When I first began to think of this story, it was one of those silly talks that began with one of my best friends, Brandon. I never thought it would be a light novel, of course, yet here I am, sitting at my computer, and looking at a finished rough draft of it.

It started as an idea for passing talk, but it somehow scraped itself into the basis for a video game him and I wanted to make, eventually called “Project: Aetherfel”. It was about a hero that died miserably, was given a second chance, and was sent on a bizarre and wild adventure with an unruly ghost princess where he met strange companions and even stranger foes. My friend and I started a greenhorn gaming studio sometime in 2023, I went from story writer to programmer, and like most fleeting fancies, it fell apart and was postponed indefinitely.

While the game never reached completion, far from it, I had written hundreds of pages for the story and lore that would make the backbone of Aetherfel. A year later, I felt a crippling guilt that all my work, my experience, had gone to complete waste. While I was able to shift my programming experience to make a game called “GachaPon!” some months later, “Aetherfel” was as dead as Adrian was when he met Guidance Guy. It gnawed at me that, while I finally did something unthinkable to me, complete a project I started like the cutesy puzzle game I developed, the crowning jewel of a non-existent RPG laid dormant and gathering dust.

So, I wrote. I didn’t know what I wanted to happen, only that I knew that between the story bible I made for the game and my years playing both sides of the table of D&D, I wanted to bring Aetherfel to life. As you can see, I completed the first milestone of that journey. Yay, me!

It felt nice that I had a giant document that had already laid out what I wanted from the story, and helped give me a chance to give a second breath of life into details that may have never entered the game. The benches, as an example, was the location that Adrian could rest, heal, and talk with Ichni in between levels of monsters and puzzles.

In the book, I added characters that didn’t make the original cut for the game, like Serah, who could build the lore and help maintain a world that continues to exist outside of our plucky ghoul knight’s bubble. While it was in my nature for the player to understand most of what was happening around them while maintaining some mystique, the reader now can enjoy the narrower perspective of the hero and leave details left in their imagination.

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A reader’s imagination, far more powerful than any programming know-how I had, is priceless to me. It allows words unsaid to be interpreted how they wished, not something a dozen strings of codes can easily accomplish for an amateur GameDev like myself. It’s a level of trust between me, the author, and the reader that there’s so much to ask, and only so much to answer, but the ride will be fun and funny all the same until things get figured out.

With inspirations from other isekai genre titles like Mushoku Tensei, Konosuba, and The Beginning After the End, I knew that writing about a reverse-isekai (or double-isekai, I wouldn’t even know how to describe that) would be a challenge in its own right. In the end, though, I had asked myself, “well, would it be fun or funny?” and the answer was, “one hundred percent, yes!”.

My wife and kids are sleeping right now, but I know when I see them again it’ll be a hectic day for me as a dad wrangling a couple of three-year-old rambunctious sons. Perhaps that’s why I felt so comfortable writing about a character who dealt with something unthinkable and still managed to roll with the tides. Obviously not to his level, haha, but you can imagine as a parent the cycle of working hard, going to bed dead tired, only to wake up to tackle what wild shenanigans awaits me once more.

Anyways, I just wanted to thank you. Like I said, I’m counting on you to enjoy yourself reading this book, and I’m counting on myself to get this into something awesome for you to enjoy, as well as the next one. I can’t be quite certain how long the story will go, as all good adventurers never rest. What I can be certain of is that I hope you’ll stick with me, Adrian, Princess Ichni and many more as we see what silly adventures take them next.

Thank you for reading this book, and I’ll forever be indebted to you for giving me the chance to finish what I started.

Gratefully yours,

Tyler Vittitow,

better known by my pen name, TwoTimesTyler.