The third bell turned out to be literal.
Somewhere deep in the compound—below me, maybe several floors—a bell rang three times. Not the bright, clean chime of a school bell or a church bell. This was deeper. Heavier. The kind of sound that traveled through stone before it traveled through air, so you felt it in your spine before you heard it in your ears.
I was still in bed.
Not by choice. I'd attempted to stand twice since the servant left. The first time, I made it to the window before my knees buckled. The second time, I made it to the desk before the grinding thing behind my sternum—the cracked mana core, I was assuming—pulsed hard enough to white out my vision for three seconds.
So. Bed.
I'd used the time productively.
And by "productively," I mean I'd stared at the ceiling and tried to figure out why a seventeen-year-old boy in what appeared to be a wealthy noble family had a room with no personal belongings, a body in catastrophic condition, black veins creeping up his arms, and a servant who'd been trained not to look at him.
The answers I came up with were not encouraging.
Footsteps in the corridor. Two sets. One was the measured, efficient rhythm of the servant from earlier—I recognized the cadence, quick and purposeful, the walk of someone who wanted to complete a task and leave. The other set was different.
Slower. Deliberate. Each step landing with the precise, unhurried confidence of a person who had never once in their life been made to wait.
The door opened.
The servant entered first, head bowed, and stepped to the side like a curtain being drawn.
Then Lady Helena walked in.
And the temperature of the room changed.
Not literally. Or... maybe literally? It was hard to tell in a world where people threw fire from their hands. But something shifted in the air when she crossed the threshold—a pressure, faint but unmistakable, like the barometric drop before a storm that the news promised was "mild" but you knew damn well wasn't.
She was beautiful.
I'll say that first because it was the first thing I noticed, and because it was clearly the first thing everyone noticed, and because it was clearly something she had built her entire existence around ensuring.
Tall. Dark hair pinned in an arrangement so precise it looked architectural—not a strand out of place, not a single element left to chance. Her skin was the kind of pale that came from expensive creams and never being in a room where she wasn't the most important person in it. High cheekbones. A jawline that could cut paper.
Her eyes were blue. Pale blue. The kind of blue that looked warm in paintings and cold in person.
She wore a dark dress that cost more than my Seoul apartment's annual rent. I knew this not because I recognized the fabric or the design—I didn't—but because everything about it was quiet. No embroidery. No jewelry except a single silver chain at the throat. The kind of simplicity that only the truly wealthy can afford, because they don't need to prove anything to anyone.
She smelled like winter roses and something else—something underneath—sharper, chemical, like the aftertaste of a perfume designed to make you forget you were being managed.
Lady Helena looked at me.
Directly. No avoidance. No flinching. She looked at me the way you'd look at a stain on a table you'd been meaning to deal with—not with hatred, not with anger, but with the calm, appraising assessment of someone calculating whether it was worth the effort to clean or easier to throw the whole table away.
"Caelum."
One word. My name—this body's name. She said it the way you'd read an item off a grocery list. Milk. Eggs. Caelum.
"You look terrible."
...
'Thank you. I did die recently.'
I didn't say that. Obviously. Because I didn't know the relationship between this woman and this body, didn't know the rules, didn't know what was safe and what would get me—
Actually, I didn't know what the consequences were for anything here.
Which meant I should keep my mouth shut and watch.
So I watched.
Helena didn't sit. The room had a chair—wooden, straight-backed, positioned by the desk—but she didn't use it. She stood. Arms crossed loosely in front of her, one hand resting on the opposite wrist in a posture that looked relaxed and wasn't.
I knew that posture. I'd seen it on every teacher who'd ever called me in for a "talk about your performance." Casual authority. The body language of someone who wants you to know that this conversation is happening on their terms, at their pace, and will end when they decide it ends.
"The physician tells me your core destabilized again."
Again.
I noted that word. Filed it.
"Three episodes in two months. Do you understand what that means for the family's position?"
Not "for your health."
Not "for you."
For the family's position.
I said nothing. Partly because I didn't have information. Partly because this voice—this thin, cracked, seventeen-year-old voice—didn't feel like something I should use carelessly.
Helena's eyes narrowed. Slightly. A millimeter of movement that most people would miss but that I caught because I'd spent twenty-two years studying the micro-expressions of people who were disappointed in me.
It was, in a strange way, the most familiar thing I'd experienced since waking up here.
"Your father," she continued, and the way she said "your father" sounded like she was handling something with tongs, "has decided to proceed with the Astralion enrollment despite the physician's recommendation."
Astralion.
New word. Filed.
"The entrance examination is in six weeks."
She paused. Looked at me the way a jeweler looks at a cracked stone—not with sadness, but with the professional acknowledgment that this particular gem would not be going in the display case.
"I want to be clear, Caelum. This is not a kindness."
...
I waited.
"Your brothers have both passed through Astralion with distinction. Dante graduated first in his cohort. Rowan is currently ranked ninth among third-years."
She recited this the way you'd read a company's quarterly earnings. Numbers. Rankings. Value produced.
"Your enrollment is not because anyone believes you will succeed. It is because keeping you here has become an inconvenience that outweighs the embarrassment of your failure elsewhere."
There it was.
Clean. Surgical. No wasted words, no unnecessary cruelty—which, in its own way, was the cruelest thing about it. She wasn't being mean. She was being accurate. The way a doctor is accurate when they tell you the tumor is inoperable. They're not trying to hurt you. They're just done pretending the situation is something other than what it is.
I should have felt something.
Anger. Hurt. The sting of being called an inconvenience to your own family by a woman who married into it and decided you were the part she didn't want.
I felt nothing.
The gray. The flat, familiar, comfortable gray. Same as always. Same as the apartment. Same as the pills. Same as every report card, every ignored phone call, every twelve-minute conversation that was never about me.
'You're being sent away because you're embarrassing.'
'You're the family's bad investment and they're cutting their losses.'
'This is not new information, Jiwon. This is Tuesday.'
"Do you have anything to say?"
Helena asked this the way a judge asks if the defendant has final words. Procedural. A box to check before the sentence.
I opened my mouth.
Closed it.
...Opened it again.
"When—" The voice cracked. That raw, unused throat fighting every syllable. I swallowed. "When do I leave?"
Something crossed her face. Fast. So fast that if I'd blinked, I'd have missed it.
Surprise.
Not at the question. At the fact that I'd asked it without arguing. Without crying. Without the reaction she'd clearly prepared for—the one she'd armored herself against with that perfect posture and that rehearsed speech and that perfume that smelled like roses and control.
She'd come expecting resistance, and I'd given her compliance.
It threw her off. For exactly one second.
Then the mask resettled. Seamless. Professional.
"Two weeks. A carriage will be arranged. You will be accompanied by a household attendant, not a family member."
Not a family member.
Noted.
"Your allowance will be the standard stipend for third-born children. No supplementary funds."
Noted.
"If you are expelled or fail to qualify past the initial evaluation, you will not return to the main estate. Arrangements will be made for you at the Greymoor property."
I didn't know what Greymoor was, but the way she said it—the slight downward tilt of her chin, the barely perceptible thinning of her lips—told me everything. Greymoor was where you put things you wanted to forget. A storage unit for unwanted sons.
"Is that understood?"
"...Yes."
Helena looked at me. One more second. Her eyes moved across my face, my hands, the black veins visible at the wrists where the blanket didn't cover them. Something behind her expression shifted—not softening, nothing that generous—more like a brief internal recalculation.
Then she turned and walked toward the door.
The servant opened it.
Helena paused in the doorway. Half-turned. The light from the corridor caught the silver chain at her throat, and for a moment she looked like a painting—beautiful, composed, and absolutely untouchable.
"Your mother would have been disappointed."
...
The door closed.
The room was silent.
***
I sat there.
I don't know for how long. The soup on the desk had gone cold, a thin film forming on its surface. The green tonic sat untouched, its glow dimmer now, like even it had lost interest.
'Your mother would have been disappointed.'
That was calculated. I knew it was calculated. She'd delivered the entire conversation with the precision of someone who'd rehearsed it in a mirror, and that final line—dropped at the door, delivered over the shoulder, perfectly timed for maximum impact—was the knife she'd been saving for last.
She wanted it to hurt.
And the thing was...
...it did.
Not much. Not the way she intended. I didn't know who Caelum's mother was. Didn't know if she was dead or alive or somewhere in between. But the sentence structure—"would have been"—implied past tense. Implied someone who wasn't here anymore. And the fact that Helena used her as a weapon meant the wound was old enough to be reliable.
You don't stab someone with a dull knife. Helena chose that sentence because it had never failed to cut.
Something in my chest ached. Not the mana core—this was older, duller, more human. The ache of a body that had been carrying loss for so long the muscles had shaped themselves around it.
Caelum's grief.
Not mine.
...Or maybe mine too. It was getting hard to tell where he ended and I began. His body, his pain, his mother. My emptiness, my pattern recognition, my inability to cry even when the situation clearly called for it.
We were a collaborative project, Caelum and I.
And the product was not looking great.
***
I pulled up the status panel again.
Same numbers. Same pathetic little spreadsheet of failure. I stared at it, looking for something I might have missed the first time.
STR: 8.
That explained why standing for three minutes felt like running a marathon. I didn't know the scale, but I was willing to bet 8 was "can technically lift a sword but not for long" territory.
INT: 47.
...Huh.
That was high. Comparatively. Everything else was single digits, but intelligence was 47. Which either meant Caelum was smart, or—
Or Park Jiwon's twenty-two-year-old brain was leaking through into a seventeen-year-old body.
I filed that. Possibly useful. Probably irrelevant. But data was data, and I collected it the way some people collected stamps—compulsively, joylessly, and with no clear endgame.
AGI: 12. END: 6. MNA: 4. CTR: 3.
Endurance of 6 explained why the body collapsed after minimal effort. Mana of 4 meant... whatever mana did, I had almost none of it. Control of 3 meant that even the tiny amount I had, I couldn't use properly.
And Ice at two percent.
I dismissed the panel. Lay back.
Six weeks until an entrance exam I knew nothing about, for an academy I'd never heard of, in a world that ran on rules I didn't understand, in a body that could barely stand.
I'd been given a character sheet, and the character was the tutorial enemy that gets killed in the opening cutscene to show the player how combat works.
...
This was going to be a problem.
***
The servant came back an hour later to collect the tray. She glanced at the untouched soup, the empty tonic glass, and my face—in that order, spending the least time on the last one.
"Young Master. Do you require anything?"
'A new body. A manual. An explanation for literally anything that has happened in the last two hours.'
"...No."
She nodded. Collected the tray. Turned to leave.
"Wait."
She stopped. Didn't turn around. I could see the tension in her shoulders—the rigid set of someone who'd been addressed by something she didn't expect to speak.
"What is Greymoor?"
A pause. Long enough to confirm that the question made her uncomfortable.
"The Ashworth family's northern holding, Young Master."
"What's there?"
Another pause. Longer.
"...Not much, Young Master."
She left.
I stared at the ceiling.
Not much.
'Greymoor is where they send the embarrassments. The broken. The ones not worth the cost of keeping around. Not a prison—prisons at least imply that someone will come check on you eventually. Greymoor is a shelf. You go there to gather dust until everyone forgets you were a person.'
I didn't know if that was true. I'd made it up entirely from Helena's chin movement and a servant's two-word answer.
But I'd spent twenty-two years reading the silences between what people said.
I was rarely wrong.
***
Outside, the snow continued to fall.
The courtyard had emptied. The training dummies stood in rows, some of them cracked, one of them split clean in half from the ice disc I'd watched earlier. The blue-white crystals on the walls hummed their quiet, endless frequency.
And I lay in a bed that didn't belong to me, in a body that didn't belong to me, in a family that didn't want me, in a world I didn't understand, with six weeks to prepare for something I had no information about, and a stat sheet that read like a death certificate with extra steps.
Six weeks.
F-minus.
Four mana.
Two percent ice.
A cracked core, a dead mother, a father who'd rather ship me off than look at me, and a stepmother who sharpened her words the way other people sharpened knives.
...
'Okay.'
I closed my eyes.
'Okay.'
I'd figure it out. Not because I was brave, or determined, or any of the things that protagonists in stories are supposed to be. Not because I had a plan, or a goal, or some burning desire to prove everyone wrong.
I'd figure it out because the alternative was Greymoor.
And I'd already spent one lifetime gathering dust.
I wasn't particularly interested in doing it again.
...
The static buzzed. Once. Faint.
Closer than before.
I ignored it.
Again.