—
Transported into a realm full of darkness without a single glimmer of light, Gustave was unable to feel his limbs—or even his entire body. Apprehension and unease washed over his whole being. He tried to move, but he could not, for there was nothing to move in the first place.
As the unsettling dread crept in, the emotion grew so severe that no word in his vocabulary could describe it. He felt only cold and an unimaginable fear engulfing him in an eternity of icy terror. It was the most vicious experience he had ever faced, and if this was what death felt like, then this was exactly it.
Screaming and shrieking did nothing for him; he could only confront this dismay head-on without any sensory input. The only thing he could rely on was his mind. Yet even his mind faltered, for soon he felt the returning madness—misfortune and curse—embracing him once more with the chilling laughter of pestilence.
Like cockroaches wriggling all over his body, crawling into his mouth, eyes, and ears, or like swimming in manure filled with disgusting pus, Gustave knew this time the madness would become permanent.
Smelling the stench of rotting, rancid flesh coming from his body—even though he had no body—he understood, with horrifying certainty, that he had been transformed into some kind of monstrosity. Finally realizing he had advanced to Sequence 8, he laughed maniacally, followed by tears of blood—if he had any, or if he could even express emotion.
With the madness and insanity that were not caused by any outside influence but were inherent to the transformation itself, it no longer knew how to think or form a coherent thought. It only laughed and chortled dementedly. It knew with absolute certainty that it was now categorized the same way as a Relict in the Witcher bestiary, for it was no longer anything close to human.
Pain from outside influences—pain it could barely recognize—suggested that people close to it were trying to subdue it. If it had been capable of thought, it might have guessed as much. Instead, it simply charged at them in hysterical laughter, injuring someone dear to it.
With its hand about to slam down and reduce all four of them to minced meat, it suddenly found itself unable to continue—because another of its friends had arrived, unleashing every Witchery technique they possessed to restrain it.
But because it was lost in rage, unable to feel any satisfaction, the disgusting pus that should have been instinctively rejected by it was instead welcomed—and then its mind… its mind… its mind… its mind… its mind… its mind… its mind… its mind… its mind…
The vampire friend arrived… the vampire friend's dragon arrived… and finally the lilac-and-gooseberries woman arrived… giving strange potions… an operating table… the very old wolf holding a container for the disgusting pus…
—
Unknown how much time had passed since the incident, Gustave felt clarity return to his thoughts—enough that he could even activate his [Knowledge] ability, a sign of how "normal" he had become after enduring a transformation he had feared would be permanent.
Expanding his spirituality, already strengthened after advancing to Sequence 8: Archaeologist, he saw through his ability that he was lying on a bed with many infusion tubes attached to his Uma-like monster body. From the extremely slow rate of improvement, he guessed it would take another two and a half years before he could fully return to normal.
Seeing the doctor who had been taking care of him all this time—or more accurately, the sorceress undoing his transformation thanks to her expertise in Creation Magic—Gustave silently thanked Yennefer from the bottom of his heart before falling asleep, his spirit exhausted from its expansion.
—
After three months of sleeping soundly—like being cradled by a mother, though this presence felt far more ancient—Gustave was finally able to open his eyes through his [Knowledge] ability again.
This time, he found himself facing his vampire benefactor, Regis, who was speaking with Yennefer. In an instant, seeing only a blur, he watched the vampire appear beside the bed with a look of surprise. Yennefer followed shortly after, chanting and weaving spells into his body, seemingly unfazed by the fact that Regis was a vampire.
Realizing there was a story he had missed while he slept—seeing the two of them working together to undo his transformation—Gustave found himself unable to stay awake.
Not because his spirit was exhausted this time, but simply because he was tired after enduring the madness—madness he now understood was not merely something scheduled by the world itself, but something the Winter Queen had been causing all along. Madness that struck every full moon and every Friday, when it should have manifested only on Samhain's New Year.
Because, he now also realized that only the Winter Queen—the former and first main carrier of the Elder Blood—would have been able to sense the disturbance caused by a descendant of Lara Dorren the moment he was born.
—
Finally able to wake himself again using his [Knowledge] ability after two months, Gustave found himself surrounded by many people—his mother, Meve, among them.
But instead of feeling happy, he felt only guilt and deep remorse when he saw his maids gathered there as well, each missing limbs—some one, some two. Rosemary was in the worst condition, confined to a wheelchair and connected to a respiratory machine that Yennefer had likely constructed just to keep her alive.
Knowing that his attack back then, when he transformed into a monstrosity, had likely been laced with a magical curse, he understood why Yennefer had been unable to regrow their limbs with her Creation Magic.
The only thing keeping him from breaking down completely was seeing that each maid held a small animal—creatures that, through his [Knowledge] ability, were slowly regenerating their bodies, allowing his maids to begin healing and eventually move normally again in the distant future.
Silently, he offered thanks: to Nehaleni, in the form of a baby magpie nestled in Mira's hand; to Veyopatis, in the form of a tiny loach resting in Rosemary's lap; and to Morrigan, in the form of a baby raven perched on Delilah's shoulders.
Then Gustave looked to Brenna, whose face was disfigured beyond recognition, and he couldn't help but release a long, quiet breath of remorse.
Wanting desperately to resume his research into the magical beauty soap—the only thing he could do to help at least one of them, to restore Brenna to her former beauty—his emotions suddenly flared when he discovered that his shop had fallen under the control of Matta Hu'uri.
And not only that—after expanding his spirituality even further, he realized his maids had continued expanding the shop throughout the entire year he had been unconscious.
What had once been a small shop had grown into a full-fledged enterprise spanning from Cintra all the way to Kerrack. Even though he had wanted the expansion to move sideways into Lyria and Rivia, it was still impressive. At the very least, his maids had understood his vision to some extent.
But once again—because of that Ofieri erotic dancer, whose personality resembled Carthia van Canten and who believed every problem could be solved in a bed—the enterprise had become elitist. On top of that, even its internal structure existed only to swell Matta Hu'uri's coffers to excess, leaving his maids with mere scraps.
His original vision—to make beauty accessible to all ladies and mothers, to help them charm their suitors and husbands, to build goodwill and forge strong alliances through something as simple as a shared product—had been utterly ruined by one selfish individual sitting at the helm of his first enterprise.
Yet he had known from the very beginning that something like this would eventually happen the moment he met her. That was why his rage was not directed at Matta Hu'uri—whose greed he had always been aware of—but at himself, for wasting so much time asleep. Once again, he had lost an entire year of his life, a year in which he could have accomplished so much.
And his indignation did not end there. With his upgraded [Knowledge] ability—now capable of detecting even the faintest vibrations in the air—he overheard, through the exhausted voice of his mother speaking to Calanthe beside her, that the Eternal Fire was planning to move its main branch from Novigrad into Aedirn, claiming it was following the "will of the ever-burning pyre."
Although he knew that removing the history of the Elder Blood and the House of Raven from Lara Dorren's line would make the gods procrastinative and unenthusiastic, he also understood that this was only a stopgap measure.
After all, gods might possess instincts far sharper than mortals—and even mortals with keen enough intuition could eventually notice that something was amiss with the history they believed they knew.
Because at the end of the day, the truth was that all he had done was place that history into a state of superposition—scattered, unintelligible information that would remain incomplete until deeply observed. It was the only thing he could do if he wanted to stay alive while still retaining both his abilities and his Elder Blood.
But the problems did not end there. The rebellions in his homeland of Lyria and Rivia—which had only recently been quelled after being stirred up by the Brossard family, who merely wanted a wiser king—had evolved into something far more extreme and uncontrollable.
They were now being led by Caldwell's son, Dragomir, following Caldwell's own execution—an uprising justified, once again, by his failure to let a controllable, manageable enemy die, only for that old threat to be replaced by a hidden one driven by entirely new mindsets and methods he had never encountered.
And he knew with absolute certainty that if it hadn't been Dragomir's son, someone else would have risen sooner or later—especially if he grew paranoid enough to kill every enemy the moment he met them. Someone unexpected. Someone absent from any book or game, emerging like a mushroom after rain.
And considering the development proposal he had written for Lyria and Rivia—a letter meant for his mother—had never been sent, likely withheld by his maids who were smart enough to realize it would cause complications while he remained bedridden and unable to write, the situation had only worsened further.
His homeland had now become a pair of corrupt kingdoms, twisted by the aftermath of the executions carried out against their nobles in Cintra.
Something he could have easily prevented by simply keeping those nobles barely alive and manageable as pawns—if only he had been awake and acting cute long enough to avoid killing them until his mother finished developing the Twin Realms.
Coupled with the fact that he was now hearing reports of many monsters long thought extinct suddenly appearing all over the world, it gave Gustave a throbbing headache.
Eskel had even discovered sea monsters from the Sedna Abyss and the Dragon Fangs while taking contracts with the Skelligans, creatures that were now coming ashore to hunt humans again instead of lurking deep in the sea—creatures seemingly born from the ocean's bed or out of nothing, exactly as foretold in the Necronomicon book from The Witcher 3.
"Today man is master of the world, but only for a short while. They await patiently and will soon arise and regain their one-time glory. This is as certain as dawn follows dusk, and dusk then follows again soon after, to drown everything once more in darkness."
Reading the passage once again, now realizing that because of him this era might become a period of dusk for mankind—with just a little push from the Devil—Gustave became so enraged that he could move only a single finger with all his might, causing everyone who had come for a sick visit to cry out in surprise.
Laughing maniacally in his mind at the fact that he could move his body—even if only his index finger—Gustave channeled this volcanic inner rage to communicate in Morse code. He refused to do nothing while witnessing the chaos unfolding around him. By sheer force of his anger, he formed the letter G as his initial, hoping everyone present could understand him.
Sure enough, because they were all cunning and intelligent—sorceresses, monarchs, druids, and even his maids, who were now attuned to his frequency—after hours of trying, they finally deciphered that the letter G was what he intended.
From that point on, he proceeded to spell out the entire alphabet from A to Z whenever he awoke from his deep slumber, which now occurred only every two to four days, his wrath preventing him from sleeping continuously.
—
First and foremost, he warned his mother, Meve, to watch out for the Eternal Fire, which would attack their kingdom of Aedirn from both inside and outside—even though Demavend III was technically an ally, being their cousin. Unlike with Calanthe, there was now no familial connection to maintain a strong bond.
If he had spent the holidays in Aedirn, acting cute and saving Demavend's children in the process—just as he had done with Calanthe—it would have been possible to consider them allies, since he could forge such bonds himself.
But now it was too late. The Eternal Fire wanted to sink its claws into Aedirn, probably because their god feared that something or someone in Lyria and Rivia could challenge his authority over the advancement of civilization without magic.
Instead of focusing on mending the deteriorating relationship with Aedirn, Gustave wanted his mother to focus first on the true threat: the Eternal Fire.
Because he wanted to halt the Eternal Fire's migration from Novigrad to Aedirn, he introduced his mother to the concept of a pantheon and the hierarchy of divinity, essentially setting the gods against each other from within.
This, in turn, bought time for the civilians of Lyria and Rivia to begin their scientific revolution and gain the enlightenment to stop depending on the gods for every aspect of their lives.
He deduced that not only did Melitele have Freya as another aspect, but he also calculated that Kreve, the Sky Father, had another aspect as well, which was the Eternal Fire.
Because he wanted to pit believers against themselves, he provided the information that the Eternal Fire ranked lower than Kreve in the pantheon of the ever-burning pyre.
And sure enough, even though his divinations back then at Kaer Morhen had classified certain gods as neutral, he now realized that there was no such thing as complete neutrality.
This became especially clear when the weather suddenly erupted into a chaotic storm that required druids and mages to calm it entirely—shortly after the information had spread throughout Lyria and Rivia.
The news was so compelling that even people from Oxenfurt traveled to Cintra just to see his mother, the author of the book inspired by his Morse code messages, which could only convey short, two-word phrases such as:
Eternal Fire. Bad. Corrupt.
Twin Realm. Inside. Outside.
Kreve same. Eternal same.
Pantheon. Kreve higher. Eternal lower.
Moreover, because he had also given his mother many inspirations drawn from his knowledge of modern Earth—essentially opening her mind to a variety of ingenious and creative concepts—she was now known as the Enlightened Queen of the Twin Realms.
And because of that fame—mostly thanks to Dandelion's ballads when he visited Cintra to meet with Geralt and the new Kaer Morhen—scholars from across the world came to the Twin Realms, witnessing in their lifetime a monarch who was not only politically strong but also remarkably learned and scholarly.
This helped make the transition to a scientific kingdom much smoother, toppling the nobles and establishing the first kingdoms run solely by peasants and civilians.
The unfortunate part, and something he was unable to prevent, was that the kingdoms were now perfectly suited for mages to live and manipulate within, as no corrupt nobles remained in the core courts of the Twin Realms.
It was only thanks to his cousin Alvin, who lived on Isle Avalon and was one of the strongest archmages alive—after Tissaia de Vries, Gerhart of Aelle, Francesca Findabair, and Vilgefortz of Roggeveen—that Aretuza, Ban Ard, and even the wider sorcerer community were unable to sink their claws into Lyria and Rivia.
But because sorcerers inevitably stalled the civilization and growth of a kingdom due to their selfish nature, he repeatedly told his mother that, except for Yennefer, no sorcerer should serve in a court or even live in Lyria and Rivia.
Although this was only a stopgap measure—since he knew these sorcerers would eventually resort to force rather than wits, especially while the weaponry of the Twin Realms was not yet advanced enough to defend the revolution—he was able to wake up long before that happened, giving him enough time to design inventions and weaponry once again.
And it wasn't just Lyria and Rivia that he changed through Morse code; Gustave also transformed his personal enterprise during the two years he had been bedridden.
Because his maids' cunning was not on the level of Matta Hu'uri or any of the nobles in his first enterprise—which had already been expanded to Kerrack—and because their physical conditions were not yet fully restored, Gustave's solution was simple: he gave a share of his enterprise to Yennefer, the doctor who had undone his transformation over the past two years.
He knew it was already too late to make himself the sole owner of the soap enterprise due to Matta Hu'uri's meddling.
So, instead of trying to make the soap industry entirely his, masked as a joint-stock company, he doubled down.
He made the creation of his prototype beauty soap public, turning it into a product that anyone could produce, with Yennefer as the largest stockholder and himself at the bottom—thanks to Matta Hu'uri duping his maids into signing an agreement at a dwarven bank under his name.
Thankfully, and somewhat comically, the agreement had been executed at Giancardi Bank, which, all things considered, was also under Yennefer's influence.
More accurately, because Yennefer had saved the Giancardi family back when the Vengerberg Pogrom occurred many decades ago, she held a seat on the bank's board, which allowed Gustave to change the contract in the first place.
If it had been any other bank, he probably would have had no choice but to give up his first enterprise—one that his maids had worked tirelessly to build—and start anew.
But thanks to this comical twist of fate, Gustave was able to save his maids' enterprise and free it from people who could only think in terms of short-term gain.
As for why he wasn't worried about giving Yennefer full ownership of his stock as the price for kicking Matta Hu'uri and several idiotic nobles off the board, it was because he trusted her selfishness.
A selfishness born from a desire to see his far-reaching ambition realized in the soap enterprise, combined with her lack of interest in money and her focus on researching the product itself.
This trust, in turn, allowed him to renegotiate the contract so that his maids could hold equal standing on the board with Yennefer, thanks to his numerous inventions for the soap industry and his plan to release multiple versions of the product with different flavors.
And that, in turn, became a springboard for many different kinds of enterprises later, just as he had planned three years ago, with the ultimate goal being the creation of a full production line for his privately owned Research and Development (R&D) company—entirely separate from the Twin Realms' ownership or any enterprise board.
As for developments on the Aen Elle and Nilfgaardian sides, and the dance of wits involving the Chapter discovering many mages in Cintra—because of his transformation into a monster that required a Higher Vampire and Golden Dragon to subdue—he simply left those matters to Calanthe on the political side and to Alvin on the Aen Elle side.
Because at least with the obscure knowledge of the House of Raven and the Elder Blood from this world, these parties were not consumed by intense jealousy to the point of hostility, but were merely annoyed by the gatekeeping of secrets—such as the discovery of many mages in Cintra and on the Isle of Avalon, which they believed to be two entirely separate factions.
As for the development of monsters long thought extinct suddenly appearing little by little, Gustave knew it was an effort that all of mankind would have to contribute to in order to solve this slowly unfolding crisis.
So with the image in mind of the mural in Kaer Morhen from The Witcher 3, depicting the Mounted Witchering method used back in the days of the Order—allowing them to move swiftly from one place to another—Gustave's eyes opened.
Only for the first news he received upon awakening to leave him tongue-tied: his marriage to Cerys had been arranged by his mother and Crach's wife, causing the design for a horse-steam exoskeleton that Roach and Scorpion would be able to use to scatter from his thoughts.
—
References may break immersion. Just go ahead to the next chapter.
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References
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I will find the exact reference when I have the time.
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A/N: This is the only timeskip I'm willing to accept now—one that actually makes sense, as the MC was unable to do anything besides watch everything flash before his eyes.
Because if a timeskip exists solely to make a character an adult for the sake of being an adult, what would happen otherwise is either that nothing occurs during all those skipped years—because the world simply sits still, filled with NPCs so naïve and dense that they politely wait for the protagonist—meaning any sudden plot development that happens later without prior setup becomes entirely my fault.
Or, at the opposite extreme, everything happens all at once in overwhelming chaos, caused by NPCs who refuse to wait—just like this one, which occurred when Gustave slept for a year.
—
Yennefer saved the Giancardi family—owners of Giancardi Bank—from a pogrom, which is why she is so wealthy. It is also why Geralt is able to live comfortably as a Witcher, while the protagonist's father has no idea about any of this.
So when playing The Witcher 3, if you notice rewards of 100 to 300 crowns—very high compared to what an ordinary Witcher usually receives, which is around 30 to 100 per contract—just think of it as Yennefer's influence. That is, the contractor who posted the contract may have been contacted by Giancardi Bank to slightly increase the reward.
As for why I estimated the range at 30 to 100 crowns, it is because Gaetan, the Cat School Witcher who massacred the village, said himself that 12 crowns is barely enough to cover the cost of Witcher potion ingredients. Adding labor, mission difficulty, and a fee for personal expenses, 30 to 100 crowns is reasonable for an ordinary Witcher.
—
The procedure for undoing the transformation is the same as in the Avallac'h–Uma scene in The Witcher 3, only much more severe.
—