The last thing Kang Junho remembered was the loading screen.
Specifically, the spinning icon in the corner of it — that smug little circle that had been mocking him for eleven hours straight as the update for *Epoch of Calamities* downloaded on his ancient laptop. He'd fallen asleep on his desk waiting for it. Coffee gone cold. Ramen untouched. His last waking thought had been a vague, bitter hope that the 47GB patch was worth it.
It was not, as it turned out, the last thing he experienced.
Because now he was lying face-down in cold mud, and something very large was breathing very close to his ear.
He opened one eye.
A warhorse — seventeen hands at least, black as a funeral — was staring at him with the particular contempt that only large animals and ex-girlfriends could truly achieve.
Junho closed his eye again.
*Think,* he told himself. *Think like a rational adult.*
He catalogued what he knew. He was in a body that was not his own. His hands, visible through the mud, were wrong — longer, older, with a thin white scar running across the right palm in a crescent shape. He could feel unfamiliar muscle memory in every limb, a coiled, practiced tension that spoke of decades of sword training. And somewhere in the back of his skull, like a folder he hadn't opened yet, sat the memories of the man whose body this was.
He opened the folder.
The memories hit him like cold water.
*Raethen Voss. Age forty-three. Former Emperor of the Aurelian Sovereignty. Abdicated eleven years ago following the Ashveil Incident. Currently resides in self-imposed exile at the edge of the Greywood as a "retired farmer," which was a lie so threadbare it was essentially see-through. Cause of death: three crossbow bolts in the back, administered by a bounty hunter in the employ of the current emperor. Time of death: approximately thirty seconds ago, if the cooling sensation spreading across his back was any indication.*
Junho opened both eyes.
He pushed himself upright, and his hand found the crossbow bolt embedded in his lower back. He pulled it out with a grunt that he was proud of — it was a very dignified grunt — and stared at it.
Then he stared at the blood.
Then he stared at his hands again, which were not shaking, because Raethen Voss's hands did not shake. Apparently that was just a thing about this body. Its hands did not shake. He filed that away.
"Still alive," said a voice, and it was not a pleasant one.
The bounty hunter was twenty paces away, already nocking a second bolt. He was a big man, built like a granary, with the flat eyes of someone who had stopped seeing targets as people a long time ago. Behind him, two more shapes moved through the treeline.
*Three of them,* Junho noted. *And I'm bleeding from three entry wounds. Raethen's memories say he was a sword saint before his abdication. His body should be able to handle this, theoretically.*
He looked at the sword at his hip.
He looked at the crossbow being raised at his head.
*I played this game for four thousand hours,* he reminded himself. *I know exactly what happens next.*
And he did. Because this was a scene he recognized.
In *Epoch of Calamities,* this was it. This was the death of Raethen Voss, the exiled emperor — a four-line footnote in the game's lore compendium, tucked under a subsection titled "Historical Figures of Minimal Relevance." He was a nobody. A background detail. A name on a wall in a museum that the camera panned past in the opening cinematic.
He was supposed to die here, in the mud, three weeks before the game's actual story began.
The crossbow released.
Raethen Voss's body moved before Junho's brain caught up with it — a sidestep so fluid it felt like water finding a gap in stone, and the bolt sang past his cheek close enough to shave him. The sword was in his hand. He didn't remember drawing it. The muscle memory had simply... decided.
It took eleven seconds.
He wasn't proud of how he knew that, but he'd once written a fifteen-thousand word forum post about Raethen Voss's implied combat capabilities based on three lines of flavor text, and he'd calculated, theoretically, that a sword saint of his caliber could end an engagement like this in under fifteen seconds.
Eleven was better than expected.
He stood in the sudden quiet of the aftermath, chest heaving, the three men unconscious in the mud around him — alive, which surprised him somewhat, since the body had clearly been aiming to kill — and he looked at his own hands.
The crescent scar. The unfamiliar knuckles.
"Okay," Junho said, in a voice that was deeper than his own and carried the ghost of an authority he had never personally earned. "Okay. I'm Raethen Voss."
The horse looked at him.
"Don't," he said to it.
---
He found the farmhouse half a mile into the Greywood, exactly where Raethen's memories said it would be. It was modest to the point of insult for a man who had once commanded seventeen legions — two rooms, a vegetable patch that was losing its war against the local deer population, and a cellar that contained, inexplicably, enough preserved food to outlast a siege.
Junho sat at the single table and did not panic.
He was very deliberate about the not-panicking. He acknowledged the panic — it was there, enormous and structural, like a wall he was choosing not to look at directly — and he set it aside, and he thought.
He was in the body of a dead side character.
Not just any side character. *The* side character. The one that every lore-obsessed player of *Epoch of Calamities* had argued about in forums for years, because Raethen Voss made no sense. His lore entries contradicted each other. His canonical death was suspicious. His timeline of abdication didn't line up with the Ashveil Incident if you cross-referenced the in-game history books. And his supposed "retirement" at the edge of the Greywood placed him within forty miles of where, three weeks later, the game's story would begin.
Specifically, where *she* would appear.
Junho pressed his palms flat against the table and breathed.
Lira Ashveil.
The first of the Seven Calamities.
In the game, she was a catastrophe. The girl who would, over the course of the story, accidentally detonate a city, collapse two dynasties, and become — depending on which ending the player achieved — either the world's destroyer or its unwilling salvation. She was sixteen years old. She had no control over her power. She had no teacher. She had nobody, because her entire village was going to burn down in nineteen days, and she was going to run, and she was going to run *right through the Greywood.*
Raethen Voss's Greywood.
Junho looked at his hands for a long time.
In the game, there was a hidden ending. One that required a nearly impossible chain of prerequisites — one so obscure that he had only found it after two years of investigation. In that ending, a single line of dialogue suggested, obliquely, that the Seven Calamities had once had a teacher. A figure referred to only as "the old emperor." A teacher who had, apparently, taught them not just to fight but to *hold*.
The developers had never confirmed it. The line had never been expanded on.
But Junho had always believed it was Raethen.
He looked up at the low ceiling of the farmhouse.
"I'm already here," he said, to nobody in particular. "I'm already in his body. I already know the story."
He thought about Lira Ashveil, running through the dark with fire she couldn't control.
He thought about the other six. He knew all their names. All their tragedies. All the specific, devastating moments in their childhoods that turned them into weapons pointed at the world.
He knew where every single one of them would be.
Something settled in his chest — not calm, exactly, but something with the shape of calm. A decision crystalizing.
"Raethen Voss," he said again, tasting the name. "Former Emperor. Sword saint. Dead man." He paused. "Farmer."
He stood up, walked to the window, and looked out at the vegetable patch that was losing to the deer.
"I should probably fix that fence," he said. "She's going to need to eat something when she gets here."
The forest gave no response.
Nineteen days.
He had nineteen days to become the kind of man who could look a future calamity in the eye and say: *I know what you are. I know what you're going to become. And I'm going to make sure you choose what that means.*
He rolled up his sleeves — Raethen Voss's sleeves, long and rough with old calluses — and went to find a hammer.
---
*In the capital, three weeks later, a historian would add a brief addendum to the record of Raethen Voss's death: "Remains unrecovered. Bounty hunters report combat injuries. Case closed."*
*The emperor would not think about it again.*
*He should have.*
---
**[End of Chapter 1]**