Bo City, China.
Though not a first-class city, it was still a city of a major nation—once bustling with life, now reduced to a graveyard of death.
Tall buildings that once towered toward the sky now stood wrecked, broken, and destroyed. Debris from the ruins covered the streets.
The stench of rotten corpses and dead monsters filled the air, as a blanket of darkness engulfed the once-bright city.
It looked like a post-apocalyptic scene straight out of a movie. Minion-class monsters and warrior-level beasts roamed freely, feasting on the dead, hunting survivors, and attacking the evacuation bases where citizens had taken refuge.
"Come here, he needs help!"
"Healer! We need a healer here! Please, my father is going to die! Someone, please help!"
"My arm! Ah, my arm!"
Inside the camp where the citizens had been evacuated, the military and mages worked tirelessly—guarding, healing, and helping the wounded.
Many grieved for their lost ones, some had lost their limbs, children searched for their parents—men and women cried helplessly in the face of the calamity they faced today.
Looking at the scene in front of him, Damon closed his eyes and looked down at himself.
"...It's real." Taking a deep breath, he watched humans with wings soaring through the sky, giant beasts towering over them, and healers using white magic to mend the injured. Damon sighed.
'I really got reincarnated?' Reincarnation, transmigration—whatever cosmic nonsense it was—Damon didn't know what to say, even after experiencing it himself. 'That too... in a fictional world?'
He had been transmigrated into the world of Versatile Mage—a novel written by Chaos, originally in Chinese as Quanzhi Fashi, the very first story that had introduced Damon to the addiction of web novels.
"Sigh... fuck my life." Everything was too much for him. Not only had he been reincarnated into a fictional world, but into the very character he had personally created in his own fanfiction.
Yeah, he had reincarnated as Damon Morningstar.
'Okay... I know it's a ridiculous name.'
Cringing slightly, Damon thought to himself as he sifted through the nightmarish backstory he had written for his protagonist.
Born in the U.S., abandoned by both parents after their divorce, Damon had been kidnapped and smuggled into China, where a mad mage-researcher conducted illegal experiments on him.
The experiments were based on a new substance the researcher had discovered—something he sought to integrate into the human body. Damon had been his test subject.
Three years ago, the madman was finally caught and executed. The Enforcers rescued Damon and reintegrated him into society, enrolling him into a Magic High School—the same one Mo Fan attended, though in a different class.
Going through the memories of the previous Damon was excruciating. The vile experiments, the endless torture—no human should have endured that.
"Ugh..." Groaning, Damon relived the memories that had shaped the former Damon's distrusting, antisocial personality. He forced himself to calm down.
Looking down at his body, he observed his condition. A tall but extremely skinny young man, his upper body wrapped in bloodstained bandages. His thin left arm was covered in dark ink—tattoos, or at least they looked like it. But Damon knew better.
Grimoires.
Inspired by The Book Eating Magician—a Korean manhwa and novel Damon had loved—he had created this very character, and now found himself inside it.
'If I remember right... the plotline goes like this...'
Gluttony, after losing Theodore Miller in another dimension, deviated from existence and wreaked havoc upon the world. Noticed by Pride and Envy, the three grimoires clashed, and in the ensuing chaos, their cores were destroyed and caught in a dimensional storm.
Those remnants fused together, forming the core of Beelzebub, which eventually fell into the hands of the mad researcher who experimented on Damon.
Tampering with the powers of the three grimoires—erasing some traits, enhancing others—the man had unknowingly created a being of terrifying potential.
And that creation... was Damon.
'Fuck... why did I even write this crap?' Ruffling his hair in frustration, Damon thought as he recalled the contents of the fanfic he had written. Two chapters. That's all he had finished—waking up to this post-apocalyptic scene and discovering the power that now resided within him.
"Beelzebub."
***
"The Winged Wolf has been defeated!"
"Hurrah!"
"Thank heavens!"
"Hubby... you've been avenged!"
The Bo City calamity had finally ended. Humanity had triumphed—the commander-level monster, the Winged Wolf, was slain.
"Ugh, finally!" one of the students from the Magic High School cheered as the crowd mourned their dead. "Bo City will finally be freed!"
Sitting beside Damon, another student prayed quietly. With his wounds finally closed, Damon was asked to leave the bed for more critical patients and rest elsewhere.
Now seated among his classmates, all waiting to reunite with their families, Damon watched silently.
"Now the military will hunt the remaining warrior-class monsters and bombard the city to exterminate the rest of those bastards," muttered a student beside him, his eyes burning with hatred.
'Huang Feifeng,' Damon recalled—the classmate whose family had been slaughtered by monsters, one of those who had escaped under Mo Fan's lead.
Shaking his head, Damon cleared his thoughts. His mind was still clouded with confusion—future knowledge, past torture, reincarnation, the existence of magic... even as a seasoned web novel reader, it was too much to fully digest.
'For now... I just want some silence. Some peace.' That was all he wanted. He had accepted his situation—barely—but he still wasn't fully adapted to this new world.
'...I need a distraction, I think.' To adapt, to clear his head, Damon thought of what to do next—then smirked bitterly.
"Hah... what an idiot I am." Sighing, he muttered, "In this world of magic, what better thing is there to do than to check my magic... and my cheat?"
Taking a deep breath, Damon recalled the steps to enter his spiritual world. Closing his eyes, he sank into meditation, and when he opened them again, he stood within a vast space of stars and magic.
'Beelzebub... Stardust... here I come.'