The architecture here was blunt and brutal in the way only an ancient fortress could be. Thick walls killed sound the way deep water killed light, sealing the chaos outside until it felt unreal.
Boris and Mira followed close behind. Three sets of footsteps struck the cold stone floor, echoing down the corridor like a metronome inside a tomb.
“H-Hey… aren’t you scared?” Mira asked, voice tight with worry as she hurried up beside him. Her eyes kept darting into corners, half-expecting someone to leap out of the shadows.
Rein didn’t slow. He only glanced at her and shrugged, as if she’d asked whether rain was wet.
“Scared? The only problem I see right now is an empty pocket—and a stomach that just got patched up with a rock disguised as bread.”
Boris frowned and quickened to Rein’s other side, his expression turning unusually serious.
“Don’t joke around, Rein. Timothy isn’t just some random second-year. He’s one of the last people you want to pick a fight with. The Viremont family has serious influence in the Arcadian High Council. Even if that guy’s infamous for being a spoiled bully…”
“It’s not ‘a little,’ Boris!” Mira cut in, fists clenched. “Timothy harasses common students all the time. What you did back there—honestly? It felt like you slapped him in the face for all of us. It was so satisfying!”
She even stomped in place with righteous fire, short black hair bouncing. Boris watched her, sighed, then turned back to Rein.
“Still. You should be careful. And more importantly—” Boris lowered his voice, “you placed third in the last Arcadia Grand Magic Tournament by knocking his older brother out—publicly, and humiliatingly.”
“Timothy’s been nursing that grudge ever since.”
Rein slowed for half a beat and blinked.
Figure… an old grudge. He exhaled.
So it’s not just an arrogant young lord—it’s revenge for the brother too. Of course it is.
“Mad because I’m better than his brother,” Rein muttered under his breath. “How tragically cliché.”
“Hm?” Boris asked, confused.
“Nothing.” Rein lifted his chin slightly. “Thanks for the warning. I’ll keep it in mind.”
Then, without warning, the messy-haired boy stopped in front of a gigantic stone archway. Boris and Mira halted with him by reflex.
All three tilted their heads up.
Above the southern entrance was an ancient bas-relief, old enough that the stone itself had begun to split. It depicted a knight in full plate armor standing tall, sword raised toward the sky in a victorious pose.
But what made it unsettling—wrong, in a way the mind couldn’t ignore—was that the armor’s neck ended in empty space.
Under the harsh sunlight, shadows poured into the cracks and created a brutal contrast that revealed every detail. Rein narrowed his eyes at the fracture around the neck.
He didn’t see a curse.
He saw impact damage.
“That’s the Headless Knight Leontes,” Mira began, voice dropping into solemn legend-tone. “One of the DVM mysteries no one’s ever solved. They say—”
“When this building was new, the statue had its head,” Rein cut in calmly, eyes still pinned to the break. “But judging by the fracture pattern, it was struck hard by something solid from the right.”
He pointed faintly, as if lecturing a lab.
“Meaning someone probably got annoyed at how handsome Sir Armor was, climbed up there, and smashed it off. And boom—headless knight.”
Mira froze mid-story. Her lips pressed into a thin line. Her cheeks puffed with pure indignation at having her mood violently derailed.
“And then you were going to say,” Rein continued with a mock-thoughtful frown, “‘On a full moon night, Leontes walks the halls dragging his sword, searching for his missing head—’”
He tilted his head slightly.
“‘—or hunting the person who smashed it.’ Right?”
Mira’s eyes went wide like someone who’d just been spoiled on the ending of their favorite novel.
“How—how did you guess that?! That’s literally one of the department’s legendary stories!”
Rein let out a low, amused chuckle and looked at her with a mix of fondness and dry entertainment.
“It’s the same old template, Mira. Castle ghosts either look for their heads or look for their murderer.”
“There’s no suspense left to ruin.”
He walked through the archway into the interior, leaving Mira to simmer beside Boris—who could only shake his head like he’d given up arguing with physics itself.
Inside the corridor leading toward the central court, the outside light was cut off completely. Only thin white blades of sunlight slipped through narrow windows, slicing the darkness to reveal dust drifting slowly in the air—like trapped spirits suspended in a crack in time.
And then Rein reached the part of Devil’s Den that surprised him the most:
A gigantic emptiness hidden at its heart.
It was nothing like Ingrid’s Healing Department, with its open courtyards and comforting light. This place wasn’t built to soothe.
It was built like a vertical prison.
A massive rectangular court yawned open, roughly the length and width of an Olympic swimming pool. Far below, the floor was sealed in by stone walls that rose like five-story cliffs. Some sections were rough-hewn, others cut eerily smooth—like different buildings stitched together. Certain faces of the walls were streaked with moss and rain stains, long dark trails running downward like old tears.
Small square windows were set in disciplined rows across the walls—too orderly, too identical—like the eyes of a giant staring down into its own pit.
At one end stood a tall, rectangular stone tower—nearly ten stories—serving as the Grand Staircase Tower, connecting every level down to the battered gray stone at the bottom, cracked and scarred from more than a century of use.
Open to the sky above—yet sealed on all sides into a steep stone box.
A strange taste in design—if the goal wasn’t confinement.
Rein stopped at the lowest balcony corridor and scanned the empty court. Sunlight struck only the central void, while the edges—where he stood—remained in cold, dim shadow.
Was the architect of this place a Brutalist… or just a sadist?
Boris came to a stop beside him, gaze dropping to the cracked gray floor below.
“Do you remember, Rein?” Boris asked quietly. “That’s our combat training ground.”
Rein pressed his lips together and slowly shook his head. Of course he didn’t remember. Not even a fragment of Rein’s old life training down there rose to the surface.
He moved on without mourning the missing memories. For now, the Devil’s Den’s layout was already sketching itself inside his mind—still incomplete, but serviceable.
On the way, a group of first-years approached from the opposite direction. The moment they recognized Rein’s face—those sharp eyes—the kids stopped dead and flattened themselves against the stone wall like prey avoiding a predator. A few didn’t even dare lift their heads.
“Don’t be surprised they’re scared of you,” Mira said, adjusting her cloak. “At first, I almost ran away from you too.”
She paused, then looked at him and pinched her fingers close together, leaving only a tiny gap.
“Before this, you were insanely cold, you know? No talking. No answering. No playing with anyone. Like a walking magic golem.”
Her eyes narrowed, amused.
“But now… it looks like you’ve gained a little more humanity.”
Rein’s mouth curved faintly.
He didn’t say anything.
If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
After turning past a dim corner of the building, the three of them stopped before a door marked by a weathered wooden plaque, its paint flaking with age:
[Department Administration]
A faint scent of mana-cigar seeped out from the gap beneath the heavy wooden door.
Rein lifted his hand and knocked exactly three times.
A moment later, a hoarse, sleepy shout—like someone dragged out of a perfectly good nap—came from inside.
“Yeah… come in!”
Rein nodded to the two behind him. Boris flashed him a thumbs-up like a last-second buff before a boss fight.
Both Mira and Boris willingly chose to wait outside in the corridor’s shadow rather than step in with Rein.
The instant he crossed the threshold, the familiar sting of mana-smoke slammed into his nose.
The bright white sun behind him was cut off completely by the thickness of the northern fortress wall. Only a weak, late-afternoon reflection managed to squeeze through a narrow window, leaving the office drowned in a haze of smoke mixed with dim shadow.
Master Alvira was in the exact same posture as before—leather boots propped on a fossilized pile of paperwork.
Her eyes were half-closed. Slender fingers—adorned with silver rings—tapped the desk’s edge in a steady, unhurried rhythm.
…thup… thup… thup…
Rein could’ve sworn he heard her humming under her breath. Maybe, behind those closed lids, she wasn’t stuck in a paper grave at all—maybe she was on a concert stage, bathing in cheers.
“What is it this time, Lightning Boy?” Alvira exhaled a gray ring of smoke without even opening her eyes, as if her senses detected him by irritation alone.
“Uh… I have a small problem,” Rein said, pausing when she didn’t move. Then he gritted his teeth and forced his tone into something resembling normal.
“I need a replacement card,” Rein said. “My gold card… is gone.”
The tapping stopped instantly.
Alvira opened her eyes slowly. Heavy black eyeliner framed a stare that pinned him in place, then her voice rose in genuine disbelief.
“You lost a gold card?”
The Number One genius of DVM lost the key to his own treasure vault?
That’s… impressive.”
“I’d love to disagree,” Rein said with a dry smile, scratching his head lightly—committing hard to the “memory issues” role. “As Master knows, I’ve been having… complications with short-term memory. I honestly can’t remember where I put it.”
The black-haired instructor stood up with the energy of someone forced to do chores by fate itself. She stretched until her bones cracked, then staggered toward a document shelf so overstuffed it looked one sneeze away from collapse.
A drawer screeched open. She grabbed a single sheet and tossed it onto a wooden desk stained by ancient coffee.
“Application form. Fill it.” She spoke like every syllable cost her lifespan.
“Then pay the replacement fee.”
She paused.
“One hundred AC.”
She dropped a rune-carved black stone slab onto the desk with a heavy thunk—then paused.
“Wait. You have cash to pay that?”
Rein nodded so fast it was almost a reflex.
He turned and waved Boris inside—like summoning the only working asset left in his inventory.
Alvira frowned faintly and blew out smoke, but she didn’t ask further. She simply let Boris tap his silver card onto the rune-slab to pay Rein’s fee, while the messy-haired boy leaned over the form and began writing with the intensity of a man trying to prevent a bureaucratic runtime error.
He checked every line. Every box. Every tiny rule written to ambush the careless.
When he finished, Alvira slid her palm across the rune-slab again. The blue symbols flared and rearranged themselves, shifting shape as the magic executed its command.
Then she nodded at Rein.
“Alright. Five fingers. Touch it. Mana signature verification.”
Rein pressed his hand onto the freezing stone.
A pale blue glow swirled around his fingertips for a heartbeat—like static electricity scanning biological data—then faded into silence.
“Done,” Alvira said, short and final, before dropping back into her chair in a half-reclined sprawl.
“Done… uh, then where’s my new card?” Rein asked, holding his hand out.
“In about a week,” she answered—without even looking at him.
“That’s assuming the Central Registry doesn’t crash… or the communication beast doesn’t get shot out of the sky first.”
“A week—?!” Rein blurted, his planning instincts exploding into dust.
A week in Arcadia with no money.
How exactly was he supposed to exist?
Boris saw the color drain from Rein’s face and patted his shoulder with genuine sympathy.
“Relax, Rein. I’ll lend you mine for now. A week lines up with the end of the month anyway. Once your stipend hits the account, you can pay me back.”
Mira poked her head into the doorway, smiling like she’d been waiting to deliver the punchline.
“Yeah—and if you really want to eat that ‘stone bread’ again, I’ll treat you myself. One week isn’t a big deal for us!”
Rein looked at the two of them and released a long breath. The weight in his chest eased, just slightly.
This world might be driven by slow, inefficient bureaucracy… but the variable called friendship seemed to execute far faster than he’d expected.
…
In Arath, a week was called an Octad—exactly eight days.
Rein tried to arrange the sequence in his head, based on Arcadian beliefs tied to fundamental elements:
Earth, Water, Wind, Fire, Flora, Light, Dark…
…and finally Void—the weekly rest day people treated with a weird amount of reverence.
Biologically, he was lucky: one day here—the diurnal cycle—ran roughly 24 hours. Maybe off by a few seconds, but close enough that he could keep using Earth-time as a reference without having to rebuild his circadian rhythm from scratch.
What irritated him, as a physicist, was the calendar itself. It felt… loose. Sloppy.
A lunar month in Arath stretched 40 to 42 days, divided neatly into five weeks—a number suspiciously compatible with the orbital rhythm of the planet’s two main moons.
A solar year lasted 410 days.
Ten full months.
Arath is probably farther from an F-type star than 1 AU, Rein reasoned as he stared out the dorm window, so the orbit has to be longer to keep Earth-like temperatures stable.
He began forming a second hypothesis: beyond mana making people dependent on magic, it might be this overly generous time system that shaped Arath’s culture into something slower—lazier—more… elastic. Having almost fifty extra days per year didn’t just add time; it diluted urgency.
And that long, lethargic “week” passed without the dramatic trouble Boris and Mira had feared.
Rein gained two new companions who effectively became his major investors, funding his lunches every day. Mira was perfectly willing to sponsor “stone bread” as much as necessary, but Rein insisted on recording every debt down to the last AC.
He didn’t like owing anyone without a clear repayment plan.
As for study materials—textbooks, notebooks, the basic equipment required to reboot his life as a scholarship student…
Rein searched the old wooden trunk in the corner of Room 13 from the very first hour he returned.
It was the only “asset” the previous Rein had left behind.
Inside: neatly organized academic documents, a quill pen, and notebooks filled with rushed handwriting—evidence of a mind that never stopped accelerating.
He ran his fingertips along the spines of the old books. Pale sunlight slipped through the narrow window and landed on dust thick enough to look like ash.
“At least,” he murmured to himself, “the guy left me some starting capital.”
For the entire week, Rein did his utmost to become a “nonexistent variable.”
He avoided trouble by returning to his dorm immediately after classes and refused to wander public areas unless absolutely necessary. His heightened sensitivity to mana flow and spatial awareness allowed him to sidestep Timothy and his entourage more than once—sometimes by only a matter of seconds.
No money and still acting reckless… that’s protagonist behavior straight out of bad manga.
The previous Rein might have confronted them head-on without hesitation.
But the current Rein understood one simple rule: conflict without positive return was nothing but wasted energy.
As for first-year foundational courses… they were even more sleep-inducing than a first-year Physics 101 lecture.
Most of the principles taught in Magic Theory were things he had already dissected thoroughly back in The Vault. Listening to them again—delivered at the unhurried, almost ceremonial pace typical of Arath—was the perfect prescription for drowsiness.
…
The last day of the month.
Rein dozed in a wooden chair inside Room 13 after another exhausting round of monotonous classes. His desk was now buried beneath an ever-growing pile of letters—each stranger than the last:
Duel challenges from students seeking fame via shortcuts.
Daily threat letters from Timothy.
And—most baffling of all—small, timid love confessions from girls in the department whose faces he couldn’t even recall.
To Rein, this social anomaly was far—more unsettling than Mira’s headless ghost stories.
If he had to guess, it was the result of an aggressive PR campaign launched by a certain short, black-haired girl, who had enthusiastically spun his “return from death” into a brand-new legend within Devil’s Den. His reputation—good and bad—had spiraled far beyond control.
A soft knock broke him out of his thoughts.
“Rein… are you in there?” Mira’s bright voice came from the other side.
The door creaked open, and Rein—hair in absolute chaos—peeked out.
“What’s up?”
“Master Alvira said your new card arrived,”
Mira said, lifting a brilliant gold card that caught the corridor lights and flared almost blindingly.
“She asked me to bring it to you.”
Rein’s eyes lit up instantly. All exhaustion vanished as if it had never existed.
For an entire week, he had been forced to watch Boris chew through juicy steaks every other day, while he survived on watery vegetable stew and bread hard enough to qualify as sculpting material.
At last… the famine hell was over.
He accepted the gold card with faintly trembling fingers. A glowing blank space pulsed softly on its surface, waiting for authentication. Without hesitation, Rein pressed his fingertip against it.
A surge of golden light streaked across the engraved lines—confirmation complete. The card fully acknowledged him as its owner.
“Whoa… your card looks insanely cool, Rein!” Mira exclaimed, leaning in excitedly.
Together, they stared as runic text materialized across the surface—information that should have been his ticket to paradise:
?
Arcadia Academy ID Card
Name: Rein
Status: First-Year Student / Department of Variant Magic
Account Number: XXXXXXXX
Arcadia Credit: –3,200 AC
?
Rein frowned deeply. A chill ran straight down his spine.
Negative… 3,200 AC? Not 5,000? And why the hell is there a minus sign in front of it?
Mira gasped, eyes wide.
“A negative balance!? Rein—did you take out a loan from the Academy!?”
This time, Rein himself froze. The mind that normally processed data at terrifying speed came to a dead stop.
You idiot, Rein…
He screamed internally, fury echoing through his skull.
Not only did you leave me enemies—you left me a mountain of debt to clean up too!? You little bastard…!
The image of sizzling steak evaporated instantly, replaced by the heavy guitar riff of Metallica, roaring perfectly on beat inside his head.
The raw, crushing rhythm mirrored the brutal truth now staring him in the face.
The only thing his mind screamed was—
You know it’s sad but true.
These entries expand the lore and mechanics introduced in this chapter.
Completely optional—read only if you enjoy diving deeper into the system.
Location Codex
Full Name: Department of Variant Magic (DVM)
Description:
The central building of the Department of Variant Magic in Arcadia Academy. Designed like a brutalist fortress, it features towering stone walls that muffle sound, limited lighting, and an intimidating internal structure resembling a vertical prison.
Note: Already defined earlier; this entry expands architectural detail and interior layout.
Type: Arcadia Student ID & Financial Access
Description:
A high-level student ID card used to manage identity, course records, and finances in Arcadia. Rein’s replacement card is acquired after a bureaucratic process involving rune-verification.
Functions: Stores Arcadia Credit (AC), used for purchases, dorm access, and identification.
Type: Lore / World-Building
Units:
– Octad (Week): 8 days
Earth, Water, Wind, Fire, Flora, Light, Dark, Void
– Lunar Month: ~40–42 days (5 weeks)
– Solar Year: 410 days (10 months)
Notes:
– The Void day is a rest day with cultural reverence.
– Rein notes the planet has an Earth-like diurnal cycle (~24 hours), allowing him to preserve his circadian rhythm.
– Cultural reflection: The longer year and weeks may have shaped a slower, more relaxed societal rhythm in Arath.
Type: Folklore / Mystery
Description:
A legendary statue within the DVM, once a full knight holding a raised sword. The head was later broken off, possibly due to physical impact. Students invented ghost stories around it—claiming the knight haunts the halls under a full moon, searching for his missing head or the one who destroyed it.
Commentary: Rein mocks the cliché and debunks the mystery with a rational, scientific analysis of impact patterns.
Description:
To replace a lost card, a student must fill out a standard Arcadian document and verify their mana signature via rune-stone slab.
Fee: 100 AC
Process Time: Up to 8 days depending on Central Registry efficiency and communication channels (e.g., flying communication beasts).
“Sad But True” by Metallica (1991)
Artist: Metallica – One of the most influential heavy metal bands of all time. Renowned for their aggressive sound, uncompromising attitude, and ability to translate raw anger and internal conflict into globally resonant music. Metallica’s work often explores themes of control, identity, violence, and the darker side of human psychology.
– Genre: Heavy Metal / Groove Metal
– Key Lyric:
I’m your dream
I’m your eyes
I’m your pain
You know it’s sad but true
– The History:
“Sad But True” is a flagship track from Metallica (commonly known as The Black Album), released in 1991. The song is defined by its slow, crushing riff, down-tuned guitars, and a suffocating sense of weight. Unlike faster thrash-era Metallica tracks, this song embraces heaviness through restraint—each note hitting like a blunt instrument.
Lyrically, the song explores loss of autonomy, manipulation, and the idea that one’s suffering may be inseparable from one’s own identity. The narrator becomes an inescapable presence—both protector and tormentor—mirroring themes of addiction, trauma, and self-loathing.
– Trivia:
For live performances, Metallica tuned their guitars down to D Standard, giving the song its iconic low-end punch. James Hetfield has described the riff as one of the “heaviest grooves” the band ever wrote, despite its simplicity.
– Context:
The song echoes in Rein’s mind the moment he checks his account balance and realizes the truth of his situation: crushing debt, inherited consequences, and a life shaped by decisions he did not make—but must now own.
— Re:Naissance