The ceiling was wrong.
That was the first concrete thought I had, and I held onto it the way a drowning person holds onto something floating—not because it was helpful, but because it was solid, and everything else was not.
High. Three meters, maybe four. Dark stone, carved with patterns that curled around each other like veins fossilized in rock. The light came from crystals—pale blue-white, mounted on iron brackets along the walls, glowing with the quiet, cold luminescence of something that had no business existing outside of a fantasy novel.
...
Fantasy novel.
I shelved that thought. Not because I didn't want to think about it, but because the pain was making it very difficult to think about anything. That white-hot wire behind my sternum was still there, still screaming, and my body—
My body.
My body was wrong too.
The arms were too thin. Thinner than mine had been, and mine had been bad. The skin was pale in a way that went beyond "doesn't go outside" and into "hasn't been healthy in years." And when I raised my hands—hands that were not my hands—and looked at the inside of my wrists...
The veins were black.
Not dark blue. Black. Like ink bleeding under rice paper, slowly spreading toward the fingertips.
'...That's not normal.'
My chest tightened. I knew the feeling—precursor to a panic attack. I'd had dozens. Bathroom floors, subway platforms, the back room of the convenience store at 3 AM while Minji pretended not to notice.
But this time, the tightness went deeper. Something behind my sternum that hadn't been there twenty-two years of living—something that felt like an organ I'd never owned—clenched. Pulsed. Clenched again. Wet and grinding, like a cracked engine trying and failing to turn over.
I gasped. Everything went white.
When it came back, there was something floating in front of my face.
A translucent rectangle. Pale blue. Glowing faintly, like a phone screen in a dark room, hovering about forty centimeters from my nose with the casual arrogance of a thing that didn't care whether I believed in it.
Text. A language I'd never seen—angular, sharp, like someone had tried to write Korean with a knife—and yet I could read it.
Not translate.
Read.
As if the meaning had always been in my head, waiting for my eyes to catch up.
┌──────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ STATUS PANEL │
├──────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Name: Caelum Reivan Ashworth │
│ Age: 17 │
│ Rank: F− │
│ Title: None │
├──────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ STR: 8 AGI: 12 END: 6 │
│ INT: 47 MNA: 4 CTR: 3 │
├──────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Affinity: Ice (Grade F | 2%) │
│ Hidden: ████ [LOCKED] ████ │
├──────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ ⚠ Mana Corruption (Stage 1/5) │
│ ⚠ Cracked Mana Core (−80%) │
│ ● Depression (Chronic) │
└──────────────────────────────────────────┘
...
I stared at it for a long time.
F-minus.
Four out of a hundred mana.
Two percent ice affinity.
A cracked core that was eighty percent non-functional.
Stage one corruption.
And—this was the part that almost made me laugh, would have made me laugh if I remembered how—depression listed as a chronic status effect. As if dying and waking up in a shattered body on an alien world with a floating stat sheet might not be enough, the universe wanted to make sure I understood that the clinical emptiness I'd been carrying for years had followed me through death.
Apparently, you can't even escape depression by dying.
Good to know.
'Okay,' I thought. 'Let's think about this.'
Fact one: I was dead. Confirmed.
Fact two: I was not currently dead. Confusing, but confirmed.
Fact three: This was not my body. The hands, the veins, the age—seventeen. I was twenty-two. Had been. Whatever the correct tense is for a dead man inhabiting a teenager.
Fact four: This body was, by every available metric, in catastrophic condition.
Fact five: There was a stat panel, which implied a system of quantification, which implied a world that operated on defined rules.
Fact six: I had no idea what any of those rules were.
...
Actually, there was a fact seven.
The sound.
I'd noticed it almost immediately but couldn't place it until now. A faint buzz, sitting right at the threshold of hearing—the kind of frequency you'd dismiss as tinnitus or imagination. Low. Persistent. Static.
Not coming from the crystals. Not from the walls.
From inside my head. Or... from the space between my thoughts.
It pulsed once—sharply—when my eyes drifted to the line that read [LOCKED].
One pulse. Like a fingernail tapping glass from the other side.
Then silence.
I filed it away. I didn't know what it was, didn't know where to put it, but Park Jiwon had always been good at exactly one thing: watching, noting, filing. The world was data. Data could be sorted. And sorted data, even when it made no sense, was better than chaos.
I willed the panel to disappear.
It did. Instantly. No sound, no transition. Just—gone.
More questions. Zero answers. Story of my life.
Both of them.
***
I forced myself upright.
The pain doubled. The edges of my vision grayed. I clenched teeth that weren't mine, in a jaw that wasn't mine, and looked.
The room was large. Cold. Expensively furnished.
And completely empty of anything personal.
No photographs. No books. No scattered clothes, no trinkets on the shelf, no evidence that the person who slept here had ever laughed or cried or cared about something enough to keep a physical reminder of it.
I knew this kind of room. I'd lived in one for twenty-two years. Not the stone walls or the crystal lights—those were new. But the emptiness? The specific, deliberate absence of a person's footprint in their own space?
That was familiar.
That was home.
There was a window. Tall, narrow, iron-framed. I dragged myself to it, leaning on the desk for support, and looked out.
Mountains.
Not the rounded green hills I used to see from the train to Busan. These were something else entirely—jagged masses of dark stone and ice, tearing into a sky the color of iron left out in the rain. Snow fell in diagonal sheets. The wind bent it sideways, and the effect made it look less like weather and more like the sky was hemorrhaging white.
Below—far below—a compound. Dark stone buildings, interconnected, surrounding courtyards and training grounds. Figures moved in the yards. Tiny from this height. Some of them leaving trails of light behind their hands as they—
A column of fire erupted from a raised palm. Three meters. Spiraled. Dissolved into steam against the falling snow.
A response—a single arm slash—and the snow around another figure froze mid-air, compressed into a spinning disc of solid ice that shot across the yard and split a stone training dummy from shoulder to hip.
Nobody down there flinched. Nobody even looked up.
Casual. Routine. Like throwing fire was the equivalent of stretching before a jog.
...
'Right.'
'Fire magic. Ice magic. Mountains. Medieval compound. Status panels. Black veins. Mana.'
'Cool.'
'Totally fine.'
'This is fine.'
I waited for the panic.
It didn't come.
What came instead was the oldest, heaviest, most familiar thing I owned: the flat gray weight of nothing. Same nothing that kept me on the vinyl floor while the pills dissolved. Same nothing that turned dying from an event into an errand.
I'd like to tell you that this was the moment I felt something. Awe, maybe. Terror. The appropriate emotional response to discovering that you're dead and alive and in a fantasy world where people throw elements at each other before breakfast.
But I'd been empty for a long time.
And empty doesn't fill just because the scenery changes.
***
Twenty minutes passed. The door opened.
I was back in bed. Staring at the ceiling. Not because I wanted to be, but because standing for three minutes had used up whatever this body had left, and collapsing seemed like it would hurt more than lying down voluntarily.
The woman who entered was middle-aged, sharp-faced, and dressed in a servant's uniform pressed to knife-edge precision. She carried a tray: soup, dark bread, and a glass of something that glowed green in a way no liquid should.
She set it on the desk.
She did not look at me.
"Young Master Caelum."
Her voice was flat. Not cold—flat. The difference matters. Cold implies intent. Flat implies you're not worth the effort of intent.
"The physician says you are to eat and drink the tonic. You have a visitor at the third bell."
She spoke to the wall. The tray. The crack in the stone above the window. Her eyes touched everything in the room except me, moving with the careful choreography of someone who'd practiced not-seeing.
I knew this dance. Grew up watching it. The way teachers' eyes skipped over me in class. The way my mother's gaze drifted when I spoke. The way coworkers learned my shift schedule so they could avoid overlapping.
You don't avoid someone you dislike. Dislike is still attention. You avoid someone you've been taught to treat as furniture.
"Who—"
My voice cracked. Not my voice. Younger, thinner, raw. The throat it came from had spent a lot of time not being used.
I swallowed and tried again.
"...Who is the visitor?"
She stopped. Hand on the door handle. For a fraction of a second—less than a heartbeat—something moved across her face. Not sympathy. The mild professional discomfort of someone who's been asked a question with an obviously unpleasant answer.
"Lady Helena," she said.
A pause.
"Your lord father's wife."
...
Your lord father's wife.
Not "your mother." Not "your stepmother." Not even "Lady Ashworth." A construction specifically engineered to communicate: this woman has no obligation to you. This woman is connected to your father. You are connected to nothing.
That kind of phrasing doesn't happen naturally. It gets drilled. Practiced. Standardized across a household until every servant delivers it with the same precise, polished distance.
I didn't need a history lesson.
I didn't need a backstory.
Twenty-two years of being the wrong son in the wrong family taught me to read the architecture of rejection the way an architect reads blueprints—from the foundation up.
The door closed.
I was alone.
The soup steamed. The tonic glowed. The mountains didn't care. Outside, someone threw another fireball, and the snow dissolved into steam, and for two seconds the courtyard lit up orange and gold.
And in those two seconds—
The shadows on the wall moved.
Wrong.
Half a beat before the fire was thrown. Before the hand was raised. The shadows shifted first, sliding into position like actors who'd jumped their cue.
As if they'd known.
As if someone had written this moment, and the shadows had read ahead.
The static in my head buzzed.
Once.
Faint.
I reached for the soup. My hand shook badly enough to knock the spoon off the tray. It clattered against stone. The sound bounced around the empty room twice before dying.
I picked up the bowl with both hands and drank.
No spoon. No dignity. Dignity costs money and I was broke in two worlds now.
The soup was hot. Salty. Good.
I hated that it was good.
The tonic tasted like mint dipped in acid and hit my chest like a warm hand pressing against something cracked. The pain eased. The black veins retreated a centimeter.
I lay back. Stared at the ceiling.
'Caelum Reivan Ashworth.'
The name sat in my head like a stone in an empty room.
Not mine.
But then, "Park Jiwon" was never really mine either.
Lady Helena was coming. The wife of a father who stored his unwanted son in an empty room at the top of a mountain. A visitor announced by a servant trained not to look at me. In a body ranked F-minus, in a world where people threw fire before breakfast, and I could generate approximately enough ice to slightly cool a glass of water.
If this was a second chance, the universe had a sick sense of humor.
...But then again, I already knew that.
The static pulsed once more.
I ignored it.
I would learn, much later—after the blood, the training, the betrayals, the things I'd break and the things that would break me—that ignoring it was the first in a long series of mistakes.
But that comes later.
For now, I closed my eyes and waited for a woman I'd never met to come look through me the way everyone always had.
...
Some things, it seems, not even death can change.