Fyrion's hands wouldn't stop shaking, but it was no longer from the phantom chill of death. It was from the thrum of life.
He was whole.
He was alive.
He ran his fingers over his throat, feeling the smooth, unscarred skin. He felt his waist, his legs. Everything was as it should be.
The humiliation of his castration, the years of quiet suffering... all of it was a nightmare that hadn't happened yet.
THUD. THUD. THUD.
The heavy, angry steps of his father's boots on the stone floor echoed from the hall, long before the door to his small room was thrown open.
CRASH!
The oaken door slammed against the stone wall, shaking ice from the windowpanes.
"Fyrion!"
The man who entered was a giant, his frame barely fitting the doorway. Lord Valdemar, Fyrion's father, and the master of this failing Northern house.
His beard was wild, his eyes bloodshot, not from drink, but from a desperation that Fyrion knew all too well.
"Stop hiding in this hovel, you waste of a son!" Valdemar roared. His voice was like grinding stones. "Get dressed. The envoys from the capital are here!"
Fyrion's head snapped up.
'Envoys? This early?'
His mind, the mind of a 30-year-old Grandmaster, raced. He remembered this. Of course. This was the month. This was the "inspection" that led to the "royal levy," a crushing tax his family couldn't pay.
This was the beginning of their fall; the moment the Crown had put its boot on their throat.
"I am dressed, Father," Fyrion said. His voice was higher than he was used to. Thin. Nineteen.
"Then why are you still here?" Valdemar grabbed Fyrion by his thin arm, yanking him from the room. "You are the first-born. You will stand in the hall, even if you are a disgrace. You will show them we are not yet broken!"
'A disgrace.'
Fyrion knew why. In this life, two years ago, when he was seventeen a "training accident" accident against the second young master of the Valerius house had shattered his Aura Core.
A Northern lord's first son, unable to refine mana, unable to wield a sword, unable to lead a charge. He was Fyrion the Rubbish, Fyrion the Useless. The walking, breathing symbol of his family's decline.
It was this "failure" that had driven him to the one art that didn't require a Core: Alchemy.
But as his father dragged him down the freezing, wind-blasted corridor, Fyrion focused. He closed his eyes, not on the physical world, but on the world inside him.
He reached for the place where his memory insisted there was only a cold, dead void.
He found a sun, disturbingly broken. But he knew how to revive it this time around since it's only been 2 years yet.
It was small. It was dormant. But it was there. A pristine, warm, pulsating star of potential energy, right behind his navel.
His Aura Core. It was whole.
He had it all.
His alchemical knowledge. And now, the path to power he had been denied. The path of a warrior.
'I have... both.'
A cold, dangerous, and utterly rapturous feeling flooded his veins. It wasn't just a second chance.
It was an upgrade. 'Now, it's time to attend to those fuckers form the south.' Fyrion grunted and was yanked into the Great Hall.
It was barely warmer than his room. The great firepit was burning only low, smoky logs.
'Pathetic.' He thought.
And standing in the centre of the hall, looking utterly disgusted by the cold, were the envoys.
Two men, dressed in the fine, warm silks of the South. They smelled of perfume and spices, a sharp contrast to the North's scent of pine, iron, and cold stone.
One was a thin, sneering bureaucrat. The other was a warrior. A knight, his hand resting on the hilt of his silver-plated sword, his armour polished to a mirror shine, probably by a slave like squire.
"Lord Valdemar," the bureaucrat said, his voice dripping with condescension. "You present... this... as your heir? I was told the first-born of House Fyrion was a cripple."
"My son is... unwell," Valdemar gritted out, shoving Fyrion forward. "But he is here. To pay his respects."
Fyrion's eyes were locked on the knight. He knew that uniform. The Golden Phoenix. The Queen's personal guard.
'So, she had her eyes on us even then. Before I was even her "dog." This wasn't a tax inspection. This was a scouting she did coveting the northern lands with rich untouched resources.'
The knight looked at Fyrion with open contempt. He was everything Fyrion was not—tall, broad-shouldered, radiating a faint aura of refined mana.
"A waste of Northern steel," the knight muttered. He looked at Fyrion, blocking his path to the envoys. "Move, Northern trash."
He didn't just speak. He shoved.
It was a casual, dismissive push. An S-Rank knight shoving an F-Rank civilian. An act of utter dominance.
In his past life, Fyrion would have fallen. He would have stumbled, humiliated, into the cold ashes of the firepit, proving his "rubbish" status to the entire hall.
But this Fyrion wasn't a 19-year-old boy.
He was a 30-year-old Grandmaster who had endured ten years of torture, humiliation, and agony at the hands of the royal court. His instincts had been forged in the frontlines, his reflexes sharpened by the constant threat of death.
The knight's shove came.
Fyrion's body reacted before his mind gave the command.
It was the instinct of a survivor.
His foot pivoted. His centre of gravity dropped. His hand shot up, not to block the shove, but to intercept it.
WHOSSHH---
The dormant, pristine Aura Core in his centre, feeling the sudden, violent intent of its master, flared.
A wisp of pure, unrefined mana—his first, true mana—flowed from his core, down his arm, and into his hand.
He didn't just block. He seized.
His thin, 19-year-old fingers, now reinforced with a power they had never known, clamped around the knight's armoured wrist like a steel trap.
BAAM--
The knight's arrogant smirk froze. His eyes widened in shock. This "trash" had not only stopped his shove... he had caught him.
"Let go, you—"
Fyrion didn't let go. He twisted.
"—son of a bitc-AARGHHH!!!"
The man agonized in pain however Fyrion put ten years of repressed, suicidal rage, the agony of the lash, the humiliation of his castration, and the cold fury of his territory's murder into one, single, focused movement.
CRACK!
The sound of thick bone shattering was deafening in the suddenly silent hall.
The knight let out a high-pitched, strangled shriek. His pristine, gauntleted arm hung at an impossible, broken angle.
Fyrion released his grip, letting the man fall to his knees, clutching his shattered wrist, his face a mask of white, agonizing disbelief.
The entire hall fell silent.
The Southern bureaucrat's mouth hung open.
Lord Valdemar, Fyrion's father, stared at his "rubbish" son as if he were seeing a ghost.
Fyrion just stood there, his hand trembling slightly from the recoil, his breath pluming in the cold air.
"Argghhh-! Some one fix my arm, please! It's painful ughhh!!"
He looked at the screaming knight, then at the shocked envoy, and finally at his father.
"You said to pay my respects," Fyrion said, his voice level and cold. "I have."