I decided to stand up.
This sounds like a simple thing. The kind of action you don't even think about—muscles contract, joints engage, body rises. Gravity loses. You win. Congratulations, you're vertical.
Except when your stats look like mine, standing up is less of a daily routine and more of a negotiation with a body that has already filed for bankruptcy.
Attempt one: I sat up. Fine. The mana core grumbled but didn't scream. Progress.
Attempt two: I swung my legs over the side of the bed. The stone floor was cold through the thin socks—whoever dressed this body had put socks on it, which meant someone at some point had cared enough to do that, or it was standard procedure for unconscious patients. I was betting on standard procedure.
Attempt three: I pushed myself upright.
My knees held.
For about four seconds.
Then the right one buckled, and I grabbed the bedpost with both hands and hung there like wet laundry on a line, breathing through my teeth, waiting for the gray at the edges of my vision to retreat.
'Endurance: 6.'
That number was starting to feel less like a stat and more like a prison sentence.
I tried again. This time I kept one hand on the wall and moved in a slow shuffle that would've embarrassed a man three times my age. Left foot. Pause. Right foot. Pause. The kind of walking you see in hospital corridors, except those people usually had IV drips and nurses nearby, and I had a stone wall and a strong desire to not collapse in a room where no one would find me for hours.
The wardrobe first.
I needed to see what I looked like. Not out of vanity—I'd long since abandoned the concept of caring about my appearance, in this life and the previous one. But I was inhabiting a stranger's body, and the status panel could only tell me so much. I needed a mirror.
The wardrobe didn't have one.
Of course it didn't. Because why would a room stripped of every personal item include something as frivolous as a mirror? I opened it instead. Inside: four sets of identical clothing. Dark fabric. Simple cut. No embellishments. The kind of uniform that said "you belong to a house" without saying "the house values you." A pair of boots. A heavy coat lined with fur that looked like it had never been worn—the fur still smelled new, slightly chemical.
I pulled out a set of clothes and changed.
This took eleven minutes.
Eleven minutes to remove a sleeping gown and put on pants and a shirt, because my arms shook so badly that buttons were a genuine engineering challenge, and bending over to pull on the boots sent a wave of dizziness through me that required a two-minute break spent sitting on the floor with my head between my knees.
I was sweating by the time I finished. My heart—or whatever passed for a heart in a body with a mana core—was hammering unevenly, like a drummer who'd lost the rhythm and was too tired to find it again.
'Six weeks.'
'You have six weeks to go from this... to someone who can survive an entrance exam.'
'...'
'You're fucked.'
I was probably fucked. But "probably fucked" was still marginally better than "definitely on a shelf in Greymoor," so I opened the door and stepped into the corridor.
***
The Ashworth estate was built by people who confused "impressive" with "comfortable."
The corridor outside my room was wide enough to drive a car through—not that cars existed here, as far as I knew—with the same dark stone walls, the same crystal light fixtures, and a ceiling high enough to generate its own weather system. The air was cold. Not the passive cold of an unheated room, but the active, biting cold of a place built on a mountain where insulation was apparently a concept that hadn't been invented or hadn't been deemed necessary.
My breath came out in thin, white wisps.
Doors lined the hallway. All closed. All identical. Heavy dark wood with iron handles. No nameplates. No decorations. The architectural equivalent of a filing cabinet—here is where we store things, and we don't label the drawers because we don't expect anyone to go looking.
I turned left. No particular reason. I had no map, no guide, and no information beyond "this is the Ashworth estate" and "it's on a mountain." Exploration was my only option, and exploration required movement, and movement required this body to cooperate for more than four consecutive minutes.
We were off to a great start.
The corridor ended at a staircase. Wide. Stone. Spiraling downward. I looked at it the way a man looks at a cliff he's been asked to climb down without a rope.
One hand on the wall.
One step at a time.
Twelve steps later, my legs were burning. Twenty steps later, the mana core pulsed and I had to stop, pressing my forehead against the cold stone, breathing through the grinding ache behind my sternum. Thirty steps, and I reached a landing.
A window. Larger than the one in my room. Through it: the compound, closer now. Training grounds visible in the middle distance. The cracked training dummy from earlier—someone had dragged the pieces to the edge of the yard but hadn't bothered to dispose of them.
And people.
Not the ant-sized figures I'd seen from above. Actual people, close enough to hear if I opened the window. Two women in dark uniforms—servants, probably—carrying baskets of something toward a low building that steamed from its chimney. A man in a heavier coat, military-looking, crossing the yard with the brisk, purposeful stride of someone whose day was full of things more important than scenery.
None of them looked up.
I kept going.
***
The staircase ended in a hallway that smelled different from the floor above. Warmer. The scent of woodsmoke and cooked meat and something herbal—a kitchen nearby, or a dining hall. My stomach—Caelum's stomach—tightened with a hunger that was physical and involuntary, the body's animal need cutting through whatever my brain was doing.
Right. The soup I'd skipped.
Probably should have eaten that.
I followed the smell. The hallway opened into a wider corridor—still stone, still cold, but with tapestries on the walls now, heavy fabric in dark blues and silvers embroidered with patterns I couldn't read. Symbols. A crest, maybe. House Ashworth's insignia.
There were more people here. Servants, mostly—I could tell by the uniforms, the same dark fabric with the same small crest on the collar. They moved efficiently, purposefully, with the coordinated rhythm of a household that ran like machinery.
And one by one, as I shuffled past them, they did the same thing.
They saw me.
They looked away.
Not quickly—not the startled avoidance of someone caught staring. Slowly. Deliberately. The way you'd remove your gaze from something mildly unpleasant that wasn't worth the effort of a reaction. One woman—carrying a stack of folded linens—saw me coming down the corridor and adjusted her path so she'd pass me at maximum distance, pressing herself closer to the opposite wall like I was a puddle she didn't want to step in.
She didn't even do it with hostility. That was the part that stuck.
Hostility requires engagement. This was administrative. A policy. Something they all did, uniformly, without discussion, the way you'd follow a workplace rule about not leaving dishes in the communal sink.
'Don't look at the third son.'
'Don't engage.'
'Don't waste time.'
Nobody told me this. Nobody had to. I could read it in the choreography of their shoulders, the geometry of their paths, the perfect consistency of their avoidance.
A household doesn't coordinate this kind of behavior by accident. Someone trained it into them. And I had one guess who.
...Helena really was thorough.
I kept walking. The corridor turned, opened into a larger space—some kind of entrance hall, with higher ceilings and actual daylight filtering through tall, narrow windows. The light was gray, muted by the perpetual overcast I was starting to suspect was this region's default setting.
Here, the people weren't just servants.
Three figures stood near a large doorway at the far end, dressed differently—heavier clothes, darker colors, with visible weapons. Swords at the hip. Two men, one woman. The woman had her arms crossed and was saying something to the taller of the two men, her voice low enough that I couldn't make out words from this distance.
They noticed me.
And unlike the servants, they didn't look away.
The taller man—broad-shouldered, beard trimmed close, with the weathered face of someone who spent his life outdoors—stared at me with an expression I recognized immediately.
Contempt.
Not the cold, political kind Helena had used. This was rougher. More honest. The contempt of a professional looking at an amateur who shouldn't be in the building, let alone wearing the family crest.
"That him?" he said, not bothering to lower his voice. He was speaking to the woman but looking at me.
"Mm." The woman glanced over. Short hair, a scar running from her jaw to her ear, eyes that assessed me with the efficiency of someone counting inventory. "Third son. The sick one."
"That's what four mana looks like?" The shorter man. Younger. A crooked smile that wasn't friendly. "My daughter had more than that when she was eight."
They laughed.
Not cruelly. Not the pointed, malicious laughter of bullies who wanted to hurt. The casual, easy laughter of people sharing an observation that was, to them, genuinely funny. The way you'd laugh at a dog trying to climb stairs too big for its legs. Not mean. Just... accurate.
I kept walking.
Past them. Through the doorway. Into the cold air of the compound.
The laughter faded behind me. It wasn't replaced by silence—the courtyard had its own sounds. Wind. The distant crack of ice forming on stone. Boots on gravel. And further away, from the training grounds, the rhythmic thud of something hitting something else repeatedly.
I made it eleven steps into the courtyard before a gust of wind hit me hard enough to stagger sideways.
Eleven steps.
In my previous life, I could at least walk to the convenience store. A two-kilometer round trip, six days a week. Not impressive by any standard, but functional. Baseline human.
This body couldn't handle wind.
I braced myself against a pillar—stone, naturally, everything here was stone, I was starting to think the Ashworths had a philosophical opposition to any building material that didn't weigh a ton—and caught my breath.
The courtyard spread out before me. Bigger than it had looked from the window. Training dummies in rows—wooden, stone, a few that appeared to be metal. Weapon racks along one wall. And in the center of the yard, a flat expanse of packed earth that was clearly a sparring area, bordered by low stone walls.
Nobody was sparring now. The wind had driven everyone indoors, or to whatever counted as indoors. The yard was empty except for me and the cold and the cracked training dummy I'd watched die earlier.
I limped toward it.
Up close, the damage was worse than it looked from above. The ice disc hadn't just cracked it—it had sheared the stone clean, the cross-section as smooth as if someone had used a blade. Frost still clung to the edges, stubborn, refusing to melt despite the hours that had passed.
I reached out and touched it.
Cold.
Not normal cold. The kind of cold that sank through your fingertip and traveled up your arm and settled somewhere in the bone, like it had been waiting for an invitation. A sharp, clean sensation that cut through the dull fog of this body's constant pain like—
The mana core pulsed.
Not the grinding, broken pulse I'd felt before. This was... different. Softer. Almost tentative. Like something cracked trying to resonate with something whole.
My fingertips tingled.
I pulled my hand back. Looked at it. The black veins on my wrist had darkened slightly—just a shade, barely noticeable—but the tingling remained, a faint electric hum at the tips of my index and middle fingers that faded over the next ten seconds.
'Ice affinity: 2%.'
'The frost on the dummy. My core reacted to it.'
'...'
'Interesting.'
I filed it. Biggest file yet.
***
The walk back nearly killed me.
Not figuratively. I mean my vision went black twice on the stairs, and I had to sit on the landing for five minutes before my legs agreed to function again. By the time I reached my room, my entire body was trembling—not from cold, though it was cold—from pure, total, muscular exhaustion.
I collapsed on the bed.
The sheets smelled like old linen and the herbal residue of whatever tonics had been administered to this body before I arrived. My chest rose and fell in shallow, irregular gasps. The mana core ached. My legs felt like someone had filled them with wet sand.
Total exploration time: approximately forty minutes.
Total distance covered: maybe two hundred meters.
Discoveries: the household staff had been trained to ignore me, the estate's guard force openly mocked me, this body couldn't handle wind, and my mana core reacted to ice—weakly, pathetically, but measurably.
I lay there and stared at the ceiling.
Same ceiling. Same stone. Same carved patterns.
...
'Six weeks.'
'F-minus.'
'Two hundred meters in forty minutes.'
'...'
I pulled up the status panel. Read it again. The same numbers stared back at me with their infuriating, polite indifference. Nothing had changed.
Of course nothing had changed. I'd walked down some stairs and touched a rock. That's not training. That's barely tourism.
I dismissed it.
Then something happened.
The servant came in. Different one this time—younger, male, carrying a tray with the evening meal. Same soup. Same bread. Same green tonic.
He set it on the desk.
"Young Master. Your evening meal."
"Thank you."
He nodded. Turned to leave.
Then stopped.
Turned back.
Set the tray down again—exactly the same way, same hand, same angle, same precise placement on the same spot on the desk.
"Young Master. Your evening meal."
Same words. Same intonation. Same pause between "Young Master" and "Your." Not similar—identical. As if someone had taken the previous three seconds, cut them, and pasted them.
...
I stared at him.
He blinked. Looked confused for a moment—a brief flicker behind his eyes, like a screen glitching—and then his face smoothed, and he turned and walked out of the room.
The door closed.
I sat up slowly. Looked at the tray. The soup steamed. The tonic glowed.
'...What the hell was that?'
The static in my head buzzed.
Not faintly.
Not the distant, half-imagined hum from before. This was louder. Closer. A sharp, clear pulse that sat behind my eyes for a full second before fading.
I looked at the door the servant had left through. Looked at the tray he'd placed twice. Looked at my hands, with their black veins and their useless trembling.
Something was wrong with this world.
Not the magic. Not the stats. Not the ice or the fire or the mountains or the cracked mana core. Those were strange, but they followed rules. Rules I could learn. Rules that fit.
But the shadows that moved before the fire.
And the servant who repeated himself like a scratched record.
And the static that buzzed louder each time.
Those didn't fit.
Those were something else.
I picked up the soup and drank it. Hot, salty, good. Hated that it was good. Drank the tonic. Mint and acid. The core settled. The veins retreated.
I lay back.
'Six weeks until Astralion.'
'A body that can barely walk.'
'A world that might be broken.'
'And something in my head that won't stop buzzing.'
...
'Okay.'
'One problem at a time.'
'Tomorrow, I walk further.'
I closed my eyes.
The static was silent.
But I could feel it waiting.