The bathroom barely fit him; the walls pressed too close, the air carrying a plain, practical chill that seeped into his skin.

Cold tiles bit at his feet, their uneven edges jabbing him with small, needling stings. A wooden tub sat against the far wall, its surface blackened with age, the rim smooth under his fingers as if worn down by years of use.

Warm water filled the tub, steam brushing against his face and curling toward the low ceiling. The mist carried the faint iron tang of well-water, sharp enough that he almost tasted it.

Ruvian unbuttoned his linen shirt and let it slip from his fingers, crumpling in a lifeless heap beside the tub. Then he stepped in, slow enough to avoid splashing.

The heat wrapped around his legs, climbed to his waist, and settled there. For a while, he just sat there, elbows resting on the rim, listening to the faint creak of the wooden boards.

'If I remember correctly, this world should already have proper shower systems due to magical advancement. Yet this household never did… Judging from my memory, they probably couldn’t afford one.'

'That only means one thing...'

"I'm broke..." he sighed.

'Definitely not a good starter pack.'

Through the narrow window, a stripe of daylight cut across the room and stabbed into his eyes when he glanced up. In the warped shimmer of the water surface, a stranger’s face wavered where his own should have been.

So, he took the chance to analyse his new body.

‘Fifteen maybe, or younger, if judged by the way his cheeks still held a trace of softness. But… there was more to the shape of his body than youth.’

There was discipline etched into the line of his shoulders that was born from repetition of stacking firewood, hauling grain, and carrying water.

He studied his limbs, pale skin flushed from the bath. His hair was wet and dark, clinging to his forehead in messy strands, and when he reached up to brush it aside, it was strangely soft.

Then, his gaze locked with the eyes in the reflection.

Those eyes didn't belong to Yuzuki Nozomi.

They were darker, slightly blue and terrifying. There was no kindness in them, no warm light or boyish charm.

He somehow liked it, and so he dragged a hand over his face. There was no point in denying it anymore. The name had begun to settle in his mouth, no longer foreign, and no longer borrowed.

“Ruvian Castelor…”

Leaning back, he rested his head against the rim of the tub. His thoughts began to settle around him. The fragments of memory slowly stitched themselves into coherence.

He knew what was coming.

The first big arc of this novel.

Zian Herga, the bright-eyed, hopelessly idealistic, and cursed with a hero complex protagonist, was about to get chewed up and spat out by fate. By the second semester at Velthia Academy, the kid would be framed and tossed out of the academy.

After that incident, he'd head back to his village thinking the worst was over, but it wasn’t. The place that he called home would be gone, burned to cinders. The bodies of his family were left scattered among the ruins.

A cruel turning point.

“What a classic setup for a power fantasy,” he muttered under his breath.

‘It all happened because he was still weak during the first big arc.’

Somewhere in that wreckage, Zian would fall to his knees and swear to get stronger—to never, ever be powerless again. And the universe answered him somehow.

The System descends.

[Voice of the Strong].

From then on, Zian Herga would stop being just another unlucky kid and start turning into an impenetrable fortress. Monsters would crumble easily. Villains would be destroyed with a single slash of his sword.

Ruvian leaned forward, letting the water trail from his chin. His gaze was far away, buried in pages he had once scrolled through. He had read the damnable novel until chapter 1602. Although he doesn't know how the novel ended, the first stage of calamity was already brutal enough.

He had seen the slow erosion of the hero’s resolve, the flickers of doubt and the inescapable realisation that raw power meant nothing when the world insisted on breaking faster than the protagonist could mend it.

In the end, Zian had failed to save his people during the early stages of the calamity...

Not just because he lacked any strength, but because fate was never fair to him. The beasts at the border grew too many. The calamity that swirled around the continent’s skin refused to wait for him to be ready.

His people died not from weakness, but from timing. From his absence. Him being in the wrong place while they all stood somewhere else.

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‘One man, no matter how strong, could not be everywhere at once.’

And now, Yuzuki Nozomi—no, Ruvian Castelor found himself dragged into that very same story. Even worse, not as the hero or as a supporting cast member. Just an extra character in the current of a much larger story.

But the story was his to know.

‘Haa. Should I change it? Should I intervene? Help that naive loser?’

The thought bloomed something in his gut, an uneasy sickness. A single careless move, and everything could fall apart. He’d seen it happen before in another novel, people thinking they could change their fate.

‘No, obviously, why would I gamble my life on some self-righteous fool who’s just doomed to fall?’

There was no logic in throwing himself onto someone else’s path, especially when that path was already painted in failure.

So instead, he would forge his own.

If the world insisted on heading toward ruin, then he would face it as a wall.

The water had gone cold, but he barely felt the chill seeping into his skin. When he rose from the tub, the ache in his muscles was dull.

He wrapped himself in the coarse towel, the fabric rough against his damp skin, and stood quietly in the room for a moment longer.

Two weeks.

That was all the time left before Velthia Academy opened its gates.

Ruvian didn’t feel ready. Not for the world before him, nor for the dangers that hovered at the edges of his thoughts.

‘Forget it. Let's survive first. Everything else can burn for all I care.’

It was the only truth he could hold on to. He dressed quietly, and the gentle scent of rosemary remained on his skin.

Ruvian sighed, rubbing his face as if to wipe away the weight of the future.

****

Ruvian pulled the tunic across his shoulders, the stitching scratched faintly against his skin.

The seams are a little tight, as though tailored for his body. A memory not his own surfaced...

Ruvian’s mother bent over the fabric late into the night. But the memory made his skin itch more than the fabric. Somehow, he felt uncomfortable with the affection from the memory.

‘Strange. How a scrap of cloth can drag your mind halfway across time. I don’t even know if I should be calling her “my” mother. This isn’t… really my memory.’ Discover more novels at novel·fire.net

To him, affection is fine, when it’s yours. But when it’s borrowed? It feels invasive. He can’t even decide if he should honour it or throw it away.

What’s the point of clinging to something that never belonged to him in the first place? Well, it’s not like he can wipe off those memories. He let the thought slide from his mind, pushed it away and made his way down the staircase.

The kitchen smelled faintly of honey and smoke. The table was small, but the sight of it eased something in his chest.

A bowl of porridge steamed in front of his seat, the honey melting into slow spirals he could almost trace with his eyes, chopped nuts dotting the surface.

Across from him, a small figure hunched over her bowl, legs swinging beneath the bench. She gripped her spoon with both hands, half asleep, her messy black hair spilling over her face in every direction.

‘So that’s her, huh? My little sister. Or, well, his little sister.’

Ciela Castelor.

Five years old, maybe a little less. She was small enough that his chest tensed with the instinct to shield her, yet her restless, twitching energy seemed to spill into every corner of the kitchen.

She wasn’t spoiled with toys or luxuries, but there was softness around her. She looked up now, catching Ruvian in the act of staring with her mouth full.

Something warm grew in his chest. The warmth wasn’t fully his, but he couldn’t shake it; just watching her chew with puffed cheeks steadied him more than the food in front of him.

“Why’re you lookin’ at me like that?” she mumbled, cheeks full like a chipmunk mid-heist.

Ruvian blinked, caught off guard. ‘Had I been staring that long?’

“You… you look like a squirrel,” Ruvian said flatly.

Her face scrunched, offended, until a smile broke through. “Whaaat~ No. I don’t. And squirrels don’t eat porridge,” she declared, full of absolute certainty and none of the logic to back it up.

The warmth of her childishness spread through him, filling his hollow. Ruvian sighed, spooning another bite into his mouth.

'Ah, whatever.'

Normally, their father would have already been at the head of the table, halfway through his breakfast, preparing for another long day of work.

Their father was a wheelwright; the smell of fresh sawdust and scorched iron always clung to him when he came home. He didn’t speak much, but when he did, it was for necessity.

“He left early,” their mother had said when Ruvian came downstairs.

His gaze deviated to Ciela again, still kicking her legs and chewing like breakfast was the most important mission of her life. It was a small life, tucked away from the chaos that ruled elsewhere.

‘For now, at least.’

He set his spoon down. Throughout the meal, or what passed for one, he tried to piece together the original boy whose body he now inhabited.

There was no mystery to him, the memories painted Ruvian as a quiet child, dutiful to a fault, the type who never raised his voice and never caused trouble.

‘At least, he's not a troublemaker. So, it wouldn't be a problem to impersonate his character.’

He can easily imitate that, but with his sister? A totally different story. The original Ruvian spoiled her rotten! That is something he couldn't afford to be.

‘What kind of sis-con does that? A brother’s job is to keep a child grounded, not feed every ridiculous whim like a personal servant. Piggyback rides included!’

Even now, halfway through her porridge, she kept sneaking glances at him.

‘No surprise this chipmunk stuck to him like a limpet.’

Then, a thought fitted briefly across his mind, and a deeper question lingered. What had happened to this family when the world collapsed?

‘Did they… survive?’

Even so, he already knew.

The answer sat in the back of his mind. He pushed the thought aside and reached for his spoon again.

“Eat slower,” he said.

Ciela just grinned, honey on her face and zero intention of listening.

****

Ruvian returned to his room.

“It's been 2 hours and 9 minutes since I’ve been here. What a shame, this has the potential to be my greatest nightmare…”

The moment he realised he was inside the damnable novel, he immediately tracked the time as he always did out of habit.

‘No, since this is now my reality, the worst is yet to come…’

Breakfast had done its job, as his stomach no longer protested with the sounds of a dying beast, but it had done very little to quiet the deeper hunger clawing at the edges of his thoughts.

'If I want to survive, I need to plan.’

The room he stepped into carried no surprises—just the same familiar press of wood and dust he had grown used to. It was home. Or at least, it had been for the other him.

A plain wooden desk waited beneath the window. When his fingers brushed across it, he felt the uneven scuffs, as if someone had once tried to polish them smooth.

To the right of the wardrobe, a stack of boxes pressed neatly against the wall, their edges rough beneath his palm when he checked them.

Inside lay everything for his departure: the stiff fabric of Academy-issued clothing, notebooks that still smelled of ink, a pair of boots worn soft at the heel, and a leather pouch that gave a reassuring jingle when he lifted it. The original Ruvian had packed and bought them.

Ruvian’s gaze lingered on the boxes until his eyes began to sting, as if staring could change what they meant.

Shaking off the weight of it, he moved toward the desk, pulling the chair back with the finality of someone about to start a contingency plan.

Stray papers littered the desk—study notes, practice schedules, even a half-written letter to the Academy. He brushed them aside, the dry edges scratching against his skin, none of them mattered now.

Ruvian found a fresh sheet. The quill in his hand felt foreign and awkward.

He hesitated, before finally setting the tip of the quill to the paper.

“First, the story must progress as it should.”