Death, it turned out, was not as silent as I had imagined. There were no gates of light or vast heavenly meadows. There was only a slowly fading pain, followed by the cry of a baby breaking the silence.
When I opened my eyes for the first time in this world, I didn't see the ceiling of my cramped, stuffy apartment in Tokyo. I saw an old, dusty wooden roof and the face of a woman who looked exhausted, yet smiled softly at me.
I had been reincarnated.
Not as a hero with a holy sword, nor as a handsome, worshipped prince. I was Alex, the third son of the House of Baron Grey—a poor noble family managing a rocky territory on the outskirts of the Solstice Kingdom.
'Crap, I know this dump,' I thought as my adult consciousness began to merge with my infant brain.
This world was Eternal Flowers of Solstice, a trashy otome game whose routes I had just finished before dying from overwork. In that game, the name "Alex" didn't even have a face illustration. He was merely a "Mob" character, an extra destined to die during the first monster attack at the Magic Academy, just to show the player how cruel the main antagonist was.
"I refuse to die a second time just as a death statistic for the sake of someone else's plot progression," I muttered (though at the time, it only sounded like baby gibberish begging for milk).
Seven Years Later
Since I could walk, I never deigned to play "house" with the peasant children in my territory. While other brats were busy chasing dragonflies, I spent my time in the woods behind the Baron's near-collapsing mansion.
This world had a very mechanical magic system, exactly like the one I studied in the game. However, the nobles here were too arrogant and stupid. They relied solely on mediocre natural talent and inefficient, poetic incantations. They thought magic was an art; to me, magic was an exploit.
As a former hardcore gamer, I knew a more effective way: Glitched Training.
"One... two... one hundred..."
I was doing push-ups on the muddy ground. On my back, I had strapped a large boulder modified with a low-level weight spell. Sweat poured down, soaking my coarse linen shirt.
This kid's body had to be forged beyond human limits if I didn't want to end up as a background corpse in the second chapter. In this world, mana (magic energy) is stored within neural circuits. The common way to develop them is through boring meditation. My glitch method? Forcibly destroy those circuits so they grow back larger.
Every day, I drained my mana until it was completely empty—Mana Exhaustion. I felt nauseous, my head felt like it was going to split open, and my vision blurred. When I was on the verge of fainting, I forced myself to meditate, brutally pulling mana from nature into my "thirsty" circuits.
KRRRRACK!
I could feel the nerves inside my body vibrating violently. It felt like molten iron being forced through my veins.
"More... this isn't enough to kill that damn script."
I stood up, pulling a wooden sword I had weighted with iron. I swung it thousands of times every day until my palms were bloody and calloused. I didn't study the beautiful sword techniques of the royal knights, full of useless movements. I studied the most efficient killing technique: one strike, one life.
Beyond the physical, I practiced Mana Compression. Other nobles took pride in having a vast "pool" of mana. Idiots. A vast pool just makes you a bigger target. I preferred to turn that pool into a single "bullet." I compressed my mana until it reached an absurd density. On the surface, any mana sensor would only see me as a lower-class student with thin mana. However, if I pulled the trigger, that mana would explode with enough destructive power to crumble a fortress.
"Alex! What are you doing in the woods again?!" my father's voice, Baron Grey, echoed from a distance.
I immediately deactivated the weight spell and hid the wooden sword behind a bush. I put on a blank face. The face of a boring, harmless Mob.
"Just playing, Dad!" I shouted as I ran home.
The Year of Academy Entrance
Time passed quickly. Thanks to the "hellish" training I conducted in secret for ten years, I now had a dense physique and mana circuits far beyond human standards, though I hid them with high-level stealth magic.
Today was the day of my departure to the Royal Magic Academy. The place where that nauseating main plot begins. The place where the narcissistic Prince Julian would meet Clarisse, and where the antagonist, Lady Elara von Heist, would begin her terror.
"Alex, remember what I told you," Baron Grey held my shoulder emotionally. "You don't need to stand out. Just graduate, find a job in city administration, and help our family a little."
"Of course, Father. That is indeed my plan," I replied sincerely.
I wasn't lying. My plan was to be the most boring background character in the academy's history. I would sit in the corner of the class, get perfectly mediocre grades, and avoid all the main characters like the plague.
I boarded an old horse carriage toward the capital. In my mind, I had already mapped out a strategy to survive three years at the academy without attracting the attention of a single "important person."
However, there was one thing I didn't predict.
At the academy gates, a magnificent carriage bearing the silver lion crest of the Heist family passed beside mine. The window was slightly open, revealing a glimpse of a girl with beautiful black hair, but crimson eyes that looked empty and cold.
Elara von Heist.
For a split second, our eyes met. I immediately looked away, acting like an extra intimidated by the aura of high nobility.
'Never get involved with her,' I warned myself. 'That woman is a time bomb that will destroy anyone near her.'
I didn't know that my actions of "trying too hard to not stand out" would instead become the very anomaly that attracted the most dangerous predator in this world.
The Royal Magic Academy awaited. And the trashy script I had memorized... was about to be torn into shapeless pieces.