The ability to turn something fictional into reality is, without a doubt, a godlike power.
To speak and have the world obey. To imagine—and have existence reshape itself to match your thoughts. If such a thing truly existed, its wielder should stand above all things. Untouchable. Divine. Unstoppable.
As the wielder of this power, Dante should have been a god.
But reality… had other plans.
"Engulf the world in my eternal flame—Black Fire: Abyssal Oblivion!"
A dull spark fizzled at his fingertips. Wisps of smoke sputtered, followed by a faint puff of warm air, like someone exhaling on his palm.
The "black fire" he just summoned didn't burn. It didn't even sting. At best, it was slightly lukewarm. At worst, it was embarrassing.
Dante stared at his hand with the deadpan disappointment of a man who'd just asked for a dragon and received a particularly aggressive pigeon.
"...This is pathetic."
He sighed, the weight of cringe pressing down harder than the supposed fire ever could.
This wasn't how it was supposed to be.
He was twenty-three now. An adult. And yet here he was, standing in his dimly lit bedroom at 2:47 in the morning, wearing pajama and a long black cape from a Halloween sale three years ago.
The only audience to his performance was a half-empty energy drink, his cluttered desk covered in old notebooks and a wall plastered with sticky notes scribbled with phrases like: "Belief must be pure.""The subconscious doesn't lie.""Reality follows conviction."
It hadn't always been like this.
There was a time when Dante was just a normal kid. Or close enough. He was quiet, a little too observant, and always lost in thought. Teachers said he had "potential." Classmates said he was "weird." Neither were entirely wrong.
The first time it happened, he was eleven.
It was something stupid, like most revelations are. He had forgotten to study for a quiz and, in a panic, told himself over and over that the quiz would be canceled. Not hoped. Believed. Deeply, irrationally, with the desperate faith only a panicked child can summon.
And then it was. The teacher walked in, smiled awkwardly, and said there would be no quiz today—the photocopier had jammed.
Dante didn't think much of it at the time. But things like that kept happening. Little coincidences. Predictions that weren't just lucky guesses. People reacting the way he imagined they would before he even spoke. Not every time, but enough to notice.
By high school, he started keeping a journal. A record of coincidences. A catalog of whispers from the edges of reality.
By college, he had a theory: belief could shape the world. Not just his belief, but belief as a force. A collective undercurrent. An unseen gravity.
He majored in psychology, not because he cared about the degree, but because he wanted to understand the mind—his mind, everyone's mind. If belief was the lever, then the subconscious was the fulcrum. He needed to understand both.
It took him three years to teach himself self-hypnosis.
He tried everything. Guided meditations. Binaural beats. Sleep deprivation. Affirmations scrawled in notebooks until the pen ran dry. Each attempt chipped away at the barrier between conscious thought and subconscious certainty.
Eventually, something clicked.
The first time he successfully implanted a belief, it was laughably small. He told himself—no, convinced himself—that he would find a blue marble on the sidewalk. A random, pointless thing.
Three days later, he did.
It shouldn't have meant anything. But it did.
It proved something.
He escalated slowly. Believing he could wake up without an alarm. Believing a stranger would compliment his shirt. Believing that he wouldn't catch the flu even after everyone else in his dorm had it.
And it kept working.
But the more ambitious the belief, the weaker the results.
When he believed he could shoot lightning, he got a static shock from touching a doorknob. When he believed he could lift objects with his mind, a nearby book toppled off a shelf after a breeze drifted in.
He wasn't reshaping the world. He was nudging it. Barely.
But the rules were there. The framework existed. Something was listening.
And that was both thrilling and terrifying.
He learned early on that belief couldn't be faked. The subconscious couldn't be tricked. Saying he had power did nothing. He had to believe it with every cell in his body. That kind of belief wasn't easy to produce. It took mental gymnastics, rituals, repetition, and immersion.
And even then, the results were inconsistent.
He began experimenting with "narratives" instead of powers. He'd spend days crafting fictional backstories for himself—alter egos with different abilities. He figured if he could make himself believe he was someone else, maybe he could unlock more.
Hence, the chunibyo nonsense.
Hence, Black Fire: Abyssal Oblivion.
It didn't work. Not really. But it was a step forward. The spark was still a spark.
And if a spark could exist, maybe it could grow.
Maybe the problem wasn't belief itself, but scale.
What if individual belief could only go so far?
What if the real power came from shared belief?
After all, superstitions, folklore, gods, and monsters—all of them came from collective imagination. Stories passed down, given form in the public subconscious.
What if belief didn't just bend reality? What if it defined it?
That was when the idea truly took hold.
If he couldn't convince himself that he had godlike power, maybe he didn't need to.
Maybe he could get others to do it for him.
What people believed in, they manifested. Not consciously. But unconsciously, through behavior, through expectation, through action. If enough people believed something was real, their actions would start to shape around that belief. Society would shift. The world would respond.
Mass belief. Collective dreaming. Mythology as machinery.
And maybe, just maybe, he could be the one feeding the stories.
Behind the scenes.
Not as a god.
But as a writer.
That night, he scribbled another note onto a yellow sticky and slapped it onto the wall above his bed.
"The actor gives belief form. The audience gives belief power."
He lay down, staring at the ceiling fan as it spun in lazy circles, shadows flickering across the plaster.
He was still weak. He was still clumsy. But he had something far rarer than power.
He had a theory that worked.
And a world just gullible enough to test it on.