I woke up before the sun.
Not because I wanted to. Because the body I was living in apparently had the sleeping habits of someone who had spent months staring at the ceiling waiting to die. Every joint ached. My back felt like it had been assembled incorrectly. The blanket smelled like medicine and old grief.
I sat up, rubbed my face, and got on with it.
First things first. I needed to know what I was working with.
I pulled up my status.
[Name: Caiden Knox][Level: 1][XP: 0 / 200][Strength: 4 | Agility: 4 | Intelligence: 6 | Endurance: 4 | Mana: 5 | Perception: 5 | Vitality: 4 | Luck: 2][Skill Points: 100][Skills: None]
Right. So the body of a bedridden noble who never trained a day in his life. Stats so low they were practically decorative. No skills. No combat experience. Not a single useful thing in the inventory except a hundred skill points and an ability the system itself couldn't fully explain.
Fine.
I spent the first hour reading every book in the room.
Caiden had been a reader at least. Shelves packed tight with histories, natural encyclopaedias, political records, and one very battered bestiary shoved at the back like he was embarrassed by it. I pulled them all and read fast. Not carefully. Skimming for what I actually needed.
By the time the sun came up I had the basics.
Aethoria. Constitutional kingdom, ruling monarch, noble houses ranked by land and mana core lineage. Magic was real and common. Technology existed but ran on mana instead of electricity. Beasts lived in the forests, the mountains, the dungeon rifts that opened randomly across the countryside. Adventurers hunted them for materials and coin. The guild system handled registration and ranked hunters the same way everyone else got ranked, FF through Z, though nobody alive had ever seen anything past S.
The bestiary was outdated and half the entries were illustrated by someone who had clearly never seen the animals they were drawing. But it gave me names. Threat levels. Rough locations.
I noted the ones that lived within walking distance of the Knox estate.
Then I opened the Sovereign Index and spent an hour there too.
A hundred points wasn't much. I had to be precise about it. I filtered out everything flashy, everything offensive, everything that looked impressive but wouldn't keep me alive when I was level one walking into a forest alone with arms like wet noodles.
I bought two skills.
[Skill purchased: Basic Body Reinforcement (Passive)][Effect: Continuously hardens muscles, bones, and skin using ambient mana. Reduces physical damage taken. Scales with Vitality and Mana stats.][Cost: 50 Skill Points.]
[Skill purchased: Mana Sense (Passive)][Effect: Allows user to passively detect mana signatures in the surrounding environment. Range and clarity scale with Perception and Mana stats.][Cost: 50 Skill Points.]
[Skill Points remaining: 0]
Spent everything. Zero left.
Good. I didn't need points sitting in a menu doing nothing. I needed to survive Day One.
The Knox estate was small. A main house, a storage shed, a garden that had given up, and a low stone wall surrounding all of it that a motivated child could have climbed. Beyond the wall the land sloped down into a treeline about two hundred metres out.
I stood at the gate in Caiden's clothes, which were loose on me because he had apparently stopped eating properly a while before the fever finished the job. I'd found a short hunting knife in the storage shed. Rusted at the base but sharp enough at the tip. I held it and tried to feel dangerous.
I didn't feel dangerous.
I walked into the trees anyway.
The forest was quiet in the way that made it obvious something lived in it.
My Mana Sense pinged almost immediately. Small signature. Low to the ground. Moving parallel to me about thirty metres off to the left and trying very hard not to be noticed.
I stopped walking.
It stopped moving.
I waited.
It waited longer.
I took three slow steps toward it and it broke and ran and I got my first look at what the bestiary had called a Grim Rat. About the size of a large cat, grey-black fur, eyes that caught the low morning light and reflected it back red. Fast. Skittish. Ranked FF on the strength scale, which put it just barely above a civilian in a bad mood.
It stopped at the base of a tree about fifteen metres away and looked at me.
I looked at it.
[New objective issued.][Objective: First kill.][Reward: 50 XP. 10 Skill Points.]
Helpful timing on that one.
The rat made a sound like a small, wet cough and launched itself at my face.
I threw myself sideways. It missed. Hit the tree behind me and dropped to the ground, shook its head once, and came again. Faster this time.
I was not a fighter. I had never been a fighter. I was a seventeen year old who had been average at everything and was now standing in a foreign forest with a rusty knife being attacked by an oversized rodent.
The knife caught it mid-leap. Not cleanly. Not skillfully. Just desperately, both hands, driving it forward and closing my eyes because some instincts apparently survive death and dimension travel.
When I opened my eyes the rat was on the ground.
Not moving.
[Grim Rat defeated.][XP gained: 50][Total XP: 50 / 200]
I stood there for a moment. Breathing hard. Hands shaking slightly. Knife dripping on the dead leaves.
Then I looked around the forest for the next one.