As a self-proclaimed web novel connoisseur, William couldn’t explain why his favorite novel Survivor’s Handbook for the Apocalypse had so few readers.
In fact, he thought it was better than both First to the Throne and Immortal Deity, which were both kind of unremarkable in his humble opinion.
Last week, while he was in a bit of a risque mood after receiving an earful of unjustified complaints from his manager at work, William decided to post that blasphemous thought on the light novel fan forums. His inbox was immediately spammed with hate comments from an angry lynch mob of fans.
“How can you think that a no-name novel is better than First to the Throne? Are you blind?”
“Even your mother must love the taste of trash.”
Of course he expected people to disagree with him, but he was surprised by the sheer degree of rejection from the online commenters.
To be fair, the latest chapter of Survivor’s Handbook only received a pitiful two likes, with one of those being William himself. In stark comparison, First to the Throne and Immortal Deity's latest chapters garnered tens of thousands of likes in less than an hour respectively.
No one ever seemed interested enough to leave comments on Survivor’s Handbook, and William just didn’t understand why. The story was amazing, and the setting and characters felt like they were based on reality by how vividly the author lavished details on them, as if they were written from real life experience.
Most importantly, the release rate for Survivor’s Handbook chapters was an unimaginable blitz, nearly four times faster than First to the Throne which had built a reputation among the fan community for being the king of release speed. The author of Survivor’s Handbook–whose username was null in all lower case–hadn’t skipped a day in years. Sometimes William wondered if it was even physically possible for an author to write so quickly.
This was the only novel that released chapters faster than William could read them. Whenever he fell behind, he stayed up all night reading until his eyes were red and sore and he’d happily go to work groggy the next day. No matter what disparaging things the online netizens said, he was a loyal and devoted fan of the series. He had stopped reading other novels at this point, and the unreasonably fast–perhaps unhealthily fast–release rate had a hypnotic grasp on his daily life.
He read on the toilet at work, while in bed, and pretty much any other moment a junior office worker like him could squeeze in during the day. In the absence of any good news from other parts of his life, Survivor’s Handbook was what got him through each day. It was the perfect distraction to mindlessly get lost in with its endless content.
Just imagine his shock when he opened the latest chapter on his phone and noticed an author’s note for the first time.
Dear readers:
The story will be placed on indefinite hiatus starting from today. Thank you for following, and best of luck in the future.
William’s heart sank after the first sentence, and he refused to believe it. His dear author null, who had never said a word up until this point, just ended the series with an author’s note? And right before the Labyrinth stage was about to start? Not just that, he was now discovering after desperately tapping his thumb against the grayed-out [last chapter] button that all the previous chapters were now gone, leaving the page depressingly empty.
It was just a story that he mindlessly followed, so why did he feel so much pain now that the author went on hiatus, like a part of his existence had just been ripped out? Why did his emotions rely so much on this stupid web novel? The answer came to him naturally as his mind stewed in contemplation. Reading was a form of escapism for him, a way to forget the pains of reality. Now that the distraction was gone, all his old wounds reopened themselves.
Loneliness. No family or loved ones to support him. Debt. Abuse and gaslighting at work. Loss of any pride he once had. Those were just some of the problems that he suppressed these days by keeping his mind occupied.
William looked around, suddenly cognizant of the fact that he felt very much alone in the cafe, despite all the people all around him. A group of college-age girls by the window were chatting over lattes. Next to them, two loving parents doted over their three year old child. Sometimes, the loneliest places were filled with people, just not a single person that cared about you. William sat at his table in the corner, by himself like usual. It wasn’t because he was introverted or anything like that, rather he was just a defeated man, humbled and brought down to earth too many times, a prisoner in his own life.
Normally, a warm cup of hot water and his phone in his right hand were enough to keep him company. But now, without the story to get mindlessly lost in, he felt an emptiness he’d avoided for so long.
“Would you like a refill?” the waitress asked, a coffee pot filled with hot water in her hand.
“Yes please.”
At least the waitress was nice.
Old thoughts that used to pester him began to resurface like an affliction. Sometimes he felt that it might not be so bad to just end things. But in the end, he was a bit too stubborn to do that, and he didn’t want to go to the other side just yet. A walk by the river later would clear his head a bit. He’d best move on with his life, find something else to distract himself with.
His mind wandered before drifting back to his favorite novel. As much as he wanted to just put it behind him, he couldn’t shake a strange feeling he had about the author’s notes. Thank you for following, and best of luck in the future. In the future… the words echoed in his head strangely. His gut said that there was a deeper meaning to the author’s note, no matter how silly that sounded.
As he took a sip of his newly refilled cup of comforting warm water, the unthinkable happened. Five words appeared in front of his eyes out of thin air, a most peculiar sight that he had no rational explanation for.
[A new stage will now begin.]
His first reaction was to blink.
The floating box of text did not disappear, and the message was word-for-word from the beginning of Survivor’s Handbook. Great. Now he could add seeing hallucinations to his long list of problems.
He blinked again and rubbed his eyes for good measure, but the floating text did not go away. Seriously now?
There was no way this could be real. He had to be seeing things in his delirium. William Blackwood was many things, but crazy was not one of them.
Stories were fictional. Imaginary. He was here in real life, living and breathing in his own body. The cafe he currently sat in, with its dim lights, its sleek wooden tables and bookshelves, was real. The people around him were real.
If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.
He had to be hallucinating, he told himself, because if the first round had actually begun, wouldn’t everyone else be having some kind of reaction?
William’s eyes darted across the cafe to the other customers, still keen on proving to himself that he was just tired and seeing things, and not crazy, although the floating blue text box remained defiantly in his vision. To his surprise, there was quite a commotion across the room.
“What the hell?” one of the girls by the window exclaimed, swatting at the air in front of her. “Do you see that?”
“Yeah, it says a new stage is starting in floaty words?”
“Is it some kind of prank?”
So he wasn’t just imagining things. Like the saying went, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
“Daddy?” the three year old girl said.
“Honey, are you seeing what I’m seeing?”
The wife nodded to her husband.
He still refused to believe it, but at this point there was so much smoke in the room that everyone was coughing now, which meant that fire was burning. The implication sent a jolt down William's spine. If the story was real, hell, the world was about to be engulfed in a sea of chaos.
Survivor’s Handbook for the Apocalypse was a gruesome, twisted story. From an entertainment perspective it was engrossing, but if the horrors from within spilled into the real world… the world as he knew it was now ended, effective immediately.
A confusing mixture of fear and excitement gripped him. The stages, the zones, the monsters… everything was coming back to him now. He knew what message would come next. It always came.
“You will now be teleported to the stage preparation zone,” he mouthed under his breath. He’d seen this phrase countless times in the past, and it was almost nostalgic.
[You will now be teleported to the stage preparation zone. Danger level, white.]
“Danger level, whi–”
The others in the cafe couldn’t even scream as they witnessed their bodies dematerialize in front of their very eyes. William surrendered himself to the spectacle, knowing there was no way to fight it. The last thing he saw was darkness, and then he felt nothing.
—
When he came to, he found the artificial lighting unbearably bright. Squinting against the glare, he opened his eyes to find himself in a room, seated on an uncomfortable plastic chair. The room around him was bathed in an intense brightness, its walls, floor, and ceiling a seamless expanse of white, devoid of any decoration or feature that could provide a sense of comfort or normalcy except for a rich mahogany table in front of him.
Directly across from the table in front of him sat a business woman with a notepad. Had William been a clueless initiate, he’d be impressed with her strikingly feminine figure and sophisticated posture, her flawlessly dyed chrome hair color, and her cute face which was attractive enough to be an internet celebrity.
Her appearance wasn’t going to work on a veteran like William. As someone who’d read thousands of chapters of this story, there was no way he’d make a crucial rookie mistake like falling for an opposite gender Navigator’s charms. They were the snake oil recruiters, or in this case saleswomen, of the multiverse. Their attractiveness was meant to bring down an unsuspecting initiate’s guard, and trick them into signing an unfavorable Contract.
“Your name is William Blackwood, correct?”
She continued in a hurry, without waiting for him to respond, glancing up to him occasionally before jotting down another note. “Twenty two years old, office worker, blond, slightly malnourished, weak appearance but acceptable frame. Physical potential noted.” She continued to scribble onto the clipboard with a sleek black fountain pen, the kind that a company executive would use. “Protege of old noble family that went bankrupt. Parents deceased under mysterious circumstances. Possible mental instability or mood disorder noted.”
“…”
Was she trying to insult him?
It was one thing reading the sentence ‘the Navigator evaluated his potential with the precision of a seasoned guild recruiter’ in the novel. Sitting in a somewhat humiliatingly cheap plastic chair and getting judgmental comments about his entire existence was an entirely different thing.
“Subject appears surprisingly calm for the situation relative to other subjects. Cool-headedness while adjusted to new surroundings noted.”
He bit his tongue and didn’t reply. That was a good point. A normal human being would probably panic and scream after being kidnapped via teleportation into some suspicious room. The only reason he appeared somewhat calm was because this was exactly how Survivor’s Handbook to the Apocalypse began, except he couldn’t just come out and say that, could he? How was she supposed to react if he just came out and told her that this whole world was written in some shitty novel that nobody really liked besides him? Generally speaking, claiming to know the future or to be some kind of messiah was a quick way to paint a target on your back, which was the last thing William wanted to do. He’d better keep his mouth shut about his knowledge of Survivor’s Handbook for now.
“Excuse me, where is this and what’s going on?” he asked, even though knew full well that this was the Waiting Room, also known as the Interrogation Room.
“You are in the waiting room for the next stage,” she replied coolly. “But before you worry about that, there’s a problem here.” She pointed a finger lazily at him in a somewhat accusatory manner.
He wasn’t sure what she meant by that, and he didn’t like it. Still, there was no reason to antagonize his own Navigator. “What’s the problem?”
She let out a small laugh, as if she was amused that he wasn’t comprehending. “I’ve been doing this for quite a while now, and this is the first time I’ve met an initiate who I can’t sense any power from at all. Zero.”
Looking him up and down with a pitying gaze, she continued. “You’re also too skinny, which makes you weak in a whole other sense. If I had to guess, you’d die before the first nightfall.”
“Die?” he replied in the most timid voice he could muster up. He was starting to see her game now, trying to gaud him into a bad contract, although she did speak some truth. Someone like him was not an ideal candidate to count to survive.
“Yes, die. Most initiates die on the first stage anyway. Sometimes less than half come back, sometimes no one comes back. It’s a bit random, and depends on what hazards you run into and how good you are at dealing with them. And don’t think that we design the stages– whichever god or cosmic entity makes them is beyond both our control and our understanding.”
Her tone was quite level and matter-of-fact despite the horrors that she casually announced. “Usually first nightfall is the toughest hurdle. If I had to be honest, in your current state and without any sponsorship, your chances of survival till then are about forty percent, and I’ll be generous and give you ten percent to survive the night.”
She produced a remote from her pocket as a projection screen appeared beside her simultaneously. A press of the remote turned on the screen, which showed neat white rectangles arranged in rows.
“Each of these icons represents an initiate. And as you can see–” she pressed the button again. Nothing happened at first. Then the first white square turned red, and then another in a mesmerizing display of morbidity. Sometimes they turned one at a time, and at other times a large amount of squares turned red at the same time, a sign that something big must have happened at that moment.
When the slide show ended, William felt his heart pounding in his chest in excitement.
She cleared her throat. “I don’t think you fully understand, William Blackwood. Initiates get killed and even eaten if they're unlucky enough in the first stage. You are going to need all the help you can get.”
She paused for a moment. “My name is Yuliana, by t
Where you will encounter things that will want to eat you, things that, and all sorts of things that will kill you
“Things that will eat humans?”
“That’s correct.”
“Like what?”
“I’m not allowed to share that information with you.”
“But before you are allowed to proceed, there is some information that we need to review.”
“What do you mean? What stage?”
William noticed that the chrome haired Navigator appeared ever so slightly irritated, her eyebrow twitching like she didn’t want to be doing this job, before her appearance melted back into professionalism.
“I’ll start from the beginning. My name is Yuliana, a Navigator that works closely with Blue Mountain and its affiliated guilds.” She swelled with pride when speaking of Blue Mountain.
William hadn’t heard of that particular guild,
—--
When the stage opens, people freak out about the zones and the fact that bully guy has so many perks. Then they are deprived of food and water, everyone notices that they’re very hungry and thirsty as the default, and the people with backpacks open them only to find a few protein bars. Then the first teams scatter out to find food and water. Some of the guys have more food in their bags.
Only after Jenny disappears does Julie get ostracized for being the killer, and then William steps in and says I believe you.
The yellow zone monster kills and leaves a corpse. The red zone monster does not leave corpses..