The words had barely left his mouth before the reality of his situation came crashing down like a bucket of cold water.
He gripped the edge of the sink and took a slow breath.
Okay. Think. What did he actually know about Crimson Academy and more importantly what did he know about where Alister was in the story right now.
The novel started with Alister arriving at the academy as a first year. Crimson Academy was the most prestigious combat institution on the continent, the kind of place where the children of nobles and old bloodlines and military dynasties all got funneled together to either forge connections or destroy each other, sometimes literally. The power system ran on something called Vein Awakening, where a person's bloodline determined what kind of combat ability they could unlock. Most people got one ability. Exceptional people got two. Alister, because the author had no chill whatsoever, was eventually revealed to have a theoretically impossible four awakened veins which was the whole reason every faction in the story started either trying to recruit him or kill him.
But that was later. Early Alister was just a cold, antisocial first year with a reputation for being unapproachable and a habit of training alone at four in the morning.
Ethan stared at his reflection and tried to figure out what chapter he had landed in.
The room he had woken up in was a dormitory. Single occupancy, which meant Alister had either requested that or his reputation had already scared off any potential roommates. The furniture was decent but not lavish. First year accommodation then, probably early enough in the story that none of the major plot points had been triggered yet.
Which meant he had time.
"Right," he said to the mirror, pointing at the unreasonably handsome face staring back at him. "New rules. We are not doing the dense protagonist thing. We are not ignoring confessions. We are not choosing sparring over a girl who just told us she has feelings. That era is over."
The face stared back at him with its built in expression of cold indifference.
He was going to have to work on that.
He turned away from the mirror and moved back into the room, taking stock properly this time. A desk with a few books stacked neatly on it. A sword leaning against the wall, plain looking but clearly well maintained. A schedule card pinned to the notice board by the door.
He walked over and read it.
[First Year Orientation. Main Hall. Seventh bell.]
He had no idea what time it currently was but the light coming through the narrow window looked like early morning so he probably had a few hours. He unpinned the card and turned it over. There was nothing else on it, no additional notes, no name written on it, just the single line.
Alister apparently traveled light in terms of personal touches. The entire room was like that actually, functional and completely empty of anything that suggested a person with preferences or interests actually lived here. No pictures. No small objects. Nothing that said this space belongs to someone.
Ethan sat down on the edge of the bed and thought about that for a moment.
He remembered Alister's backstory now that he was thinking about it more carefully. The character had not had an easy run of things before the story started. Youngest son of a declining noble house, mostly ignored by his family because his older brothers had awakened first and the resources all got directed at them. He had been training alone since he was a child basically out of spite, which explained both the insane work ethic and the complete inability to connect with other people. The cold expression was not an aesthetic choice. It was the face of someone who had learned not to expect anything from anyone.
Ethan sat with that for a second.
Okay so the character he had just inherited the body of was running on years of accumulated emotional damage and had no social skills to speak of. That tracked. That explained a lot about why the original Alister had failed so comprehensively at every human interaction the novel threw at him. It wasn't density exactly. It was more like a person who had never been taught the language and then got dropped into a conversation and expected to keep up.
"Well," Ethan said to the empty room. "Lucky for you I have years of watching romantic comedies and reading self help articles I never applied to my own life."
All that accumulated knowledge had been completely useless to him personally. His own track record spoke for itself. But that was different. He had been working with his original face and his original circumstances and a universe that seemed personally invested in keeping him lonely.
This was a different game entirely.
He had the face. He had the reputation. He had the combat ability, or would once he figured out how Alister's body actually worked. He had the foreknowledge of every major plot beat and every character who was going to walk through that academy's doors. He knew who the heroines were, knew their personalities, their insecurities, what they wanted and what the original Alister had failed to give them. He knew which of the villanesses had started out as something else before the story broke them.
Seraphine especially.
He remembered her clearly. Cold, sharp, positioned as an antagonist from her second appearance, but the author had left enough in the margins to show exactly what she had been before she decided that cruelty was easier than wanting things. She had been one of the characters he had actually cared about before he quit the novel. The wasted potential of her arc had genuinely annoyed him.
He had a chance to do something about that now.
He stood up, rolled his shoulders and looked at the sword against the wall. He needed to figure out the body situation, get a feel for what Alister's physical baseline actually was, and then get to that orientation without doing anything that would dramatically alter his reputation before he understood the lay of the land.
One thing at a time.
He reached out and picked up the sword. The weight of it settled into his grip like it belonged there, the muscle memory apparently coming with the body, and something in his arm hummed faintly, a low pulse that ran from his palm up to his elbow.
His eyes dropped to his forearm where a faint mark sat just beneath the skin, barely visible, like a vein that ran the wrong color.
One awakened vein. Early Alister. Before any of the story had happened.
He had so much time.
The corner of his mouth pulled up slightly, the first expression the mirror would have shown that wasn't just cold indifference.
This was going to be interesting.