Jace woke with a jolt. His eyes snapped open to a cracked ceiling fan spinning lazily overhead, casting weak, dusty light across a cramped room he didn't recognise. The air was thick with the smell of cheap instant noodles and something else. Despair, maybe. None of it made sense.
This wasn't the Sovereign's Royal Chambers. This wasn't his body. This wasn't his time.
A violent storm tore through his mind. Memories flooded every corner of his consciousness, each one fighting the others for space. One moment he was Prince Aerion, heir to the Sky Throne, commanding Monarch-class beasts and charting celestial cultivation paths. The next, he was this twenty-year-old Jace, a low-level summoner barely scraping by in some forgotten corner of the Ironcrest Nation.
The dissonance was unbearable. A spiritual torture that forced a ragged gasp from his lungs. The pain only subsided when his mind, desperate for self-preservation, slammed an internal barrier between the two existences. He was left trembling in the aftermath, sweat plastering his thin cotton shirt to his chest. He was Jace now. Undeniably, physically, irrevocably Jace. But he was also Aerion.
The Prince's memories were still there. History, vast political knowledge, unparalleled royal arcane studies. All of it locked behind a mental fog, hazy and incomplete. The true power of Prince Aerion was inaccessible, a shadow trapped in the mind of a weak summoner.
He sat up, leaning against the peeling paint of the wall. He needed to assess the damage. He needed to understand how this world worked, this new world that had somehow replaced his home. His world had functioned on bloodline power and mutually beneficial contracts. This one, he realised as he instinctively searched for a status readout, operated on numerical statistics. A system he vaguely remembered belonging to a minor, unsophisticated tributary nation back home.
A faint blue screen shimmered before his eyes, responding to his thought.
System: Summoner Status
Name: Jace
Age: 20
Rank: Common Tier Summoner
Contract Slots: 1 (Empty)
Talents: Insight of the Tactician (Dormant)
Stats: Power 35, Spirit 45, Constitution 40, Speed 38
He stared at the numbers. Pathetic. An absolute embarrassment. In his part of the world, a child of the Royal Bloodline possessed higher base stats before they learned to speak. The Prince's rage, cold and absolute, briefly pierced the fog. The King's son, the heir who once held the loyalty of Sovereign beasts, was now weaker than a common street baby.
He took a slow, deliberate breath. Forced the Prince's disciplined mind to take control of Jace's panicking consciousness. Panic wouldn't bring back his throne, his family, or his life. Knowledge would. He reached into the mental space that had been violently carved out by the fusion. It wasn't a personal memory, but an archive. He recognised it as the collective knowledge of his bloodline. A vast, instinctive library of lore that only a true heir could access.
Within moments, he was swimming in data. The structure of the current stat tier system. The history of the four major nations in this region. Most importantly, the foundational principles of summoning contracts. This new system was crude, but easy enough to understand. Stats governed raw potential. Tiers governed the limits of that potential. His current Common Tier status meant he was permanently capped. He'd be unable to contract or even sustain a beast that could approach the power levels he required for survival, let alone reclaiming his lost inheritance. His highest stat, Spirit at 45, was barely adequate for maintaining a sustained contract with a low-tier, Common-level beast.
The humiliation was a physical ache. Jace had inherited the consequences of a monumental failure. He'd inherited the disgrace of a failed life. The debt, the weak body, the pitiful stats. It was a deep pit he'd been thrown into. Yet he possessed knowledge. Hazy and fragmented, but the forgotten archives of the Sovereign bloodline were more powerful than all the libraries of his era combined. He instinctively knew how to identify cultivation weaknesses, how to optimise growth, and how to execute battle plans that exploited weaknesses he saw.
The key lay in the dormant talent. Insight of the Tactician. It was a rare, low-level manifestation of the royal bloodline's core ability: the power to instantly parse and exploit statistical weaknesses, both in enemies and allies. It was why his family had ruled. They didn't fight fair. They found the weakness, and they used it to their advantage.
He pushed the sheets aside and swung his legs out of bed. The exhaustion was immediate and heavy. His body was weak, brittle, unused to the mental strain of accommodating a Prince's consciousness. His Constitution stat of 40 was woefully low. He needed food. Real food, not the nutrient paste he found in the cupboard. He needed resources.
He walked over to a battered wooden desk and picked up a crumpled notice. A summons from the local Faction Academy. The annual selection trials for prestigious students were looming in one week. The Academy. Using Jace's memory, he knew it was the best source of resources, information, training and beast summoning potential in the city.
If Jace failed, he'd be conscripted into manual labour to pay off the debts attached to his failed Summoner status. If he succeeded, he'd gain access to the knowledge and materials necessary to push his stats past the miserable Common Tier ceiling.
I need a beast, the Prince's tactical voice echoed in his mind. Not just any beast. A true weapon. Something that will get me heading in the right direction. Jace looked back at his stats. Power 35. Spirit 45. Constitution 40. Speed 38. Pathetic. He had to face the public summoning circles one more time, despite the memory of Jace's past failures being prevalent in his mind. It was the fastest way to get a powerful beast. A powerful beast was the fastest way to escape failure.
He moved towards the window. The weak sunlight hurt his eyes. He saw his reflection in the cheap, dusty glass. A young man with dark, tired eyes and a face too gaunt for his age. A failed man, wearing the echoes of a lost throne.
This is the first move, Aerion, he told himself. We start with nothing. We take the shame. We endure the weakness. But we will not fail the climb. The true struggle wasn't against the world, but against the shame of being so small. He wasn't used to this feeling. It was a feeling the Prince had never, could never, have tolerated. Yet the price for this life, it seemed, was humility. He accepted the price. He'd pay it back in blood.