The Branch didn't want him.
That was the first thing he noticed when he sat down with it that night. He'd barely touched his mana to it — gently, just to get a read on what he was holding — and it had immediately started pulling.
Not aggressively. More like a drain left open at the bottom of a sink.
Steady. Patient. Hungry.
He pulled his mana back. The Branch let go, reluctantly, the way something does when it's decided it can wait.
Junho stared at it.
The author had given a stick separation anxiety.
He remembered the Volume 18 reveal now. The Branch was "semi-sentient." It had spent centuries being handled by people it deemed unworthy and had developed what the author dramatically called "a will of rejection."
What the author meant was: the weapon had trust issues.
He had written a God-tier artifact with the emotional damage of a rescue animal.
Junho set it on the desk and pinched the bridge of his nose.
Okay. The sentience wasn't the problem. The drain was the problem. If it kept pulling every time he touched it, it was useless as a weapon and actively dangerous as a possession.
He thought back through his catalogue.
Chapter 402. Filler arc. The one where Soyeol visited a remote village and learned a breathing technique from an elderly side character who appeared for exactly three chapters before dying to give the Hero motivation.
The technique was called Hollow Reed Breathing. The elder had described it as a method for moving mana so passively it became nearly invisible. Undetectable. Like breath, not current.
Soyeol had learned it, used it once in Chapter 403 for a stealth mission, and never touched it again because his power curve made subtlety irrelevant by Volume 6.
Junho had commented: "Why introduce a nuanced technique just to abandon it? This could have been a fascinating combat approach. Instead it exists to show the MC can do one (1) clever thing before going back to hitting harder. Wasted. Minus one star."
He hadn't known what he was annotating.
He settled into a cross-legged position, closed his eyes, and tried to remember the exact description.
Breath in like an empty vessel. Breath out like the wind passing through.
He let his mana go quiet. Not stopped. Just... ambient. Unfocused. No current, no direction. Just presence.
He picked up the Branch.
The drain reached for him.
Found nothing to grab.
It kept reaching, confused, searching for the structured mana flow it knew how to pull from. Like a pickpocket trying to lift a wallet from someone who wasn't carrying one.
After a moment, it stopped.
The Branch sat in his hand, and for the first time, it just sat there.
The "useless" filler technique was the exact counter to a weapon the author introduced fourteen volumes later.
The author had done this accidentally. He was certain of it.
He held the Branch for a long time in the quiet room and felt it slowly, grudgingly, stop treating him like an obstacle.
Not acceptance. Not yet.
But tolerance.
He could work with tolerance.
He heard about Kim Hana the next morning.
It wasn't dramatic. He was walking past the infirmary on his way to the training grounds and caught a piece of conversation through the open window.
"— getting worse. The mana sickness is progressing faster than—"
"Is there nothing in the stores that could—"
"We've checked. There was something in the kitchen stocks, apparently, but it's gone. Nobody knows where it went."
Junho stopped walking.
He stood very still outside the infirmary window.
Kim Hana. First year student. Minor character. Appeared in Chapter 5 with a total of two lines of dialogue before the author used her as a plot device. She'd been developing mana sickness — a condition that damaged the meridians, progressive, painful, and expensive to treat.
In the original story, the Hero had found the Frost Dragon potion in the kitchen while looking for snacks.
Because of course he had.
He'd brought it to the infirmary, the healers had used it on Kim Hana, and she'd recovered. Her family — minor nobility with connections to the eastern trade routes — had become quietly loyal to Soyeol as a result. A small thread that paid off seventeen volumes later.
It was a classic author move. Casually deposit a good deed. Collect the return later.
Junho had stolen the potion on Day 1.
He had removed the only viable treatment in the entire Academy.
Kim Hana was getting worse because of him.
He stood outside the window for another moment.
This was the problem with hating a story from the outside. You could call the characters "props." You could say the author used them cheaply, which was true. You could note that Kim Hana existed purely to make the Hero look kind, which was also true.
But he was inside now.
And props, it turned out, had fevers.
He was a hater. Not a murderer. There was a line.
He changed direction and went back to his quarters.
He still had the bottle. He'd kept it — pragmatism, not sentiment, he'd told himself — because the last quarter inch of potion hadn't poured out cleanly and he hadn't wanted to waste it.
He picked it up from the desk. Held it to the light.
Enough. Probably.
He pocketed it and went to find the Academy's floor plan in Baek Cheon's desk drawer, because he was not going to walk into the infirmary in broad daylight and explain where he'd gotten a legendary lost potion.
He'd go tonight.
The infirmary at midnight was quiet and badly lit.
One healer on night duty, currently asleep at the front desk with professional dedication. Junho had timed it. The woman could sleep through a sword demonstration; he'd watched her do it during one of his classes that morning.
He found Kim Hana's bed in the third room.
She was small. Young. Eleven, maybe twelve. Her breathing was uneven in the specific way the book had described mana sickness — the meridians contracting, the body trying to compensate.
He uncorked the bottle. Tipped it carefully.
Three drops onto his fingertip. He pressed it to the pulse point at her wrist, where the primary meridian ran closest to the surface.
The cold moved through her fast. She shivered, once, hard.
Then her breathing evened out.
He stepped back.
He felt approximately nothing heroic about this. He was cleaning up his own mess. That was all.
He turned to leave.
"That technique."
He stopped.
"The meridian application. That's not standard. Where did you learn it?"
The voice was quiet. Not alarmed. More like someone who had been watching carefully and had decided, just now, to speak.
He turned around slowly.
She was standing near the doorway to the adjacent room. She hadn't been there when he came in. He was nearly certain of that.
Tall. Maybe sixteen. Dark blue robes without Academy insignia. Her hair was pinned up simply, no ornamentation, the kind of deliberate plainness that only people with money could pull off convincingly.
He knew her face.
The author had dedicated an embarrassing amount of prose to describing it in Chapter 8.
Lee Seol-ah.
Crown Princess of the Haewon Empire.
The Hero's primary love interest. Supposed to meet Soyeol in three days during a daytime infirmary visit when he came to check on Kim Hana.
Supposed to.
Junho's brain ran the calculation in approximately one second.
The plot had been set up like a machine. Soyeol saves Kim Hana, gains a reason to visit the infirmary, visits at the wrong time, runs into the Princess who is here incognito doing her own quiet charity work, they have an awkward but charged encounter, Romance Flag A is triggered.
Soyeol wasn't here.
Kim Hana had been saved by the wrong person.
The Princess had been watching the wrong person do the saving.
The plot had found a substitute. Of course it had. The narrative was desperate.
It wasn't going to just cancel a Romance Flag because the designated participant was absent. It was going to reassign it.
To him.
He needed to leave immediately.
"Old family method," he said. "Nothing interesting."
She tilted her head slightly. Still watching him with that careful, measuring look. The author had described her as perceptive. He'd said it so many times it had become a character trait that existed independently of evidence.
In this case, unfortunately, it seemed accurate.
"You're an instructor here," she said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"You came to the infirmary at midnight."
"Apparently."
"To treat a first-year student you have no particular connection to."
"She was sick."
The Princess was quiet for a moment.
"Using a technique that requires a significant amount of controlled mana," she continued. "And a potion that the infirmary has been trying to locate for two days."
She had seen the bottle.
Of course she had. She'd been standing there long enough. Perceptive. The author had said so twelve times and, apparently, meant it at least once.
"I found it," Junho said. "In storage. Mislabeled."
"Mislabeled," she repeated.
"Poorly organized kitchen. Academy administration issue. Goodnight."
He walked past her toward the door.
"I don't know your name," she said behind him.
He almost kept walking. He should have kept walking.
"Baek," he said, without turning around. "Just Baek."
He left.
He walked back to his quarters at a pace that was not quite running because running would look suspicious, but was faster than any reasonable midnight stroll justified.
He sat on the edge of his bed.
He put his face in his hands.
The Crown Princess had seen him do a good deed.
In the dark. In secret. In the exact spot where the Hero was supposed to meet her.
The narrative had been sitting there like a broken vending machine, and he had walked up and pressed the button it needed.
He thought about the way she'd looked at him. The careful attention. The precise questions.
In the book, she'd looked at Soyeol that way in their first meeting and the author had written three paragraphs about how she never looked at anyone like that.
He'd called it cheap in his review.
"The love interest is immediately and inexplicably fascinated by the protagonist for no reason established in the text. The author is telling us she's perceptive while demonstrating that her perception is just 'finds the main character interesting.' One star."
He now understood the scene from the inside.
She wasn't fascinated by the protagonist.
The narrative pointed her like a compass and told her to be fascinated by whoever was standing in the designated spot.
Tonight, that had been him.
Nine days until the Proving Ceremony.
He was already holding the Hero's ultimate weapon, living in the body of the character meant to be publicly destroyed, and had just accidentally introduced himself to Soyeol's future wife.
He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
The original plot was screaming somewhere in the distance.
He could almost hear it.