Sigh.

The young man tilted his head to the side, then slowly raised it to look at the figure before him.

Then he spoke.

"Let me guess... I died?"

He said it calmly, as though the situation were not entirely unfamiliar to him.

To his left and right, nothing existed but white clouds and drifting yellow lights that swayed and danced without purpose.

The air itself felt weightless, suspended between one moment and the next.

And not too far from where he knelt, a giant throne sat at the center of it all, occupied by a goddess whose presence alone seemed to bend the space around her.

Her dress was so long it covered the entire surface beneath her, flowing outward as though it breathed, as though it had a quiet life of its own.

The goddess looked down at him, and then she smiled.

"You speak as though you already expected it."

There was a pause. A long, unhurried silence.

"I was shot in an alleyway by a random stranger," he finally said. "If I appeared in a place like this, then I must be dead. Either that, or I am hallucinating."

The goddess laughed at his response, a soft and genuine sound.

"You are quite funny, for a human. You are right. You did die from that gunshot. Which, in a way, is not as terrible as you might think."

The man frowned slightly.

"So I am not going to hell then?"

"Hell?" She tilted her head. "No, there is nothing of the sort here. But I will grant you two choices. One, you receive a chance to live your life again. Or two, you cease to exist entirely, and die as you were always meant to."

When you weighed both options against each other, there was very little reason to deliberate.

A chance to relive your life.

Knowing he had never truly lived the best version of it to begin with, there was almost no reason to refuse.

"Fine. I accept."

The goddess studied him for a quiet moment.

"You are taking this remarkably well." She seemed amused by it. "Very well then. I shall give you something to help you along your journey. Depending on how you use it, you may yet live a full and meaningful life."

She snapped her fingers, and a card went sailing through the air toward him, its blank face catching the light as it spun.

The man did not know what it was, only that it was a card. He reached out to touch it, to turn it over and understand it.

But the moment his fingers drew close, the ground split open beneath him.

And in an instant, it swallowed him whole.

His screams plunged with him, buried deeper with every passing second, until eventually the darkness consumed everything.

The last thing he saw before the floor sealed shut above him was the goddess, still seated on her throne, wearing that same ridiculous smile.

...

That was eleven years ago.

Adrian von Vane.

Firstborn son of Count Rage von Vane, ruler of Ashmere county, eleven years of age.

He had spent those years absorbing everything he could about this new world.

The language, the customs, and the unspoken rules of society built on bloodlines and power.

The most striking difference, beyond the politics and unfamiliar geography, was magic.

In his former world, magic had been the stuff of stories. Here, it was as fundamental as breathing.

And this morning, his father had summoned him to breakfast.

Count Rage never made time for something like that.

Adrian stood before the dining room doors and breathed, just once, slow and steady to calm himself.

The doors were enormous, dark wood with iron handles worn smooth from decades of use.

He could not afford to mess this up.

Beside him stood the head maid, her red hair pinned back in a neat ponytail, her uniform immaculate as always. She glanced over at him, read the hesitation on his face, and smiled quietly.

After a moment that stretched longer than it had any right to, Adrian pulled the door open and walked in.

The dining room expanded before him. Huge and spacious enough to ignore everything else and simply focus on the long dining table at the center of the room.

A butler stood at the side, watching with calm as the young lord showed himself.

Adrian’s mother sat at one end, Countess Emilya von Vane, dressed in a red gown with her black hair loose down her back.

She was composed in the way that noblewomen trained themselves to be, though something behind her eyes held a weight he could not immediately name.

Across from her sat his twin sister, Erica von Vane, dressed far more casually in a plain shirt and shorts. She spotted him the moment he entered and smiled like she had been waiting for exactly that.

Adrian scanned the rest of the table.

One chair remained empty.

He did not move from the doorway.

"Where is Father?" he asked, keeping his voice level, his expression calm.

Upon hearing his question, Emilya turned toward the door and looked at him. She had been on the verge of putting a spoon of rice into her mouth when she paused, lowered it back onto her plate.

"Sit down, Adrian," she said, her voice carrying that familiar cold edge.

Adrian respected his mother without reservation, and so he did not hesitate.

"Right away, Mother."

With slow, deliberate steps, he crossed the room toward the chair closest to hers and settled into it.

He was barely seated when his mother set down the utensils and spoke.

"Your father is dead."

Despite carrying the memories of a full life already lived, there were moments when the body he now inhabited asserted itself in ways beyond his control. A tight pressure formed in his chest, the kind that dug in and refused to loosen, and it stayed there even as he slowly turned his gaze back toward his mother.

"What was that?"

Emilya met his eyes without flinching.

"The count is dead."

"Dead?" Adrian leaned forward slightly. "Mother, is this some kind of test? I received a message from Father only yesterday, asking me to join him for breakfast—"

He stopped. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

The expression on his mother’s face was unlike anything he had ever seen on her before. It was not the composed mask she wore during crises.

After a moment, Emilya spoke again.

"We received word this morning. He died during his trip to the neighboring county. The circumstances remain unknown, and his body has not yet been recovered."

Her composure fractured all at once. She lowered her head to the table, and her shoulders began to shake with muffled sobs she could no longer hold back.

Across from Adrian, Erica sat frozen in her chair.

She was young, far too young to fully process the weight of what she had just heard. But even she understood, in the instinctive way children sometimes do, that something irreplaceable had just been taken from them.

Adrian’s thoughts moved in all directions at once.

’Father is dead? How? This cannot be right. If he is truly gone, then who rules the county in the interim? Mother has never involved herself in administrative matters.’

He pressed his lower lip together and said nothing for a moment.

Dammit.

He wanted to fall apart. Some part of him, the part that remembered what it felt like to lose someone who mattered, was already fracturing quietly behind his ribs. But he could not let it show.

Being the heir and firstborn son of the Vane family meant something. It meant composure when composure was the most difficult thing to offer.

He kept his face still, his voice even.

"I hope they find his body soon," he said, looking at his mother’s bowed head. "I do not believe for a moment that Father’s death was any kind of accident."

He received no response beyond the continued sound of his mother weeping.

Adrian rose from his chair, crossed the room, and let himself out through the dining room doors.

The moment the latch clicked shut behind him, and the silence of the hallway swallowed the sound of her grief, the control he had been holding slipped.

His eyes burned.

He tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling, trying by sheer will to keep his tears from falling.

After all, he could feel the hate slowly surfacing, those bastards that dared to kill his father.

As he cried, something unexpected suddenly happened.

Golden runes materialized in the air before him, luminous and perfectly still, hovering as though they had always been there and simply chosen this moment to make themselves visible.

[Trauma has been registered.]

[You have met the requirement to access the system.]

Adrian stared at the floating windows for a long moment, saying nothing.

A system.

...

[A/N]

If you like the story so far, please do not forget to add it to your library and vote. Thank you. (Edited versionn.)