The Knife and the Chopping Block
In this world, power was everything.
Power decided who lived comfortably under shining chandeliers and who rotted in dark alleys forgotten by society.
Wealth, influence, and violence were the true laws that governed the city, far stronger than any written rule.
The strong devoured the weak.
And the weak never even realized they were food.
The city itself stood like a giant beast made of steel and glass.
Towering skyscrapers pierced the sky while luxury halls hosted elegant banquets for the powerful elite.
But beneath that glittering surface, darkness quietly flourished.
Crime syndicates, secret organizations, corrupt politicians, and ruthless corporations all fought silently for control.
Alliances formed and shattered overnight, while countless lives were sacrificed for ambition.
Among those forces, one name stood above the rest.
Kael Arden.
To some, he was a brilliant businessman.
To others, he was a shadow ruler who controlled half the city from behind closed doors.
His influence stretched through politics, crime, finance, and warfare like invisible threads pulling the world in whatever direction he desired.
But even a king of shadows needed pawns.
And pawns were disposable.
In the original story, one of those pawns was a man named Axel.
Axel was not a warrior, nor was he a hero.
He was simply a strategist—a man who used his mind to plan schemes and manipulate situations for the benefit of his master.
Yet in the grand story of the city, Axel was nothing more than a minor character.
A disposable piece on the board.
Someone destined to die quietly in the background of the narrative.
His life, his struggles, and even his death were barely worth a few paragraphs.
But fate has strange ways of rewriting stories.
Somewhere in another world, a miserable young man named Rio lived a life filled with failure, humiliation, and regret.
He was a nobody whose existence barely mattered to anyone around him.
Yet through a cruel twist of destiny—or perhaps a blessing disguised as chaos—his soul suddenly crossed the boundary between fiction and reality.
When Rio opened his eyes again, he found himself inside the world of a novel.
Inside the body of Axel.
The disposable pawn.
The doomed strategist.
At first glance, it seemed like the worst possible role.
But Rio possessed something no one else in that world had.
He knew the future.
He knew the secrets of the characters around him.
And soon, he would gain something even more terrifying.
A System.
A power that could turn a forgotten pawn into something far more dangerous.
Because in this world, there were only two types of people.
The fish on the chopping board.
And the one holding the knife.
This time…
Rio refused to be the fish.
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