Author's note: You can skip this chapter if you are not interested in Lythian's mini sidestory.
***
"Fuck this…"
It was the thirteenth time Lythian cursed within just under four minutes.
Well, who would not? Given that all he had ever experienced after he arrived to this world was being locked in prison— the same as right now, cuffed with Eternum cuffs that he cannot even feel a drop of zaen both from his body and around him.
"I was… fucking delusional, thinking I'm the main character."
Lythian thought of Seven.
He suspected something was off ever since he first met him at the forest behind the exiled mansion when Seven waited for him.
Waited.
For the assassin meant to kill him.
Who does that? No one. No sane person would ever do that.
Not only that, but that 'Seven' had the gall to outtalk him and even made him his slave.
Lythian was sure when that bundle of Selverin herbs vanished from Seven's hand when they first arrived at the Kingdom of Othrelis, but he looked away and pretended he was interested in a merchant's rack of rusted daggers instead.
"I feel like fuc—"
"Shut your damn mouth!"
A knight guarding the cell he was locked in finally snapped.
"Fuck this, fuck that. Fuck your mouth before I rip it apart!"
Lythian glared at him then spat by the knight's boot.
"Fucking monkey."
He cursed the knight as he grinned through his teeth.
Haah…
A slow breath as he stared at the floating window interface before him.
|| Basic Information ||
|| Character: Lythian Ace ||
|| Gift: Immortality ||
That interface was the only thing he could see.
There were no stats. There was no zaen count. There were no flashy skill trees or cheat screens like those light novel protagonists usually got.
All it displayed were just three lonely lines on a translucent blue box as if mocking him.
The damn thing did not even tell him the description of his gift.
He still bled. Still got hungry. Still got tired. The cuffs on his wrists were not exactly bouncing off like he was some undead warlock. He had not received any benefits of the so-called system.
'...If this was immortality, then the system could suck it.'
Lythian narrowed his eyes.
There was not even supposed to be a system in this novel. The one he had read— skimmed rather— had not bore a single window interface. It was a grounded like a grimy low-fantasy world.
"Fuck."
He repeated the word out of habit more than rage this time.
"How can a genius like me fail so badly in this shitty world?"
Hff…
He leaned back against the cold stone wall of his cell, letting his head knock lightly against it. He closed his eyes and the silence pressed in that made him remember his past life.
Earth.
For him, it had never smelled like piss-soaked stone and blood. It smelled like brewed coffee every morning and new car interiors.
His bed was king-sized.
His shower had pressure settings.
His computer had a 4090 RTX and a 2K refresh rate monitor that made game graphics look like reality, though all he did was playing RPG and MMORPG games as an assassin all day.
He was not Lythian Ace back then. Just…
Ace.
Ace Tohru, 21, magna cum laude in Applied AI Engineering, youngest startup founder in his university and once even interviewed by a niche tech podcast called Mini-Silicon Hearts.
His biggest problem was choosing between two VC deals and not letting his parents find out he skipped a cousin's wedding for an Esports finals ticket.
"Almost perfect," or that's what people said.
He had money. He had brains. He had a decent jawline. He had no trauma to speak of, except maybe the time he accidentally formatted his SSD.
He was not unhappy.
But he also was not… fulfilled.
He remembered skimming the novel that would eventually become this cursed world. He started it at around 4:26 A.M., two years ago, half-tipsy on leftover red wine and sick from a cheat-day binge of cold pizza.
It pissed him off though that he even wrote a 4,000-word review flaming the author's "waste of potential." He called it "a beautifully built world ruined by a cowardly protagonist who refused to change it."
Funny how things turned out.
Because now, not only he was not the main character, but he was also a cowardly assassin stuck in it— not the kind of assassin he had always dreamed of.
"If only—"
|| House of Fate has detected discrepancies ||
|| House of Fate found the existing informations regarding the existence of Lythian Ace as shackles to the potential of the fourth reader ||
|| Updating… ||
|| T-Tik T-Tak T-Tik T-Tak ||
|| T-Tik T-Tak T-Tik ||
|| Lythian Ace's existence has been updated ||
|| Beginning Synchronization ||
All of a sudden he clutched his temple and groaned as a sharp pain stabbed through his skull.
"Urkhhh-kh…"
Memories.
Rather, memories of the original Lythian Ace.
A memory in a timeline before that gut-wrenching trauma he had witnessed back then, this time Lythian was still barely six and a small kid with his Mom cradling him like a baby.
The room was dark, btu he could see those two figures as if their outlines are illuminated by light.
Cr-Cracskk…
No.
There was still a faint light from a crackling candle that hung on the wall right beside the door, so small that it would probably go out in under a minute.
Based on the image, he had no father figure in this house, thus her mother could barely buy enough food to ease their hunger, let alone buy a candle that costs around 1 zevi each— one could buy 2 pieces of stale bread with that.
"Mom…"
The kid Lythian mumbled as he hugged his mother as if she was the only light he could see in that pitch-black darkness.
"I'm… scared. I'm scared of the d-dark…"
"Ah, my poor little sweetheart~"
His mother replied, humming, and cradled him back.
"It's okay~ Mom is with you. Mom promise to buy you a new candle tomorrow, so sleep just for tonight, 'kay~?"
"Mmmkay!"
Minutes passed in that pitch-black darkness, where even the light of the moon refused to shine through the cracks in the wooden walls.
The wind outside howled gently, as though it, too, was trying not to wake the world.
She began to tell him a story.
"Once upon a time…"
His mother began as she brushed Lythian's hair gently behind his ear as he curled into her lap.
"...There lived a legendary assassin.
"But he wasn't a bad man, no. People only thought he was bad because he was strong, and moved through the shadows every time the sun hid behind the clouds.
"But do you know what he really did?"
The kid Lythian shook his head, wide-eyed, and clutched the hem of his mother's sleeve.
"He gave food to the children who lived in the gutters. They were not just scraps or leftovers or crusts, but warm, golden loaves he baked himself, with honey drizzled on top.
"Even when he hadn't eaten for days.
"Even when he was hurt and bleeding, he still made sure the children were fed first."
"And when someone cried for help, even if that voice was miles away, drowned beneath rain and stone, he heard it.
"He once leapt across five rooftops just to rescue a girl caught in a chimney fire. He climbed the tower of the eastern cathedral barefoot in a thunderstorm to save a boy locked inside the bell chamber. He even…"
She leaned in, lowering her voice like she was sharing a sacred secret.
"...carried an old blind man on his back all the way up the snow-covered mountains just so he could hear the wind one last time."
"Even if it was scary?"
She smiled and nodded.
"Yes. Even if it was scary. Because heroes don't wait for the world to be kind, they run into the dark to make it kinder.
"But…
"...One night, the assassin rushed into a skewer-lit street to rescue someone. But the candle in that skewer flickered… and then went out."
Her hand paused for a moment on his hair.
"The assassin was afraid of the dark. He had always been. But he never told anyone, not even the children he saved.
"And because he was scared… he didn't notice it was a trap. And the bad people hurt him, terribly. Because even heroes… get scared sometimes."
Lythian did not understand why his mother's voice trembled at the end.
But he cried.
It was small tears at first, until it became the kind that left his chest shaking.
"I'm not scared of the dark anymore, Mom…"
The kid Lythian whispered, biting his lip, trying to be brave.
"I won't be like… that assassin…"
He never got to finish the sentence.
Because the warmth of her lap, the rustle of her shawl, the flicker of the candlelight, all of it collapsed into flame and screaming.
Screams coming from one person: Lythian but a year older.
He was back.
Tied to the post with his skin against splintered wood and the scent of burning flesh of her mother thick in the air who was bound and engulfed in holy fire as the priests chanted words, calling it the purification ritual.
Hff…
Haah…
His breathing staggered.
His eyes were wide with his pupils shaking as the fire reflected in them was no longer candlelight and no longer the warmth of a bedtime story.
But the curse of a memory.
The trauma that Seven made him relive at the basement prison back then.
Hff…
Taking a deep breath, he looked down at the scar on his chest that refused to heal and told himself to calm down, though he could not see the scar given that it was under his clothes.
He clenched his teeth, forcing himself not to think about it. Just like that, the memory dissolved and was replaced by another.
Pitch-black space.
A cave.
A young Lythian stood there, no older than ten. His eyes were now vacant and lifeless, as if the spark of childhood was already drained from them.
Beside him were other children, just as confused.
No one spoke.
They just… looked… at each other, as if waiting for something.
Click.
The overhead lights flickered on, buzzing faintly, revealing a wide, domed cavern. Steel doors. Cracked tiles. Bloodstains, old and new.
And the moment he saw it— this arrangement, this silence, the eerie symmetry of children in a circle— he knew.
He had played this setting a thousand times in RPGs and MMORPGs back on Earth.
"Hell."
His voice in the present whispered the truth his child-self could not speak.
It was not a normal place, but it was a training ground for assassins where only the cruelest rule applied:
Kill… or be killed.
Only one could walk out alive.
|| Synchronization Complete: 4% ||
|| House of Fate has finally stabilized the discrepancies ||
|| Reader #4 has now been stabilized ||
Lythian's body tensed as he yanked himself from the memory, head pressing back against the stone wall of the cell.
Back in the present.
"Yeah."
He smirked, then spat on the ground. But it was not a spit.
It was blood.
He watched it drip against the stone.
"Fuck this world."