Night settled over Ashstone not like a blanket, but like a lid.
The sky above the town had turned into a slab of dark iron, thick clouds swallowing what little light the stars might have offered. Snow still fell, but slower now, in sparse, drifting threads—like the last ashes of a fire that refused to admit it had burned out.
Inside The Brass Dagger, the noise had softened into a low, distant murmur. Most of the drunkest had already fallen asleep at their tables or disappeared upstairs. The fires at the hearths burned lower, their light dimmer, shadows longer.
Kel closed the door to his room with a quiet click.
The sound was swallowed almost immediately by the thick wooden walls. He stood there for a moment, back to the door, eyes half-lidded, listening to the soft crackle of the embers in the stove set into the far corner.
The room was small. Narrow bed. Short, stout table. One chair. One window crusted with a layer of frost, the frozen patterns across the glass catching faint light and turning it into ghostly white veins.
His cloak, still dusted with melting snow, hung from the iron hook near the door. Droplets had begun to gather at the edge, falling slowly, one by one, to the wooden floor.
Kel took a breath.
The air was cool, carrying a hint of smoke and the faint lingering scent of stew that had soaked into the building over years.
His muscles ached with an almost pleasant exhaustion. Not the bone-deep collapse of earlier months, when even standing for too long felt like affront to the curse lodged in his body. This ache felt… earned.
A reminder.
A record.
He crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed.
The mattress dipped beneath his weight, creaking softly. He leaned back, letting himself sink slowly until his upper body rested against the thin pillow and rough blanket.
For a few heartbeats, he simply stared up at the ceiling.
Dark wood.
Faint cracks.
Shadows shifting as the fire in the stove flickered.
His right hand rose of its own accord, fingers coming to rest lightly against his chest, just over where the curse sat coiled like barbed wire around his core.
I'm still here.
The thought was simple.
Not triumphant.
Not bitter.
Simply… observed.
He exhaled.
His breath slipped upward, pale and thin, dissolving into the darkness.
His lips parted.
His voice was barely above a whisper.
"Status."
The word seemed to fall into the air like a pebble dropped into still water.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then—
Something shifted.
A faint, cold luminescence gathered at the edge of his vision. It was not truly light, not like a lamp or a spell—more like the world had agreed to show him a layer it normally kept hidden.
In front of him, above his chest, the familiar translucent blue window unfurled into existence.
Rectangular.
Flat.
Perfectly still, hovering in the air.
Letters wrote themselves across it in cool lines.
Kel's eyes focused.
He had seen this screen the day he woke in this body.
He remembered very clearly what it had shown then.
[STATUS WINDOW]
Name: Kel von Rosenfeld
Age: 12
Race: Human
Titles:
— Cursed Heir —
— Walking Death Flag —
— The Doomed One —
House: Rosenfeld (One of the Seven Pillars of the Empire)
Condition:
— DEATH CURSE (ACTIVE)
— MANA SYSTEM SEALED
— PHYSICAL GROWTH SEALED
Vitality: 4
Strength: 2
Agility: 3
Endurance: 1
Mana: SEALED
Aura: SEALED
Resistance: 4
Luck: ??? (Unreadable)
Skills:
— None —
Blessings:
— None —
Traits:
— None —
It had not been a character sheet.
It had been a sentence.
A verdict.
A quiet little screen saying: You are not meant to live long enough to matter.
Kel's fingers tightened slightly into the blanket.
I wasn't even worth a tutorial build, he thought.
I was a joke NPC with a countdown painted across his back.
He remembered the weight of it that first night.
Vitality: 4.
Endurance: 1.
He had seen monsters in the game with 10 in those stats and still drop in the first area.
And this body had started with less than half of that.
A weak, cursed heir with sealed mana, sealed aura, sealed growth.
No skills.
No traits.
Just three titles, all variations of doom.
His lips tugged faintly.
Not into a smile.
Into something thinner.
Colder.
And yet I'm still here.
The current window flickered, as if something responded to that unspoken thought.
The old numbers faded.
Replaced.
The letters reformed.
[STATUS WINDOW]
Name: Kel von Rosenfeld
Age: 13
Race: Human
Titles:
— Cursed Heir —
— Walking Death Flag —
— The Doomed One —
House: Rosenfeld (One of the Seven Pillars of the Empire)
Condition:
— DEATH CURSE (ACTIVE)
— MANA SYSTEM SEALED
— AURA CHANNELS: PARTIALLY DISTORTED
— PHYSICAL GROWTH: RESTRICTED
Vitality: 10
Strength: 9
Agility: 10
Endurance: 9
Mana: SEALED
Aura: [LOCKED – ANOMALOUS CORE DETECTED]
Resistance: 11
Luck: ??? (Unreadable)
Skills:
— "Essence of Breath: Foundational Form" (Lv. 2)
— "Basic Swordsmanship – Rosenfeld Style" (Lv. 3)
— "Noble Etiquette & Courtly Bearing" (Passive)
— "Strategic Discourse – Low Tier" (Lv. 1)
— "Cold Requiem – Bowmanship" (Lv. 1)
Blessings:
— None —
Traits:
— "Will Alignment – Iron Thread" (Minor)
— "Strain Adaptation (Dormant)"
Kel's pupils tightened.
Not in shock.
In focus.
He read every line, letting it sink in as if each word weighed something.
The Titles section remained unchanged.
Cursed Heir.
Walking Death Flag.
The Doomed One.
He studied them for a long, still moment.
You really don't forget easily, he thought at the world.
Once it decides you're meant to die, it keeps the label pinned… no matter what else changes.
His lips parted in a slow exhale.
"Those three again," he murmured, voice almost soundless. "Persistent things…"
His attention moved downward.
Condition.
DEATH CURSE (ACTIVE) – unchanged.
MANA SYSTEM SEALED – unchanged.
PHYSICAL GROWTH: RESTRICTED – shifted, at least, from fully sealed.
There was a new line now—
AURA CHANNELS: PARTIALLY DISTORTED
[LOCKED – ANOMALOUS CORE DETECTED]
The memory of that night surfaced.
Root chakra.
Sacral pain.
Blood in his mouth and the curse recoiling like a wounded predator before adapting around the microscopic red aura sphere he had forced into existence.
So you noticed, he thought at the unseen system. You don't know what to call it… but you noticed.
His gaze dropped further.
Vitality: 10.
From four.
Strength: 9.
From two.
Agility: 10.
From three.
Endurance: 9.
From one.
Each number was still low by player standards.
By protagonist standards.
But by this world's logic—
It was no longer a corpse waiting to happen.
He now sat comfortably in the realm of a basic, trained NPC.
A guard.
A low-ranked knight.
A minor adventurer.
Average.
The word should have stung.
It didn't.
In his past life, average had meant failure to climb ranks fast enough, failure to reach peak builds.
Here, average meant something else entirely.
It meant he could stand in front of a swinging blade and not shatter immediately.
It meant his lungs could endure a little more cold.
It meant he could pull a bowstring and have his chest burn from effort, not collapse from shock.
He exhaled slowly.
A faint, almost invisible warmth flickered in his eyes.
From 4 to 10.
From 1 to 9.
From an NPC joke to an NPC baseline.
The thought made his fingers relax slightly on the blanket.
I really did crawl this far.
His gaze moved down the window.
To Skills.
Before, it had mocked him with a single line:
— None —
Now, it wasn't empty.
His eyes read each, and memories came with them.
"Essence of Breath: Foundational Form" (Lv. 2)
The nights in the Rosenfeld estate courtyard.
Frozen ground beneath bare feet.
Breath scraping through cursed lungs.
The words of that old manual—"A sword is not technique. It is will."
The way his vision had narrowed until there was only inhale, exhale, stance.
"Basic Swordsmanship – Rosenfeld Style" (Lv. 3)
Wooden sword cracking against training posts.
Samuel's distant gaze from the shadows.
The banquet duel—predicting his opponent's movements, striking not with power but inevitability.
The nobles' eyes changing when he refused to fall.
"Noble Etiquette & Courtly Bearing" (Passive)
The hours spent in front of mirrors, reconstructing posture and tone to turn pity into discomfort, discomfort into caution.
The weight of Duke Arcturus's gaze during their conversation in the study.
Standing upright, unbowed, while his father measured the difference between a cursed son and a potential heir.
"Strategic Discourse – Low Tier" (Lv. 1)
The conversations at the banquet.
The controlled responses to mockery.
Prince Adrian's half-smile.
The way each word and silence had been chosen like moves in a game.
"Cold Requiem – Bowmanship" (Lv. 1)
The library's dim light.
Ink-scented pages describing arcs and wind and breath.
The training yard, his arms burning, the string biting into his skin.
Snowfield hunts.
Wolves leaping.
Arrows intercepting death mid-air.
Kel let those images pass through him like ghosts.
His eyes softened.
Just slightly.
So I do exist, he thought. Not just as a cursed flag in someone else's story, but as something that leaves marks in numbers, in skills, in traces the system can't pretend not to see.
His gaze shifted to Traits.
Two lines.
"Will Alignment – Iron Thread" (Minor)
"Strain Adaptation (Dormant)"
He exhaled through his nose.
Iron Thread…
A thin, steady line.
Not flashy.
But resistant to snapping.
Strain Adaptation— he had felt it at work already. The way his body learned from repeated pain, adjusting, mapping safer pathways each time he pushed himself close to breaking.
It wasn't kindness.
It was simple.
Mechanical.
Cause and effect.
You punish me less when I teach you where I won't shatter, he thought.
His eyes drifted back up again.
To the center of the window.
To the stats as a whole.
Vitality: 10.
Strength: 9.
Agility: 10.
Endurance: 9.
Resistance: 11.
Not heroic.
Not grand.
But no longer something the world could dismiss with a lazy sigh.
He watched the numbers.
And for the first time since he had arrived here, the weight on his chest shifted a little.
Not lighter.
But different.
He realized it slowly:
All the pain.
All the training.
All the carefully measured risks.
It had not been the illusion of progress.
It had rewritten him.
Quietly.
Relentlessly.
From the inside.
His throat moved.
A faint sound escaped him—half a breath, half an amused, disbelieving exhale.
"…I really did claw my way here."
He spoke to the window now.
To the game-logic that had once sent him mocking messages after multiple playthroughs.
"Titles are the same. Curse is the same. Luck is still hiding from me."
His eyes glinted faintly, a thin shard of humour cutting through exhausted calm.
"But everything else… isn't."
The window, of course, did not answer.
It simply hovered.
Unblinking.
Unfeeling.
Recording.
He stared at it for a while.
At the Skills section.
At the way "Cold Requiem – Bowmanship" sat there now, a newborn thing.
New path. New reach.
His fingers, still resting lightly over his chest, tapped once.
Sword.
Breath.
Words.
Bows.
Nothing extraordinary, taken alone.
Combined…
Enough to live a little longer.
His heartbeat thudded, steady but thin beneath the curse.
He thought of Reina.
Still waiting to choose her constellation.
Standing right now at Tier Two, uncommitted.
He thought of Landon.
Stubborn mountain soul, slow but relentless.
He thought of the path to Scarder Lake.
Of the barbarians in the mountains.
Of the portal.
Of whatever lay beyond the lake's mirrored surface.
When he spoke again, his voice carried something new.
Not just calm.
Not just calculation.
Something like quiet conviction.
"Everything I've done so far… was worth it."
He let the words hang in the air.
He tasted them.
They did not feel like self-consolation.
They felt like a statement engraved in the same place those numbers had crawled toward.
It hurt.
It cost me.
But it changed me.
Slowly, he reached up with his right hand and brushed his fingers through the glowing window.
The blue light broke apart under his touch, dissolving into faint motes that faded into the air.
The room darkened again.
Only the dim orange glow from the stove remained, casting long shadows along the wall, turning his profile into a cut of sharp bone and softer throat.
Kel turned his head toward the frosted window.
Beyond the glass, he could see almost nothing of the night.
Only the suggestion of falling white.
In the game, he remembered, this is where I'd grind levels and stats until numbers carried me.
Here, I grind pain.
And will.
He closed his eyes.
Not abruptly.
He let them drift shut as his breath steadied.
His body hurt.
His curse pulsed.
But under all of it—
There was a thin, steady line of satisfaction.
He had moved the needle.
The numbers had obeyed.
And in a world where destiny seemed carved in constellations and titles, that small defiance…
…felt like the first real step toward cracking something much larger.
Just before sleep took him, an idle thought curved through his mind like a blade sliding back into its sheath.
If this is how far I've come while still carrying all three death titles…
His lips moved.
Almost a smile.
I wonder how far I'll go when the world finally realizes I refuse to play the part it gave me.
The stove crackled.
Snow tapped lightly against the window.
And in a small, cold room of an inn at the edge of the world, a boy with three death-flavored titles slept—
Content, for once, that his suffering had left visible scars.
Even on the numbers.