CHAPTER 2 : Kael Maren
It lit up immediately.
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STUDENT IDENTIFICATION FILE
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Name : Kael Maren
Age : 17
Program : Hero Program — Year 1
School Rank: 2,041 / 2,055
Potential : F Rank
Profession : [Swordsmanship Lv.1]
Status : Enrolled
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He stared at the screen.
2,041 out of 2,055.
Ren Dover had been 1,750th. Bad, but not catastrophic. D-rank potential, mediocre but workable.
Kael Maren was 2,041st. Fourteen spots from the absolute bottom of the Lock's student roster. F-rank potential.
He knew every character in The Author's POV with a speaking role across the first 312 chapters. He had read the novel twice, followed chapter discussions obsessively, and could have reconstructed most of the character interaction diagrams from memory.
Kael Maren appeared in exactly zero chapters. Not a minor character. Not a background character. Not a character whose name was mentioned once in a crowd scene. Kael Maren did not exist in The Author's POV.
Which meant he was an extra so minor that the author — the actual author, Entrail_JI — had never felt the need to acknowledge his existence. The lock had two thousand and fifty-five students. Ren Dover was one of them. Kael Maren was another one, fourteen spots from the bottom, with F-rank potential, carrying a swordsmanship profession that matched the weapon he had apparently been training since before the story began.
He thought about what happened to extras in the early arcs of The Author's POV.
The dungeon arc. The party of five F-ranked heroes that Ren had found dying in the desert. Killed by a demon's Mindbreaker curse. Left to dehydrate in an F-rank dungeon with no ability to call for help.
F-rank.
He looked at the tablet again. At his own rank.
Then something else happened.
A sound.
Not a sound from the room. A sound from somewhere internal — like a notification chime that didn't have a source, that arrived in his awareness without going through his ears.
— ✦ —
╔══════════════════════════════════════╗
║ THRESHOLD SYSTEM ACTIVE ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════╣
║ HOST DETECTED ║
║ SOUL ORIGIN: External ║
║ VESSEL BODY: Kael Maren (Age 17) ║
║ VESSEL RANK: F ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════╣
║ WELCOME PACKAGE RECEIVED ║
║ ║
║ [SKILL GRANTED]: ║
║ Eclipse Thread Art — Beginner Scroll║
║ (Forms 1–3 Unlocked: Dormant) ║
║ ║
║ [ITEM GRANTED]: ║
║ System Store Access — ACTIVE ║
║ Starting Points: 0 SP ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════╣
║ NOTE: This system tracks personal ║
║ growth only. No inheritance powers. ║
║ No shadow extraction. No armies. ║
║ You earn what you bleed for. ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════╝
He read it twice.
He sat back in the chair.
The window showed an early morning sky — pale blue shifting toward gold. Somewhere outside, birds were doing what birds apparently still did even in a post-Cataclysm world. The window showed a dormitory courtyard below, concrete paths between grass, a few students already moving in the early hour.
He was in the Lock. Or close to it — the dorm buildings that flanked the main academy. One week before the first major canonical event he could place on a timeline: Kevin Voss's arrival at the Lock and the class placement exams. The chapter one of the actual story, the story he had read, was beginning. Ren Dover was out there somewhere — probably at Clayton Ridge right now, or on the train there, chasing the Seed of Limit. Kevin Voss was preparing to arrive.
And Kael Maren — whoever Kael Maren had been before Seojun's soul landed in his body — was seventeen years old, ranked 2,041st, F-rank potential, with a dormant sword style he'd just received as a gift from a system he didn't fully understand, sitting in a room he recognized from a novel.
He put his face in his hands.
He sat like that for a while.
The birds kept chirping.
—-----------------------------------
He found out what Kael Maren had owned by going through the wardrobe and the desk drawers methodically.
The wardrobe held: three pairs of plain trousers, four shirts, one training uniform (Lock-standard issue, dark grey with the academy's crest on the chest), one pair of boots, one pair of indoor shoes, one light jacket. All of it clean, nothing remarkable. The wardrobe smelled faintly of cedar.
The desk drawer held: a student ID card, a student card for public transport (Lock enrollment privilege), a thin wallet containing 3,200 U (United — the post-Cataclysm human currency), a phone (standard model, basic), and a folded sheet of paper that was a printed course schedule for first-year Hero Program students, standard track.
In the bottom drawer: a sword. Sheathed. Plain, no ornamentation. The scabbard was worn at the edges — used, not new. He picked it up and felt the weight of it in his hands, and discovered that his hands apparently knew what to do with it. His grip adjusted automatically. His wrist tracked the balance point without him thinking about it.
Kael Maren had trained with a sword. The calluses on the palms confirmed it. The body remembered.
He set the sword gently on the desk and opened the phone.
The phone worked. Standard apps — class schedule, academy news, student directory (access restricted), a mapping app, a monster encyclopedia. He opened the student directory and searched for his own name.
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KAEL MAREN — STUDENT PROFILE
Year: 1 | Hero Program
Dorm: Horned Sheep Block D, Room 14
Potential: F Rank
Emergency Contact: Maren, Lyra (Mother)
Scholarship: Partial (Academic Merit)
Notes: Transfer enrollment. Ashton City local.
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Transfer enrollment. Ashton City local.
Kael Maren had not come from another city. He was local — from Ashton itself, the human capital where the Lock was built. That was unusual enough to be notable. Most Lock students came from the other four border cities, because those cities bred warriors by necessity. Ashton was the safest city, relatively speaking, and tended to produce scholars and administrators rather than fighters.
An F-rank potential local who had fought hard enough to earn a partial scholarship and somehow passed the Lock's entrance criteria. That was the character whose body he was in.
He thought about that.
Then he went to the bathroom, splashed cold water on his face, and looked at himself in the mirror for a full minute.
The face looking back at him was seventeen years old. Average features — not striking, not unpleasant. The kind of face that didn't register in a crowd. Brown eyes. Slightly sharp jaw. A faint scar on the left eyebrow, old and clean — a training scar, probably. Dark hair cut at a length that suggested he'd been meaning to get it trimmed and hadn't gotten around to it.
A forgettable face. An anonymous face.
For an extra in a story that killed people without acknowledging their existence, that might be the most valuable thing he had.
—-----------------------
He spent the first hour sitting on the bed and thinking.
He wasn't panicking. He noticed that with a kind of distant interest. He had expected to panic — he'd read enough isekai novels to know that panic was the expected response, that there were usually chapters of disorientation, denial, bargaining with reality. He didn't feel those things. He felt cold, and specific, and very, very focused.
He thought it might be because he had read The Author's POV. Ren Dover had reacted to his own transmigration with unusual calm, and the narrative had explained it: he'd hated his previous life, had given up on it in a way so complete that dying and arriving somewhere else had felt more like relief than horror. Seojun didn't hate his life. But he had spent five years living primarily inside other people's stories, and now he was inside one, and some part of his brain had simply — accepted it. Filed it under 'novel logic' and moved on to the practical questions.
The practical questions were:
One. What happened to the original Kael Maren? Was the soul displaced? Was there a previous resident of this body, and if so, where had they gone? He didn't know. He had no way to know. He filed this question under 'cannot answer, continue'.
Two. What did he know about the next week's events in The Author's POV? He ran through the timeline carefully. Ren Dover was currently retrieving the Seed of Limit from Clayton Ridge. He would return to the dorm before the academy's formal start. The Lock would begin its first semester with placement exams. Kevin Voss would arrive and score SSS, creating the first wave of shock through the student body. The first canonical death among background characters in the academy would occur during —
He stopped.
The first canonical death.
He didn't remember the exact chapter. It was somewhere in the mid-20s to 30s. A student from the lower ranks — an extra, faceless — who was pushed into taking a dungeon request above their level because of debt pressure from an upperclassman. The student died in the dungeon. It was a plot beat to establish how brutal the academy's social hierarchy was, how the weak were exploited.
He was in the lower ranks. The bottom fourteen, specifically.
He had one week.
He opened the system notification in his mind — it was still there, glowing at the periphery of his awareness the way notifications sometimes stayed visible on a closed phone screen.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ THRESHOLD SYSTEM v1.0 ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ HOST STATUS CHECK ║
║ ║
║ Name : Kael Maren ║
║ Level : 1 ║
║ Rank : F ║
║ EXP : 0 / 500 ║
║ ║
║ STATS: ║
║ Strength : F (12) ║
║ Agility : F (14) ║
║ Vitality : F (10) ║
║ Intelligence : F+ (17) ║
║ Mana : F (11) ║
║ Luck : G+ (6) ║
║ ║
║ SKILLS: ║
║ [Eclipse Thread Art — Dormant] ║
║ Unlock Condition: 3 days training ║
║ ║
║ SYSTEM STORE: 0 SP available ║
║ SP earned via: Monster kills, quests, ║
║ achievement milestones ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════╝
He looked at the intelligence stat for a long moment. F+ — slightly above the base F rank. That was Kael Maren's original edge. Not strength, not speed, not mana. Intelligence.
And he had the foreknowledge of someone who had read 312 chapters of this world's future.
That was his real starting position.
He thought about what Ren Dover had done in his first week. Seed of Limit. Keiki style. Two major acquisitions that gave him a structural advantage over every other student at the Lock. Ren had the advantage of being the author , he knew where everything was hidden, which characters would become important, which items were undervalued.
Seojun knew the story from a reader's perspective. He knew events, outcomes, character arcs, and turning points. He didn't know the specific locations of hidden items. He didn't have the intimate author's knowledge of every world rule. He had the next best thing: pattern recognition, arc structure, and the specific, obsessive attention to detail that came from reading the same chapters twice.
One week before the academy starts.
One week before Kevin Voss's SSS score would reorganize the social hierarchy.
One week before Ren Dover would return from the mountains and begin his careful navigation of the Lock's political landscape.
He got off the bed. He put on the training uniform. He laced up the boots. He picked up the sword from the desk and buckled it to the plain leather belt he found on the wardrobe's inside hook.
He had no Seed of Limit. He had no five-star sword manual hidden in a mountain. He had no red book that showed him the protagonist's real-time experiences.
He had a system, a sword style he didn't yet know how to use, and three thousand two hundred U.
He walked out of Room 14 in Horned Sheep Block D, closed the door quietly behind him, and went to find the academy training grounds.
—----------