The first thought that came to me the moment I opened my eyes was simple.
Ah, I’m fucked.
To be precise, it was that kind of certainty.
When a person is in real danger, the body knows first.
The inside of your throat goes dry, your heart pounds pointlessly hard, and somewhere in your head, an emergency alarm starts blaring before your eyelids even open.
That was me right now.
I lay on the bed for a while, doing nothing but steadying my breath.
I could see the ceiling.
It wasn’t white.
The ceiling was yellowed with age and cracked, and old decorative molding hung in the corners.
It wasn’t the ceiling of some cheap studio apartment.
But it wasn’t the ceiling of a nice house, either.
A house that had money but hadn’t been maintained.
No, a house that had run out of money to maintain it?
The moment I realized that, my head rang.
“Ugh.”
It hurt as if someone had driven an awl into the inside of my skull.
Reflexively, I pressed my temples.
My fingertips were trembling.
When I looked at my hand, it felt unfamiliar.
Long, slender-knuckled, with almost no calluses. It wasn’t the hand of a twenty-nine-year-old who worked at a company, hammered away at a keyboard, and tore open convenience store triangle kimbap.
That fact was so vivid that fear came a beat late.
I sprang up, then stopped and sank back onto the bed.
My vision swayed for a moment.
I could see the room.
The curtains were thick, but they failed to block out the light properly.
It seemed the sun was already fairly high.
Dust had gathered in the window frame, and the walls weren’t papered… It looked like the walls themselves had been painted, but here and there, dampness had seeped through and made the color peel.
One desk. One wardrobe.
One decorative sword propped against the wall.
A washbasin. And an unfamiliar smell.
The smell of dry wood. The smell of old cloth.
A faint scent of medicinal herbs. And the distinctive smell of an old house.
That smell was strangely familiar.
Even though there was no way it should be.
I gripped the edge of the bed.
“No way.”
The moment the words left my mouth, a chill ran down my spine.
No way.
It couldn’t be.
The problem was that there were far too many “no way” things in the world, but even so, people cling to reality until the very last moment.
Because they have to, if they want to even pretend they’re sane.
I got off the bed, practically staggering.
My bare feet touched the cold floor.
It was something like marble. But it was cracked, and the corners were slightly chipped.
Something expensive that had been bought and used for a long time, with no money to replace it.
At this point, it was almost funny.
If this was a dream, it was shitty. If it was reality, it was even shittier.
I went to the mirror hanging above the washbasin.
The moment I saw the bastard standing there, I couldn’t say a word for a long while.
Hair so dark brown it was nearly black.
Dull eyes, like someone who hadn’t slept properly.
A face whose lines were still not quite firm for his age.
A body that didn’t look sickly, but didn’t look strong either.
And above all, I knew this face.
“…Yurian.”
I rolled the name around in my mouth.
Yurian Balter.
Early-game trash mob number one from a ruined game. No, he wasn’t even a trash mob.
An extra with only a name.
Not someone who played any important role in the story, but someone treated like “a noble student who dies not long after entering the academy.”
Not the protagonist. Not the second male lead. Not a hidden powerhouse. Not someone who would reappear later to unravel foreshadowing.
He just died.
Quietly. Ambiguously. Without being remembered for long by anyone in particular.
I stared at the face in the mirror for a long time.
It felt insane.
No, in a situation like this, being perfectly fine would make you the insane one.
Wasn’t this kind of thing supposed to happen with lottery-winning odds, landing you in the protagonist’s body?
At the very least, someone with some importance in the story.
Or, failing that, someone rich.
Why did it have to be this vaguely leftover scrap?
I briefly wondered what I’d done so wrong in life, then immediately stopped. If I thought about it, too many things came to mind.
I leaned on the mirror and caught my breath, then suddenly touched my neck. The feel of the skin was unfamiliar.
My pulse was fast.
It wasn’t a dream.
That was the worst part.
“Great.”
It wasn’t great at all.
“Really great.”
It was even less great.
A hollow laugh escaped me.
There are moments when, if a person is hit by too much shock, they actually become calm instead.
The brain temporarily shuts off the emotional circuit in order to endure.
That was exactly what was happening now.
The problem was that, over that temporary calm, memories began to flood in.
Ermeria. The Arkenia Empire.
National Holy Academy Astra.
Nobles. The Sanctuary. Seals. The Abyss. And bad endings, bad endings, bad endings.
That trash game I had clung to like a madman for years.
Its setting was grandiose.
There was an academy, nobles, saintess candidates, the northern wall, seals, and foreshadowing about the end of the world.
From the outside, it looked like orthodox fantasy.
Though the inside was rotten.
That was why I had kept clinging to it.
Not because it was a well-made game, but because between all the half-finished parts, I could see a structure that was genuinely interesting.
Event conflicts, hidden text, deleted logs, awkwardly cut-off scenarios.
When you dug into that unease, the true faces the game was hiding gradually emerged.
The academy was not a school but a sorting facility, the Sanctuary was closer to management than salvation, and the Empire was closer to concealment than order.
And in that kind of world.
Yurian Balter was among the first to die.
I gripped the edge of the washbasin.
When my palm touched the cold stone, I came to my senses a little.
“Of all people.”
I couldn’t even curse.
Yurian Balter. The only son of a fallen baronial family. The family still existed, but was effectively ruined.
Scheduled to enter the academy. Dies after getting caught up in a certain incident shortly after admission.
A certain incident.
That was the filthiest part.
This game had a habit of explaining pointlessly important things in detail, while treating the truly fatal things vaguely.
Yurian’s death was the same.
A few cutscenes, a few short lines of dialogue, and later, from another character’s perspective, it was brushed past with, “That student died back then too.”
So I know.
I know that I’m going to die soon.
But I don’t know exactly how I die.
That was the part that could really drive a person insane.
It wasn’t getting hit by a truck, or eating poison, or dying in a duel, and it wasn’t even clear who killed him.
It seemed like an accident, but also not.
Just one name tag that disappeared early on.
Fuck.
I slowly raised my gaze.
The seventeen-year-old face in the mirror was looking at me.
It wasn’t a handsome face.
It wasn’t a striking face either.
But the longer you looked at it, the more strangely your mood sank.
A face steeped in anxiety.
Come to think of it, this was the expression I knew best.
The face reflected in the subway window when I was working at my company had looked roughly like that too.
A human standing with dead eyes on his way to work at eight on a Monday morning.
The kind of guy who, even if he heard news that the world was ending, would think first, “Ah, but I have overtime today.”
What would change just because someone like me had come here?
I can’t roll around like a hero.
I don’t have the guts to live like the protagonist either.
I’m not that kind of person.
I just don’t want to die.
I never thought that one modest desire could sound so solemn.
That was when an envelope on the desk caught my eye.
Thick paper. Red sealing wax. An old family crest.
And the name written on it.
To Yurian Balter.
I picked up the envelope.
My fingertips were cold.
The sealing wax had already been broken.
Which meant the original owner of this body had already checked the contents.
An academy admission notice.
I slowly opened the envelope.
And the moment I read the first line, cold sweat ran down my spine.
Admission granted to National Holy Academy Astra.
Scheduled departure date.
Three days later.
I wasn’t sure whether I had laughed or ground my teeth.
Only one thing was certain.
There was no time.
Not even a little.
Three days.
I checked the date written on the paper about three times.
It didn’t change.
Of course it didn’t.
If letters ran away just because a person glared at them, the world wouldn’t be this damn awful.
“Three days.”
I muttered.
Three days until enrollment.
To be precise, three days until I left this house and headed to the capital, Lumenheim.
And what came after that was the problem.
Academy admission. Basic examination.
Dormitory assignment. Freshman ranking battle.
The first appearances of the heroines. The student council.
Sanctuary-recommended students. Noble children.
Invisible pressure. And… my death.
Do you know what’s truly filthy?
A vague ruin is scarier than a predetermined one.
Because it feels like standing beneath a ceiling when you don’t know when it will collapse.
If there were at least a date fixed, I could run like mad until then.
But this wasn’t even that.
Shortly after admission. A certain incident. Death with barely any importance.
At this point, it was as if the game developers had decided to pick one person and screw with him.
I put the envelope down and began searching the room.
First, information. Information came first.
To survive, I would need money, strength, and connections, but before that, I had to know what I was holding right now. Sitting down at the table without even knowing the cards in your hand was suicide.
I opened a drawer.
It was a complete mess.
Still, it wasn’t a completely abandoned room.
Whether Yurian’s original personality wasn’t particularly neat, or whether his mind had been elsewhere, piles of paper, pens, old textbooks, and folded letters were all mixed together.
On top were documents related to the academy.
Admission notice. Preliminary registration confirmation. Basic dormitory guide. List of required supplies.
I read the list, then immediately pressed my brow.
Uniform. Training clothes. Basic textbooks. Writing instruments. Identification pass. Registration fee. Deposit for basic measurement. Preliminary living expenses.
“Are they insane?”
It costs this much just to enroll?
No, I had known.
In the game, it had been brushed off with a few lines of numbers, so it hadn’t felt real, but there was no way school in a world like this would be free.
And this was National Holy Academy Astra, no less.
Even if they pretended to accept nobles and commoners alike, once you entered, even breathing cost money.
.
I searched the drawer again.
A small leather pouch came out.
Inside were several copper and silver coins.
I poured them onto the desk and counted them.
Four silver coins. Thirty-seven copper coins.
I stopped for a moment. Then I counted again.
It didn’t change.
“Wow.”
I was genuinely impressed.
They said it was a ruined noble family, but this was even more ruined than I’d expected.
They were nobles on the outside, but in reality they weren’t just ambiguously poor—they were practically walking a tightrope.
If I wanted to eat three meals a day, dress neatly, and act like a student in the capital like everyone else, it was obvious money would keep leaking out.
It was an amount that would make my stomach hurt the moment I bought even a single medicine.
At that moment, very strangely, I felt a little relieved.
The fact that I had no money was shitty.
But at the same time, it was so realistic that it helped me keep hold of my sanity.
Yes, this was it.
Grand words like destruction, seals, and the Abyss were frightening, but in the end, what truly made a person live were things like this.
The money I had, the time I had left, the things I needed. Things like that.
I searched the room further.
In the wardrobe hung two sets of outdoor clothes, several shirts, and one old cloak.
For the clothing of a noble’s son, it was shabby.
Still, the fabric itself wasn’t bad.
It meant this family had once had money.
The problem was that it was no longer in the present tense.
At the very bottom of the drawer, I found a small pair of silver cufflinks.
Their shine was gone, and one side was slightly dented.
I briefly calculated how much they might fetch if sold, then put them back.
If I started liquidating family assets right from the beginning, that would be miserable in its own way.
Beside them was an old letter.
The sender was the academy administration office. The recipient was House Balter. The contents were simple.
Strict adherence to registration deadline. Admission may be canceled in case of delay. Equipment preparation to be paid personally. Dormitory assignment may be adjusted according to status and registration standing.
Status and registration standing.
If you wrote it nicely, it was administrative language. To be honest, it meant that if you had no money, you’d better crawl on your own.
I sneered.
As expected, this world was not kind.
It glittered on the outside, but was hard on the inside.
A structure perfect for grinding people up with a casual smile.
The same unease I had felt in the game was present even between a few sheets of paper.
One book caught my eye.
A basic textbook for prospective academy students.
When I opened it, it summarized the basic stances of swordsmanship, the foundations of mana sensitivity, an introduction to imperial history, and the minimum common knowledge regarding the Sanctuary and seals. I flipped through it roughly, then stopped.
Seals.
Even now, just seeing that word made my insides go a little cold.
Ermeria is not a normal fantasy world.
It only looks normal on the outside.
There is an empire, nobles, an academy, the Sanctuary, the northern wall, and they all look perfectly fine.
But all of that was just them holding out.
They weren’t protecting anything so much as slowing the speed of the collapse.
The problem was that, in the early part of that kind of world, I was among the first to be swept away.
“Great.”
I muttered under my breath.
“Just great.”
No matter how I thought about it, it was not great.
I sat down in the chair. It creaked.
I propped my elbows on the desk and covered my face with my hands.
Think calmly.
I could panic later. What I needed now was to organize things.
One.
I was Yurian Valter. The son of a ruined noble family. Scheduled to enter the academy.
Two.
In the original, Yurian died early on. He got caught up in some incident right after enrollment.
Three.
I didn’t remember the exact cause. It wasn’t that I didn’t know; it was highly likely the game had never shown it properly in the first place.
Four.
Which meant that if I wanted to survive, I had to figure out as much as possible before going to the academy.
Five.
If possible, I shouldn’t stand out. But I couldn’t look too weak, either. In this kind of world, the quiet ones got trampled first.
Six.
I had no money. This was an extremely important problem. Far more important than one might think.
Seven.
My memories of the original could become a weapon.
But they weren’t a complete answer key. That was the most dangerous part.
After organizing things that far, I could breathe a little easier.
I pulled a sheet of paper over and began writing.
Goal.
First, don’t die.
After writing it down, I almost laughed at how ridiculous it was.
Other transmigration protagonists changed the world, seized supremacy, built harems, awakened hidden talents, and so on, but my current goal was not dying.
It was so modest I could have cried.
But what could I do? Modest goals were the hardest ones.
Survival was usually only possible if you were cowardly, dirty, and calculating.
Dying while acting cool was easy.
I looked in the mirror again.
The boyish face still felt unfamiliar.
But the look in my eyes had changed a little from before.
The panic had passed.
From now on, it was time to calculate.
If I didn’t know why Yurian died, I at least knew where he died.
The academy.
Then what I had to prepare before entering it was obvious.
Money. Information. Routes. And people.
Who would get me killed if I got involved with them, who I needed to keep my distance from, and who I absolutely must not carelessly pass by.
The heroines’ names flashed through my mind.
Serena Arsein. Rine Bellar. Erka von Lumen. Mia Ferdi.
I closed my eyes for a moment.
Each of those names was not simply a romantic interest.
Each was the axis of an incident.
Nobility, sanctuary, legacy, the north. Get tangled up the wrong way and I would die; avoid them the wrong way and the world would be destroyed.
It was a truly fucked-up structure.
Just then, footsteps sounded outside the door.
I immediately flipped the paper over. I didn’t know why. It was instinct.
Anyone could tell it was a suspicious memo.
Knock, knock.
A knock.
“Young master.”
It was a woman’s voice.
An older voice, one that sounded as if it had settled into this place.
“Are you awake?”
I kept my mouth shut for a moment.
For about a second, I wondered how I should answer.
I didn’t even know how similar my voice was to the Yurian the people of this house knew.
“…Yes.”
It came out more calmly than I expected. Thank goodness.
A brief silence passed beyond the door, then the voice came again.
“The family head wishes to see you after the meal. And the luggage you will be taking to Lumenheim must also be packed by the end of today.”
The family head.
In other words, my father.
I slowly drew in a breath.
Right. I couldn’t just stay holed up in this room anymore.
A few documents wouldn’t be enough to survive.
I had to learn what state this house was in, just how ruined the family had become, who I shouldn’t trust, and what kind of face I had lived with until now.
“Understood.”
Once I answered, the footsteps receded.
I turned the paper on the desk back over.
Goal. First, don’t die.
A short, shabby sentence.
But in my life right now, nothing was more important.
I folded the paper and tucked it inside my clothes.
Then I walked toward the door.
The moment I gripped the handle, a thought suddenly occurred to me.
If I entered the academy, I would die.
But maybe, if I took the wrong step before that, it could all end before I even got there.
There was no guarantee that this house itself was a safe zone.
I opened the door.
Cold air pushed in from the old corridor.
Now it was truly beginning.