[Subject Found!]
[Transmigrating Soul Into The Chosen Vessel…]
[Installing System features…]
[Failed to install all features…]
[Dividing installation into phases as compensation…]
[Initiating Transfer…]
"Nngh…"
Clark peeled his eyes open. He squeezed them shut immediately. He braced himself for the morning ritual. He waited for the sharp pinch in his lower back, the souvenir from five years of bad office posture.
It never came.
The stiffness was missing. His limbs felt frictionless. The heavy, leaden exhaustion that usually pinned him to the mattress had vanished completely.
He sat up. The movement was too fast. He nearly launched himself off the pillows.
Clark froze. He looked around.
He wasn't in his studio apartment. He was sitting on a four-poster bed draped in expensive linen. The walls weren't peeling beige paint. They were pristine cream, decorated with intricate blue molding that screamed old money.
"Where…"
The word died in his throat.
Clark froze. He touched his neck. The vibration was wrong. The voice was too smooth. It lacked the gravel of a thirty-year-old man who spent his days arguing with logistics managers. It was a tenor. Clear and melodic.
He scrambled off the bed and stumbled toward the tall, silver-framed standing mirror in the corner.
He gripped the frame.
A stranger looked back at him.
The reflection wore a loose white shirt and black shorts. Jet-black hair spiked in messy layers against a pale forehead. But the face wasn't the problem.
It was the eyes.
They were electric blue. The pupils weren't round. They were sharp, vertical diamonds that gleamed like obsidian shards.
Clark raised a hand to his cheek. The stranger in the glass mimicked the movement instantly.
"Brown," he whispered, his voice cracking as he stared into the alien pupils. "My eyes are supposed to be brown."
[Stats]
[Strength: 20 (E-)]
[Endurance: 19 (E-)]
[Agility: 51 (E)]
[Speed: 49 (E-)
[Mana: 0 (F)]
[Luck: 402 (C+)]
[Instinct: 747 (A+)]
[Charisma: 362 (C)]
Clark stared at the floating text. He blinked. The UI didn't glitch or fade. It tracked perfectly with his eye movement. It rendered with zero latency.
"A HUD?" Clark muttered, his voice thick with sleep. "Really?"
He let out a short, dry laugh.
It had to be Yuji. His best friend had finally done it. He must have bought that new immersive VR rig he wouldn't shut up about and strapped it onto Clark while he was passed out. It was exactly the kind of expensive, annoying prank Yuji lived for.
"Very funny," Clark said. He looked around the room, expecting a camera. "I know you're recording this. Joke's over."
He reached up to rip the headset off. He expected the smooth plastic of a visor or the sweaty foam padding of a rig.
His fingers met skin.
Clark paused. He frowned. He clawed at his temples. He dug his nails into his scalp. He searched for a strap, a wire, or a haptic node.
Nothing. Just hair and bone.
"What the…"
He pinched his cheek. Hard.
A sharp, stinging heat blossomed across his face. It wasn't the dull, buzzing vibration of a haptic suit. It didn't fade instantly like a programmed sensation. It throbbed. It lingered.
"Ow," he whispered.
He rubbed the spot. It was still tender.
Clark sat very still. His brain tried to categorize the sensation. Maybe it was next-gen neural linking. Maybe Yuji hacked his actual nervous system. But that technology didn't exist. Not yet.
A cold drop of sweat rolled down his back.
The silence in the room wasn't the dead silence of noise-canceling headphones. It was heavy. He could hear the blood rushing in his ears. He could feel the texture of the sheets under his fingertips, too complex for a render.
The amusement died in his throat. His heart slammed against his ribs, skipping a beat, then two.
"Log out!" Clark shouted, his voice cracking. "System, Disconnect! End Task!"
Silence. The red holographic screen hovered in his peripheral vision like a dead pixel.
"Come on…" he wheezed.
He scrambled off the bed. His bare feet slapped against cold wood. He ignored the sensation and rushed to the open window. He needed to see the skybox. He needed to find the low-resolution textures or the invisible wall that would prove this was just a high-budget simulation.
He gripped the rough stone sill and looked out.
He froze.
Fields of lavender rippled in the wind. It wasn't a looped animation. Millions of individual stalks swayed with chaotic, independent physics. The lighting wasn't baked in. The shadows shifted in real-time as clouds drifted across a sun that was too bright to look at directly.
The breeze hit his face. It carried the scent of earth and pollen.
Clark gripped the sill tighter until his knuckles turned white.
This wasn't a game engine. No GPU on Earth could render this many particles without dropping frames. The draw distance went on forever.
"It's real," he whispered, the panic settling into a cold, heavy weight in his gut. "It's actually real."
Movement caught his eye near the edge of the field.
A figure stood there. A farmer, dressed in rough linen, is next to a wooden bucket. Clark watched, waiting for the man to pick it up.
He didn't.
The farmer raised a hand. With a lazy flick of his wrist, the water inside the bucket ignored gravity. It spiraled upward, twisting into a transparent coil, before bursting into a controlled mist over the lavender blooms.
Clark gripped the stone windowsill until his fingers hurt.
There were no wires. There were no special effects rigs hidden in the bushes. The water moved as if it were an extension of the man's limb.
"No way," he whispered, the word feeling foreign on his tongue. "That was magic."
He backed away from the window until his legs hit the edge of the bed. He sat down heavily. The mattress creaked under his weight.
That wasn't a tech demo. It was a magic system.
"Okay," he breathed. "Okay. Think."
He rubbed his temples.
European architecture. Endless lavender fields. The casual use of hydro-kinesis for basic agriculture.
It felt familiar. It felt like a setting description he had read a thousand times.
Clark looked up at the floating red screen. He needed data. He needed to verify the tags.
He scanned the holographic text, ignoring the installation errors. He focused on the character sheet.
[Name: Dominic] [Title: The Manaless Extra] [Mana: 0 (F)]
The text seemed to mock him.
"Manaless," he whispered.
It wasn't a generic fantasy term. It was a specific condition. A unique plot device from the webnovel he had read last night.
"Sylvestria," Clark said to the empty room.
He wasn't in a game. He was in A Magician's Path.
Clark rubbed his temples. He tried to force the headache away, but the reality of the situation refused to budge.
He turned his back on the window. His gaze landed on a poster taped crookedly next to the wooden desk. It was a crude, crayon-drawn picture of a warrior brandishing a sword against a swirling star-shaped portal. A child's dream, held up by peeling tape and delusion.
"Stargate Raider…"
The original Dominic wanted to be a hero.
But in Sylvestria, that dream was a suicide note.
Without magic, he was trash. The Manaless were the background assets. They were the NPCs who got crushed by falling debris just to raise the stakes for the main characters. The police ignored them. The mages bullied them.
"Great," Clark muttered, a dry laugh escaping him. "I'm worse than an extra. I'm cannon fodder."
He sank onto the edge of the bed and buried his face in his hands. He wanted a quiet life. He wanted a nap. Instead, he was in a world scheduled for a brutal war against the Umbrascourge.
Clark paused in the middle of his panic.
Why was he worrying? The plot wasn't his problem.
"I'll just leave it to the protagonist," he whispered.
It was the only logical choice. The protagonist of A Magician's Path was a monster. He was a beacon of justice who would inevitably unlock god-tier spells and rewrite the laws of physics. He had a harem that acted like a walking artillery strike.
They didn't need a Manaless extra getting in the way.
Clark nodded to himself. He just had to stay out of the blast zone. Let the main cast vaporize the villains with the power of friendship and excessive violence. He would ride out the apocalypse in a refugee tent.
It was a perfect, peaceful plan.
"Dominic! Lunch is ready!"
The sudden, warm female voice shattered his strategizing. It was followed by a gentle knock on the door.
Clark froze as his heart slammed against his ribs. "Dominic's mother?"
A cold wave of nausea washed over him. It wasn't just the body swap. It was the crushing weight of conte xt.
His own mother had died when he was four. He barely remembered the sound of her voice, let alone the casual intimacy of a mother calling her son to lunch. He didn't know the dynamic. He didn't know the inside jokes. He didn't know how to be a son.
"This is wrong," Clark whispered, his hands trembling.
He looked at the door. On the other side was a woman preparing a meal for a son who no longer existed. Clark was just the pilot of a stolen vessel.
"I'm a parasite," he muttered, his chest tightening. "I'm going to eat his food. I'm going to sleep in his bed. I'm going to let her look at me with love that I didn't earn."
It terrified him. In his old life, the silence of his apartment was the only thing that greeted him. He had forgotten the sound of a mother's voice—forgotten the specific, heavy warmth of being wanted.
Now, he was about to steal it.
"She's going to smile at me," he whispered, swallowing the dry lump in his throat. "And I'm going to lie to her face."
"Dominic?" The voice came again, slightly more insistent.
Clark flinched. He had been silent too long. He had to answer. He had to play the role.
"I'm…" His voice cracked. He cleared his throat and forced the volume up. "I'm coming!"
"Okay! Don't take too long or it'll get cold!"
He strained his ears. He listened as her footsteps retreated down the hallway, the floorboards creaking softly.
Clark closed his eyes. He took a deep, shuddering breath and held it until his lungs burned. Then he exhaled slowly.
He pushed himself off the bed. The cool floor grounded him. He walked toward the door to face a family that wasn't his.
He opened the door and found himself in a hallway. To his left stood another door that likely led to a second bedroom. He looked to the right and saw a spacious living room that opened up before him.
Two plush brown leather couches faced a sleek television set. Instead of a power cord, a small, diamond-shaped gem pulsed on top of the frame, powering the screen.
"Aether," Clark muttered.
On the display, a news anchor spoke with practiced urgency, footage of a swirling, star-shaped portal playing behind her. The ticker at the bottom scrolled with updates on the "border skirmishes" and "increased monster activity."
On the side stood a modest dining table set for four. It was laden with a feast that made his stomach growl instantly.
Right next to the dining table was an open kitchen with a polished island at its center.
At the oven, a woman with long, cascading black hair was kneeling and carefully pulling a ceramic dish out of the heat with mitts.
"…mom?" Clark said before even thinking. The word slipped out, raw and instinctive.
The woman turned around and faced him. Just like Dominic, she had striking sky-blue eyes, but her pupils were round and gentle, unlike the sharp, diamond-shaped shards in Dominic's eyes.
"Ah, Dominic!" She beamed, her face lighting up with warmth. "Come, sit!"
She walked toward the dining table and placed the hot dish on the trivet.
Clark stared at her. He searched her face for the disappointment or coldness usually reserved for the Manaless in this brutal world. He found nothing but light.
He slowly walked toward the dining table and sat in the chair nearest to hers.
"Come now, eat."
She picked up a fork and served herself a small portion.
Clark looked at her eating and then down at the food. It looked delicious, and the smell alone was enough to make him dizzy. He had never eaten this kind of food before. He certainly hadn't eaten food prepared with this much care by a mother.
"Dominic, are you okay?"
Clark looked up at her. Despite how overwhelmed he felt by the delicious spread, he had to act like Dominic.
"Uhh, yeah. Just… appreciating the food you made."
She smiled gently and placed a large spoonful of beef onto his plate. "Of course, I made it special. I have to make sure you have plenty of nutrients and strength before you head off to Verdalis."
Clark's heart skipped a beat. "Verdalis?"
Celine paused. The fork in her hand stopped mid-air, steam curling around her wrist. She tilted her head, her brow furrowing ever so slightly as she studied his blank expression. It was the look one gave a child who had asked a silly question.
"Yeah, you applied, remember?"
Clark froze as the blood drained from his face.
This was bad. Verdalis Academy. It was the primary setting of A Magician's Path. It was the school designed to train future Stargate Raiders, the place where the protagonist rose to power. In other words, it was the epicenter of every disaster, villain attack, and catastrophe in the entire plot.
Also, why would Dominic, a Manaless, try entering Verdalis? It didn't make any sense. In a combat academy ruled by magic, a Manaless student would be nothing more than a walking target for bullies and lethal training accidents.
Ding! Dong!
All of a sudden, the front doorbell rang.
"Oh, who is it?"
She stood up, wiped her hands on her apron, and went toward the front door.
Clark watched her go while his heart hammered against his ribs. He closed his eyes and pressed his hands together like a prayer.
"I hope Dominic gets rejected," he murmured fervently. "Please, let him be unqualified. Let him be too weak."
She looked through the peephole and opened the door.
Clark craned his neck and saw a mailman in a crisp uniform holding a thick envelope.
"Bonjour, Madame Celine. Here's a letter for you."
"Merci, Monsieur Steve."
Clark observed the exchange. The language sparked a realization.
"Bonjour?" he muttered.
It confirmed his location. He was in Everdane. It was one of the five great nations of Sylvestria. In the webnovel, the author based Everdane heavily on France. The inspiration was obvious in everything from the architecture to the language.
He filed that information away. He also noted another crucial detail.
"So... her name is Celine," he whispered.
Celine and Steve exchanged brief pleasantries before she closed the door and walked back to the dining table, holding the envelope.
"Let's check what they said," she chirped, her eyes bright with maternal hope. "I hope you get accepted."
Clark gripped the edge of the table until his knuckles turned white. He stared at the wax seal on the envelope as if it were a bomb. He braced himself for the verdict that would decide whether he got to live a quiet life or be thrown into the meat grinder of the main plot.
"Yeah," he choked out. "Let's see."