Ren woke up and rubbed his eyes sleepily without opening them.
"Fang…?" he called softly. "What time is it?"
There was no response. Ren stretched out his hand to the side of the bed, still half asleep, and found it to be cold and empty.
Alarmed, Ren's eyes snapped open. Then he sat up abruptly and rubbed his eyes again. Then he looked around again.
Then he closed his eyes, rubbed them again, and looked again.
He repeated the action several times.
Then he pinched himself hard – hard enough to leave a bruise.
But the scene around him didn't change.
He was back in his room, back in his previous world. The world where he had come across the book 'The Trials of Ren' at an airport shop and bought it on a whim – and he had read it on the flight, and then his flight had crashed in all probability because the next thing he remembered was that he had transmigrated into the book as Ren the villain…