"Those fuckers are finally gone," Razeal muttered, wiping the cold sweat off his forehead. The tension that had coiled around his chest for the last several minutes slowly began to unwind.
He exhaled deeply, breath shaky but relieved. The dense foliage around him no longer felt like it was pressing in to crush him. A faint breeze stirred the leaves above, but it no longer sounded like footsteps.
Phase one complete.
With deliberate care, he climbed down from the thick branch he had been perched on. His movements were cautious, his muscles still taut with the echo of adrenaline. As his boots touched solid ground, he allowed himself a rare moment of stillness. A breath. A heartbeat.
Most of his worries were over... for now.
Still, a lingering anxiety prickled at the edges of his thoughts like static.
What if Areon wasn't worthy enough to claim the Heart?
What if he failed the trial?
What if Razeal had just signed his own death warrant?
After all, the contract he made... it wasn't just a bluff.
If the Heart didn't choose its bearer, Razeal would die.
"Yeah... that was fucking insane," he muttered bitterly, shaking his head.
To hinge his own survival on someone else's actions it was reckless, borderline suicidal.
People might ask him later, mockingly even:
"Do you trust the protagonist that much? Do you believe he's worthy?"
He'd scoff at that.
But well that would be the wrong way to put it.
It wasn't about trust. It was about certainty. Not in the person, but in the narrative.
In the novel, the Heart had always been meant for the protagonist. It was written into fate itself. That sacred relic wasn't just made for him it waited for him.
So Razeal didn't trust Areon.
He trusted his insight.
He believed in the blueprint buried within the world. The pattern only he knew. And if that blueprint still held weight if the plot hadn't entirely derailed then Areon would be chosen.
Still, there were cracks in the narrative. Subtle, shifting fractures. Some characters had already veered away from their destined paths most notably... Selena.
He narrowed his eyes, thinking back.
That woman. That conniving, vile, saint-faced snake.
She had definitely sensed him earlier. That moment of eye contact a flicker of recognition in her gaze. The gentle smile she wore? A mask. And yet, she had said nothing.
Why?
What the hell was she planning now?
Selena had already proven that she wasn't following the original script. Years ago, long before the plot's official beginning, she had already begun to deviate. Her personality, her actions utterly different from how the novel had portrayed her.
Razeal remembered. There was no event in the original story where she accused him of attempted rape.
Yet in this timeline, she had done exactly that.
Out of nowhere.
And the fallout was enormous. That one false accusation twisted the entire foundation of the plot. It shook public opinion, his reputation, and the trust of key figures. It was one of the major reasons why so many future events became unpredictable.
The butterfly effect.
She was an unstable factor a walking contradiction to destiny.
Still, whatever she was planning could wait. For now, his focus was elsewhere.
His admission into the Royal Classroom had been secured.
And why only that classroom mattered? Why is he taking so many risks to get in there? Like there is normal classroom too right?.
There are many reasons actually
First of all because even tho academy say all classes are the same.
There was only one true classroom in the entire academy. The rest were illusions of prestige places for the weak to pretend they were strong.
The cannon fodders in simple words.
And also If he wanted to execute his long-term plan if he wanted to survive what was coming he needed to be in that classroom.
Too many of his contingencies relied on that space. Too many alliances, resources, secrets... all converged there.
His boots hit the grass softly as he approached the platform the hero's party had used. The area was quiet, wind gently brushing the leaves overhead.
No one was around.
Perfect.
He moved fast.
At the base of the stone altar, tucked just beneath the raised platform, lay a heavy cloth sack. He grabbed it with both hands, feeling its dense weight immediately.
Inside were one thousand elemental cores.
He opened it slightly and looked in. A quiet smile touched his lips.
The bag shimmered with power. Each core was polished, nearly perfect in shape small, round, marble-like spheres of glowing color. Red. Blue. Green. Yellow. Each orb pulsed with restrained elemental energy, whispering promises of power.
These weren't just rocks.
These were Third Rank Elemental Cores.
Each one harvested from a monster slain in battle. A one to one ratio: one monster, one core.
And they were invaluable.
Elemental Cores were crystallized manifestations of a creature's elemental affinity created when a monster evolved or was born in prolonged exposure to a specific mana type. Fire. Ice. Wind. Earth. Lightning. Light etc.
They were used in every major profession.
Blacksmiths infused them into weapons. Alchemists used them to balance volatile brews. Magicians refined spells with them. Knights used them to reinforce their bodies. Aurers, priests, spirits, tamers even engineers and farmers had found uses.
Artifacts. Mana fuel. Structural stabilization. Construction, Medic. Agriculture.
They were everywhere.
And more importantly?
They could be absorbed.
If you possessed elemental affinity and compatibility with a specific core, you could absorb it increasing your own mana capacity, elemental alignment, and the purity of your energy.
But it wasn't easy.
The compatibility had to be natural innate. You couldn't fake affinity. Not unless you wanted to end up a twitching corpse.
These cores were born in monsters, lodged where their hearts should be. Extracting them without destroying the core required finesse.
Razeal admired the shimmering orbs for a long moment.
There were four distinct colors of elemental cores inside the bag each one shimmering faintly in the filtered light. Razeal crouched beside it, inspecting the contents with narrowed eyes.
"Fire, wind, water, and earth," he muttered under his breath, recognizing the most common elemental types at a glance. "Of course it'd be these. The universals. The easy ones."
These four elements were widespread across the continent, found in every nook of terrain, dungeon, and ruin. Their abundance didn't make them weak not at all. In fact, if wielded by someone with high compatibility, they could become terrifyingly powerful.
But rarity brought prestige.
Elements like lightning, wood, ice, or light? Those were the elusive ones. Hard to find. Even harder to master. You couldn't simply stumble into a lightning-type beast in the woods.
Still, as rare as those elements were, they didn't always translate to value. Cores were only useful to people born with an affinity for them. Without that? They were just shiny, glowing marbles with no purpose well can be used in other ways but those processes are rare tp found so yeah.
In some places, rare-elemental cores sold dirt cheap because there was no one to use them. In others, their price skyrocketed especially if someone in power needed that particular element.
It was a strange and tricky economy.
The cores in Razeal's bag shimmered with gentle pulses of color, like the breath of something sleeping. The light was faint expected. After all, these were only common-ranked elemental cores.
He exhaled, pulling one out.
"Still... a thousand of them." He eyed the smooth, round core in his hand no bigger than a marble. Each glowed in its respective color, a crystallized drop of elemental essence.
They were divided into broad categories:
Common Rank: 1st to 3rd tier.
Professional Rank: 4th to 6th tier.
Legendary Rank: 6th and 7th tier.
Mythical Rank: 8th tier.
Unranked: A mysterious 9th tier, so rare it defied classification.
Naturally, the higher the rank, the more potent the mana and affinity it contained. The advantages gained were proportional: stronger elemental attunement, increased purity, more efficient mana control.
Razeal, however, simply clicked his tongue in annoyance.
"These are all light faction aligned," he muttered. "Of course they are."
Useless. Completely and utterly useless to him.
Because of the system's damn curse debuff he couldn't absorb any element belonging to the Light Faction.
And all these elements are of light faction.
He scowled.
"Motherfucker of a system..."
["I heard that, host."] the mechanical voice chimed in his head with smug satisfaction.
Razeal ignored it and pulled out a special bag from his waist pouch issued by the Academy itself.
To avoid cheating, candidates weren't allowed to bring their own storage tools into the trial. These regulation-issued bags had limited capacity only about one square feet and were handed out before the test began. Their purpose was to ensure every core collected came from the field.
He dropped the shimmering marbles inside, watching them vanish into the dark inner space.
"One thousand cores... that's all they left behind. So stingy." He scoffed, shaking his head. "Would it have killed them to leave a few more?"
Still, there was one silver lining.
Any student who passed the trial was allowed to keep the cores they collected after the instructors had counted and verified them. A standard reward policy.
And the math...
"A single third-ranked elemental core goes for around ten gold coins..."
He did a quick calculation, his heart thumping in rhythm with every imagined clink of coin.
One thousand cores. At ten gold coins apiece. That was ten thousand gold coins.
His lips curled into a greedy grin.
People didn't understand what that kind of money meant. A middle-class family three meals a day, school tuition, house maintenance, clothing, everything could survive a whole month on a single gold coin.
And he had ten thousand.
That was generational wealth.
That was power.
It was also the minimum price.
Fourth-ranked cores the entry-level of the professional tier started at ten thousand gold coins each. From there, prices skyrocketed based on demand, elemental rarity, and the strength of the creature it came from.
Razeal's eyes gleamed with golden fire.
"I'm about to get rich."
Just as he closed the bag and slung it over his back
Grrrrrrr~
A low, guttural growl rumbled through the air like thunder scraping against stone.
Razeal froze.
His lips twitched. A bead of sweat rolled down his temple.
Very slowly, he raised a hand to his face and dragged it down.
"Just... my fucking shitty luck..."
The growl deepened. Something heavy shifted behind him.
"Don't tell me," he whispered to himself, "don't you fucking dare tell me there's a monster behind me now."
His heartbeat spiked. His breathing halted. His fingers tightened around the bag strap.
Everything had been going perfectly. Absolutely, stupidly, wonderfully perfect.
And now...
"Ahhhhhh..." he exhaled through gritted teeth, barely keeping himself from screaming. "Why. Why the fuck....why now?!"
A shadow loomed over him.
Whatever it was... it wasn't small.
--