CHAPTER 3 : The Shape of a Week
— ✦ —
The training grounds occupied the western sector of Lock's main campus — a cluster of open fields, enclosed arenas, and specialized training rooms that Seojun recognized from the novel's descriptions.
At six in the morning, only a handful of students were present. He expected this — the first week before the formal semester began was technically orientation week, which meant most students were sleeping in, socializing, or navigating the bureaucratic process of finalizing dorm assignments. Those who trained at dawn were the ones who had not come to the lock to socialize.
He did not approach any of these individuals. He found an empty stretch of open field in the far corner, away from the closest occupied arena, and stood there in the pale morning air.
He unsheathed his swords.
The blade was made of plain steel, with no inscriptions or special alloys. It was a training sword, although its edge was maintained. He held it in his right hand, let his left arm hang loose, and stood with his feet at shoulder width.
His body knew how to wield swords.
That was the memory in the muscles — Kael Maren's years of practice expressing themselves through whatever connection existed between soul and flesh.
However, knowing how to wield a sword was not the same as knowing how to fight. He could feel the limits of his muscle memory: basic stances, basic cuts, drills repeated until automatic. No style. No art. Just foundation.
He thought about system notifications.
Eclipse Thread Art — Dormant. Unlock Condition: Three days of training.
Three days of training were required to unlock the first form. That was achievable. Six days remained before the Academy formally began. Three days to unlock the art, three days to begin working on Form One: Thread Perception.
He began to practice.
He was not trying to be impressive. He was not trying to develop a style. He was running through the basic cuts that Kael Maren's body already knew — overhead, diagonal, horizontal, thrust — and paying attention to what his body did wrong. Where the grip slipped. The elbow came out at an angle that bled power. His footwork hesitated on the backward step.
He noted each error without judgment and repeated the movements.
This was something he knew how to do well. Not from fighting — he had never trained in martial arts in his previous life — but from reading. He had read enough cultivation novels, progression fantasy, and martial arts stories to understand the principle: improvement required accurate observation of failure. You cannot fix what you cannot see.
He was trained for two hours.
At eight, his stomach made an argument he could not ignore, and he sheathed his sword and went to find the cafeteria.
— ✦ —
The cafeteria in the Horned Sheep Dorm — the budget dormitory, he had gathered from the student directory's notation that it housed students on partial or full scholarships — was a long room with metal tables and a serving line that opened at seven.
He arrived after the breakfast rush, which meant that the line was short and the table selection was wide.
He took a tray. Rice, soup, a portion of protein that the label identified as D-rank boar — a common dungeon monster apparently used for food production — and a cup of black coffee that smelled institutional but functional were served. He found a table in the corner with sightlines to both doors and sat.
He always eats alone. That was one constant between the world he had come from and this one.
He was halfway through the rice when someone sat across from him without asking him to move.
He looked up.
The person who had sat down was a girl — roughly his age, 17 or 18, with a round face and short-cropped hair that had clearly been cut by someone who knew what they were doing. She was carrying a tray loaded with an amount of food that seemed impractical for her body frame. She was wearing Lock's training uniform, like him.
She looked at him with open, assessing eyes and said, " you are in Block D, right? Room 14. I'm Room 11. Yeon Sohee."
He processed this. Room 11 is located in the same block. They were corridor neighbors.
"Kael," he said.
"Kael Maren? Transfer student?" She began eating without waiting for confirmation. " I have been watching you train for the past two hours from the window. Your footwork's weird."
He did not notice her at the window. That was already a problem; he needed to be more aware of his surroundings.
"Weird how?" he said.
She tilted her head and chewed. "You hesitate on backward steps. Like you are not sure the ground's going to be there. However, you are fine with forward steps. Most people are the opposite."
This is an accurate observation. He filed it.
"What's your rank?" he asked.
She held up her hand and showed him three fingers on it. Then folded one. "F+," she said.
"You?"
"F."
She nodded, not unkindly, however. "The scholarship range. Most of Block D is F or F+. The real talent lives in Block A." She said this without bitterness, as a simple categorization of fact.
He had not read Yeon Sohee's novel. That meant one of two things: she was a background extra who never spoke on the panel, or she was original to this transmigration — someone who existed in the world but not in the narrative. He would have to determine which over time.
"What profession?" he asked.
"Spear," she said. "You?"
"Sword."
She nodded again. She had the manner of someone who gathered information efficiently and did not waste energy on social padding. He appreciated that.
They ate in comfortable silence for a few minutes.
"The placement exams are in eight days," she said. " I am trying to get to at least 1,900 before they happen. Easier to stay invisible in the middle."
He looked at her. "You want to stay invisible?"
"Easier to survive," she said simply, and ate another spoonful of soup.
He considered telling her that she had good instincts. He didn't. Instead, he said, "The weighted composite for placement combines current rank, combat assessment, and a written exam. The written exam accounts for thirty percent."
She looked at him. "How do you know the weighting?"
"I read the intake documentation thoroughly," he said. This was true in the sense that he had read chapters 13 and 14 of The Author's POV, which described the placement process in some detail.
She considered this. Then, she nodded once, as if she had categorized him and found the category acceptable.
"I'm weak on writing," she said.
"I can help with that."
She glanced at him again. The look lasted for approximately three seconds. She then resumed eating.
"Okay," she said.
— ✦ —
He spent the rest of the first day on a systematic inventory.
Lock's campus was larger than he'd imagined from the novel's descriptions, but the layout matched — he recognized the general orientation from the few times the narrative had described Ren moving between buildings.
He mapped the training grounds' locations relative to the dorms, found the library, located the administrative block, and identified the arenas used for inter-student sparring.
He was careful about his movements.
Not hunched, not small — that attracted a different kind of attention. He walked at a neutral pace and kept his gaze forward, a particular quality of movement that said, occupied with my own business' without saying.
'I am hiding.' It was a skill he had developed in his previous life, navigating a university full of people who networked aggressively and a dormitory full of people who socialized loudly.
He did not see the Ren Dover. He had not expected to — Ren was at Clayton Ridge today, possibly starting to climb. He did see someone who was probably Jin Horton, based on the dagger at his hip and the way he moved through space as though he had already mapped all the escape routes.
He saw several people who might have been minor canon characters and several others who were definitely not.
In the early afternoon, he found the academy's public skill library — not the restricted archive, which required merit points, but the open-access section available to all enrolled students. He spent 90 minutes reading.
He was not looking for martial arts manuals. They required either merit points, connections, or money he did not have. He was reading the sections on mana theory and the documented behaviors of F-rank monsters — creatures likely to appear in the lowest-tier dungeon requests that would be available to first-year students.
He thought about the party of five F-rank heroes in the dungeon. Dead from a demon's curse of a mindbreaker. They had enough strength to enter an F-rank dungeon, but not enough to survive something they had not prepared for.
He was going to be in F-rank dungeons soon enough.
This is probably within the first month of the semester because Lock's practical curriculum sent first-years to dungeons early. He needed to know what could kill him before encountering it.
He read until the library was closed.
At night, lying on the bed in room 14, he ran through the timeline again.
Day 1 of 7 before semester: Today. He had trained, mapped the campus, made one tentative contact, and read mana theory and monster documentation.
Day 2: Training continued. He needed to hit the system unlock threshold for Eclipse Thread Art in three days.
He maintained contact with Sohee, who was potentially valuable both as a local information source and as someone whose survival instincts aligned with his own.
Day 3: Continue the training. They began identifying which upperclassmen controlled the informal social hierarchy in the lower-ranked dorms. This was important — the dungeon debt system that killed that unnamed extra had run through those hierarchies.
Day 4: The Eclipse Thread Art should be unlocked. Begin Form One: Thread Perception. Start practicing the observation protocols.
Days 5–6: Build on Form One. He avoided any situation that might lead to forced dungeon requests or debt traps before he had enough base strength to negotiate from a position that was not desperation.
Day 7: Placement examination. Kevin Voss arrives. The first act of the story begins in earnest.
He had to survive the first act as a background character. Stay in the middle of the rankings, not at the bottom, where debt and exploitation thrive, or at the top, where attention and jealousy thrive. He stayed in the exact middle where he was nobody, training in private, watching the canonical plot proceed without disrupting it.
He closed his eyes.
He thought about chapter one of The Author's POV, the line that had been playing in his memory since he woke up on the concrete floor this morning:
Thank God, I am not the protagonist.
He understood that line differently now than he had when he read it at 2 AM in his apartment. He had not read irony. He had been reading the truth.
He is not the protagonist. He was a rank F extra with brown eyes and a forgettable face, living in a dormitory fourteen spots from the bottom, in a world that would escalate toward a demon war that killed thousands.
The story was going to happen around him. The people he would come to know faced things that nearly destroyed them.
Characters he would watch from a distance were going to carry weights he could not take from them, because disrupting their arcs would change the outcomes he relied on to plan his own survival.
He had read about this feeling without knowing what it was—the pressure of foreknowledge of the future. Knowing that a tragedy was about to happen and having to calculate whether intervention would help or make things worse.
He was going to feel that a lot.
He allowed his breathing to slow and eventually fell asleep.
— ✦ —