The Journey Begins

A boy named Eren who live in Canada woke up one day, it was unusual today as if something has changed. He got up form the bed and rushed down there was no one in the house. He went outside, roads were empty.

He noticed something that it was not earth it was some other place similar to novel he read sometime ago "I think I am stuck here!" But the reason he stuck there was because the power of the city of silver is blocking his ability to return to reality.

The door to Eren's room swung open with a sigh of displaced air, spilling morning light across a landscape of discarded novels. The scent of old paper and fresh coffee from downstairs mingled with the faint, sharp tang of impending frost against the windowpane. Canada, in all its crisp, autumnal glory, lay outside, but Eren's world was shrinking with every word he read.

He was twenty-two, with the kind of restless energy that made quiet suburbia feel like a cage. His dark hair was a perpetual mess, and his glasses perpetually slid down his nose. Today, a heavy fantasy tome lay open on his chest, its gilt-edged pages catching the light. The real world could wait; this one had dragons.

As he shifted, the book slipped, falling open to a dog-eared page in the middle. A strange symbol, like a coiled serpent eating its own tail, was sketched in the margin of a previous note—something he didn't remember drawing. He'd seen it before, though. Flicking through other books, he found it again, a faint ghost in a philosophy text, a sharp impression in a sci-fi epic.

"What the hell?" he muttered, tracing the shape with his fingertip. It felt… warm. The warmth spread, a tingling sensation that crawled up his arm. The room around him began to thin at the edges, the familiar posters on his wall blurring into watercolours. The scent of coffee was replaced by something else—damp stone, coal smoke, and a faint, metallic tang of blood. The light from the window warped, twisting into a murky, greyish luminescence that seemed to press in on him.

His bedroom floor dissolved into wet, grimy cobblestones. The frame of his bed became the cold, unyielding iron of a streetlamp. Panic, cold and sharp, seized him. He tried to stand, to call out, but his body felt heavy, sluggish, pinned by an immense, unseen pressure.

Then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped. He was standing, solidly, on a street that reeked of industry and despair. Fog coiled around the ankles of passers-by, their faces pale and etched with a weariness so profound it seemed to have settled into their very bones. They wore heavy wool coats and flat caps, the men with pipe-stems clenched in their teeth, the women with shawls pulled tight over their heads. The architecture was all ornate, soot-stained stone and wrought iron, leering gargoyles and high, narrow windows. Horse-drawn carriages clattered by, their wheels slick with something unpleasant in the street.

This wasn't a fantasy world. It was Victorian, grimy, and suffocatingly real. And it was terrifyingly familiar.

A newspaper, abandoned on a nearby crate, flapped in the breeze. The date stared up at him: September 15th, 1348. Not 2023. And the name of the city, printed in bold, black letters: Tainato.

"No," Eren whispered, the word stolen by the wind. "No, no, no." He knew this place. He'd read about it. The gas lamps, the fog, the creeping sense of dread, the secret societies battling in the shadows. He was in *Lord of the Mysteries*.

The realization was a physical blow. The initial wonder, the nerdy thrill of being inside his favorite story, was instantly suffocated by a wave of bone-deep fear. This wasn't a game. The damp chill wasn't a description; it was a cold that seeped into his marrow. The hunger on the faces of the crowd wasn't a literary device; it was the gnawing ache of an empty stomach.

***Download NovelToon to enjoy a better reading experience!***