The sunlight reflected inside the room.
I opened my eyes to a ceiling I didn't recognise, a body that felt like it had been wrung out and left to dry, and the specific kind of soreness that comes from using muscles that had spent ten years doing absolutely nothing.
My shoulders ached from the armour, and my legs ached from the road.
Even my throwing arm ached, which was new, since the most strenuous thing I had ever thrown before yesterday was a pillow at Damon during an argument we had at fourteen.
I lay there staring upward.
'I walked half a day and killed one wolf,' I thought.
'One, and my body is throwing a tantrum.'
The exp bar floated lazily in my vision.
[Exp: 180/2000.]
A number so small it was almost funny.
I sat up slowly, rolled my shoulders until something clicked in a way that felt more concerning than relieving, and looked at the rope coiled on the bedside table where I had left it the night before.
'This rope was given to me by the system itself.'
It looked completely ordinary in the morning light.
Rough fibre, unremarkable thickness, the kind of rope you'd use to tie luggage to a cart.
Nothing about it suggested it could move like water and restrain a dire wolf in under two seconds.
'I still don't understand it,' I thought.
'It worked. But I don't understand why it worked.'
That bothered me more than the soreness, so I had to figure out if my journey was going to be smooth.
I stood in the middle of the room and looked at the chair in the corner.
A wooden chair with four legs.
'Alright,' I thought.
'Let's see what you actually are.'
I held the rope loosely and thought about the chair the same way I had thought about the wolf, not throwing exactly, more like pointing my intention at it, and let go.
'Move!'
The rope crossed the room and wrapped around the chair back in one clean pass, snug and precise, the knot settling exactly where I would have wanted it if I had tied it by hand.
I pulled.
The chair slid toward me smoothly, like it had decided cooperation was the better option.
'Hmm.'
I unwound it and tried again, this time thinking about just the front left leg.
The rope went for the front left leg, then I thought about both back legs simultaneously.
It was unsure at first, genuinely hesitated, like it was considering, and then split its movement, a loop for each.
'Holy shit.'
I sat down on the bed and looked at my hands.
'It's not the rope,' I thought slowly.
'The rope is just the medium. The skill reads intent as I think about something, and it goes there.'
The system was completely useless for this. It gave me the usual silence of a feature that considered itself self-explanatory.
'Right,' I thought.
'So the question isn't what it can reach. The question is whether I can hold more than one thing in my head at once.'
I tried the table leg next, then the table leg and the chair simultaneously.
Then the chair, the table leg, and the door handle.
The door handle on one failed because the rope wavered halfway across the room and dropped.
'Three targets,' I thought. 'Two is the limit for now.'
I coiled the rope back up and tucked it into my belt.
One morning of testing, and I already understood it better than ten years of having it in my list.
That said something unflattering about how I had spent the last decade, but I chose not to examine it too closely.
I went downstairs for breakfast, my eyes landing on a woman.
She was sitting at the far end of the common room.
I noticed her the way you notice something slightly wrong in a familiar room, not dramatically, not all at once, just a quiet insistence at the edge of your attention that said that one is different.
Late twenties, maybe thirty.
It was hard to tell with the type.
Dark hair pulled back practically, not for style but because it was out of the way.
'So hot.'
Travelling clothes that had seen actual travel without the designs nobles wore to look rugged, but clothes with real wear in the fabric, softened at the knees and elbows.
A short blade at her hip, sitting in its scabbard the way a blade sits when the person wearing it has forgotten it's there, which is the most dangerous way a blade can sit.
There was a scar along her jaw.
She was eating without looking at her food, eyes moving across the room in that slow sweep that people develop when they have spent enough time in places where paying attention is the difference between fine and not fine.
Those eyes passed over me and stopped for a second.
Then moved on.
'She clocked me in under a second,' I thought, sitting down two tables away and signalling the innkeeper.
'And she's already decided I'm not a threat and possibly not interesting.'
Somehow, that hurt more than it should have.
What I'm even more amazed at is that none of the people seemed to recognise me as the prince.
I ordered porridge and tried to look like someone who had chosen to be here.
She spoke without looking up from her cup.
"That pauldron is sitting wrong."
I looked at my shoulder.
The left pauldron, which I had not been able to adjust without help since putting it on, had been slowly rotating outward since yesterday morning.
"I know," I said.
"It'll cut into your neck on a downhill slope." She glanced up then, briefly.
"Has been since you walked in."
'She noticed that in the time it took her eyes to cross the room,' I thought.
'Wonderful.'
"I'm aware," I said, which was half true.
I had known something was wrong, just not known the specific mechanical consequence.
"Where are you headed?"
She was starting a casual talk since I looked rich and handsome among the crowd.
"South," I said.
One corner of her mouth moved.
"South covers a lot of ground."
"It does."
She looked at me for a moment with those calm eyes, and I had the uncomfortable feeling of being read the way she had read the room, quickly, efficiently, and with conclusions I wasn't going to be told.
"You're not a soldier," she said.
"The way you sit is wrong for someone trained. But you're not a merchant either. Wrong hands."
'Wrong hands,' I thought.
'What does that even mean?'
"Adventurer," I said, because it was the closest available category.
"Hm, she made a small sound that managed to communicate polite scepticism without technically being rude about it, and went back to her cup.
I ate my porridge.
A man three tables over, broad, loud, the type who takes up more space than he needs, shoved his table back, standing up and sent his knife spinning off the edge.
It flipped handle-over-blade toward the floor in the direction of a small girl sitting nearby with her mother, who had absolutely no reason to be in the path of a falling knife but was anyway, because that's how these situations go.
'Shit.'
I didn't think.
But the rope moved.
Just a flick, barely a motion, the knife caught mid-spin and redirected, clattering harmlessly against the far wall instead of the floor it had been heading for.
The place became silent for a minute.
Then the room resumed like nothing had happened, because most people had processed it as a coincidence, physics, the knife hitting the table edge on the way down.
Most people.
I felt the attention before I looked up.
She was watching me with an expression that had changed in some subtle way I couldn't entirely name.
The polite scepticism was still there, but something had moved behind it. Her eyes had sharpened by a fraction, the way eyes do when something previously filed under unremarkable has just been quietly reclassified.
She looked at the wall where the knife had landed, but didn't say anything.
Neither did I.
She asked again, a few minutes later, while settling her tab with the innkeeper.
"The cave south of Devil's Pass?"
I kept my expression neutral.
"What about it?"
"That's where south leads, if you stay on this road." She pulled on her jacket with the ease of someone who had done it ten thousand times.
"People go in. Most don't find what they're looking for."
"Most," I said.
"Most." She looked at me one more time with that measuring quality, calm and unhurried, like she had all the time in the world to be right about things.
"You're alone."
"Observant."
"You're unprepared."
"Also observant."
Something moved in her expression.
"If you make it through the next few days," she said,
She left it there, unfinished, and walked out the door into the morning.
I sat with my cooling porridge and the ghost of a sentence and thought about the way her eyes had looked at the rope. Not afraid. Not confused.
Curious.
'If I make it through the next few days,' I thought.
I finished my breakfast, adjusted my pauldron as best I could one-handed, and followed her out into the road.
But she already disappeared.
'Right,' I thought, and turned south.
'Next time, I won't let her leave like this.'