The Royal Academy of Vipers didn't look like a school. It looked like God's middle finger.
It floated two thousand feet above the city of Ashenford—a mass of white marble and gold spires perched on the **Zenith**, a gravity-defying island that hung in the sky like an insult to everyone who lived in its shadow. Literally everyone. Zenith's shadow blanketed the slums from dawn to noon, a daily reminder of who mattered.
Silas stood at the base of the **Ascension Steps**, staring up.
Three thousand students were shoving into the registration queue around him. The noise was obscene—laughter, bragging, the crackle of teenagers flexing their mana for each other like dogs pissing on lampposts. The air stank of cheap cologne, nervous sweat, and ozone.
The Steps themselves were a con.
They spiraled upward without supports, each marble slab floating six inches from the next, held in place by enchantments older than the kingdom. Beautiful. Elegant. And rigged. The stairs responded to your mana core. Strong core? Smooth ride. Weak core? The stairs turned into a treadmill. No core at all, and they'd dump you into a moat full of **Crest-Eels** - blind, electric parasites that the Academy kept "for pest control."
Nobody had cleaned the moat in thirty years.
In his past life, Silas had watched a farm boy from the southern villages step onto the first stair and get launched backward so hard he broke his collarbone on the cobblestones. The crowd had laughed. A professor had filed a report. The boy went home with a sling and a new understanding of where he stood in the world.
That boy had later died in Trench 22, holding a spear he'd never been trained to use.
Silas shook the memory off. He didn't have time for ghosts. Not today.
"Move it, peasant!"
A shoulder slammed into him—hard, angled to knock him sideways into the gutter. It was a practiced move. The kind of hit designed to humiliate, not injure.
Silas didn't stumble. His body shifted on instinct—weight back, hips absorbing, back foot pivoting. The collision turned into a half-step. Smooth. Natural. The kind of thing that looked like clumsiness unless you'd spent ten years in a war zone learning how to stay on your feet when the ground was trying to kill you.
He looked up.
Blue velvet robes. Blonde hair styled with the kind of magical gel that cost more than a commoner's weekly wages. A sneer that had been rehearsed in front of a mirror until it sat on his face like a birthmark.
**Garret Stormwind.**
Third son of a minor Duke. Circle 2 mana. D-rank combat ability. In Silas's past life, Garret died in Year Two—choked by a swamp vine during a field trip because he refused to call for help from a commoner. Silas remembered stepping over his bloated body to grab a map, and thinking: *What a stupid way to die.*
But that was the old timeline. Here, Garret was alive, seventeen, and radiating the unearned confidence of a boy who'd never been told no by anyone with fewer than three syllables in their surname.
"My apologies, Lord Stormwind," Silas said, bowing his head just enough. "Didn't see you in the crush. My fault."
*I didn't see you.* He was dressed like a parade float.
Garret blinked. He'd wanted a reaction—a flinch, a glare, something to justify escalation. Instead he got surrender, and surrender was boring. You can't slap a man who's already on his knees.
"Hmph. Keep your eyes down where they belong, commoner."
He strode past. Three boot lickers trailed behind him, one of them kicking mud onto Silas's boots as a parting gift.
Silas watched them go.
He wasn't angry. He'd stopped feeling angry at people like Garret around the time he turned thirty and realized that the truly dangerous people in this world didn't announce themselves with velvet robes and hair gel.
What he felt was more useful than anger.
He felt *accounting.*
*Garret Stormwind. Mana: Circle 2, low end. Family controls the Silver Mines. Political bloc: Conservative Noble. Combat skill: laughable. Personal value: zero. Asset value: his family's money. Filing priority: low.
Keep breathing, kid. I might need your wallet later.*
Silas touched his chest. The **Paradox Engine** hummed against his ribs—a warm, steady pulse that matched his heartbeat. He'd gotten used to it. You get used to anything, even an impossible artifact lodged inside your sternum by a dead god's parting gift.
He glanced at the interface - the faint, translucent text that floated at the edge of his vision. Only he could see it.
**[CDI: 3.8% — Stable]**
**[Mana Core: Circle 1 (Shattered/Reformed)]**
**[Physical: Malnourished. Underweight. Dehydrated.]**
**[Objective: Infiltrate. Observe. Acquire. Do NOT get noticed.]**
CDI. Causality Deviation Index. The number that measured how much Silas's existence was screwing with the timeline. At 3.8%, the Gods' surveillance systems would chalk him up as statistical noise—a rounding error in the cosmic ledger.
At 7%, they'd start looking.
At 10%, they'd send something to *fix* the error.
He could've broken Garret's nose just now. Three seconds. One pivot, two pressure points, one open-palm strike to the bridge. The boy would've gone down like a sack of expensive laundry.
But breaking noses was loud. Loud drew eyes. Eyes drew questions. Questions drew reports. Reports climbed the chain until they reached something that didn't have eyes at all - just a vast, cold, computational hunger for order.
*Attention is death.*
He muttered it like a prayer. Because in this world, it was.
If the Church's Assessment Division tagged him as a "Prodigy"—if a single professor noticed that a Circle 1 commoner from the outer provinces moved like a war veteran—they'd pull him into the Elite Track. Press conferences. Handler assignments. Weekly reports to the Capital. And those reports, eventually, would drift upward to desks that weren't made of wood.
So he aimed low.
He didn't want Rank 1. Rank 1 was a cage made of gold and scrutiny. Tea with the Headmaster. Mandatory duels with jealous nobles. Recruitment posters with your face on them. And worst of all—first draft pick when the Gate cracked open and the demons started pouring through.
He wanted **Rank 500**.
Rank 500 was the kid nobody remembered at graduation. The one who shook the Headmaster's hand and walked into a logistics desk job and was never seen again. Rank 500 didn't get profiled. Rank 500 didn't get reported. Rank 500 was a ghost.
Ghosts could go anywhere.
"Papers!"
A guard at the gatehouse—beer gut straining against ceremonial silver, the spear in his hand more decorative than dangerous—pointed the tip at Silas's chest.
Silas handed over his registration scroll. Crinkled parchment, cheap ink, the seal of a village registrar who'd processed three hundred identical forms that week and stopped caring around form number forty.
"Silas Vane." The guard held the scroll between two fingers, like it might be contagious. "Farm boy from *Ashenvale*. And you think you can climb the Steps?"
"Hope, sir." Silas gave him a smile—empty, harmless, the smile of a boy with no ambition and no future. A mask so complete it had its own heartbeat. "Just hope."
The guard snorted. "Hope doesn't pay tuition, kid. Don't puke on the marble."
Silas stepped onto the first stair.
The Academy's magic hit him like walking into a wall of wet sand. It was *heavy*—oppressive, arrogant enchantment designed to make you feel small. Gravity thickened. His bones ached. Each step demanded effort, and the effort was the point. The Academy wanted you gasping and humbled before you even reached the front door.
Around him, students were showing off. Auras flared. Mana crackled. A noble girl had conjured golden butterflies that orbited her head. A boy with white hair was levitating three inches off the stairs, hands in his pockets, bored. A group of merchant-class kids were comparing the luminosity of their cores like boys comparing bicep measurements.
Silas kept his core locked down. Compressed. Dense and dark and hidden, like a knife in a boot. On the Academy's scanners, he'd read as a Circle 1 with a cracked foundation—the kind of student they admitted for the tuition fee, not the talent.
He climbed. Slowly. Deliberately. Sweating like an ordinary boy on an extraordinary staircase.
*Let them sparkle,* he thought.
He looked up at the Zenith. White marble blazing in the morning sun. Gold spires catching the light. A monument to everything he planned to dismantle from the inside.
*I'll be the mud.*
***