The walk back from Elder Thandor's cottage was shrouded in the long, cool shadows of the late afternoon. Lysander and I split up at the crossroads near the village well, the weight of the bronze tokens in our pockets keeping our usual banter completely muted. He gave me a tight, unyielding nod—a silent promise between childhood friends—before turning down the path toward his family's woodcutting cabin.
"See you at the crack of dawn, Astraeus," he called out, his voice echoing slightly in the crisp air. "Don't oversleep."
"I won't," I replied quietly.
I walked the final kilometre alone, entering the silent, pristine frame of my childhood cottage. The small common room was cold, the fire in the hearth having burned down to pale grey ash hours ago. I didn't bother relighting it. Instead, I sat at the rustic wooden table and ate a simple, mechanical meal of dried cured meat and stale rye bread—tasting absolutely nothing as my mind continued to process the immense timeline friction scraping against my thoughts.
When the sun finally dipped below the jagged western peaks, casting the frontier into a deep, starless twilight, I walked into my bedroom and lay flat on my back across the wooden cot.
I poured myself onto the mattress, pulling the coarse, hand-woven wool blanket up to my chest as I stared blindly up at the dark wooden rafters overhead. The silence of the cottage was absolute, a perfect mirror to the terrifying stillness of the forest clearing from my dream state. I didn't close my eyes. My right hand remained slipped beneath the blanket, my fingers lightly tracing the smooth, cool geometric runes etched into the surface of the bronze token resting on my stomach.
Tomorrow, my thoughts turned over, a cold wave of anticipation tightening the muscles in my jaw.
If this entire experience was nothing more than a hyper-vivid psychological hallucination born from the trauma of my execution at the altar, then tomorrow morning the universal system would unseal my mana channels and display the exact same parameters I had before. I would be registered as a standard A-Rank Heavy Blade user. I would be pushed right back into the vanguard tank pipeline for the noble houses, destined to bleed on the frontlines until the day they decided to harvest my core all over again.
But if that surreal forest entity was real... if that blinding starlight vortex had genuinely rewired the internal geometry of my soul... the system's evaluation was about to drop a cataclysmic anomaly right into the sandbox.
The internal friction in my brain slowly began to blur as absolute, bone-deep exhaustion finally overtook my unawakened seventeen-year-old physical frame. My eyelids grew heavy, the faint, phantom scent of forest ozone and dry lavender blending together into a seamless mist. Surrounded by the fragile safety of a home that had been burned to cinders in my memory, I finally allowed myself to drift into a deep, dreamless sleep.
A sudden, sharp chill woke me.
My eyes snapped open as the first pale, orange rays of dawn cracked through the small windowpane, painting the bedroom wall in long, sharp angles of morning light. There was no hesitation. The battle-hardened reflexes of my mind overrode my teenage grogginess in a fraction of a second. I bolted out of the cot, threw my woollen cloak over my shoulders, and gripped the bronze token from the vanity table.
Ten minutes later, I was standing at the outermost edge of the village perimeter fence.
Lysander was already there, leaning against a wooden post, his breath pluming into thick white clouds in the freezing morning air. He looked pale, his knuckles white as he anxiously gripped his own token. When he saw me approaching down the frost-covered dirt path, he forced a tight, rigid grin across his face.
"The countdown hits zero today, Astraeus," Lysander whispered, his chest heaving as he stared out at the long road leading toward the regional capital. "Let's go find out what we're worth."