Illum was once a boy who sat in a classroom; fiddling with his pencil and doodling in his notebook.
He would look at the whiteboard of numbers & equations but imagined a cinema screen instead; it played a hundred movies in one minute-all starring an independent & successful adult that someday, he believed... would be him.
That day was around the corner on the day that he graduated.
...Or so he thought.
The next year felt like the world turned against him; he was so demoralised from job rejections, that if he tried imagining that movie on the cinema screen from when he was a kid-it would simply burst in flames.
...But the ashes still held hope in them.
That small ounce of hope led him to move to China; not as a famous vlogger or journalist; but an ESL teacher-that was about to give Illum a shot at the role of his childhood dreams.
At first, it wasn't turning out the way that he wanted; he was more of an 'extra' than a 'protagonist'.
All of this, however, was about to take a drastic turn, the day he visited an abandoned pagoda...a place not for Buddhists.
Illum was finally given a lead role; but would it be in a movie he was hoping for?
A woman might be the key to this answer; a woman he meets along the way, who seemed to have watched a similar movie in class as a kid-that she happened to be the star in.
Now that they're together-one might ask, were they the directors all along? Or, was it somebody else? And no, not 'me', the author; you smartass!
Come & find out. Strap in for the ride and well, if your squeamish...now is the time to leave.
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A deep story that naturally overlaps with many genres; built off the alternative history surrounding the silk road that I fictionalised.
