Day two.
I woke up at dawn because the pain wouldn't let me sleep past it.
Not the mana core—that had settled into its baseline grind, the constant low-level ache I was starting to suspect was just... how this body felt. All the time. Every day. The way some people have bad knees or a trick shoulder, Caelum Ashworth had a cracked engine in his chest that reminded him it was broken every time he breathed.
No, the pain that woke me was muscular. My legs. My arms. My back. Everything I'd used yesterday to walk two hundred meters and climb one staircase was now screaming at me with the righteous fury of muscles that had been pushed beyond their capacity and wanted me to know, in detail, how they felt about it.
Endurance: 6.
I was beginning to understand what that number actually meant. It meant that an activity most people performed without conscious thought—walking—was, for this body, roughly equivalent to sprinting. The metabolic cost of existing upright was already more than the system could handle.
Which meant training would be...
...fun.
I sat up. Slowly. Everything protested. I ignored the protests the way I'd spent twenty-two years ignoring things that hurt—by noting them clinically and moving on. Pain is data. Data can be categorized. And once something's been put in a file, it loses its power to surprise you.
The tonic from last night had helped. The black veins were at their minimum—visible, but faded, more gray than black, retreating toward my elbows. The core ache was manageable. I had, by my rough estimation, a window of maybe three to four hours after the tonic where this body was at its functional best.
"Functional best" being a relative term, since the functional best of an F-minus was still objectively terrible.
But it was a window.
And I intended to use it.
***
Here's what I knew about mana.
Almost nothing.
Here's what I could infer.
More than nothing.
The status panel gave me numbers: MNA: 4. That was my mana capacity. CTR: 3. That was my control. Ice affinity at 2%, grade F. A cracked core at negative eighty percent efficiency.
Yesterday, touching the frost on the training dummy had made the core react. A soft pulse. A tingle in my fingertips. The veins darkened momentarily.
This told me several things.
One: mana was real and physical. Not metaphorical, not spiritual—it was a measurable force that existed in the body and interacted with the external world. The core was its source. The veins were its pathways. The tingling was its movement.
Two: ice specifically triggered a response. Not the cold air, not the stone, not the wind—the frost. The frozen water. My 2% affinity meant I had a connection to that element, and proximity activated it.
Three: the activation hurt. Slightly. The veins darkening meant corruption was engaged. Using mana, even passively, came with a cost. Using it actively, with a cracked core...
I could guess what that would look like.
But guessing wasn't data. And I needed data.
***
I got dressed in seven minutes.
Four minutes faster than yesterday. Not because I was stronger—I wasn't—but because I'd figured out the buttons. The trick was to brace my forearms against my knees to stop the trembling, then use my thumbs instead of my fingers. Slower per button, but fewer drops.
Small optimization. Marginal gain.
But marginal gains were all I had.
I ate the breakfast the servant brought—different servant, older woman, same avoidance behavior, same tray placement, no repetition this time—drank the tonic, and waited for the warmth to spread through my chest.
Then I went outside.
***
The courtyard at dawn was different from the courtyard at midday.
Quieter. Colder. The sky was a pale gray that hadn't decided yet whether it wanted to be overcast or merely threatening, and the snow had stopped overnight, leaving the training grounds covered in a thin, unmarked white layer that crunched under my boots.
The air tasted like iron and pine.
I was alone. The guards from yesterday were nowhere visible—probably on shift rotations, or wherever guards went when they weren't mocking dying teenagers. The servants were busy in the kitchens. The compound had the eerie stillness of a place that was full of people but hadn't woken up yet.
Good.
I didn't want an audience for this.
I walked to the training grounds. Slowly. One hand on the wall whenever a wall was available, bracing against pillars when it wasn't. The distance from the main building to the training yard was maybe seventy meters, and it took me nine minutes.
Nine minutes for seventy meters.
I noted the time. The distance. The number of rest stops—three. Duration of each: thirty seconds, forty-five seconds, one minute. The progression was getting longer, which meant fatigue was accumulating faster than I was covering ground.
Data. Data. Data.
The training yard was a flat rectangle of packed earth, bordered by low stone walls on three sides and an open face that looked out toward the mountains. Weapon racks lined the left wall—swords, spears, things I didn't have names for. The training dummies stood in two rows, wooden and stone, most of them unmarked. The one that had been split by the ice disc yesterday was still there. Nobody had replaced it.
I walked to the weapon rack first.
Swords. Different sizes, different weights, different lengths. I reached for the smallest one—a short blade, maybe sixty centimeters, with a plain grip and no decoration.
I lifted it.
Or tried.
The weight wasn't the problem. It couldn't have been more than two kilograms—a weight that, in my previous body, I could have held one-handed without thinking. But this body's STR was 8, and its END was 6, and its arms were wasted sticks of bone and corrupted vein, and the moment I raised the blade to chest height, my wrist started shaking.
I held it.
One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three—
Four—
Five—six—sev—
The sword hit the ground.
Seven seconds.
I picked it up. Tried again.
Six seconds.
Again.
Five.
The muscles weren't just weak. They were degenerating mid-effort, like a battery draining faster than it could charge. Each rep was shorter than the last, and by the fourth attempt, I couldn't raise the blade above my waist.
I set the sword back on the rack.
Leaned against the stone wall. Breathed.
'Okay. Swordsmanship is not happening today.'
'Or this week.'
'Possibly this month.'
I looked at my hands. Trembling. The black veins had darkened slightly from the exertion. Not much—a shade—but the direction was wrong. Physical effort was making the corruption worse.
Which meant I couldn't train the body without feeding the thing that was destroying it.
...
Wonderful.
'Think, Jiwon. Think.'
I couldn't build strength because the body broke down faster than it recovered. I couldn't use mana because the core was cracked and corruption would accelerate. I couldn't just rest because six weeks wasn't enough time to rest and there was nothing to rest toward.
Every path forward went through a wall.
...Unless I was looking at it wrong.
I'd touched the frost yesterday. The core had reacted. Softly. A tingle. The veins darkened a shade.
But the corruption from that had been less than the corruption from lifting a sword for seven seconds.
Physical effort: high corruption increase, fast degradation.
Mana contact: low corruption increase, slow degradation.
If that ratio held...
'Mana isn't the problem. Mana might be the only option.'
***
I found frost.
It wasn't hard. The compound sat on a mountain, the temperature was below freezing, and every stone surface in the training yard had a thin layer of ice crystals clinging to its northern face. I crouched beside the low wall—carefully, because crouching was its own challenge with an END of 6—and pressed my palm flat against the frost-covered stone.
Cold.
Immediate. Biting. The kind of cold that doesn't build gradually but arrives all at once, sinking through the skin like it's been waiting for permission.
And—
There.
The core pulsed.
Same as yesterday. That soft, tentative contraction behind my sternum. Not the grinding agony of a cracked engine—something quieter. Something almost... reaching. Like a broken hand trying to close around something it recognized.
The tingle started in my palm. Spread to my fingertips. Faint. So faint I'd have missed it if I weren't paying attention with everything I had.
I kept my hand there.
Ten seconds. The tingle held. My fingers were going numb from the cold, but the mana sensation—the electric hum beneath the skin—remained constant.
Twenty seconds. The core pulsed again. Slightly stronger. Still soft.
Thirty seconds. Something shifted.
I don't know how to describe it. Not physically—physically, nothing changed. My hand was on the stone. The frost was under my palm. The cold was the cold. But somewhere inside, in that space where the mana core lived, something... aligned. Briefly. Like two gears that had been grinding suddenly catching each other's teeth for a half-rotation before slipping apart again.
The frost under my palm melted.
Not all of it. Not dramatically. A patch the size of a coin, directly beneath the center of my palm, went from white to wet in the space of a breath.
Then the core spasmed, the alignment broke, and a lance of pain shot up my arm and into my shoulder.
I pulled my hand back.
"Shit—"
The first word I'd said out loud since asking the servant about Greymoor. It came out raw and surprised and entirely Park Jiwon, not Caelum Ashworth.
I looked at my palm. The skin was red from cold. The black veins had crept forward maybe half a centimeter. The tingling was gone, replaced by a dull, throbbing ache that sat in my wrist like a bruise.
But the frost was melted.
A coin-sized patch. Less than a centimeter of ice, dissolved by... what? By me? By whatever this body's cracked, broken, barely-functional mana system had managed to push through a 2% affinity and an 80% efficiency loss?
I stared at the wet spot on the stone.
'That's not nothing.'
'It's almost nothing. But it's not nothing.'
I pressed my hand back to the wall.
Same process. Cold. Wait. Core pulse. Tingle. Focus.
This time: forty-five seconds. The alignment came, held for a fraction longer—
Frost melted. Slightly larger patch. Maybe the size of a two-hundred-won coin instead of a hundred-won.
Core spasm. Pain. Pull back.
Recovery: two minutes.
Third attempt. Fifty seconds. Coin-sized melt. Spasm. Pull back.
Fourth attempt. The core didn't respond. I pressed my hand to the frost and nothing happened. Dead. Empty. Like pressing a button on a remote with no batteries.
MNA: 4.
Four units of mana. I'd used them. All of them. Three coin-sized patches of melted frost and I was empty.
I slid down the wall and sat on the frozen ground.
My breath came in clouds. My hand ached. The core was silent—not grinding, not pulsing, just... off. Like a machine that had done everything it could and had nothing left to give.
'Three reps. That's my limit. Three attempts at the most basic, passive mana interaction possible before the tank is empty.'
'...'
'The people in this courtyard throw fire that spirals three meters high. They forge ice discs that split stone.'
'And I melted a coin.'
I almost laughed.
Didn't. Couldn't. The muscles for it had apparently atrophied along with everything else.
But the impulse was there, and it was the first time I'd felt an impulse that wasn't exhaustion or pain since arriving in this body. So I noted it. Filed it.
Progress.
***
I was still sitting on the ground, twenty minutes into a recovery break that my body showed no signs of ending, when I heard footsteps.
Not the servant shuffle. Not the guard swagger.
These were measured. Even. Controlled. The footsteps of someone who was aware of exactly how much space they occupied and had chosen to occupy precisely that much and no more.
I looked up.
A man stood at the entrance to the training yard. Tall. Lean. Dark hair cut short, military-style. His face was the kind of face that had aged past handsome and arrived at severe—sharp cheekbones, hard jawline, a scar that ran from his left temple to just above his ear in a faded white line.
His eyes were gray. Not the gray of clouds or stone—the gray of something that had been heated past color and cooled into something harder.
He wore the Ashworth crest on his collar. Not a servant's collar—a different uniform. Heavier. Darker. Something between military dress and formal attire.
He was looking at the wall.
Specifically, at the three wet spots where the frost had melted.
Then he looked at me.
Sitting on the ground. Legs useless. Hand still red from the cold. Black veins visible on both wrists. Seventeen years old, F-minus, four mana, chronic depression, looking like something that had crawled out of a medical waste bin and was trying to pass as a human being.
His expression didn't change. Not contempt. Not amusement. Not pity.
Assessment.
The cold, precise evaluation of someone who measured things for a living and had just encountered something that didn't fit the measurements.
He looked at the wet spots again. Then at me. Then at the sword rack—where the short blade I'd tried to lift was slightly out of position from when I'd replaced it.
"The sword first," he said. "Then the wall."
It wasn't a question.
I said nothing. Watched him.
He walked to the wall. Crouched. Ran a finger over one of the wet patches. Brought his finger to his face. Looked at it the way a chemist looks at a sample.
"How long did you hold?"
"...Thirty seconds. Forty-five. Fifty."
"Three attempts?"
"...Yes."
"And the core?"
"Empty."
He stood. Looked at me again. That same expression—the absence of an expression, really. A blank ledger waiting for numbers.
"Your core is cracked."
"I know."
"Stage one corruption. Spreading."
"I know."
"Four mana."
"I know."
"You should be in bed."
"..."
"You should be in bed," he repeated, and the way he said it was different from the way anyone else had said anything to me since I'd woken up. Not an order. Not a dismissal. A fact, delivered with the clinical neutrality of someone stating a mathematical truth.
"Instead, you're sitting in a training yard at dawn, in freezing temperatures, having used your entire mana reserve to melt three patches of frost."
...
"Why."
Not "why are you doing this." Not "what's the point." Just: why. A single word that expected an answer and didn't care if the answer was stupid as long as it was honest.
I looked at him.
"Because the alternative is Greymoor."
Something moved behind his eyes. Barely. A microshift in the gray, like a cloud passing behind a window.
"...Hm."
He turned. Walked three steps toward the exit. Stopped.
"The frost exercise is correct."
I blinked.
"Your core is cracked. Physical training will accelerate the corruption faster than the tonic can manage. Mana exercises—passive ones, external stimulus, short duration—will stress the core less while maintaining whatever pathways are still open."
He was talking to the air in front of him. Not turning around.
"Thirty-second holds. Three per day. Not four. Not five. Three. Morning, after the tonic peaks. If the veins advance past the mid-forearm, stop. If you cough blood, stop. If the core goes silent for more than six hours, come find me."
"..."
"Professor Hagen. East wing. Third floor."
He walked away.
I sat on the frozen ground and watched him disappear through the archway, his footsteps fading with the same measured, even precision they'd arrived with.
Professor Hagen.
East wing. Third floor.
The first person in this entire estate who had looked at me, assessed me, and responded with something other than avoidance, contempt, or calculated cruelty.
Not kindness. I wasn't stupid enough to call it that. He hadn't smiled. Hadn't offered encouragement. Hadn't said a single word that wasn't purely functional.
But he'd looked at the wet spots on the wall.
And he'd seen something worth three sentences of instruction.
***
I made it back to my room in fourteen minutes.
Three minutes faster than yesterday's outbound trip, despite the return being uphill and my legs being worse. The difference wasn't physical. It was routing—I'd mapped a shorter path, cutting through a side corridor I'd noticed on the way out, avoiding the main hall where the guards had been.
Optimization. Marginal gain.
I collapsed on the bed. Ate the midday meal when it arrived. Drank the tonic.
Then I pulled up the status panel.
Same numbers.
STR: 8. AGI: 12. END: 6. INT: 47. MNA: 4. CTR: 3.
Nothing had changed.
...But something had.
I couldn't point to it on the panel. Couldn't quantify it in numbers or stats or percentage points. But somewhere between the seven-second sword hold and the three patches of melted frost and the fourteen-minute walk back, something had shifted.
Not in the body. In me.
'Tomorrow, three holds. Thirty seconds each. After the tonic.'
'Day after, the same.'
'Day after that, the same.'
'Until the core is empty or the six weeks are up or the corruption takes me.'
'Whichever comes first.'
...
I closed my eyes.
The static didn't buzz.
The room was quiet.
And for the first time since Park Jiwon died on a floor in Gwanak-gu, the silence didn't feel like emptiness.
It felt like the space before a first step.
...
Don't misunderstand me. I wasn't hopeful.
Hope is for people with better odds and shorter rap sheets of failure.
But I wasn't nothing, either.
And that was new.