Chapter 12: Sins

I woke without screaming.

That was the first wrong thing.

No phantom fire licking my nerves. No acid-dissolving skin that wasn’t there anymore. Just… nothing. A flat, unremarkable return to consciousness, like falling asleep on a couch and waking up hours later.

I blinked at the canvas ceiling.

It took some seconds for the realization to hit me.

“I’m late.”

It was barely a whisper, but the panic behind the words was there. I could already hear it. The boots outside, the sharp crack of tent poles being kicked.

The camp was awake.

I sat up fast and pressed my palms against my temples as if I could squeeze the timeline into making sense.

 

The curse’s cruel arithmetic had always been simple: suffer more, rise sooner. A death by fire bought me hours. A death by wyvern jaws bought me a little less. But the last death, the draconic flame that had passed through me so fast my nerves didn’t even have time to register it, had been almost painless.

“Shit,” I muttered, low enough that the neighboring tents wouldn’t hear. I dragged both hands down my face. “Shit. Shit.”

No sword. No time to steal one. No time to train. No time to find Iris. No time to do anything except sit in this canvas coffin and listen to the day march.

The thought made my jaw clench.

But I still had one hope.

They had appeared just before the restart.

 

I sat very still. The tent creaked around me. Outside, someone yelped as a boot connected with a support pole. Canvas collapsed. Curses followed.

Iris had shown me hers. She’d lifted her hand, and the air had shimmered, and a book had simply appeared in her palm as if it had always been there.

I raised my hands in front of my face.

Thin fingers. Student hands. No calluses, no scars, no evidence of the thousand sword swings the system had counted. The curse reset everything physical.

 

 

It was magical.

“How do I…” I started.

I tried snapping my fingers.

Nothing happened.

I tried speaking the word aloud. “Grimoire.”

It sounded ridiculous.

Nothing.

I closed my eyes and thought about it harder, as if concentration alone could drag a magical artifact into existence. I pictured a book. Leather-bound, heavy, pages filled with the secrets of my unknown element.

Still nothing.

Then I remembered Iris.

Her gesture.

She hadn’t strained. She hadn’t spoken an incantation or performed a ritual. She’d simply raised her hand, palm up, and the grimoire had come to her.

I raised my hands before me, palms facing upward. I closed my eyes.

I stopped trying to force it.

Instead, I thought about what a grimoire was supposed to be. I thought about magic. About mana.

A quiet pop broke the silence.

 

I opened my eyes.

Something rested in my hands. A pocket watch.

For a long moment, I simply stared at it, trying and failing to reconcile what I’d expected with what I’d received.

The watch was small enough to sit in my palm. Its casing was round and smooth, crafted from a metal that looked like aged silver but felt warmer than metal should. Intricate engravings covered every surface as if they’d been etched by hand. Gold details traced the edges. Thin lines of it ran along the engravings.

“Is this supposed to be a grimoire?” I whispered.

I turned it over.

On the back, inscribed in elegant script that I could somehow read despite my inability to decipher anything else in this world’s written language, was a name.

My thumb traced the letters slowly, feeling each one.

My name. On an object that was supposed to be a piece of my soul.

I turned it back over and studied the face.

The watch had a hinged cover sealed shut. A small clasp held it closed.

“Is this… normal?” I murmured to myself. “Or is this another one of my problems?”

My thumb found the clasp and pressed.

The cover sprang open with a soft click.

Inside, a watch face stared back at me. The craftsmanship was exquisite. Every line was perfect, every number precisely placed.

The hands weren’t moving.

They pointed to a time two hours earlier than now. I stared at the frozen hands for a long moment.

“Two hours ago,” I breathed. “That’s when I should have woken up.”

The watch knew. Somehow, impossibly, the watch knew my curse. It had recorded the time of my usual awakening.

I closed the cover gently and held the watch in both hands, feeling its weight. It was heavier than it looked.

“There has to be more,” I said quietly. “Iris said grimoires write themselves. They fill with spells, with knowledge. They’re not just… objects.”

I turned the watch over again, searching for a seam, a hidden compartment, a second clasp. My fingers ran along every edge, every groove.

Nothing opened.

Nothing revealed itself.

Maybe it’s empty because I’m empty, I thought bitterly. No circles. No spells. Why would my grimoire be any different?

I almost set it down.

Almost.

The messages had said more than just “Grimoire Unlocked.”

They’d said “Mana Absorbed.”

If my body had absorbed draconic blood, if mana had entered my system for the first time…

Maybe the grimoire wasn’t empty.

Maybe I just wasn’t asking it the right question.

I held the watch in my palm and closed my eyes again. This time I didn’t think about books or spells or what a grimoire was supposed to be.

I thought: Open.

The word formed in my mind like a command.

The watch vibrated. A single, brief pulse against my palm.

Light spilled from between my fingers.

My eyes snapped open.

A translucent screen hung in the air before me. It shimmered faintly at the edges, runes crawling along its border.

The display was familiar. I’d seen something like it every time I died. The same system that had been tracking my deaths and my progress since the first loop.

My eyes moved over the screen.

At the top, a section labeled in script I could somehow read without effort.

 

No spells listed. No elemental affinities. Just a blank screen.

Below the empty magic section, another heading.

 

Followed by two entries.

My stomach dropped before I even read them. The word “curses” alone was enough to make my skin crawl.

 

I read it twice.

Then a third time.

“Sin of Sloth,” I repeated under my breath. “Because dying repeatedly is… lazy?”

I forced my eyes to the second entry.

 

I read the words again, slower, letting each one settle into place.

I had mana.

I’d always had mana. Nine cores worth of it.

Yet my body consumed it. Every drop of mana my cores generated was swallowed before it could reach the surface, before it could form a Circle, before it could manifest as anything the outside world could see or measure.