I woke without screaming.
That was the first wrong thing.
No phantom fire. No dissolving skin. A flat, unremarkable return to consciousness, like falling asleep on a couch and waking up hours later.
I blinked at the canvas ceiling.
It took some seconds for the realization to hit me.
"I'm late."
It was barely a whisper, but the panic behind the words was there. I could already hear it. The boots outside, the sharp crack of tent poles being kicked.
The camp was awake.
I sat up fast and pressed my palms against my temples as if I could squeeze the timeline into making sense.
No pain meant no early wake-up.
The curse's cruel arithmetic had always been simple. Suffer more, rise sooner. A death by fire bought me hours. A death by wyvern jaws bought me a little less. But the last death, the draconic flame that had passed through me so fast my nerves didn't even have time to register it, had been almost painless.
"Shit," I muttered, low enough that the neighboring tents wouldn't hear. I dragged both hands down my face. "Shit. Shit."
No sword. No time to steal one, train, or find Iris. I could only sit in this canvas coffin and listen to the day march.
A wasted loop.
The thought made my jaw clench.
But I still had one hope.
The messages.
They had appeared just before the restart.
Grimoire unlocked.
I sat very still. The tent creaked around me. Outside, someone yelped as a boot connected with a support pole. Canvas collapsed. Curses followed.
Grimoire.
Iris had shown me hers. She'd lifted her hand, and the air had shimmered, and a book had simply appeared in her palm as if it had always been there.
I raised my hands in front of my face.
Thin fingers. Student hands. No calluses, no scars, no evidence of the thousand sword swings the system had counted. The curse reset everything physical.
But the grimoire wasn't physical, was it?
It was magical.
"How do I…" I started.
I tried snapping my fingers.
Nothing happened.
I tried speaking the word aloud. "Grimoire."
It sounded ridiculous.
Nothing.
I closed my eyes and thought about it harder, as if concentration alone could drag a magical artifact into existence. I pictured a book. Leather-bound, heavy, pages filled with the secrets of my unknown element.
Still nothing.
Then I remembered Iris.
Her gesture.
She hadn't strained. She hadn't spoken an incantation or performed a ritual. She'd simply raised her hand, palm up, and the grimoire had come to her.
I raised my hands before me, palms facing upward. I closed my eyes.
I stopped trying to force it.
Instead, I thought about what a grimoire was supposed to be. I thought about magic. About mana.
A quiet pop broke the silence.
I opened my eyes.
Something rested in my hands. A pocket watch.
For a long moment, I simply stared at it, trying and failing to reconcile what I'd expected with what I'd received.
The watch was small enough to sit in my palm. Round silver casing, warm in my palm, every surface etched by hand. Gold traced the edges.
"Is this supposed to be a grimoire?" I whispered.
I turned it over.
On the back, inscribed in elegant script that I could somehow read despite my inability to decipher anything else in this world's written language, was a name.
Kaspar von Hexenzeit.
My thumb traced the letters slowly, feeling each one.
My name. On an object that was supposed to be a piece of my soul.
I turned it back over and studied the face.
The watch had a hinged cover sealed shut. A small clasp held it closed.
"Is this… normal?" I murmured to myself. "Or is this another one of my problems?"
My thumb found the clasp and pressed.
The cover sprang open with a soft click.
Inside, a watch face stared back at me. The craftsmanship was exquisite. Every line was perfect, every number precisely placed.
The hands weren't moving.
They pointed to a time two hours earlier than now.
"Two hours ago," I breathed. "That's when I should have woken up."
The watch knew. Somehow the watch knew my curse. It had recorded the time of my usual awakening.
I closed the cover gently and held the watch in both hands, feeling its weight. It was heavier than it looked.
"There has to be more," I said quietly. "Iris said grimoires write themselves. They fill with spells, with knowledge. They're not just… objects."
I turned the watch over again, searching for a seam, a hidden compartment, a second clasp. My fingers ran along every edge, every groove.
Nothing opened.
Nothing revealed itself.
Maybe it's empty because I'm empty, I thought bitterly. No circles. No spells. Why would my grimoire be any different?
I almost set it down.
Almost.
The messages had said more than just "Grimoire Unlocked."
They'd said "Mana Absorbed."
If draconic blood had soaked into me, if the system had finally logged mana it could measure…
Maybe the grimoire wasn't empty.
Maybe I just wasn't asking it the right question.
I held the watch in my palm and closed my eyes again. This time I didn't think about books or spells or what a grimoire was supposed to be.
I thought Open.
The word formed in my mind like a command.
The watch vibrated. A single, brief pulse against my palm.
Light spilled from between my fingers.
My eyes snapped open.
A translucent screen hung in the air before me. It shimmered faintly at the edges, runes crawling along its border.
The display was familiar. I'd seen something like it every time I died. The same system that had been tracking my deaths and my progress since the first loop.
My eyes moved over the screen.
At the top, a section labeled in script I could somehow read without effort.
Spells and affinities both showed blank.
Below the empty magic section, another heading.
Followed by two entries.
My stomach dropped before I even read them. The word "curses" alone was enough to make my skin crawl.
I read it twice.
Then a third time.
"Sin of Sloth," I repeated under my breath. "Because dying repeatedly is… lazy?"
I forced my eyes to the second entry.
I read the words again, slower, letting each one settle into place.
Your body is a glutton.
It wants everything.
Even possessing mana, you will devour it endlessly.
You cannot project mana outside your body.
I had mana.
I'd always had mana. Nine cores worth of it.
Yet my body consumed it. Every drop of mana my cores generated was swallowed before it could reach the surface, before it could form a Circle, before it could manifest as anything the outside world could see or measure.
That was why the ceremony had shown nothing. Why no Circles had ever lit beneath my feet. Why the world had named me the False Promise.
My own body ate itself.
I let out a long, shaking breath.
"So I'm not empty," I whispered. "I'm full. I've always been full. I just… can't let any of it out."
My mind raced back to what Iris had told me about Knights. Lunatics who used mana inside their bodies. They treated mana like fuel and their flesh like a furnace.
A furnace.
The word echoed with a new meaning.
If I couldn't push mana outward, if my body devoured every scrap of magical energy before it could escape…
Maybe the answer had never been to become a mage.
Maybe it was to become exactly what the curse had already made me: a Knight.
My eyes dropped back to the screen, scanning past the curses to the bottom of the display.
A line of text sat there, small and almost easy to miss.
I blinked.
"Why," I said slowly, "would I want more curses?"
I stared at the two entries above. Sin of Sloth. Sin of Gluttony.
Yet…
Sloth meant I couldn't die permanently. Every loop was another chance. Every death was tuition paid toward knowledge with pain.
Gluttony meant my body was a bottomless well of mana. I couldn't use it the way mages did, but it was there.
The curses were chains.
However, even chains could also be weapons, if you swung them right.
"The downsides are obvious," I murmured, turning the watch over in my hands. "But the upsides…"
Immortality, in a sense. The pain was real, the suffering was real, and the warning about insanity wasn't a joke. But to my knowledge, I could not be permanently killed.
And a mana reserve so vast that my body had to constantly devour it just to keep from overflowing. If I could learn to direct that consumption, to channel it inward the way Knights did…
"That's not just good," I breathed. "That's broken."
If the next curses carried the same trade, devastating cost and hidden benefit, growing stronger might be the best way to survive.
My eyes found the final section of the display.
Everything I'd earned through blood and repetition was listed there in neat rows.
Below the skill list, another annotation glowed faintly.
I read it and felt something click into place.
I remembered the whispers from earlier loops. Students muttering about how I had "high scores" despite having no mana. Blut's confused disdain: How the hell do they let someone without mana come to a Magic Academy? Just because he has high scores?
High scores.
"The curse," I said quietly. "Gluttony doesn't just eat mana. It eats… everything. It makes me want to learn? To train?"
Is that why the old Kaspar had been a scholar despite having no magical ability? The curse drove him.
An endless ambition. An endless hunger.
I closed my eyes and let the watch's cover snap shut with a soft click. The display vanished.
For a moment, I just sat there, holding the pocket watch against my chest.
Enough of the puzzle had clicked that I could see the edges. Someone had built this on purpose.
It was by design.
A boot slammed into the front of my tent.
The impact shuddered through the canvas and rattled the support pole. I didn't flinch. I'd heard that sound too many times for it to surprise me anymore.
"Get moving, Kaspar! Get out of here, you useless fool!" Blut's voice.
I tucked the pocket watch into the inner pocket of my robe. Pushed through the tent flap and stepped into the waking camp.
Blut stood there, mustache bristling, green cape thrown over his shoulders with theatrical flair. His small eyes found me, already loaded with practiced disgust.
"You're late," Blut snarled. "Fall in with the others. Now."
I fell in.
The familiar group assembled around me. Ten students, bleary-eyed and resentful. We were marched down through the camp toward the logistics tents near the gate, the same route I had walked in loop after loop.
The supply tents appeared exactly as they always did. Crates stacked in orderly rows. Lanterns hung at measured intervals. The faint hum of residual mana in the air.
Blut barked his orders. Crystals were distributed. Students began testing them, rings of light forming around wrists as mana flowed into blue stone.
I received my crystal. Held it. Felt nothing flow outward, as always.
Blut's lip curled.
"Bastard," he spat, and snatched the crystal back. "Go clean. Make yourself useful."
I took my place at the cleaning table, cloth in hand, and began polishing crystals one by one.
This time I wasn't wallowing. I was planning.
I didn't need to open the gate. I didn't want relics. I didn't care about the expedition's goals, the Academy's approval, or whatever glory the professors imagined waited beyond that colossal door.
I want the gate to stay shut.
If it never opened, the wyverns never attacked. If the wyverns never attacked, no one died. If no one died, I could end this loop.
To my luck, I already knew how to stop the ritual.
In a previous loop, I'd shattered a mana crystal with my sword and watched the runes go dark. The suspended mages had dropped. The mechanism had failed.
I didn't need a sword this time.
I had my hands.
The first crystal passed through my fingers. I polished it with the cloth, turning it slowly, examining its surface with apparent diligence.
Then squeezed it.
Pressure until something gave, not enough to shatter it.
A hairline crack appeared. Thin as a thread. Almost invisible unless you knew to look for it.
However, the crystal's glow changed immediately. The steady radiance of a healthy mana reservoir began to flicker. Mana leaked from the fracture in wisps so faint they were nearly invisible, dissipating into the air.
I turned the crystal over, hiding the crack against my palm, and set it gently into the crate with the others.
The next crystal arrived in my hands.
I polished. I squeezed. Another crack. Another slow leak.
One by one, the crystals passed through my station. Each one left my hands looking pristine, its surface gleaming from the cloth. Each one carried a hidden fracture that bled mana.
Around me, the other students kept chatting while ignoring my presence.
"Did you hear about the artifact they found?"
"Near the girls' camp, right?"
"Ancient text, someone said."
I didn't look up. Didn't react. My hands kept moving. Polish, crack, place, next. While my ears tracked conversations out of habit.
No one watched the person doing the boring job.
The last crystal settled into the crate with a soft clink. I wiped my hands on the cloth, folded it neatly, and stepped back from the table.
I glanced at the crates.
Every crystal inside them was compromised. Fractured just enough to bleed, not enough to look broken. To a casual inspection, they'd appear perfectly functional.
I moved away from the logistics tent with the careful nonchalance.
I positioned myself along the path between the supply area and the gate. Close enough to see the ritual circle. Far enough not to be in anyone's way.
And waited.
The announcement came right on schedule.
"We are about to open the gate!"
The familiar words rolled through the cavern. Students began their march. Soldiers fell into formation. The armored figures in Magitek plate moved with confident strides.
Minutes crawled by.
I watched the mages approach the ritual circle. Seven of them, taking their positions around the runic formation. The Six-Circle mage stood at the center, sleeves already pushed back, the faint luminescence of his rings visible even at this distance.
Soldiers placed the crystals.
One by one, blue stones were set into their carved positions around the circle. The runes on the ground responded, light traveling along chalked channels toward the gate.
The glow flickered, brightened, and died.
The Six-Circle mage frowned. He gestured sharply, and the light surged again, runes pulsing as mana flowed from the crystals into the formation.
It held for two seconds.
Until it snuffed out like a candle in wind.
Murmurs rippled through the assembled mages. Heads turned. Hands gestured. The soldiers exchanged uncertain glances.
The Six-Circle mage's expression darkened. He stepped forward, crouching beside one of the crystals, and held his palm over it.
"There is something wrong. We need to check what's happening."
I stood in the crowd, face blank, hands clasped behind my back.