from him. So he followed. That was all.

(This is surveillance. This is information gathering. This is not following him because he is the only familiar thing in this entire world.)

Sylvian glanced back once. Said nothing. Kept walking.

(He noticed,) Caelum thought. (Of course he noticed. He notices everything. That's the whole point of his character.)

Sylvian walked into the mathematics classroom and sat down near the window.

Caelum stood at the doorway, looked at the back row where he was apparently supposed to sit according to every established pattern of Caelum Voss's academic career, and then walked to the empty seat beside Sylvian instead.

The entire class went quiet for approximately three seconds.

Sylvian looked at him with one eyebrow raised, just slightly. Not surprised exactly. More like a person who had been handed something unexpected and was quietly deciding what to do with it.

The teacher walked in and class began.

Mathematics. Basic university level. Caelum sat up straight and listened and within four minutes felt the specific exhaustion of a man who knew this material so well that being taught it again was physically draining. He had taught more complex versions of this to students who still managed to fail. He had written exam questions designed to test the outer limits of this exact content. This was not stimulating.

His eyes got heavy.

He tried to hold them open. He crossed his arms. He sat straighter. None of it worked because his body was young and apparently accustomed to sleeping through lectures and his brain had decided that the most threatening thing in the room was boredom and not the fact that he had woken up in a fictional universe that morning.

His head dropped.

"Caelum Voss."

The teacher's voice cut through the fog. Caelum jerked upright.

"Yes," he said immediately, in the clear and automatic voice of someone who had spent years being the one doing the calling out rather than the one being called. "Present. My apologies."

A ripple of confused murmuring moved through the classroom. Beside him Sylvian made a very small sound that might have been a laugh and also might have been nothing at all.

The teacher squinted at him. Clearly recalibrating.

The lesson resumed. Caelum lasted another six minutes before his chin started drooping again. The warmth of the room and the sound of chalk on the board were genuinely working against him and there was nothing he could do about it.

Then Sylvian leaned slightly toward him and said, very quietly so only he could hear, "Why are you so different today. Did something happen to you? Did you hit your head?"

Caelum opened his eyes. "I'm fine."

"You're sitting next to me voluntarily. You said good morning to me earlier without insulting me even once." A pause. "You're being a little cute. It's concerning."

"I said I'm fine."

"Are you really falling for me?" Sylvian said it lightly, conversationally, like he was commenting on the weather. "Well. It doesn't matter if you do."

Caelum opened his mouth.

A piece of chalk flew across the room.

It would have hit him directly between the eyes except that Sylvian's hand came up without looking and caught it cleanly, the way you catch something you saw coming from a long way off.

The class went silent again.

Sylvian placed the chalk on the desk in front of him and looked at the teacher with a pleasant expression. "I'm sorry, teacher. Cal doesn't attend your class very often. Today is actually his first time coming." A small pause. "Please forgive him just for today. I'll make sure he keeps up with everything."

The teacher looked at Sylvian. Then at Caelum. Then back at Sylvian with the expression of a person who had opinions about this but had decided that some battles were not worth it today.

"Fine," the teacher said. "Once. Not again." Then, almost under his breath, "I don't know why you bother with bad students, Ashcroft."

Something flickered in Sylvian's expression. Too fast to read. He smiled. "Thank you, teacher."

The lesson continued.

Caelum sat very still and stared at the board and thought about absolutely nothing for a full minute because his chest had done something strange and uncomfortable when the teacher said that and he did not want to examine why.

Then Sylvian leaned close again, close enough that his voice was barely a breath against the side of Caelum's ear.

"You really are my little problem," he murmured. "That's exactly why I don't want a solution." A beat of silence. "Being a little trouble suits you."

End of Episode 2

The class ended and the hallway filled up fast with the noise of students pouring out of classrooms, bags swinging, conversations overlapping. Caelum walked through it all with his hands in his pockets and his eyes pointed at the ground and his brain somewhere else entirely.

(How do I get out of here.)

That was the only thought running on a loop. Not the Valentine's Day chocolates still sitting in his bag. Not the math class. Not Sylvian's voice in his ear. Just that one question, steady and persistent like a dripping tap.

(I fell asleep reading a manhua. I woke up inside it. There has to be a way back. There is always a way back in these kinds of stories. I just have to figure out the rule.)

He turned a corner without really seeing it and walked directly into someone.

It happened fast. A small collision, a startled sound, and then the instinct that had been drilled into him by thirty years of basic human decency kicked in before his brain had fully caught up. His hand shot out and caught her by the wrist before she could stumble, steadying her with a grip that was firm but careful.

"Are you okay?" he said.

The girl looked up at him.

She was small, dark haired, with wide eyes and a face that was currently cycling through about four different expressions at once. She looked at his hand on her wrist. She looked at his face. She looked at his hand again.

And then she grabbed his wrist right back and started running.

"Wait...." Caelum said.

She did not wait.

He ran because she was already pulling him and also because letting go seemed somehow worse. She moved fast for someone her size, cutting through the crowd with the confidence of someone who had mapped every exit in this building, and within thirty seconds she had pulled him through a side door and down a narrow corridor and into what appeared to be a small unused storage room with shelves of old textbooks and a single dusty window letting in pale light.

She shut the door behind them.

Caelum straightened up and looked at her. "What!?"

"What's your real name," she said. Not a question. The tone of someone who already knew the shape of the answer and just needed to hear it confirmed.

He opened his mouth. Closed it. (Don't say it. You don't know who she is. You don't know what she knows.)

"Caelum," he said carefully. "Caelum Voss."

She gave him a look that said she was not impressed by that answer at all. "Your real name."

A silence stretched between them.

"How do you know," he said slowly, "that I'm not."

"Because," she said, crossing her arms, "I have been in this story for three months and I have watched Caelum Voss from a distance for most of that time and he has never once in his entire fictional life caught someone when they stumbled and asked if they were okay." She tilted her head. "He would have stepped over me. Possibly on purpose."

Caelum looked at her for a long moment.

"Someone transmigrated into this story," she continued, "and they are walking around in Caelum Voss's body being polite to people and following Sylvian Ashcroft to class voluntarily and it is genuinely alarming." A pause. "So. Real name."

He studied her face.

Something about the way she was looking at him. The set of her jaw. The specific brand of exasperated patience in her eyes that he had seen directed at him approximately four hundred times across the last several years.

His brain went very quiet.

Then he grabbed her by both shoulders and said, "Maya."

She blinked. "What!"

"Maya. It's you. It's actually you." He stared at her face, at this face that was not quite her face but had all of her expressions sitting in it, the same raised eyebrow, the same slight pursing of the lips when she was caught off guard. "You sent me that link. You told me to read it. This is your fault."

A beat of stunned silence.

Then she grabbed his arms back and said, "Caelum? You're Caelum?"

"Yes!"

"Oh my god." She exhaled. Then she pulled back and looked at him properly and the relief on her face was so immediate and genuine that something in his chest unknotted just slightly. "Oh, okay. Okay. I thought it was someone else. I've been watching the villain's body for a month waiting for someone to show up and I thought." She stopped. Shook her head. "It's fine. It's good that it's you. At least I know you."

"At least you know me," he repeated flatly. "Maya. I woke up this morning next to the male lead."

She stared at him.

"He was sleeping right there. Golden hair. The whole thing. I looked in the mirror and I was Caelum Voss and Sylvian Ashcroft was just...."

"Wait." Her expression shifted into something that was trying very hard to be neutral and not quite managing it. "You woke up next to him?"

"Yes."

"In the same bed."

"We are roommates. Assigned. I read the whole story, I know..."

"Caelum." She pressed her lips together. A suspicious brightness came into her eyes. "Do you know what it means in omegaverse terms when an alpha and an enigma sleep in the same bed?"

He opened his mouth.

"It means," she continued, "that at some point they were close enough for that to happen naturally. Which in this designation system is not a small thing." A pause. "Also. You weren't wearing anything when you woke up, were you."

The silence that followed was extremely loud.

"We have separate beds," Caelum said. "In the same room. That is all."

"But you woke up in the same."

"I don't know the full context of what happened before I arrived in this body and I am choosing not to think about it."

Maya made a sound that was definitely a laugh disguised as a cough. "It's good that you're not pregnant at least."

"I'm sorry, what."

"Well," she said, composing herself with visible effort, "in this world's biology, omegas can get pregnant from alphas obviously, but there are some rare cases and I want to stress the word rare where if an alpha and an enigma are properly bonded, the alpha can also"

"Stop."

"I'm just giving you the information"

"I don't need that information. I need to go home."

"Right, yes, okay." She took a breath and switched into the more serious version of herself, the one that showed up when things actually mattered. "So here's what I know. The story has already changed. Things that weren't in the original manhua are happening. The fact that you woke up next to Sylvian" she held up a hand before he could object, "whatever the reason, that was not in any chapter. The story is shifting around you."

Caelum leaned against the shelf behind him. (Well... nothing can just be simple.)

"Also," Maya added, "you need to be careful about getting too close to the ML."

"Why."

"Because the real MC the original omega protagonist of this story is still out there somewhere. And that character's relationship with Sylvian is the whole spine of the plot. If you get too tangled up in it before the real MC shows up, things could get complicated."

Caelum nodded slowly. That made sense. He understood narrative logic. He had read the whole thing. "Fine. I'll keep my distance."

"Good." She nodded. Then something occurred to her and she looked at him with a new expression, something edging toward sympathy. "By the way.... which character do you think I ended up in?"

He looked at her. At the small frame, the wide eyes, the omega designation that practically radiated off her now that he was paying attention to it.

"You're an omega..?" he said.

"Yea i am an omega," she confirmed.

He blinked. "So that means..."

"Yes."

A pause.

"Maya," he said, very carefully, "are you telling me that you, my best friend, are an omega in this world, and I am an alpha, which means biologically speaking"

"Do not finish that sentence," she said immediately.

"I wasn't going to say anything alarming"

"You had a face. I know your face." She pointed at him. "We are best friends. That is the only relevant information. Everything else the designation system wants to imply can go directly into the trash."

Caelum raised both hands. "Agreed. Completely agreed."

A beat of silence. Then despite everything, despite the storage room and the omegaverse and the entire impossible situation, the corner of his mouth pulled upward just slightly. And she saw it and shook her head but she was smiling too, the same way she always smiled when things were genuinely absurd and they both knew it.

"I can't believe," he said, "that you sent me that link."

"I didn't know this would happen!"

"You said I would love it."

"I thought you would love it as a reader! Not as a participant!" She pushed his arm lightly. "Also for what it's worth you are very convincing as a villain. You have the jawline for it."

"Thank you. That means nothing to me."

She laughed. A real one this time, quiet and warm in the dusty little room, and Caelum thought that of all the things he had not expected to find in a fictional omegaverse university, his best friend's laugh was somehow the most disorienting and also the most steadying thing of all.

.

.

End of Episode 3