A jagged ridge of cooled glass sliced into my cheek. I inhaled, and a lungful of pulverized ash sent me into a violent, hacking fit.
My chest convulsed, scraping against the hard, uneven ground. I rolled onto my hands and knees, spitting gray phlegm onto the fused earth. The crater was silent. No war drums. No tearing flesh. No rain. Just the sharp hiss of super heated rock cooling in the thin mountain air.
My fingers dug into the glass beneath me. The surface blistered my fingertips, but the pain registered as a dull, distant ache, muffled by a heavy, pulsing thrum caged beneath my ribs. It felt like I had swallowed a live coal.
I pushed myself upright, my joints popping in protest.
The coarse, blood-soaked linen of my militia tunic was gone. Instead, heavy, midnight-blue fabric draped over my shoulders. It clung to my sweat-slicked skin, woven from something impossibly soft, yet stiff with dried sweat and scorch marks. Intricate silver thread, tarnished and fraying, bordered the cuffs. A thick leather belt hugged my waist, anchoring a row of small, velvet pouches.
A spike of pressure drove itself directly behind my left eye.
My vision fractured into jagged splinters of light. I collapsed back to the dirt, clutching my skull. Foreign images slammed into my cortex. A towering gallery of white marble. A woman with a rapier parrying a thrust. A heavy iron crown resting on a velvet cushion. Endless rows of bowing courtiers.
The memories weren't mine, but they carried a terrifying gravitational pull. They tried to latch onto my identity, rewriting the architecture of my brain. I felt the overwhelming urge to stand, to draw a sword I didn't own, to demand the loyalty of subjects I didn't know.
I slammed the heels of my hands against my temples.
Charlie. I forced the word through my teeth. Charlie Hobbs. Guinmill. The mud. The broken pike. Elian. I anchored myself to the grit of my own life. I focused on the smell of wet pine, the ache of chopping wood for Miller, the terror of the beast dropping over the palisade. The friction between the two lives sparked a blinding migraine. I ground my jaw until the joints popped, holding my meager, peasant history against the crushing weight of whatever dead nobleman had just shoved his magic down my throat.
With a sound like tearing silk, the foreign memories shattered. The marble gallery collapsed into dust. The iron crown vanished.
I dry-heaved over the glassy stone, gasping for air. The pressure behind my eye receded, leaving a hollow, echoing void in my head. I was still me. Charlie. The stranger's attempt to pave over my soul had fractured, leaving me intact but completely saturated with his residual power. The live coal in my chest flared, a terrifying reservoir of energy with no master.
I wiped a trail of spit from my chin with a silk-clad forearm. My hands were shaking. I needed to figure out what just happened. I fumbled with the velvet pouches on the heavy belt. My numb, clumsy fingers struggled with the brass clasps.
From the largest pouch, I pulled a crumpled sheet of heavy, ancient-feeling parchment. One edge was jagged, torn violently from a larger spine. Dense, cramped script covered the page, accompanied by an ink diagram of two overlapping circles.
I squinted at the text. It was a spell instruction. The Cosmic Twin Overwrite.
I read the passage circled in dried, rusted blood. "...requires a subject of exact physical resonance. Upon successful casting, the ritual will completely take over the twin and put your soul and memories into their body. The original vessel's consciousness is eradicated, providing a seamless continuation of the caster's existence."
A cold sweat broke across my neck. The guy in the crater. The exact mirror image. He didn't summon me to save me from the horde. He summoned me for spare parts.
My fingers crushed the torn page. I shoved my hand back into the pouch, searching for anything else. My knuckles scraped against a folded square of thick, cream-colored vellum. A cracked wax seal—a sunburst radiating over a crescent moon—clung to the center crease. I peeled the parchment open.
Elaborate, gilded calligraphy dominated the page. It was an official writ, bearing the seal of the Crescent Sun Academy.
To His Royal Highness, Rakan Amore, Prince of the Kingdom of Amore.
The words blurred for a second. Prince. The dead man who tried to steal my body was the heir to the entire kingdom.
The Crescent Sun Academy formally accepts your enrollment into the upcoming term, bypassing standard foundational testing per royal decree.
I stared at the academy letter, then back to the ripped spellbook page. My village was gone. My life was erased. I was sitting in the epicenter of a magical wasteland, wearing the clothes of a dead prince who had failed to hijack my soul.
The live coal in my chest flared again. This time, it burned hotter. The rogue magic the prince had shoved into my veins detected the panic spiking in my blood. It surged upward, a violent, unguided missile of energy threatening to rupture my heart.
I gripped my shirt, gasping. I didn't know how to vent it. I had never touched a spark of magic in my twenty years of existence. The heat cooked my ribs. My vision tunneled, the edges of the crater fading to black.
A mechanical snap echoed directly behind my eardrums.
The surge of magic slammed into an invisible wall within my chest. The agonizing heat instantly cooled, funneling into a rigid, structured pathway. My vision blurred, and a translucent blue grid projected itself onto my retinas. The grid stabilized, overlaid against the smoky sky of the crater.
Crisp, white text materialized in the center of my field of vision.
[ANOMALY DETECTED][SOUL OVERRIDE: FAILED][HOST IDENTITY RETAINED. FOREIGN MANA POOL DETECTED.]
I blinked, but the text remained, tracking perfectly with my eye movements.
[INITIALIZING COSMIC TWIN SYSTEM][STABILIZING MANA CORE...]
The burning in my chest faded into a steady, manageable hum. The interface flickered once, then offered a single, pulsing prompt.
[SYSTEM STABILIZED. WELCOME, CHARLIE HOBBS.]
I swiped at the air. My knuckles passed right through the glowing blue text, striking nothing but the sulfur-tainted breeze of the crater. The words didn't waver. They weren't floating over the fused glass of the wasteland; they were projected directly onto the back of my eyes.
I squeezed my eyelids shut. The blue grid remained, stark and rigid against the blackness.
A sound like a tuning fork vibrated against my teeth, and the text shifted. The welcome message dissolved, cascading into a structured block of information. It hung in my field of vision, impossible to ignore.
Name: Charlie Hobbs (Host: Rakan Amore)
Stage: Dissonant (Level 1)
Animus Synchronization: 2%
[Vitals] HP: 150/150 MP: 50/50 SP: 100/100
[Attributes] Strength: 12 Agility: 10 Vitality: 15 Willpower: 5
[Active Skills] (Empty)
[Passive Traits] Cosmic Twin (Anomaly): Grants access to the Dual Combination System. Masks true soul signature from external scrying.
I stared at the readout. My breath hitched, catching on the ash coating my throat.
Host: Rakan Amore. I looked down at my hands. The heavy silver cuffs of the midnight-blue tunic clung to my wrists. I turned my palms over. The deep, dirt-stained calluses from swinging Miller's logging axe were gone. The skin here was unblemished, save for faint, deliberate scars across the knuckles that spoke of formal sword training. I was a parasite squatting in a dead prince's vessel.
My eyes snagged on the next lines. Stage: Dissonant. Level 1. Dissonant. The word tasted exactly like the jarring friction between my peasant memories and the royal blood pumping through these veins. I didn't belong here, and the System knew it.
Then there was the percentage. Animus Synchronization: 2%. I pressed my palm flat against my sternum. The heartbeat there was too fast, too heavy. When Rakan grabbed my tunic, he had poured an ocean of liquid fire into me. It was a pressure so massive it had threatened to split my skin open. If this blue grid hadn't booted up, I would have combusted. The System was a dam. It was bottlenecking the dead man's astronomical power, locking ninety-eight percent of it away so my fragile soul didn't burn out like a damp match.
I dragged my focus down to the vitals. HP: 150. Health. How much of that would a rusted pitchfork take off? What about a demon's blade? A hundred and fifty felt like a dangerously finite number. SP: 100. Stamina. I pictured a long day hauling pine logs in the snow. Would that drain it to zero? Would I collapse if it hit bottom?
And MP: 50. Magic. Back in Guinmill, the traveling priests demanded coppers to test our affinity. They'd tell us to close our eyes and "listen for the hum of the world's aether." I never heard anything but the wind. Now, magic was reduced to a brutal tally. Fifty points. A tiny puddle siphoned from the prince's sealed ocean.
I reviewed the four attributes, trying to ground the abstract numbers in reality.
Vitality: 15. This was my highest stat. Years of surviving freezing northern winters on half-rations had built a stubbornness into my marrow. My body knew how to take a beating and keep walking.
Strength: 12. Not terrible. I chopped wood for a living. The muscles I brought with me—or rather, the physical template Rakan's body already possessed—could hold their own in a fistfight.
Agility: 10. Average. I tripped over a wagon rut just last week. I definitely wasn't outrunning an arrow.
Willpower: 5. I let out a harsh, dry bark of a laugh that scraped my throat. Five. The lowest number by a mile. The priests always preached that manipulating aether required a disciplined, educated mind. I guess surviving on turnip stew and avoiding the militia lash didn't count as rigorous mental training. Rakan might have been an arcane prodigy, but I was the one holding the reins now, and I didn't know the first thing about shaping a spell.
My gaze dropped to the bottom. Active Skills: (Empty). That confirmed it. I had the prince's mana, but none of his techniques. I was a loaded musket without a trigger.
But the final line made the tension in my jaw ease just a fraction. Passive Traits: Cosmic Twin. Masks true soul signature from external scrying.
I touched the torn spellbook page tucked into the velvet pouch at my waist. The Academy letter rested right beside it. If I was going to a city full of elite mages and aristocratic snobs, my peasant soul was a death sentence. Impersonating royalty was treason. This passive trait was my only shield. As long as the System hid my true nature, they would just see a traumatized Prince Rakan.
I imagined shoving the blue interface aside, like brushing a cobweb from my face. The text flickered, collapsing into a small, unobtrusive blue icon resting in the bottom corner of my vision.
A sharp cramp seized my right calf. I hissed, stumbling sideways on the uneven glass. The crater was a furnace. The ambient heat radiating from the fused stone baked through the soles of the royal boots, blistering my heels.
I needed to move. The demon was gone, sucked into whatever hellish rift the prince had opened, but the magical fallout here would attract attention. Scavengers. Soldiers. Things far worse than the beasts that hit Guinmill.
The weight of the velvet pouches slapped against my thigh as I took a tentative step up the slope. The boots gripped the glass. The air thinned the higher I climbed. I didn't look back at the center of the blast zone. There was nothing left to bury.