The initial shock of waking up in his sixteen-year-old body had worn off, replaced by something sharper, colder.
Resolve.
Shadow had lived through pandemics, economic upheavals, tech revolutions. He had watched empires rise on the back of code and crumble under the weight of poor decisions. Now, standing in 2010—armed with fifteen years of foresight—he understood the raw power of the moment. The world didn't know it yet, but it was on the brink of transformation. And he held the match that could ignite the blaze.
The internet was still a wild frontier.
Dial-up wheezed and groaned in homes across the country. Facebook was for college kids and high school drama. YouTube was just cat videos and grainy music covers. The online economy was in its infancy, barely walking, let alone sprinting. It was a blank canvas.
And he had the blueprint of a masterpiece.
But genius needed tools.
His current desktop—a bulky beige tower with a humming fan and the processing power of a potato—was laughable. Trying to build an empire on that would be like sculpting the Taj Mahal with a spoon.
So, Shadow enacted Phase One.
He started small. At dinner, he casually mentioned a newfound interest in programming. "School's doing a tech fair," he lied smoothly between bites of spaghetti. "Thinking I might build something cool. Maybe an educational site or something."
His father raised an eyebrow but said nothing. His mother, however, perked up. "That's… new. You sure you're not just trying to avoid history homework?"
Shadow smiled. "What's more historical than the evolution of the internet?"
Over the next week, he ramped up the act. He dug up old programming books from the garage, flipping through them with performative focus. He spent hours Googling "advanced PHP functions" and "efficient database design" while making sure the browser history was filled with enough legitimate-looking terms to pass parental inspection.
He spoke about RAM like it was the holy grail. He grumbled loudly about his "slow machine" while trying to "compile code" that didn't exist yet. He printed out fake benchmarks and left them strategically on the kitchen counter.
Eventually, the pressure worked.
"You've been working really hard lately," his dad said one evening, sipping his coffee with a skeptical frown. "And your grades are… surprisingly solid. Let's say we upgrade your setup a bit."
Shadow tried not to grin. "I mean, it would help with productivity."
Two weeks later, his bedroom was reborn.
A sleek new desktop with twice the RAM he asked for. A decent monitor. A reliable internet connection that no longer needed to sacrifice the phone line. Even a brand-new ergonomic chair—his mom's idea, for "spinal health."
He closed the door behind him that night and stared at his new workstation like a general admiring a war map.
It was time.
With a cup of instant noodles in one hand and a notepad full of architectural sketches in the other, he began.
The late-night hours became his sanctuary. As the world outside slumbered, Shadow typed. And typed. And typed.
Fiction Zone was born line by line.
He started with the foundation: a clean, lightweight architecture that could support large text files without lagging. He designed a user interface that was intuitive, almost minimalistic—but elegant. While everyone else in 2010 was busy stuffing websites with blinking banners and ugly sidebars, Shadow focused on speed and function. He knew the pain of dial-up. He knew attention spans were short. And he knew what the web could be.
He coded in PHP, gritting his teeth through its primitive clunkiness. He wrestled with early HTML5, coaxing it into layouts he knew would feel futuristic. CSS was his sculpting chisel, carving aesthetic grace from jagged edges.
By the third night, the login page was live. By the fifth, he had a working database. By the seventh, he was uploading his first batch of content.
Books. Dozens of them. All from memory.
Stories that hadn't been published yet. Stories that wouldn't trend until 2017 or 2022. Shadow chose carefully—novels with global appeal, emotionally resonant arcs, and genre-defining brilliance. To the 2010 audience, they would seem like revelations.
He wasn't just uploading content.
He was seeding a cultural revolution.
Each line of code was a calculated step toward inevitability. Every pixel was a prophecy.
In the soft glow of his monitor, with lo-fi music humming through tinny speakers and the scent of miso noodles lingering in the air, Shadow felt it—the rush. The fire. The addictive joy of creating.
He wasn't just building a website.
He was laying the foundation for an empire.
And this time, nothing would stop him.