Fifteen years. If you had told me before I died on Earth that my glorious second chance at life would consist of spending a decade and a half in a magical fantasy realm doing actual, mind-numbing paperwork, I would have politely asked you to shoot me twice just to be absolutely sure I was dead. Welcome to Arviance. I know, I know. It sounds like the name of an overpriced, pretentious high-end perfume that rich nobles buy just to flex on the peasants. But trust me when I tell you that the reality of this place smells entirely of damp horse manure, watered-down cheap ale, and the suffocating, inescapable stench of impending doom.
For fifteen agonizing, repetitive years, I have been stuck in this medieval cesspool, surviving not as a glorious, sword-swinging hero, but as a glorified merchant with a talent for supply chain logistics. When you are a transmigrator from Earth, ripped from your modern life and dropped into a world of magic and monsters, you expect certain undeniable perks. You expect the heavens to part, a divine choir to sing in perfect harmony, and a shiny, semi-transparent blue holographic screen to appear in front of your retinas, proudly declaring that you are the main character of this universe. But the transmigration god who handled my paperwork clearly fell asleep at the wheel, skipped my file entirely, and completely forgot to give me my golden finger or a system. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Just a regular, fragile human body and a brain full of useless pop culture knowledge.
So, what exactly does a modern man do in a ruthless, magical society without a divine cheat code to protect him? He capitalizes on the sheer, unadulterated boredom of the masses. I introduced them to the absolute peak of human entertainment. I became a ruthless businessman, peddling the revolutionary concepts of chess, ludo, and mass-produced, heavily plagiarized storybooks to the gullible nobility and the desperate commoners alike. They ate it up like starving wolves stumbling upon a fresh carcass. I briefly thought about bringing in the real money-makers—cricket or football—but that experiment was a miserable, spectacular failure. I spent months trying to explain the lbw rule to a bunch of muscle-bound meatheads, only to realize that in this violent world, nobody plays those sports because kicking a leather ball around a grassy field doesn't translate to effectively decapitating a goblin in the wild.
Being a wealthy merchant with a monopoly on board games was fine, comfortable even, until the apocalypse decided to violently knock on our front gates. The kingdom I currently reside in—the very one paying my exorbitant invoices—is being heavily besieged and attacked by three opposing kingdoms simultaneously. Three! One enemy kingdom declaring war is a geopolitical crisis; two is a historical disaster; but three? Three is just a scheduled mass execution with colorful banners.
You might be asking, "Vikrant, my boy, you're rich. You have carts of gold. Why didn't you just pack your bags, bribe a border guard, and flee across the continent to a peaceful, neutral country?" Oh, believe me, I tried. But our brilliant, benevolent, and utterly incompetent ministers decided to play a high-stakes game of political hide-and-seek. The old King suddenly kicked the bucket, and the ministers, terrified of sparking a mass panic and losing their cushy jobs, hid his death from everyone—not just the ignorant commoners in the slums, but even the upper crust of society.
When the bloody truth finally leaked through the cracks, panic erupted. The higher-class nobles, the ones with the fastest horses and the deepest pockets, tried to run away in the dead of night, packing their gilded carriages with gold bullion and their favorite mistresses. They didn't make it far. They were all brutally slaughtered on the roads. The borders were sealed shut, not by the advancing enemy armies, but by our own paranoid forces.
Now, the deceased King's child—who just so happens to be the ruthless, bloodthirsty commander of all the armed soldiers—has violently taken over the throne and decided to wage an all-out, suicidal war to protect the kingdom against the encroaching enemies. A noble sentiment, right? A brave last stand for the homeland? I might have even been happy, or at least willing, to fight for the new King, if it weren't for a little, clandestine drinking session I had yesterday evening.
I was huddled in the dark corner of a dingy, smoke-filled tavern, sharing a ridiculously overpriced bottle of sour ale with one of the new King's supposedly trusted soldiers. Booze loosens the tightest of tongues, and this guy, drowning his own terror, spilled a secret that could easily get us both publicly beheaded. The old King didn't die of natural causes, nor did he fall in glorious battle; he was maliciously poisoned by his own 3rd child in a desperate, treacherous bid for the throne. The whole "glorious, unified defense of the realm" narrative being fed to the public is nothing but a bloody, elaborate cover-up for a royal assassination.
And to make matters infinitely worse, this idiot commander-turned-King has issued a new, completely deranged law that borders on genocide: absolutely anyone who is more than 12 years old must immediately take up arms and go to war. Twelve! They are handing heavy iron swords to terrified children whose voices haven't even dropped yet, children who can barely lift the weapons they are supposed to die with. It is basic, undeniable logic that the 12 to 20 age group is the absolute foundation and future of any civilization. If you send them to the front lines of a meat grinder, even if by some miracle you win the war, your society is effectively dead in a single generation. Oh, the sheer, unadulterated stupidity and hubris of it all. It makes my blood boil.
"Vikrant!"
The sharp shout shattered my gloomy, spiraling internal monologue. I violently snapped out of my thoughts and turned to see Rohan jogging toward me down the crowded, filthy street, a smug, punchable grin plastered across his face.
"Come on, man, let's get moving to the playground," Rohan said, gesturing wildly toward the center of the city. "They are handing out our equipment there, and you know as well as I do that you desperately need it. Without a sword in your hands, your body is essentially useless."
I gritted my teeth, feeling a vein throb in my temple. He wasn't entirely wrong, but he certainly didn't have to be such a massive jerk about it. In the rigid power system of this cursed world, my combat class is classified as a 'Shoorveer'—a traditional warrior. But the fatal, glaring flaw of a Shoorveer is that without a physical blade clutched in our hands, we become an agonizing 50% weaker in terms of raw combat capability. We are practically sitting ducks, moving targets waiting to be skewered, at least until we manage to hit the legendary Level 4. Once a Shoorveer miraculously reaches Level 4, they transcend the need for a physical weapon; they can manifest a razor-sharp blade entirely out of their own compressed Qi and aura. I am nowhere near Level 4.
"Yeah, yeah, I know," I muttered darkly, violently kicking a loose cobblestone out of my path.
Rohan chuckled, adjusting the pristine cuffs of his robes. "Don't be so sour, my friend. As a specialized magician, I don't need to burden myself carrying around a heavy, crude piece of metal. But hey, don't forget, I can always use my magic to make a temporary sword for you if you start crying on the battlefield."
"Shut up," I snapped, glaring at him. "Just hurry up and tell me, how exactly is your precious mental power training going?"
His grin widened, but then he quickly pointed a warning finger at me, his eyes narrowing playfully. "I am almost at Level 3, my friend! And don't you dare start bragging again about how you've already reached Level 3. We get it, you're a prodigy. Just let me have my moment."
I smirked, enjoying the brief, familiar distraction from our impending doom. "I wasn't going to say a word. But since you brought it up..."
We kept walking shoulder-to-shoulder toward the designated armory at the playground. The air around us was thick and cloying with the metallic scent of fear, unwashed bodies, and cheap leather. Thousands of terrified citizens, many of them barely more than weeping children gripping their mothers' hands, were being systematically herded like cattle toward the slaughterhouses of the front lines. My chest tightened until it physically hurt. I was fifteen years older than when I first arrived in this hellscape, but I was about to die face-down in the mud for a poisoned king, a rigged throne, and a broken kingdom.
"Hey, what happened?" Rohan asked suddenly, his annoying swagger dropping as he noticed my abrupt, rigid silence. "Vikrant, what are you looking at up there?"
I had stopped dead in my tracks, ignoring the frantic shoves of the crowd moving past me. My eyes were locked onto the bleak, overcast gray sky hovering above Arviance. But I wasn't looking at the miserable clouds. I was staring, wide-eyed and breathless, at the glowing, blood-red, semi-transparent text that had just violently materialized out of thin air, hovering directly and unmistakably in the center of my field of vision. A robotic, chilling, yet beautifully synthetic sound echoed directly inside the confines of my mind—a sound I had waited fifteen agonizing, bitter years to hear.
[Kill System Activated]
[Host: Vikrant]
[Analysing the world...