The pristine white ceiling of the infirmary offered absolutely no answers.
My exhausted brain, running on the absolute last dregs of its caloric reserves, initiated a desperate, sequential audit of the last twenty-seven hours to locate the missing hardware.
Sector Three.
I spent seven subjective days walking through an active temporal anomaly. I remembered the freezing cold at my throat. I remembered the sweat stinging my eyes. I did not remember the two-kilogram weight of a brass collar resting against my collarbone.
The Grand Hall.
I stood on the platform during the Reader cascade. The underground ley-lines hummed directly against my eardrums. A functioning ORG would have automatically intercepted and filtered that toxic frequency. It didn't.
The Northwest Corridor.
Crouched over a noble's malfunctioning gear. No mechanical filter hummed against my spine to vent the residual heat of the confrontation.
Outbound Ward 04.
Four in the morning. An Ethonix anomaly field. The ghost doctor's corrupted scalpel phased directly into my chest to forge a miracle. There was no brass collar blocking the incision.
Circuit Anatomy.
Instructor Cicero's Odic Projector. My raw, unbuffered nodes swallowed the diagnostic feed directly and violently crashed the machine. An ORG would have shielded the scan.
The Dueling Grounds.
Fourteen seconds against the Winter Blade. The sheer, freezing atmospheric pressure of Tsukuyomi Raiden's Katana tearing across the dome.
The horrifying, undeniable math slowly clicked into place.
The latches on an Academy-issued Odic Recovery Gear are industrial-grade. They require deliberate, two-handed pressure to release. They do not fall off in a scuffle, they do not melt without causing severe third-degree burns, and they are not stripped by temporal loops.
I didn't lose it today.
I never had it.
The original Arzane. The six missing hours before I transmigrated into this body at 1:00 PM yesterday.
That absolute, suicidal lunatic didn't just walk into a restricted anomaly field—he manually unclasped his life-support machine and threw it away before he did it!
I had just spent the last twenty-seven hours walking through two active anomaly fields, absorbing a Reader Cascade, crashing institutional magitech, surviving a deathmatch, and sitting directly inside Syevira Sinclair's lethal deadzone... completely bare-faced.
I had been raw-dogging the toxic atmospheric Ink of Odia-Prime for two days straight, entirely by accident.
Beside my bed, Angelica frowned. The momentary silence had stretched too long.
She leaned over, her soft honey-blonde hair brushing my shoulder, and gently pulled down the back collar of my ruined uniform.
The bustling noise of the massive trauma ward seemed to mute itself.
Angelica froze. Her hands, still wrapped in sterile medical gloves, hovered in the empty air above my bare neck.
Slowly, she stepped back. All the blood drained from her face, leaving her as pale as the pristine sheets I was lying on. The bright, frantic energy that had defined her presence a minute ago completely vanished, replaced by pure, unadulterated medical horror.
"Where is it?" she whispered. Her voice didn't carry the authority of a healer. It carried the hollow dread of someone looking at a ghost.
I didn't answer. Forming a defensive facial expression required calories I simply did not possess.
"Where is your filter, Arzane?" Angelica asked, her voice trembling as she took another step back, staring at my chest as if I were a ticking biological time bomb. "I pulled your preliminary file while you were walking over. You were in Sector Three yesterday. You were on the platform during the Cascade today. more than twenty-four hours of raw, unfiltered exposure..."
She gripped the edges of her brass medical tray, her knuckles turning white.
"According to the fundamental laws of Odic Drowning Syndrome, your lungs should be solid crystal right now. How are you breathing?! How are you even conscious?!"
Because my INHERITANCE passive is aggressively cannibalizing the poison and turning it into fuel. But I cannot tell you that. If I tell the future Saintess of the realm that I am biologically processing anomaly poison, I will be locked in a subterranean laboratory by midnight.
I needed an excuse. A socially acceptable reason to downplay a thirty-hour exposure into something mildly idiotic.
I looked at her terrified, trembling face. I kept my expression completely vacant, anchoring my voice into a hollow, exhausted deadpan.
"I took it off right before the last class," I rasped.
Angelica blinked. "…What?"
"The brass collar," I clarified, staring flatly at the ceiling. "It weighed two kilograms. It was ruining my posture. And I didn't like the humming sound it made, so I unlatched it before the sparring session."
The silence in our partitioned trauma bay became absolute.
Angelica stared at me. Her brain, built on years of pristine medical theology and the sacred laws of the Architect, tried to process the idea of a student casually inhaling lethal atmospheric poison purely out of aesthetic annoyance.
It couldn't. The logic simply shattered.
Then, the panic broke.
"Are you completely out of your mind?!" Angelica exploded, her voice pitching up into a frantic, horrified squeak. "You cannot just unlatch a regulated life-support machine because of your posture!"
She snatched a small glass vial of thick, amber-colored alchemical salve from her brass tray. She popped the cork with her thumb and slammed the salve directly onto my frostbitten right hand. The stinging heat bit into my dead, violet knuckles.
"Do you have any idea what atmospheric Ink does to an unprotected respiratory tract?!" she scolded, her hands moving with blinding, frame-perfect efficiency. She wrapped a layer of sterile gauze around the joint without even looking at what she was doing. "Your lungs turn into solid glass! You cough up your own crystallized blood! And you took it off because it hummed?!"
I am currently being aggressively lectured by a girl in an oversized apron who is at least a full head shorter than me.
I genuinely wanted to smile. The exhausted, cynical gamer part of my brain found this absolutely hilarious. It was the exact energy of a disappointed mother scolding a toddler for eating dirt.
But my body vetoed the request. Forming a smile required caloric energy my E-Rank circuit was currently cannibalizing just to keep my spine upright. So instead of looking amused, I just sat there, staring blankly at her with the hollow, unblinking eyes of a dead fish.
"You are so lucky your circuit didn't instantly lock up!" Angelica continued her rapid-fire lecture, her bright blue eyes glaring daggers at my vacant face while her fingers deftly locked the bandage, checked my radial pulse, and palpated my wrist nodes. "If you ever do something this stupid again, I am personally going to strap the collar to your neck with alchemical glue! Do you hear me?!"
"Loud and clear," I muttered deadpan.
This right here.
This was why she was objectively my favorite character.
Her brain was having a complete existential crisis, and her mouth was yelling at me at a hundred miles an hour. But her hands? Her hands belonged to the absolute endgame Saintess of the realm. Pure, unadulterated, immovable medical competence.
She finished the knot on the bandage with a sharp, aggressive tug. She looked at my neatly wrapped hand, then looked back at my bare, unfiltered neck, and realized a basic thermal salve wasn't going to fix a boy who was currently defying the laws of biology.
"I am going to need the high-grade stabilization wraps," Angelica muttered to herself, her frantic energy shifting back into deep dread as she turned toward the ward's main exit. "And a massive dose of Odic painkillers. And possibly a priest. Don't you dare move, Arzane!"
She bolted out of the trauma bay, her oversized white apron fluttering behind her as she disappeared down the corridor to raid the main apothecary.
The chaotic, antiseptic-scented hum of the infirmary faded back into the background. The silence in our semi-partitioned trauma bay returned.
I turned my head toward the other cots.
Cot two. Nova Celestine Melody had pulled her oxygen cannula tightly against her face. Her sapphire eyes were wide, staring at me with the profound, suffocating horror of someone who had nearly died from ten seconds of ambient poison, only to realize the boy in the next bed treated a thirty-hour lethal dose as a minor aesthetic inconvenience.
Cot three. Alya Pance Varine wasn't curled up in her alchemical bandages anymore. She had propped herself up on one elbow. The terrified, fragile provincial act she had been maintaining all afternoon had completely stalled. She was staring at my bare neck as if looking at an unexploded bomb.
Only Kazrana remained blissfully unconscious in cot one, entirely spared from the existential crisis of this room.
Great.
The entire main female cast of this franchise just listened to me get scolded by a healer, and now they all think I am a suicidal idiot who cares more about my posture than my internal organs.
I let my head fall back against the stiff hospital pillow. My eyelids felt like they were made of lead.
I survived the fourteen seconds. My missing ORG is currently being blamed on my own superficial stupidity. But at least I managed to survive again. The plot is secure. Nothing else can possibly go wrong today.
My eyelids surrendered, sinking into the heavy, chemical-scented exhaustion of the infirmary.
Then, right above my face, in the dead center of the sterile ceiling, the pristine golden interface of the cosmic network quietly blinked into existence.
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
[ QUEST COMPLETE : "The Hidden Master's Lesson" ]
[ CLEARANCE REWARD : NARRATIVE PLAGIARISM (1 SLOT) ]
[ Description : Target's Arsenal successfully analyzed. You are granted the absolute authority to extract, plagiarize, and permanently equip ONE (1) conceptual property from the defeated target (Tsukuyomi Raiden). ]
[ CATEGORIES AVAILABLE FOR EXTRACTION ]
▶ (1) TRAIT
▶ (2) TECHNIQUE
▶ (3) MAGIC
[ Awaiting User Selection... ]─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Oh.
Right. The loot.