Elias Ashford came to in the middle of a bed so massive it could've passed for a ballroom floor.
For a moment, his gaze was hollow, fixed on the chandelier hanging above him—a sprawling constellation of crystal and gold. The morning sun caught the thousands of hand-cut facets, scattering light across the ceiling like tiny, indifferent stars.
His eyes slowly adjusted, a faint weariness settling in their calm gray depths.
Then came the weight.
A tightness pressed against his chest, something soft yet heavy. He blinked, frowned, and tilted his head. What filled his vision was a pair of pale, impossibly smooth legs, draped across him as though he were a piece of furniture.
Elias sighed, gently lifting the legs away. Their owner shifted in protest, lips parting in a sleepy pout before she turned over, her dark hair spilling across the pillow. A trace of drool glistened at the corner of her mouth—a small, human imperfection on an otherwise sculpted, ethereal face.
He didn't feel a thing.
There were eleven more just like her—strewn across the enormous bed, lost in their dreams. The air was thick with perfume, skin, and the faint hum of the air conditioner.
To anyone else, the scene would have looked like something out of a billionaire's fantasy—twelve women, all of them recognizable faces from red carpets, runways, and magazine covers, draped in careless perfection.
But for Elias, it was only silence.
His eyes moved from one body to the next, not with desire, but with a kind of detached curiosity—until they stopped on a young woman near the edge of the bed. She was different. Bare-faced, almost innocent. There was a softness to her expression, like a photograph from another life.
Without thinking, Elias reached out a hand toward her.Bang!
The innocent school beauty was pushed away and rolled twice on the bed.
Such a noise naturally woke up the innocent school beauty. Her big, confused eyes kept blinking, looking like she had just woken up in a daze.
Su Mu ignored her and picked up the books that the school beauty had pressed under her from her previous position.
I picked up the warm book and saw the words: [Practical Course of Clinical Hypnosis]
Turning to page 128, a bold title catches your eye: How to use your voice, props, and behavior to give hypnotic suggestions.
Su Mu studied carefully, immersed in learning.
At this time, the twelve beauties nearby also woke up one after another and started playing around.
An exotic woman came over with a sweet smile: "Hubby, stop reading. Are books as interesting as us? Hehe..."
Her words caused the other women to giggle as well.
However, a hint of displeasure flashed across Su Mu's face, and he snapped his fingers lightly.
Bang!
As if some kind of switch was pressed, the entire space suddenly fell into an eerie silence, and the laughter of the twelve stunning girls came to an abrupt end.
Then, an inexplicable force descended, like an eraser, gently sliding across.
Swish!
The twelve stunning figures disappeared out of thin air, leaving only Su Mu in the huge room, and the occasional sound of flipping books could be heard.
Two hours later, Su Mu threw the book aside, frowning slightly: "There are only a few tricks in the whole book that are useful, the rest is all nonsense."
There was no answer in the empty apartment.
After a long silence, he muttered to himself,
"Forget it. Let's just watch something."
Elias Ashford rose from the couch and walked toward the tall pane of glass that stretched from floor to ceiling beside the television. The reflection that stared back at him was almost unsettling—sharp features, clean jawline, dark eyes that gleamed like polished obsidian. Handsome, but fragile in a way that made him look as if he'd stepped out of a baroque portrait.
Too thin. Too pale. The kind of pallor that spoke of sleepless nights and the kind of exhaustion that wasn't cured by rest. With his tired gaze and distant poise, he could've passed for one of those tragic vampire aristocrats out of an old European myth.
He stood before the glass, gazing out at the sprawling city below. From this high up, the traffic looked like glowing veins under steel skin, the people like restless ants carrying invisible burdens.
Elias reached for the TV remote lying beside him and pressed the red power button.
Click.
For a split second, everything went still.
Then—
The television didn't light up.
The sky did.
It was as if the sun had decided to fall to earth.
BOOM.
BOOM.
BOOM.
The sound rolled across the horizon, tearing through the city like divine thunder. Towers vanished. Streets folded in on themselves. The skyline bloomed with mushroom clouds, a dozen miniature suns blooming one after another, until the white blaze devoured everything.
Elias didn't flinch. He simply stood there, watching as the end of the world unfolded beyond the glass. The reflection of the explosion danced in his pupils, burning away the fatigue, leaving behind a strange serenity.
"Still beautiful," he whispered. "Even after all this time."
And then, the light swallowed him too.
Elias Ashford woke on a narrow twin bed—barely three feet wide.
The sheets were coarse, the air stale. No chandelier, no city skyline, no trace of the endless women that once filled his dreams. Just the faint hum of a radiator, yellowed wallpaper curling at the edges, an old oak dresser, and a battered desk buried under paperbacks and notebooks.
The contrast was brutal.
It felt like waking up into another lifetime.
But this wasn't reincarnation.
He had simply woken up.
From that dream.
And what a dream it was.
They say you can have anything in dreams. Elias had proven that true.
Inside his, he was a god.
He could imagine a world—and it would exist. A neon metropolis built on greed and desire. A universe of ancient empires and immortal kings. A realm of magic and monsters, where power hummed in every breath.
All he had to do was think it, and it became real.
If he wanted women, they appeared—models, actresses, mythical queens, beings sculpted from imagination itself. Each one perfect, each one real in the moment he touched them.
If he wanted power, he became it—president, emperor, archangel, deity. Titles meant nothing there; they were just skins he wore.
Money? He never needed any. In a world he built, everything was his by default.
For a year, Elias had lived like that—sleeping less and less, craving the moment his consciousness slipped into that boundless place. Out here, in the real world, he was nobody: an orphan, a student barely scraping through his rent, the kind of guy people forgot existed in five minutes.
But in there… he was everything.
He'd wandered through hundreds of realities, rewritten a thousand stories, and lived every power fantasy ever dreamed up by lonely writers. He'd even dropped himself into the worlds of the novels he used to read, playing hero, villain, or god until the lines blurred.
And among them all, his favorite was one story he kept returning to—
a brutal, blood-soaked world called Until Death.
He'd replayed it a dozen times. Maybe more.
And every time he left it, the real world felt just a little less real.