“This… This can’t be real…” Alec muttered under his breath. With shaky pupils, his gaze darted between the small black dots staining the crimson sky and the gaping hole in the middle. If he were to compare, this hole would be bigger than the sun in his old world by about three times.

And that wasn’t all. When he focused more, he noticed small trails of energy being extracted from the atmosphere and slowly being absorbed by the hole. It was as if the thing was sucking the very essence out of the planet.

Alec stared at the hole for a few more seconds before a sharp pain jolted him. He didn’t know when, but at one point, he had started hearing whispers.

“Stop writing…” The voices told him. The pain was getting deeper and deeper as the whispers intensified in volume, slowly becoming shouts. Not being able to keep his bearings anymore, Alec grabbed his head with both his hands and pressed down.

Then, he lost his footing. His legs started feeling like noodles as he fell on his butt.

“I can’t… I can’t look away!” he shouted to no one in particular. No matter how hard he tried, his eyes seemed to be glued to the hole in the sky. Fortunately, just in time, he made the mana brain take over and punch himself in the face.

Not only did the force make him break eye contact, but it also managed to make the voices disappear. When he pushed himself off of his prone position and sat upright, Alec found himself gasping for breath.

‘I almost got demonized,’ he thought. The memories of his encounters with the monsters flashed past his mind, making him shiver at the thought of becoming like them. Then, he contemplated how he had understood the fact that he was about to become a demon, before discarding it as another effect of the anti-memetic magic.

Once more, this time more rigorously, he looked around. The eerie and almost alarming crimson lights blasting through the windows and illuminating the library were hard to ignore.

‘This is not something a singular entity can do…’ He thought to himself. ‘Messing with memories, making people forget each other, blocking us from learning more about the anti-memetic being itself, that’s all somewhat okay. But this… Making us ignore the fact that the sky is like this…’

He wanted to look at the sky again but managed to stop himself just in time.

“Don’t look up,” he told himself. He also ordered the mana brain to focus on the matter in case he forgot.

‘What more did I ignore?’ Alec couldn’t help but ask. No matter how deep he went, it seemed like he couldn’t reach the bottom of the well. Every time he loosened the shackles around his mind, different forgotten truths and ignored realities seemed to appear from the depths.

Feeling uncomfortable being so close to the window, Alec pushed himself back with his hands on the ground. However, his back hit a furniture much earlier than he had expected.

“What’s this…” He muttered before turning his head. With the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of a reflective surface, which made him shiver and jump to his feet.

‘It’s… It’s a mirror,’ he thought with a nervous chuckle. “God… I thought someone was behind me.”

Patting off the dust on his uniform, Alec got up. He stretched as his search both through the physical library around him, and the mental library in his head would be tedious. He then shifted his gaze toward the mirror.

“As always, I’m looking go— Huh?” Alec suddenly got cut off. His eyes searched for a familiar face in the mirror, but couldn’t achieve their goal no matter how hard they tried. “Who the fuck is that? That is not my face…” Alec muttered as he patted his face, trying to determine if what he was seeing in the mirror was real.

’Wait… Of course, it’s not my face. I transmigrated to this world, into the body of Alec Greenwood,’ he then mentally repeated. This wasn’t a fact he had forgotten, but one that he had seen as too simple a truth so far. ‘But since crossing over, I have never looked at a mirror. Not once. At least that’s what the memories left to me convey. Which means that this is the first time I’m seeing what Alec Greenwood looks like.’

If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

Once more, this time with fascination, Alec caressed his own face. He had deep, messy black hair and dark-brown eyes. He had a small amount of baby fat, an amount that you wouldn’t be surprised to see on a 19-year-old student’s face. His gait was one of confidence, even in that situation. He hadn’t realized it when it happened, but his hand had involuntarily gone into his pocket at one point.

‘All of this, and I still feel strangely excited,’ Alec thought to himself. His mouth curled up into a smirk as one of his brows rose. ‘Hah, I do look good after all.’

Slightly shifting his body, he struck a pose.

‘Hm… I shouldn’t have forgotten to wear the disciplinary committee armband. It would have made me look cooler,’ Alec contemplated. His eyes first focused on his upper arm, then shifted toward the folded sleeves slightly under.

‘What’s that?’ he thought. There seemed to be a weird patch of skin stretching under his shirt. When he pulled on his sleeve, he noticed that weird patch to be scar tissue. ‘Scar? What scar? I always used health potions whenever I got wounds. Why would I have scars left over?’

Seeing that his sleeves couldn’t be pulled any further up, he scrambled to undo his buttons. It took him a short while to do so. When he finally undid the last button, he had already lost all his patience. He took off his jacket and shirt in quick succession.

And when he did, Alec was shaken.

He knew that his memory had been severely altered. He knew that there had been times when he had left the influence briefly and left clues and messages to himself. Maybe he had left the anti-memetic magic’s influence briefly whenever he drank a mental cleansing potion. However, how deep did those messages really go? Had he already freed himself completely from the shackles?

He didn’t know.

However, what he did know was the fact that he was really close to the end. And the state of his body which he could only notice now was a testament to that.

“WAKE UP”

“YOU ARE LOSING YOUR MEMORIES”

“REMEMBER”

On his upper body, focused around his chest and arms were countless messages from his past self. From a self that hadn’t lost his memories. However, these messages weren’t written with a pen. No, nothing as ephemeral as that. Instead, he had carved those messages onto his body, waiting for it to heal and scar. This way, they would be eternal. As long as he lived, he would carry those messages with him.

“And all this time…” Alec muttered. There were too many messages to take in at once, however, most were something along the lines of ‘Wake up, you are losing your memories’.

‘I probably got momentarily aware of something. Remembered some stuff I shouldn’t have,’ he guessed. ‘However, I still couldn’t see the other messages. So instead, I left a new one for every time.’

Then, there were some more complex messages. One that particularly attracted his attention was a message that contained a list of names. Those complex scars were also written very lengthy. Maybe at the point he had written this, Alec had already become adjusted to the pain from disfiguring himself.

[I have forgotten many things. What if among those things are people? People I hold dear to myself? I am writing this so you can remember. Do you know these names?

Ariel

Evan

Thomas

Alexei]

As Alec read through the lines, he frowned.

‘Who is Ariel? Why is she on the top of the list?’ he questioned in his head. ‘I know my writing style. I was probably feeling depressed at the point I was writing this. Why? And this… Ariel person. Who is she? I wouldn’t have written her above Evan if she wasn’t someone really important.’

However, no matter how hard Alec tried to remember, he couldn’t do so. It was as if alongside memories of Ariel, anything that acted as a clue toward her existence was also shrouded.

“Fuck!” Alec shouted in anger. He kicked a nearby chair with all his power, launching it away.

Then, his gaze shifted slightly lower on the mirror, down to his abdomen.

For some reason, the scars left there were very simple, and isolated from the other messages.

“OUTSIDE?”

“What?” Alec muttered with a frown. He looked around and inspected the scars again. The letters of “OUTSIDE?” were thicker than any other’s. He had apparently stabbed very deep, and maybe even shifted the blade inside to really cause damage.

“What outside? Outside is the outside…” he then muttered. However, his thoughts seemed to get a hold of something. A thought so heavily protected that he was still having problems reaching.

Suddenly, blue sparkles started flashing around Alec’s head.

“Outside… What’s there?” he disregarded the commotion and spoke as if he was trying to get an answer.

“Outside the library is the academy grounds. Walk a little bit more, there should be the forest. Further ahead, there are the walls.”

As he kept extrapolating, the sparkles intensified. Unfortunately for the thing, the average mental cleansing potion created by The Author’s Pen was too strong.

“And behind the walls…” Alec muttered. He turned his head toward the window he had previously looked outside of. He didn’t look up, but forward, trying to see behind the walls. “No land? We are floating in the air? The entire academy?”

Taking a few shaky steps Alec noticed his breathing become rugged.

“Nothing… I don’t know anything about the outside,” he muttered again. “What city are we in? Wait… The academy seems self-sufficient, so maybe there isn’t a city… No fuck that. What country are we in? Why did the outside authorities not notice what was going on here? Since crossing over, why have I never once thought about what is going on outside the academy?”

Gulping loudly, Alec turned his head back toward the mirror. The scars in the middle of his abdomen seemed much more intimidating now.

“Why is the academy cut off from the outside world..?”