[Completed the Royal Road Writathon challenge - November 2023] Aleem Beckenbauer, a 23 year old digital artist, dies a painfully sudden death one evening, only to wake up in the immense open-world RPG setting of "Tales of Woe: Orig Eternal". A truly bleaksome game designed by his foster parents, and by which he'd been wholly enraptured growing up. He finds himself inhabiting the body of a demi-human teenager at the epicentre of a historic calamity that unfolded nearly 12 years before the game's original timeline.  Aleem has been thrust a decade into Orig's obscure past. He is caught between two sides of a divine conflict and must desperately navigate an intricate web of causality just to stay alive. Every alteration he makes to the timeline vitiates and further deters the future he knows.  Aleem possesses enough information to obtain true power and outgrow the machinations of superior entities, but before any of that, he would have to survive his first week on the planet. WHAT TO EXPECT: -This is a slow burn story. Consider yourself warned. -Protagonist starts out weak but becomes very powerful eventually -An MC who reasonably leverages their knowledge of future events -Characters that explore their emotions and internal experiences. A fair bit of internal monologuing, but never to the extent of navel-gazing. If you resent that, then this might not be worth your while. -MC that's not an anti-hero but certainly not a paladin either -Characters with agency -Various intriguing schools of magic and mystic traditions -Crafting, artefacts, spellwork, armed combat, lots and lots of meditation -Swashbucklery, adventure, daring escapades -Machinations, plots, conspiracies, cloak and dagger operations -Third person narrative style with little in the way of gratuitous POV shifts -Blue screens and Stats that don't bog down the narrative -Self-aware(-ish) Protagonist -Very soft western-cultivation elements -The power of friendship (regrettably) -An epic slow-burn progression fantasy that wants to knock your socks off