"Well, this is one way to wake up."

The only thing I can see as I open my eyes is fire and corpses. If I was really here, I might have already thrown up or screamed in pain because of the heat. Fortunately, it seems like I am watching this through a screen of some kind in a first-person view. The person whose perspective I am following is either really short, or a child. Eventually, they collapse in a pile of rubble and the only thing I can see is their hand reaching for the sky in a vain attempt to call for help. Suddenly, another hand grabs hold, and I see a face that makes me question reality. It was the face of Kiritsugu Emiya from Fate, which means the kid I've been seeing the world through was Shirou Emiya.

My first instinct was that this was just a dream and that I would wake-up soon. I was soon proven wrong as the scenes in front of me kept flashing forward. From the hospital where Shirou was first adopted, to him moving into the old mansion, I was forced to keep watching without being able to move, look away, or have any influence on the outside world. The only consolation was that I didn't feel tired, and I could even "speed through" the boring parts if I wanted to.

Now I was starting to worry. How did I get in this situation? How do I escape this situation? Can I go back home? Have I just gone insane? I tried simply closing my eyes and waiting to wake-up back in my bed again, but that was clearly not working. To be honest, I was reacting a lot calmer than I expected to earlier because it didn't feel real. It felt like a video game or a show before, but now the implications that I might actually be trapped for real were starting to set in. I needed to calm down, analyze what was happening to me and figure out a solution from there.

I am somehow in the head (or soul) of the fictional character Shirou Emiya from the Fate franchise and I don't know how to leave and go back home. I can't do anything to influence Shirou or the outside world, although I do seem to gain some control when he falls asleep and starts dreaming. It is highly unlikely that this is all in my head because I am seeing extremely detailed scenes from Shirou's daily life that I should not know about as just a fan of the franchise. I don't believe that my imagination is good enough to make all of this up on its own.

So, assuming that this is all real, what should I do? If I were to remain within Shirou Emiya, what will happen to me if Shirou dies? I can think of multiple possibilities:

A) I wake-up back at home (the best outcome)

B) I die with him (the worst outcome)

C) I start over from the fire like a video game (second best outcome)

D) I switch to someone else's head (neutral outcome)

E) Something completely unexpected happens (second worst outcome)

With the idea of being prepared for the worst, I should assume it is outcome B and try to keep Shirou alive. But Shirou is not immortal so that plan won't work forever. As for leaving this world, I can only think of a few options:

A) I get help from Zelretch and the Second Magic.

B) I get help from a powerful entity or force like the Counterforce

C) I can "touch" the root of Akasha and "become God-like"

There is a pervading problem with all of these options though, and that is it needs Shirou's cooperation. As the days pass by, I am slowly gaining more autonomy and control while he dreams. After a period of time, I might be able to use his dreams to influence and communicate with him. Knowing him, I am pretty sure he would be willing to help me.

But even if I succeed, there is the problem of getting him to survive the Holy Grail War and become competent enough to be of any use to me. I could try to convince him to leave Fuyuki and escape, but the chances of success are low considering his stubbornness and a lot of the growth and connections he would need as a magus from meeting Archer and Rin would be lost. I could simply not do anything until after the war and hope he survives but considering there are 40 bad endings and 5 good endings, the odds are not in my favor. On the other hand, if I try to interfere only minimally and steer Shirou through the right choices like in the visual novel, I might not change enough or change too much and cause the end result to become unpredictable.

The most reliable method would be to start changing things early on to make Shirou a capable enough mage to survive the war on his own without relying on outside forces like Rin's kindness, Illya's mercy, Sakura's love, or just plain luck. While doing this, I also can't let my existence be known until after the grail war as I don't know how the other people in Shirou's life would react to an unknown person being inside his head. This brings up a new issue of trying to find a way to train Shirou while hiding myself from him. Regardless, my control hasn't reached that level yet and it probably won't for a while. I should wait two years for Shirou to convince Kiritsugu to teach him magecraft before doing anything.

Two years passed by relatively quickly, and I was soon watching Shirou and Kiritsugu in the shed during the first magecraft lesson. As expected, Kiritsugu's lesson was vague at best and Shirou misinterpreted how to use his magic circuits. The very first change that I have to make is to have Shirou stop converting his nerves into pseudo-circuits and open his real circuits.

One of Shirou's greatest weaknesses during the grail war was that he didn't have enough magical energy to power Saber, resist Caster, or use his magecraft. The reason for this was because his circuits became atrophied from neglect. But even then, he managed to match an average mature magus with 25 units of magical energy at only 17 years old which shows his innate talent. Waver went from having 20 units at 19 during Fate/Zero to having 70 units at 29 during the Case Files novels. If Shirou actually managed to open his circuits at 9 and trained them for the 8 years before grail war, he could probably reach between the 75-100 range. It most likely wouldn't be enough to use his reality marble, but he will be close to being considered a full-fledged magus.

Over the last 2 years, I've basically figured out how to change Shirou's dreams from the usual nightmare about the fire to whatever I want it to be, but there was also an unexpected discovery. For some reason, Shirou forgets what happens in those changed dreams almost immediately after waking up. This is actually useful to me in the early stages for hiding myself, but it will probably cause problems later down the line. Fortunately, even if he forgets the details of the dreams, he will remember certain subliminal messages and act on them. During one of my experiments, I tried to get him to do 1000 push-ups after he woke up. Although he forgot the dream, he still struggled the rest of the day to finish those push-ups. It was hilarious to watch Kiritsugu and Taiga be very confused and discourage him from overdoing it.

Third Person POV:

That night, when Shirou was dreaming about the fire, the dream suddenly started changing. He saw an image of himself which turned transparent as 27 green lines that looked like electrical circuits lit up within his body. At the same time, he began hearing eerie whispers all around him.

"Find the circuits and open them!"

"Find the circuits and open them!"

"Find the circuits and open them!"

When he woke up the next morning, the memories of the dream faded away within seconds and he couldn't remember what happened no matter how hard he tried. The only thing remaining was a feeling that there was something important he had to do during today's magecraft training. He didn't actually enjoy magecraft training as much as he hoped, mostly because he didn't manage to successfully do any magecraft and the awful pain that felt like a hot iron rod was being pushed into his spine that came from creating magic circuits. That didn't mean he was going to give up though.

When the time finally came for the lesson, Shirou joined Kiritsugu in the shed and once again imagined the hammer of a gun striking to "make" a magic circuit. But this time, instead of directing the magical energy into the metal pipe he was holding, Shirou let it flow through his body as if he was searching for something. Just when his pain tolerance was about to reach its limit, he found what he was looking for. A single green line lit up within him as he ran magical energy through it and he felt a surge of power. The old circuit he made collapsed, but he could still make magical energy through the new green line. The best part was that this one hurt way less than the old one! With the magical energy from the new circuit, Shirou continued opening the others until he was done with all 27. When he told Kiritsugu what happened, he learned that he had misunderstood Kiritsugu's lesson and had just opened his actual magic circuits for the first time.