Episode 1 — The Egg Noodles and The End of My Peace

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.

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