Alden von Astra — POV
The darkness was absolute.
It wasn't the heavy, suffocating darkness of the Black Cell, thick with the metallic stench of my own blood and the creeping chill of an SS-ranker's sadism. This darkness was different. It was soft. Weightless. It felt like sinking into a deep, warm ocean where sound couldn't travel and pain was just a distant rumor.
My consciousness floated in that void, completely unmoored from my physical body. I knew I had limbs, but I couldn't feel them. I knew I had lungs, but I couldn't feel them drawing air. It was a terrifying, peaceful paralysis.
'Am I dead?' I wondered.
The thought lacked panic. If this was death, it was a hell of a lot more forgiving than my last few hours of life had been. But somehow, deep in the recesses of my awareness, a stubborn spark refused to extinguish. It told me I wasn't allowed to die yet. I still had unpaid debts.
And then, the void shifted.
Through the heavy silence, a sound pierced the veil. Footsteps. Light, measured, precise.
'Alden.'
The voice echoed through the empty space. It was calm, carrying the unmistakable chill of winter, yet laced with a fragility I had only heard once before.
Alisia.
The darkness peeled back, revealing a grey, misty expanse. And there she was. She stood a few meters away, her silver hair catching a light that didn't exist in this space. She looked exactly as she had in the garden, standing beneath the moonflowers.
But her back was to me.
'Alisia,' I tried to speak, but I had no mouth.
She began to walk away. Her steps were slow, deliberate, fading into the mist.
Panic, sudden and violent, flared in my chest.
'Do not leave me behind,' she had told me on the pier. She had used her one wish to ask me not to carry the burden alone. I had promised her. I had looked into her eyes and promised.
And now, I was the one who had disappeared. I was the one who had left her standing outside an iron door while I was dismantled.
She was walking away because I had failed.
'Wait!' I screamed internally, throwing every ounce of my phantom willpower forward. 'I'm still here! Alisia, wait!'
I reached out, my ghostly hand extending toward her retreating figure, desperate to grab the edge of her cloak, to feel the cold reality of her presence. But the mist swallowed her. The distance between us stretched into infinity. She was gone.
The shock of her absence hit me like a physical blow.
My eyes snapped open.
Or rather, one eye snapped open.
The left side of my face was enveloped in thick, rough bandages. Beneath the linen, there was a dull, throbbing ache—a hollow vacancy where my eye used to be. The phantom sensation of blinking on that side made my stomach churn. Right. Liam had taken that.
I took a breath. My chest hitched, the ribs grinding together with a sound like shifting gravel.
'Okay. Not dead. Definitely not dead. Death wouldn't hurt this much.'
My single, blurry, crimson eye tried to make sense of the world.
I wasn't in the pristine, sterile halls of the Academy. I wasn't in the blood-soaked horror of the Inquisition's basement.
The ceiling above me was made of exposed, aged wooden beams. Bunches of dried herbs—sage, lavender, and things I couldn't name—hung from the rafters, filling the air with a strong, earthy scent that completely masked the smell of my own ruined flesh. The walls were uneven, constructed from plastered stone and wood, bathed in the warm, golden light of late afternoon.
It looked exactly like my grandmother's old countryside house from my original world. For a wild second, I wondered if I had transmigrated back.
'No,' I realized, feeling the faint, sluggish trickle of ambient mana in the air. 'Still in Elderia. Just... far away from the monsters in white suits.'
I tried to move my hand. It felt like I was trying to lift a boulder with wet noodles. My fingers twitched, barely brushing against a coarse, scratchy blanket.
As I did, something caught my limited vision.
A small face popped up over the edge of the bed.
Chestnut hair tied in messy pigtails. Huge, obsidian-dark eyes wide with a mixture of terror and absolute awe. She couldn't have been more than ten years old.
We stared at each other.
I tried to offer a reassuring smile. Given the state of my face, it probably looked like a freshly exhumed corpse baring its teeth.
The little girl inhaled a massive breath.
"GRANDMA ELARA! HE WOKE UP!"
Her voice was deafening in the quiet cottage. She spun around, the heavy thud of her small boots echoing on the floorboards as she bolted toward another room.
I closed my eye, a dry, raspy chuckle vibrating in my chest, which immediately turned into a coughing fit. Every cough felt like a knife twisting between my ribs.
Footsteps approached—heavier, older, purposeful.
"Out of the way, Lily, let me see," a gruff, aged voice commanded.
An old woman leaned over me. She had skin like weathered parchment, etched with deep lines of a life lived out in the sun. Her hair was iron-grey, tied back under a simple kerchief, and her hands, resting on the edge of the bed, were calloused and stained with crushed herbs.
But her eyes were sharp. They assessed me not as a 'specimen,' but as a patient.
"Well, well," she murmured, pulling a small wooden stool closer and sitting down. "The dead boy decides to open an eye. I'll admit, child, I was ready to start digging a hole out back this morning."
I opened my mouth to speak. My throat was as dry as the Red Devil Forest's outer plains.
"Wa... water," I managed to croak. It sounded like tearing parchment.
"Lily, fetch the cup. The one with the willow bark steep," Elara ordered without taking her eyes off me.
A moment later, a wooden cup was brought to my lips. The water was lukewarm and tasted bitterly of tree bark, but it was the greatest thing I had ever consumed. It coated my raw throat, allowing me to finally swallow properly.
"Where..." I started, my voice still weak but legible.
"You're in Oakhaven," Elara said, taking the cup away. "A village that minds its own business, nestled deep in the mountains. Far away from wherever it is you came from. And judging by the state of you, you came from somewhere very, very bad."
I let my eye drift toward the ceiling. Oakhaven. I knew that name. It was the village near the coastal town where Alicia and I had gone for the festival.
'I teleported near here?' I thought, piecing the fragments together. 'The System must have dumped me at the last safe coordinate anchored in my recent memories.'
"You were a bag of crushed bones and flayed skin when my son brought you in," Elara continued, her tone blunt but laced with an undeniable undercurrent of relief. "Your mana veins were practically scorched black. Whoever did this to you... they didn't just want to kill you. They wanted to unmake you."
'Liam von Ravel,' I thought, the hatred flaring in my chest like a sudden, hot coal. 'I haven't forgotten, you bastard.'
"I did what I could with poultices and root magic," Elara said, adjusting the heavy quilt over my chest. "But I'll be honest with you, boy. My magic didn't save you. By all the laws of nature and mana, you should have expired before the sun set yesterday."
She leaned in closer, her voice dropping to a reverent whisper.
"It was a miracle. A genuine intervention from the Gods themselves. I watched your flesh knit itself together from the inside out, driven by some golden light I've never seen in my sixty years of healing. The Gods spared you, child. They have a purpose for you yet."
I stared at her earnest, weathered face.
'Gods,' I scoffed internally. 'If there are Gods in this world, they're sitting in a VIP lounge placing bets on my misery.'
I knew exactly what had saved me. It wasn't divine intervention. It was the desperate, catastrophic backlash of a System that refused to let an SS-ranker steal an innate EX-rank ability. It was the [SSS+ Luck] triggering a literal [Divine Judgment] to preserve its host.
But I wasn't going to tell an old village healer that I was a transmigrated anomaly carrying a world-breaking cheat code.
"Thank you," I rasped instead. "For taking me in. Both of you."
I glanced at the little girl, Lily, who was peeking out from behind Elara's skirt. I forced my eye to soften. "Sorry if I scared you."
Lily blinked, then shook her head vigorously. "You didn't scare me! You just looked like a smashed tomato!"
Elara swatted the girl's leg lightly. "Lily! Mind your manners. Go stir the broth. He needs sustenance, not your commentary."
As Lily scampered off, Elara stood up with a groan. "Rest. You've survived the impossible, but your body needs time to remember how to be a body again. I'll be back with food."
She walked toward the small kitchen area, leaving me alone with the crackling sound of the hearth.
I lay there in the quiet, the reality of my situation finally sinking in. I was alive. I was out of the Academy. I was far from the Inquisition.
But at what cost?
I slowly, agonizingly shifted my right arm. A sharp spike of pain shot from my shoulder to my fingertips, but I pushed through it. I brought my hand up to my chest.
I stared at it, my vision blurring slightly.
'I'm still here,' I promised the empty room. 'I'm broken, but I'm still here.'
I needed to know exactly how broken. I needed to see what the Arcane Leech had managed to steal before the Heavens dropped a nuclear payload on his head.
I closed my eye, focusing inward, searching for the familiar, cold hum of the interface.
'Status Window... Open.'
Nothing happened.
My heart skipped a beat. Had Liam actually taken it? Had he ripped the System out of my soul?
'Status Window,' I commanded again, pushing a tiny, pathetic fraction of my remaining willpower into the intent. 'Open.'
There was a sound in my head. Not the crisp, crystalline DING that usually accompanied the interface.
It sounded like grinding gears and shattering glass.
Sparks of red and gold light flickered erratically in my mind's eye, glitching and stuttering before finally resolving into a fractured, translucent screen. The blue interface was cracked, entire sections of text blacked out or corrupted with strange symbols.
[ D-D-DING! ]
The sound was distorted, echoing painfully in my skull.
[ SYSTEM ALERT: CRITICAL FAILURE ]
[ Host has sustained existential trauma. ]
[ System has faced Heaven's Punishment for failing to protect the Host from unauthorized Authority interference. ]
I stared at the glowing, fractured letters.
'Heaven's Punishment?' I thought, dumbfounded. 'So the lightning that hit Liam... it hit the System too? It penalized its own cheat for letting me get caught?'
The text stuttered, erasing itself and reforming line by agonizing line.
[ System Has Fractured because of the Heaven's Will. ]
[ Core functions: OFFLINE ]
[ Growth Acceleration: OFFLINE (Quarantined for repair) ]
[ SSS+ Luck: OFFLINE (Recharging causality reserves) ]
My stomach plummeted. Offline. Everything that made me capable of surviving the monsters of this world was gone. I was sitting here with a fraction of my A+ rank mana, inside a body that had been put through a meat grinder.
The screen flickered one last time, projecting a large, imposing red box in the center of my vision.
[ System is in rebooting process.... ]
[ All active skills, innate abilities, and system interventions are suspended until core reconstruction is complete. ]
[ Host must rely on innate biological recovery and manual mana circulation. ]
[ Time count Remains: 28 days, 19 hours, 13 minutes... 50 sec... 49 sec... 48 sec... ]
The screen dissolved into static and vanished entirely, leaving me staring at the wooden ceiling beams.
A month.
I was completely powerless, practically crippled, and stranded in a remote village for an entire month.
If the Inquisition tracked the spatial tear... if the demons found me... if anyone from the Academy came looking... I wouldn't even be able to stand up, let alone fight back. I was as vulnerable as the day I first woke up in this world, if not more so.
I let my head fall back against the pillow, staring at the dust motes dancing in the sunbeams.
"Well," I whispered to the quiet cottage, a bitter, exhausted smile touching my lips. "I guess I finally get to be a background character for a while."
I closed my remaining eye, listening to the sound of Lily stirring the broth in the next room.
Twenty-eight days.
'Wait for me, Alisia,' I thought, letting the exhaustion finally drag me back under. 'I just need a little time.'