001 Aspiring Author
Ronald 'Ron' Retsej was an adventurer. However, that wasn't always the case.
Once, in a different world where steel towers scraped the sky and voices traveled through wires, he had been a man with broken legs and silent ears. In other words, a person with disabilities. However, more than that, he was an aspiring novelist. Crippled by fate, but not by imagination, he worked hard for his goals in his lonely apartment room with hopes for a future where he could be seen. His fingers had once danced across keys like a pianist composing dreams, even if no one ever truly heard the music he created.
Until the night fate silenced him forever.
It had been an unremarkable car crash, starting with a flicker of pain, and then, a whole lot of nothing.
But that wasn’t where his story ended.
When he opened his eyes, it was not heaven or hell that greeted him, but a world of sword and sorcery, monsters and magic… a world that many in his old life had fantasized about. It was the kind of place where legends were forged in fire and blood, and destinies were carved by steel.
But Ron, reborn with a working body and functional ears, did not seek glory in battle or fame in dungeons. He sought a quill and ink. He wanted to write.
Now, he sat hunched over a splintering desk in a lonely hut nestled at the edge of a dense, whispering forest far from any city, guild, or village. The candle beside him flickered, casting shadows across piles of half-filled parchment. Outside, the wind howled like a beast denied entry, but inside, the only storm was the one in his mind.
“What do I even write?” he muttered to himself, tapping the feathered quill against his lips.
He could have plagiarized. It would’ve been easy. A thousand stories from his old world buzzed in the back of his head from stories of chosen heroes, tragic villains, love triangles, and mecha dragons with hearts of gold. But he had sworn to himself: he would not steal. Not from others. Not even from the echoes of his past life.
He wanted to create something truly his.
Yet the problem gnawed at him… how could one write anything original when he had seen so much? Every idea felt like a reflection, a remix, and a tribute to something long since told. But perhaps, he thought, originality wasn't about being first.
Maybe it was about being honest.
He took a deep breath, dipped the quill into ink, and began to write.
Ron had just quit his adventurer gig.
He was in his twenties now, young by this world's standards, but older in soul. Reborn in a quiet farming village tucked between rolling hills and swaying wheat, he'd once been the runt of a large family, expected to plow fields and tend goats like the rest. But from the moment he could read, he knew he wanted something else.
He wanted to write.
Not simple tales scratched into bark or stories told over ale in the tavern. He wanted to write books. Real ones! Epics that would endure, tales that would reach beyond valleys and walls, perhaps even into the libraries of kings. But dreams required coin, and parchment didn’t grow on trees… at least not in any form worth writing on.
So, Ron left the village with a short sword, a bedroll, and memories of an old world filled with information, tropes, and tired formulas. He joined a guild, took on odd jobs, hunted goblins, scouted ruins, and even once helped escort a noble’s idiot son through a forest. It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t clean. And more often than not, it wasn’t safe.
But after a decade of hard work, he had done it.
He’d bought himself time.
Now, in his modest hut nestled beyond the reach of lords and taxes, he finally had what he needed: high-quality ink from the capital, parchment so smooth it made his fingers tremble, and even a certified sales agent… one of the rare honest ones, or so he hoped… who agreed to distribute his work through the local merchant networks.
He sat at his desk, hunched over parchment, a half-finished draft lying in defeat beside his elbow. The air smelled of dust and ink. His candle burned low.
Ron exhaled and crossed out yet another title.
Starborn Dominion — too futuristic.
The Hollow-Eyed Man — too horrific.
City of Neon Saints — what would villagers even make of "neon"?
He leaned back in his creaky wooden chair and rubbed his temples. This world was a cultural fossil, firmly medieval in values and technology. There were no printing presses, and no mass literacy. Most of the populace found joy in oral tales, passed around fires and hearths, always about brave heroes, terrifying monsters, and divine prophecy.
If he dropped an alien invasion into their lap, they’d either call him mad or a heretic.
Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
No, it had to be something closer to home.
He drummed his fingers against the table, staring at the ceiling until the answer began to form… not in lightning, but in slow, spiraling thought.
What if he didn’t reject the fantasy? What if he embraced it?
“That’s obvious enough, isn’t it?”
What if... he wrote a story set here, in this very world… this land of steel and spellfire? But with a twist. Maybe a hidden framework. A system, invisible to most, and guiding fate like gears beneath the surface of reality. Levels, skills, classes, progression… and all hidden beneath the familiar.
That was the kind of story he would have loved in his old life.
He grabbed the quill again, dipped it in ink, and wrote:
Title: The Hidden Code of Swords
He smiled faintly. That was a start.
“It’s catchy… But… this won’t be enough…”
Ron tapped his quill on the desk, eyes narrowed, lips twitching in a half-scowl and half-smile. The candle had burned halfway down now, wax pooling like the thoughts in his brain… thick and slow, but with heat beneath them.
The System... what kind of system would appeal to readers here? That question gnawed at him more than it should. This world had no concept of "systems" the way his past life had known them… no menus, no leveling, and no interface. But it had something similar: gods, miracles, blessings, and skills passed down from ancient bloodlines or divine pacts.
Yet no one had mechanized righteousness. No one had turned virtue into a trackable resource.
What if… the System rewarded good deeds?
What if karma were currency?
And the reward wasn’t gold or fame, but power… sacred, shining, and earned through selflessness?
He felt a jolt of excitement. That was it. He would call it the Paladin System.
In his old world, paladins had been icons of justice. They were symbols in shining armor, paragons of virtue, and the holy warriors who smote evil with divine fury. Sure, modern depictions had muddied that image, turned them into zealots or hypocrites, but at their core, they had been knights with a soul.
Knights existed in this world. That wasn't new. But paladins… It was a title reserved for those who didn't just swing swords, but upheld ideals… That would be something fresh, at least to this world.
The protagonist being a good guy filled with ideals wasn’t exactly new, and the same was true for Paladins. Especially for their mythologized counterparts from Charlemagne’s Court, King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, etc.
“I don’t think it’s plagiarism,” Ron muttered, half to the candle and half to himself. “It’s more like reinterpretation.”
A lot of popular media had been based on the Paladins after all, so what was stopping him from writing something inspired by them?
The real problem, he realized, was the religion. This world had plenty of it. Temples, priests, fanatics, gods with too many faces and not enough mercy. If he leaned too hard on the Paladin-God relationship, he’d risk offending someone… or worse, getting his book banned or himself branded a heretic.
But what if the Paladin served no god, but an ideal?
Yes. Yes!
Justice. Mercy. Truth. Protection. A Paladin who fought not for divine favor, but because the System told him what was right, guided him toward karmic good, and marked his soul like a compass always pointing north.
But then… would that still be a Paladin?
Ron chewed his lip. The essence of a Paladin had always been about service… about being chosen, about devotion! Stripping the divine entirely felt... incomplete.
So, compromise.
“Make the System sentient.”
It had been done before in the webnovels of his previous life. Sentient systems that guided protagonists, advised them, punished them, and pushed them to grow. Why not let the System itself be a kind of patron… a god not made of flesh or worshippers, but of algorithms and ancient magic?
“Yes,” Ron said under his breath, more confident now. “The System is the god. No temples. No priests. Just... a divine machine that watches and rewards the good.”
He dipped the quill in ink again, smiling as he began to write:
"Chapter One: When the Light Spoke to Me"
Ron wrote. He wrote all night.
Ink stained his fingers and smudged the edges of the parchment, but he didn’t care. The words came easier than he expected. This world’s language, though technically foreign, resembled English so closely it bordered on uncanny. Grammar was loose, spelling was phonetic, and as long as the meaning was clear, the scribes and merchants never complained.
It helped. A lot!
He still longed for a typewriter. A simple machine to click and clatter his thoughts into shape at ten times the speed of ink and quill. But that was wishful thinking, a luxury of a world lost. Here, he had wax seals instead of formatting tools, and calligraphy instead of fonts.
Still, his hands moved with purpose.
The story he was writing had begun to breathe.
It followed a young boy… no older than twelve… who wandered too close to a cliff near his village. There, he discovered a strange wooden sword embedded in the rock face, as if someone had stabbed it into the cliffside long ago and left it to rot. It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t shining steel. Just plain, forgotten wood.
But the boy was curious, intrigued, and most of all, unafraid.
He climbed toward it, small fingers gripping stone and root. He reached out and grabbed the sword.
Then he slipped.
The boy fell.
And just as his body was about to meet the jagged rocks below, the wooden blade pulsed with golden light, and the world stopped.
The light spoke.
It didn’t use words, not at first. It spoke through feeling. Through presence. Through conviction. And then, at last, through language.
"You have chosen the sword. The sword chooses you."
Ron smiled faintly as he penned those lines. He had missed this… writing without fear. Writing not for clicks or comments, but for the sheer joy of building something from nothing. This wasn’t content. It was a story.
By the time dawn began to stain the horizon in pale orange and sleepy violet, Ron had several full pages beside him. Not enough for a book. Maybe five, six thousand words at most. But it was a start.
He knew he needed at least 20,000 words—ideally 40,000!—to be taken seriously. Anything less would be seen as a pamphlet, a novelty at best, and a joke at worst. And he wanted respect. He wanted readers to sit around a fire and whisper the name of his characters the way they did old war heroes or saints.
Those boring copywork quests he'd done in his adventurer days, transcribing texts for dusty libraries and grumbling monks, had paid off. His script was elegant now. It was legible and professional. He even knew how to bind pages properly, how to waterproof the cover with treated leather, and how to prepare a draft that a guild merchant might actually agree to carry.
He set the final page aside, dusted it with sand to dry the ink, and stretched his sore back.
Then, carefully, with deliberate strokes, he turned to the very first page.
In bold, sweeping calligraphy, he wrote:
“Paladin System: The Hidden Code of Swords”
He leaned back and stared at it.
A title born from two worlds. One foot in fantasy, the other in the tangled imagination of a man who used to read forums and webnovels on a cracked phone screen between therapy sessions.
Ron smiled… not wide, but real.
This was just the beginning.