The memories came to me in fragments, disjointed but unmistakable.
I stood at the precipice between consciousness and void. My throat was open—not metaphorically, but literally severed by a blade that had moved faster than thought. The pain was a white-hot eternity compressed into a single moment.
And then, with the desperation of someone drowning, I had done something.
A 200-gram crystal of Dark stone—mana in its purest, most concentrated form. I had acquired it through means I barely remembered, some black-market transaction conducted in the final weeks of my previous life. The substance was illegal, dangerous, and incredibly expensive. It was also the last weapon I had.
In that final instant, with my blood pouring onto cold stone, I had consumed it.
Not injected it. Not diluted it. Swallowed the entire crystalline mass whole, forcing my body to absorb mana at a rate that should have torn me apart from the inside.
The pain of that consumption had been immediate, overwhelming, utterly indifferent to my already-existing agony. It had been the sensation of drowning in molten metal while my throat was being carved open.
And then: nothing.
And then: 2012.
Now, staring at the renamed file in my Journal, the logic crystallized into something approaching certainty.
└Mana drug
The file wasn't a record. It was a storage archive. The Journal—my Blessing, my curse, my incomprehensible miracle—had captured not just the memory of the Dark stone, but the substance itself. Encoded it. Preserved it in some quantum intersection between the magical and the informational.
And now it was here. Waiting. Accessible.
"The Journal remembers," I whispered, the revelation turning over in my mind like a key in a lock. "If it remembers, it can be recalled."
I stared at the file for a long moment, my fingers hovering over the keyboard interface that existed only in my mind. The implications were staggering. I was carrying a weapon that could amplify my power beyond what my teenage body should be capable of containing. I was carrying a substance that had nearly killed me before and might kill me again.
I was also carrying the only legitimate explanation for my impossible regression.
The Dark stone had been the catalyst. Somehow, in the moment of death, in the intersection of my consciousness fragmenting and this forbidden substance flooding my system, the Journal had made a choice—or fulfilled a purpose—or triggered some consequence of its own nature that I didn't yet understand.
It had brought me back.
"Then I'll use it," I said quietly.
Not as a weapon—not yet. First, I needed to understand it. I needed to understand everything. But the presence of the Dark stone file transformed me from a dying orphan into something else entirely. Something dangerous.
The determination that rose in me was cold and precise. Not the hot fury of wounded pride, but the calculated resolve of someone who had already seen how the story was supposed to end and was determined to rewrite it.
"I'll make them pay," I said to the empty night. "Every member of the Aulria family. Every person who benefited from my suffering. Sia. Leo. Henry. All of them. I'll dismantle what they've built, and I'll do it by becoming so essential to them that they can't remove me without destroying themselves."
The vow felt significant, weighted with the gravity of a promise made to the dead—which, technically, I was.
"Kevin. What are you doing over there?"
The voice pulled me from my reverie.
Roan was standing a few meters away, his expression caught between concern and something that might have been suspicion.
He was the only active military personnel at the orphanage—a fencing instructor whose primary purpose was evaluating the children for potential talent recruitment.
He was also, by the standards of this place, almost kind.
I closed the Journal and turned to face him fully.
"You seem troubled," he observed, approaching the bench. "Is your head hurting again?"
"I'm thinking," I replied, keeping my voice neutral. In the previous timeline, Roan had been largely indifferent to me—I was neither talented enough to recruit nor broken enough to waste sympathy on. But appearances mattered. I needed to present myself as functional, dedicated, manageable.
"About what?" he asked, settling onto the bench beside me with the casual confidence of someone who had no doubt his presence would be tolerated.
The true answer—'I'm wondering how to use a mana drug stored in an impossible archive to infiltrate and dismantle the most powerful family on the continent'—would not do.
"Thinking about how to become a great knight," I said instead. "How to be stronger. Things like that."
Roan's expression shifted, and I recognized the calculation occurring behind his eyes. I had confirmed that I was motivated. Ambition was manageable. Ambition could be redirected, controlled, exploited.
"That's commendable," he said after a moment. "But the path is simpler than you think."
He paused, clearly deciding how much to reveal, then continued.
"You just have to prove yourself in the match. This orphanage has significance to the Aulria family—it's a heritage project, part of their public image. The main family takes notice of events here. Direct descendants will be observing the competition."