Warlock bloodline.
That was the personal backstory Iain had written for himself.
After all, before crossing over he had never gotten around to uninstalling all those webnovel and short-video apps, so having a somewhat overactive imagination was only natural. His knowledge of the Harry Potter world amounted to a few films and a pile of dimension-hopping webfiction.
He was the sort who had barely read two proper Harry Potter fanfics, but had once been frighteningly good at World of Warcraft, spending years rampaging across Azeroth before later throwing himself into other games in the name of being dramatically miserable.
"Wizards in Harry Potter are basically just warlocks by another name, so it makes perfect sense that there's a succubus hidden in my subconscious."
With that flawlessly logical line of thinking, Iain drifted off to sleep.
Seven was a magical number, blessed by the will of the world itself, and so when the cycle of seven days came around again, he once more fell without surprise into that crystal-clear dream.
It was as though he had crossed some forbidden boundary and woken inside a tilted reflection of the world. When Iain opened his eyes, the familiar room at the orphanage was gone.
This was the main burial chamber of some underground tomb.
Rough stone walls enclosed him on all sides. There was no door, no visible exit of any kind. In the corners of the chamber were scattered objects that looked ancient: shattered clay jars and bits of jewelry, rusted metal vessels and weapons, several neatly folded pieces of cloth long since faded with age.
None of it looked casually discarded.
It looked like grave goods.
Along the walls of the chamber, strings of runes glimmered faintly in the dark.
The light was dim, like the bioluminescence of some deep-sea creature, blue-green and unsteady, flowing slowly along certain fixed paths.
These were what Iain had decided were his bloodline glyphs.
The girl he had met before was nowhere to be seen tonight. With practiced ease, Iain climbed out of the coffin, looked around, and confirmed that he was alone in the room.
"As expected of my bloodline succubus. She's actually taking time off on a workday. I approve of the lifestyle attitude, but professionally I have to condemn her harshly!"
"Absolutely no work ethic!"
Iain's razor-sharp criticism rang loudly through the sealed stone chamber, echoing several times without receiving any response.
He did not mind.
He merely rolled his neck, then turned his attention to the runes on the wall. If these runes could be pieced together into magic, Iain felt certain his future life at Hogwarts would become far more interesting.
Who wouldn't want to be called a genius?
If you study magic, then before me you are as dust before heaven. Iain refused to believe there was a single normal person alive who wouldn't want to say something like that at least once.
"Let's see now. Are you perhaps Avada Kedavra Cluster Missile Barrage?"
For the first time, Iain seriously began trying to memorize the runes, and brute-force memorization was the only method available to him.
After all, he had not even touched the real magical world yet, so asking him to interpret their deeper meaning was a bit much. Thankfully, nine years of compulsory schooling and then high school in his previous life had blessed Iain with one peerless skill:
memorizing things by force.
He had only just entered university before crossing over, after all.
The light of youth and study had not yet fully faded from his eyes.
A man bold enough to pride himself on his brain naturally had an excellent memory. Perfect photographic recall might have been a slight exaggeration, but when he truly wanted to remember something, all he had to do was concentrate and it would etch itself into his mind.
"This is the power of 4K Blu-ray visual memory!"
Iain activated his memorization mode and slowly walked around the walls, studying every set of runes with painstaking care. Every stroke, every turn, every curve entered his vision.
And at the same time, every one of them carved itself completely into his mind.
"Bloodline glyphs? Or innate spell patterns?"
He tried to interpret them through the lens of his own worldview, and at that moment he rather regretted how little he knew about Harry Potter.
If he had known in advance that he would cross into this world, Iain would never have allowed himself to stop at just the films and webnovels. He would have dropped out of school and forced himself to become a full-time Harry Potter scholar.
"Ah well. There's no medicine for regret. Limited knowledge isn't the end of the world anyway. As the legends say, Merlin still became a legend with or without some missing special equipment."
"I don't need to be a fake prophet to become an archmage!"
Iain's internal genre mix-up had clearly flared up again.
He became so absorbed in analyzing the runes that he lost all sense of time.
His fingers traced one symbol's strokes unconsciously in the air while he muttered to himself, trying to find some hidden pattern in the designs.
And then, at that very moment,
"You're still here after all."
A voice came from behind him.
Iain snapped back to awareness and turned.
The girl stood three paces behind him.
She looked to be around ten or eleven, with long pale-blonde hair spilling over her shoulders. She wore a flowered dress that did not seem to fit her properly, and she was holding a lunch tin in her arms.
She stood there shyly, like a small animal uncertain whether it ought to come any closer.
"I... I was worried you might get hungry staying down here,"
the girl explained softly, offering the lunch tin forward a little, not quite daring to look him in the eye.
"So I brought you something to eat."
This was the intruder from the dream who called herself Ariana.
Iain looked at her, his mind racing.
Classic succubus tactics.
First she vanished during the workweek, testing his patience. Now she had returned wearing that helpless, delicate look and brought him food, probing to see whether hunger would weaken his reason.
It made perfect sense.
Of the seven deadly sins, gluttony looked the most harmless, but it was often the easiest line of defense to break. How many people had fallen step by step because of a single thought like just one bite won't hurt?
Iain had seen through everything.
"You think this is enough to break my soul?"
He made his decision.
Immediately.
Without hesitation, he dropped cross-legged to the floor, took the lunch tin, and opened the lid.
Inside were several pieces of bread that looked homemade and not especially refined, though they smelled wonderful, along with a small wedge of cheese.
"My will is unshakable!"
Iain grabbed a piece of bread and stuffed it into his mouth, his words coming out garbled, cheeks puffed out like a hamster's.
He ate quickly, so quickly he barely had time to chew before cramming in the next bite.
Not because he was hungry. Well, all right, he was a little hungry. After all, his "role" in the dream was that he had only just taken over a corpse that had been sleeping in a coffin for ages.
Even knowing full well that she was testing him, Iain chose to accept the trial.
He was conducting a highly scientific and rigorous test of his own willpower.
To willingly accept a succubus's test and remain clear of mind in the face of temptation, that was what a true hero would do. Otherwise, how would the world ever know how resolute Iain's will truly was?
Ariana watched him wolfing down the food.
Her eyes curved into little crescents.
"Honestly, you're saying strange things again," she said softly, sitting down across from him with her arms wrapped around her knees and her chin resting atop them.
She remembered the things he had said the last time she had found her way into this strange place. The boy had insisted she was only a character created by his will, that this whole world was merely part of his dream, and that when he finally woke up one day, everything here would vanish like bubbles bursting in the air.
Of course it was absurd.
But Ariana also knew he had likely slept too long, and that was why his words were so confused, so she had decided to go along with his thinking and soothe him rather than argue. After all, if someone had slept in a place like this for who knew how many years, he was bound to be lonely.
Just like she was.
"But your strange ideas are kind of interesting too. I like imagining things as well, so... that makes us friends, doesn't it?"
In Ariana's eyes,
being able to meet Iain here
felt like the meeting of two similar souls.
Just like in fairy tales.
A bond.
Yes, that had to be the word for it. Her older brother had been muttering that same odd term with great excitement lately whenever he wrote letters to someone.
So that must be what this was.