A few minutes earlier.
That familiar blurring of consciousness — and when his vision cleared, Vincent was standing in an unfamiliar room.
The place was lavish. Every piece of furniture, every painting on the wall, every decorative object on every surface quietly announced the wealth of whoever lived here.
Especially the enormous luminous pearl set into the ceiling, doing the work of a light fixture — that alone would have been a treasure in the wizarding world.
He looked down at the slender fingers of his current hand, curled them slowly. "The soul-weakness is still there. But barely. This body's strength is masking it." He let out a quiet breath. "She's in my body by now, I expect. Hopefully she's watching the recording and staying put."
"I really don't need another surprise waiting for me when I get back."
He shook his head, straightened up on the sofa, and noticed for the first time what he was holding: a thick sheaf of parchment in his left hand, and in his right, a faint residue of ash — as though something had been burned.
He wasn't sure what the ash was. Rather than brushing it away carelessly, he walked to the dressing table and shook it carefully onto the surface. He looked up — and found himself in the mirror.
The filthy shirt from last time had been replaced with clean clothes: a buttoned shirt, a jacket, cream trousers. The shoes, as before, were out of frame. But the whole outfit, paired with that neatly cut short hair—
Smart. Striking, even.
High enough baseline to pull off anything, clearly.
"Hm?"
The deep red moonlight coming through the window caught him off guard. By the three-day exchange schedule, it should still be daytime. He frowned and turned his attention to the parchment in his left hand.
The script was nothing he'd ever studied. And yet, looking at it now, he understood every word.
If you can read this, the scroll has already taken effect. For the next three days, you will have full fluency in Ruen — the language you're currently reading. Listening, reading, speaking, and writing. It isn't my native language, but it has the largest number of speakers.
Vincent was genuinely awed. Whatever kind of scroll did this, it put both magic and alchemy to shame.
Let me introduce myself. I am Bernadette Gustav. What you're reading is a message I've left for you...
Bernadette Gustav.
That name.
He murmured it to himself, started to read on — and then stopped. His pupils contracted. He looked back at the name.
Bernadette Gustav?
Was this the Bernadette he was thinking of?
The one from Lord of the Mysteries — the one titled the Queen Mystic?
The daughter of the Emperor who'd said "the witch tasted quite good" — that Bernadette?
Before transmigrating into the Harry Potter world, Vincent hadn't read Lord of the Mysteries cover to cover, but he'd come across more than a few breakdowns of it on short-form video. He knew the important characters and major plot beats well enough.
Bernadette, alias the Queen Mystic — a high-popularity female character, the daughter of Emperor Roselle, the transmigrator who'd come before him.
And she's the one who swapped bodies with me?
He shook his head slowly, trying to find a foothold. "No. Could just be the same name. A coincidence."
Then his eyes landed on the blood-red moonlight outside the window, and the murmuring stopped.
If the name was just a coincidence, what about the moon? The iconic red moon?
And then there was his earlier suspicion — that the woman was probably a pirate.
This was a real problem.
Harry Potter had one Dark Lord who'd never made it off a small cluster of islands. Lord of the Mysteries was a world where the apocalypse, the Outer Gods, and madness were all live threats — where knowledge itself could kill you, where most transmigrators didn't survive first contact with what they didn't know.
Good news: Vincent knew the broad strokes. He wasn't going in completely blind. He probably wasn't going to get immediately erased.
Bad news: his familiarity with the plot was thin. He couldn't prepare the way he had for Harry Potter. He couldn't position himself to intercept useful information in advance.
"...Then again. I do remember a few of Klein's key turning points."
He caught himself.
Was he getting ahead of himself?
He wasn't a conventional transmigrator here. He'd swapped into someone else's body — which meant he couldn't only think about his own situation. He had to account for the body's actual owner.
He took a few slow breaths, settled his thoughts, and kept reading.
Regarding my identity — it's somewhat complicated, and without context you wouldn't be able to make sense of it anyway. All you need to know for now is that I'm the captain of a pirate ship. Most people call me the Queen Mystic.
So it really was her.
Vincent's last sliver of hope evaporated.
Your current location is a palace I had built on an island deep in the sea. You are the only person on the entire island. It is quite safe.
In the room next door, I've prepared enough food in advance. It comes from different countries and regions — varied flavours. If none of it agrees with you, there are also plenty of ingredients and spices available. Feel free to cook.
With that said — for the next three days, I hope you'll stay here quietly and use the materials I've left to learn as much about me as you can, so you'll be able to impersonate me convincingly going forward.
I've also left several books on the desk. They cover the major languages in common use in this world, along with some that are relevant to supernatural ability. Please work through them as quickly as you can.
This is also to help you pass as me without being caught — in our world, there are individuals who use a certain ability to possess and replace other people. If you are mistaken for one of them, your life will be in danger.
That would be the Thief pathway. And now that he thought about it — the top of that pathway was the single greatest villain in the entire novel. Amon.
So I've essentially become Amon. Wonderful.
Barring something unexpected, going forward we should continue swapping bodies every three days — or seven, from your side. However it works, the fact of our being bound together is already real.
Given that, we need to establish mutual trust as quickly as possible. Whatever our respective backgrounds, we should treat each other as equals. Neither of us should make things difficult for the other, or place unreasonable demands.
That said...
As a woman, I do ask that you observe the following while in control of my body:
First — do not change my undergarments. If it absolutely cannot be avoided, please respect my body and refrain from doing anything that would dishonour me.
To be continued…