The first thing I felt was not the warmth of a soul-bridge or the blinding light of a divine tunnel. It was the crushing, humid weight of lungs that didn't know how to breathe.
Then came the sound. It wasn't the sterile beep of a heart monitor or the hushed whispers of the hospice nurses I had expected to be the final soundtrack of my life on Earth. Instead, it was a roar—a deep, guttural sound of a man's voice, thick with both terror and an animalistic sort of joy.
"He's not crying, Elara! Why isn't he crying?"
"Give him... give him to me, Kaelen..."
I opened my eyes, but the world was a smear of oil paints and candlelight. My neck felt like a stalk of overcooked celery, unable to support the massive, heavy stone that was my new head. I tried to speak, to ask where the morphine had gone, but my vocal cords produced only a wet, pathetic gurgle.
Hands—calloused, massive, and trembling—wrapped around my torso. I was hoisted into the air. The man holding me was a giant, his face a landscape of scars and rugged nobility. He wore a tunic of fine linen, but his shoulders had the permanent, heavy set of a man who had worn steel plates for decades.
This was Kaelen. My father. An ex-general of the Empire.
As he pressed me against the sweat-drenched chest of a woman with hair like spun copper, a jolt of electricity snapped through my brain. It wasn't magic—not yet. It was memory.
The haze of infancy usually wipes the slate clean, but my soul was an intruder, a stowaway from a world of skyscrapers and antibiotics. As my blurry vision began to focus on the stone vaulted ceilings and the flickering mana-lamps on the walls, a cold, crystalline realization settled into my marrow.
I knew this room. I knew that scar on Kaelen's jaw. I even knew the name of the midwife currently hovering near the basin of warm water.
I wasn't just reborn. I was cast into the pages of The Age of Ashen Crowns.
I was an extra. A nameless speck in a 1,500-chapter epic where the world was destined to become a slaughterhouse.
The Anatomy of a Tragedy
In my previous life, I was a surgeon. I spent my days peering into the opened cavities of strangers, fixing the plumbing of the human machine. I believed in logic, in the tangible, and in the inevitable failure of the flesh.
Now, as I lay wrapped in swaddling silk, listening to my "mother" hum a lullaby, I tried to reconcile my medical mind with the narrative horror I had once read for entertainment.
The Age of Ashen Crowns was a brutal novel. It followed the journey of a boy named Lucian, a "Baron's son" whose life would be razed to the ground by the return of the Demons. Lucian would be molded by the Church into a god of war, a SSS-rank powerhouse fueled by a boundless hatred for the abyssal creatures that ate his parents.
But I knew the truth. I knew what Lucian wouldn't find out until Chapter 1,200: the Church didn't find him. They made him.
I looked at my tiny, translucent hands. In this world, at the age of ten, every child underwent "The Resonance." Their souls would manifest an ability ranked from F to SSS.
In the book, the son of General Kaelen was mentioned exactly once—in a casualty list. "The retired General's household was purged in the political cleansings of the mid-era, leaving no survivors."
I wasn't supposed to be a hero. I wasn't even supposed to be a villain. I was a footnote. A piece of meat designed to motivate a subplot.
'No,' I thought, my infant mind already straining under the weight of adult cognition. 'I'll take the footnote. I'll take the extra's life. I've seen enough blood on the operating table. Give me a quiet life. Give me a garden and a library.'
But as I drifted toward the easy sleep of the newborn, I felt a strange sensation. It wasn't the warmth of the room. It was a feeling of thinness. For a split second, the blankets didn't feel like they were touching my skin. It felt as though I was slipping through the molecules of the fabric, hovering in a space between "here" and "nowhere."
It lasted only a heartbeat. But in that heartbeat, I felt the void.
My ability wasn't F-rank. It wasn't even S-rank.
It was a flicker of something that shouldn't exist.
The Golden Years of the Condemned
Four years passed with agonizing slowness.
To my parents, I was a miracle. A quiet, pensive child who didn't cry and seemed to observe the world with the eyes of an old philosopher. My father, Kaelen, tried to put a wooden sword in my hand the moment I could walk.
"Look at him, Elara! He has the grip of a vanguard!" he would roar, his laughter shaking the dust from the rafters of our manor.
I would simply drop the sword and walk toward the infirmary.
I spent my toddlerhood in the manor's library, devouring texts on herbology and the flow of mana through the nervous system. If I was going to survive the "cleansing" I knew was coming, I needed a trade that made me indispensable. A doctor. Even in a world of magic, a man who can stitch a lung or identify a poison is rarely the first person you kill.
I tried to stay away from the "Main Cast." But geography is a cruel mistress.
The retired General's estate was a hub for the nobility. One afternoon, while I was sitting under a willow tree studying a diagram of the human lymphatic system, a group of children stumbled into my sanctuary.
"What is he doing? Is he looking at pictures of guts?"
I looked up. My heart skipped a beat, but not out of affection. Out of recognition.
There she was. Lyra van Astra. The future "Ice Queen" of the Academy, an S-rank mage whose family would eventually lead the charge in the massacre of my house. Next to her was Julian, a Duke's son with the golden hair of a storybook prince and the latent SS-rank potential that would make him the Hero's greatest rival.
And then, there was her.
In the novel, The Saintess was a beacon of light. But the girl standing before me was barely six years old, her silver hair catching the sunlight. Her eyes, however, weren't the eyes of a child.
She stared at me with an intensity that felt like a physical weight. In the original story, she doesn't meet the "Extra" son of the General. She doesn't visit this estate until years later.
But here she was. She stepped forward, ignoring the golden prince and the ice queen.
"You," she whispered, her voice trembling. "You're... still here."
I frowned, keeping my face a mask of childish confusion. "Do I know you, Lady?"
The Saintess—Evelina—flinched as if I had struck her. Her eyes welled with tears that made no sense for a child of her status. She reached out, her small fingers brushing my arm.
The moment she touched me, my Phasing triggered involuntarily. Her hand passed through my forearm as if I were made of smoke.
She didn't scream. She didn't look surprised. She looked devastated.
"Not again," she sobbed, collapsing to her knees in the grass. "Please, not the void again."
The other children rushed to her, shouting for guards, but I stayed frozen.
I was an extra. I was supposed to be invisible. But as I looked at the sobbing Saintess, I realized the plot wasn't just deviating—it was rotting from the inside out.
The Shadow of the Empire
That night, I sat by my window, watching the mana-lights of the capital city flicker in the distance. The world looked peaceful. Medieval stone towers were topped with glowing hexagonal shields. Hover-ships drifted like silent whales through the clouds, patrolling for "Dungeon Breaks."
On the surface, humanity was at its peak. They believed the Demons were myths, fables used to scare children. They believed the SS-rank Emperor was invincible.
They didn't know that the SSS-rank Dungeon at the world's core was already cracking. They didn't know that the "Hero" was currently a biological experiment in a Church vat, being fed a diet of artificial hatred.
And they didn't know about me.
I held my hand up to the moonlight. I concentrated. Slowly, my fingers began to lose their opacity. They became a translucent, ghostly blue. I pushed my hand against the stone windowsill.
There was no resistance. My hand sank into the rock.
It wasn't just phasing through matter. I could feel the molecular vibrations of the stone. I could feel the air trapped inside the granite. I could feel the time the stone had spent sitting there.
'C-Rank Phasing,' the novel had called it. A "useless utility skill" that allowed the user to dodge a few physical attacks at the cost of massive stamina.
But the novel was wrong. Or perhaps, my soul had changed the skill.
Every time I used it, I felt a piece of my "tether" to this world fraying. If I stayed phased too long, the world forgot I was there. The light wouldn't reflect off me. The air wouldn't move for me.
I was a ghost in the making.
"I just want to live," I whispered into the empty room. My voice was soft, the voice of a four-year-old, but the weight behind it was decades old. "I'll be a doctor. I'll heal their wounds. I'll stay out of the way. Just let me keep this family."
I thought of my father's loud laughter. I thought of my mother's gentle touch.
I didn't know that in six years, the golden prince's father would sign a death warrant for my house. I didn't know that the Ice Queen's mother would be the one to slide a dagger between my father's ribs.
And I didn't know that the Saintess, the girl who cried in the grass, had already seen me die a thousand times in a thousand different lives.
I pulled my hand out of the stone. I crawled into bed, shivering.
The countdown to the massacre had begun, and I was the only one who could hear the ticking