Chapter 8: Reading

 

I woke as if I’d been thrown into my own body.

The scream didn’t come this time, but the pain did.

For a few terrible seconds I could still feel it.

The wyvern’s dark green spray.

The warmth when it first hit my skin, followed by the sudden, absolute wrongness of burning that wasn’t fire. My forearms had melted in my memory. I could still feel the skin blistering, the cloth dissolving, the way the pain had climbed from surface to bone like something hungry.

I gasped and sat up, the thin blanket sliding down my chest.

My arms were whole. Still, the agony lingered anyway.

“Damn it,” I muttered, rubbing my forearms as if I could wipe the sensation away. My hands shook slightly. “Can’t anything be easy?”

Outside the canvas, someone shifted in their sleep. A muffled complaint started, then died out.

I forced myself to breathe. Inhale. Hold. Exhale.

The pain didn’t vanish, still it dulled enough for my thoughts to clear up.

I remembered the messages.

Not just that they’d appeared, what they had said.

Despite the frustration, excitement stirred in my chest.

For the first time, I hadn’t just died.

I’d done something that mattered.

I’d wounded a wyvern. Maybe not the way I intended, maybe with consequences that ate me alive. Yet it had been a real blow. Proof that these monsters weren’t completely untouchable. Proof that I wasn’t completely powerless.

A small victory, in an endless cycle that had been nothing but failure.

My mind replayed the messages again, slower now.

 

 

I stared at the tent wall as if the words might appear there again.

Level increased.

I had improved, somehow, simply by repeating the same motions until my body and mind had no choice but to learn.

A thousand repetitions.

In my old life, you got better by training, by practice, by time. Here, practice had been counted, measured, and converted into something tangible by a system that watched me die and reset the day like it was turning pages in a book.

“My God,” I whispered, hand going to my forehead. “I had to swing a sword a thousand times…”

I let my head fall forward for a moment, elbow on knee, trying to imagine what “Level 1” actually meant.

Better balance? Cleaner cuts? Stronger wrists? Faster reaction?

I wanted to feel the difference immediately, as if a skill could suddenly reshape my muscles.

Even if it was subtle, it was still progress.

My eyes narrowed as my thoughts returned to the other lines.

 

 

“How does someone learn resistance?” I muttered, half incredulous, half unsettled.

In my first life, you didn’t “learn” resistance to poison. You built tolerance, maybe, through exposure.

I flexed my fingers, testing sensation. My arms still tingled, but beneath it there was something else now: the strange sense that my body had changed its relationship to suffering.

Toxicity resistance, I thought. Had I bathed in wyvern acid and lived long enough for the curse to record it?

And fear resistance…

My stomach tightened.

Had I been afraid? Yes. Always. Every time.

But maybe fear had stopped ruling me so completely. Maybe the system had noticed the difference between terror that paralyzes and fear that you move through.

I shook the last clinging strands of sleep from my mind and reached for one of the books beside my makeshift bed. The leather cover was cracked and aged. When I opened it, the pages were crowded with notes and symbols. None of them legible to me, written in a language foreign.

While trying to find a pattern it clicked.

I slipped the book into my satchel, this time with something I hadn’t felt in a long time. Hope.

Maybe.

Iris had said I might already know why I couldn’t use magic.

Maybe the answer had been in the book all along.

 

---

 

The camp was still asleep.

Only the guards moved, silhouettes pacing their familiar routes.

My first stop was routine now.

The noble’s tent.

As usual, I went in and came out with the sword. I paused while adjusting the sheath at my belt, weighing my next move.

“Right,” I murmured to myself as I started walking again. “Making noise and hoping Iris would find me didn’t work.”

It’s time I seek her out.

I aimed myself toward the far upper reaches of the camp, where the tents thinned and the ground grew rougher. The further I went, the more space opened between the officers’ quarters. Supply carts sat abandoned in the shadows, their wheels half-sunk in dirt.

Among the equipment was a lone soldier patrolling an isolated stretch near the perimeter. Armored in the same style Iris wore. He walked with the loose confidence. His attention drifted. His pace was lazy.

To me, he looked like an opportunity wearing steel.

I stopped for a second and forced myself to become someone else.

I smoothed my white hair back, making it look intentional rather than wild. I straightened my posture until my shoulders ached with the effort. I lifted my chin and set my face into a calm I didn’t feel.

Authority wasn’t only rank. It was performance.

With a sword at my hip and a book under my arm, I had props. Now I needed the voice.

I stepped out from cover and, before the soldier could properly register me approaching, I called out sharply.

“Soldier.”

He spun as if yanked by a string. His eyes widened, and he snapped to attention so fast his armor gave a faint clink.

“Sir!” he blurted, surprise mixed in his voice.

His gaze swept over me. Hair, clothes, the way I stood. He was trying to place me in whatever hierarchy his mind lived inside.

I held steady and prayed the lie would hold.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Please let this be enough.

“I want information,” I said, keeping my tone measured, clipped, like a man used to being obeyed. “Where can I find the soldier named Iris?”

The guard hesitated. Just a heartbeat. Enough to make my stomach tighten.

“I—I don’t know for certain, sir,” he stammered. “But she usually patrols near the mess tent.”

A surge of satisfaction flared in me so hard I nearly smiled.

Finally. A lead.

As I turned, another thought caught me and stopped my feet.

If I rushed off too quickly, would that look wrong? Would it crack the illusion? Nobles didn’t scramble. They summoned.

I forced myself to pivot back and fixed the guard with a steady stare.

“Inform her,” I said, letting the words fall like a command, “that I will be waiting at the edge of the camp, near the stone pillars.”

The guard straightened further, uncertainty flickering in his posture.

“Y-yes, sir.”

I took one more step closer, just enough to press the weight of expectation. Summoned the harshest tone I could remember from Blut.

“This is urgent,” I barked. “What are you standing around for? Get lost.”

The guard jolted as if struck. “Yes, sir!” he snapped, and began moving immediately.

I didn’t watch him go. Watching would look like doubt.

Instead I spun on my heel and strode away with the confidence. My heart hammered with the fragile exhilaration of having finally moved the day in a direction that wasn’t simply toward death.

I made my way back to the edge of the camp, my hideout tucked between towering rock formations.

It was the only place I’d found where I could breathe without feeling watched.

I stepped into the narrow hollow and let the tension in my shoulders loosen by a fraction.

Each swing sliced through the air with a crisp whoosh.

Something was different.

Nothing that would make a veteran swordsman nod in approval. But I could feel it.

The rhythm had improved.

I couldn’t have explained exactly how, just that my body knew.

The blade descended with less vibration. My transitions between positions felt smoother, less like wrestling with a stubborn tool and more like guiding something that wanted to follow. My breathing didn’t rag as quickly. My hands ached less. The burn in my shoulder arrived slower, weaker.

I was still an amateur swinging a piece of steel.

But I was an amateur with a fraction more control.

That realization fed the flame inside me.

My swings sharpened. My movements grew more aggressive. An impatient desire to be better now, immediately, as if wanting it hard enough could carve skill into bone.

My eyes locked onto the sword until the world around it began to fade.

Sound blurred. The cold air, the sweat on my skin, the ache creeping through my arms. All of it dimmed until there was only the blade and the space it cut through.

It became a silent conversation.

Steel spoke in vibrations and angles. In the way the blade hummed when my edge alignment was wrong. In the duller sound when I forced power instead of letting motion carry it. In the tiny jolt that told me my stance had shifted, my balance had drifted, my wrists had collapsed a degree too far.

The longer I moved, the more I understood what the sword was telling me.

Your position is wrong. Your edge isn’t set. You’re muscling it. Stop.

It was some kind of feedback I hadn’t been able to hear before the system had carved “Level 1” into me.

I was so deep in that rhythm that the first sound barely registered.

Footsteps.

Rock crunching under boots.

I froze mid-motion, the sword held low, tip angled toward the ground. My breath stopped in my chest.

The footsteps grew closer.

A young woman stepped into the mouth of the hideout.

She held her helmet tucked under her right arm. Her left hand lifted to her forehead, trying to peel sweaty hair away from her skin. Short black strands clung stubbornly, and irritation flickered across her face as she fought them.

Her gaze darted over the rocks, searching.