The moment Soren shut the dorm door behind him, the tightness he had been holding in his shoulders finally slipped, not into guilt, not into regret, but into a hot, crawling embarrassment that made his skin itch.
It wasn't the looks.
He didn't particularly care about being glared at; he had been ignored for a month, and he had survived worse than disgusted stares.
Still, there was a difference between "people think I'm strange" and "people think I'm dangerous," and today he had watched that line snap in real time.
The grin.
The stupid, relieved grin, right after the duel, right after the quest was completed.
It had been genuine, and that was the problem.
'Now they're going to think I'm a psychopath.'
He dragged a hand down his face, then exhaled, long and irritated, as if he could breathe the rumours out of the air.
He made it two steps into the room before his knees gave up on pretending he was fine.
"Ahhhh…!"
He collapsed onto the floorboards, palms over his face, elbows splayed, half theatrical and half real, because embarrassment had always hit him harder than fear.
"I wanna die…"
Not because he felt bad about what he had done, he didn't, the duel was the duel, and Yuli had been the one to escalate it, but because he could already hear the whispers sticking to him, following him into corridors, into lectures, into every place he wanted to remain quietly invisible.
'It's a misunderstanding,' he told himself, pressing his fingers harder into his cheeks as if he could physically squeeze the thought into place. 'I was happy about completing the quest, that's all.'
Happy, relieved, excited, all the things he was allowed to be, except he had looked unhinged while feeling them, and now people were going to file him under "avoid," the same way they avoided unstable upperclassmen and violent battle junkies.
He sat up slowly, ruffled his hair until it stood up in uneven tufts, then froze when a translucent silver window drifted at the edge of his vision, persistent, patient, and annoyingly smug.
The cause.
The reward.
The reason he had smiled in the first place.
He stared at it for a second, then groaned.
"「Quest」"
A soft chime answered him, and the window clarified.
.
▶ Main Quest Complete! [First Steps (1)] ◀
[Difficulty: C-]
[Reward: Inventory, Hidden Reward]
.
Soren blinked at the difficulty rating, then leaned closer as if the system might have made a typo.
"…C-?" he muttered. "When did it drop?"
He hadn't even noticed, which felt unfair in its own way, because if he had known the system had decided the quest was easier now, maybe he wouldn't have been so keyed up.
He sighed, rubbed his eyes, then shifted his focus.
"Sigh… let's hope it was worth it. First,「Inventory」"
A second window opened beside the quest window, clean and minimal, empty slots waiting like polite squares on a grid.
Soren stood, rolled his shoulders once to loosen the lingering ache from Yuli's hits, then scanned his room for something he wouldn't mind sacrificing to experimentation.
His gaze landed on a book lying near the bed, probably one he had taken out and never bothered to put back.
He picked it up, weighed it in his hand, then stared at the inventory window.
"How do I use this…? Maybe…"
He pushed the book forward, half expecting nothing to happen, half expecting it to bounce off an invisible screen.
Instead, the window swallowed it.
Not dramatically, not with a flash, the book simply vanished from his hand, and a small icon appeared in one of the slots.
Soren's eyebrows lifted.
He tapped the icon.
.
[When They Bloom - Volume 1]
[A romance novel written by the author Lilith Valentine]
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[Withdraw [When They Bloom - Volume 1]?]
[Yes] [No]
.
"…Huh."
He didn't withdraw it immediately; he just stared, then flicked his gaze down to his now-empty hand, as if the book might reappear out of spite.
When he finally selected [Yes], the book returned with the same calm lack of spectacle, dropping into his palm as if it had never left.
Soren let out a slow breath, then sat on the edge of his bed, the inventory window hovering in front of him like a private miracle.
In Ivansia, there were items you could buy called spatial rings, and they did something similar, not as cleanly, not as generously, and certainly not for someone like him.
Spatial rings were noble luxuries, the sort of thing you inherited or were gifted, not something you casually purchased, and even the cheaper ones held so little that they were basically expensive pockets.
Soren didn't have noble luxuries.
He had a small dorm room, a thin uniform, and a life that kept trying to remind him he wasn't meant to be comfortable.
So seeing this window, seeing the empty slots waiting for him, made something settle in his chest.
Not joy.
Relief.
It meant that when he eventually had to travel, whether for assignments, visits, or the inevitable dungeon diving, he wouldn't be forced to choose between carrying supplies and carrying himself.
'At least it seems to work the same as in-game,' he thought, his eyes narrowing slightly as he examined the layout.
Unlike spatial rings, this inventory didn't look cramped; it didn't look like it had the polite limitations of reality; it looked like a system feature.
A limit of 999 per item, 300 item slots, and practically infinite storage by any normal standard.
'This'll be very useful.'
Then, almost immediately, caution followed.
'I should be careful around others, though.'
Not because he thought someone would immediately steal it from him, you couldn't exactly pickpocket a window, but because the academy was full of people who liked to collect oddities, and he was already odd enough, he didn't need to advertise more reasons for people to stare.
Soren flicked his fingers through the air, nudging the inventory window aside.
"Now the hidden reward."
.
[Receive Hidden Reward?]
[Yes] [No]
.
He hesitated for a heartbeat, not from fear of the reward, but because he still remembered the crowd, the disgust, the way his grin had made him look like a villain in someone else's story.
Then he clicked [Yes] anyway, because embarrassment didn't pay dividends.
.
[Yes]
.
▶ Quest Received! ◀
.
▶ The Truth (1) ◀
[Details: Find the letter hidden in Soren Arden's room.]
[Difficulty: PERSONAL]
[Reward: Book 1, 150 Points]
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"The hell…?"
Soren stared at the new quest window, then read it again, slower, as if the words might rearrange into something more sensible.
A personal quest.
For him.
For Soren Arden, a character who hadn't even existed in the game.
A name that still felt like a coat he had been forced to wear.
Personal quests, unlike main quests or side quests, weren't given casually; they were tied to people, to relationships, to buried storylines, obtained through affinity.
For someone in Soren's situation, transplanted into a life with no memories and no context, a personal quest was basically a lifeline.
It implied there was something here to uncover, something the system wanted to feed him in pieces.
Still, his eyes caught on the reward.
.
[Reward: Book 1, 150 Points]
.
'Book 1?'
He frowned slightly, then leaned back, thinking.
The points were fine, he wasn't going to sneer at them, but "Book 1" felt pointed, almost literal, and the fact that his unique skill was called [Library of Memories] made the word "Book" sit in his mind with uncomfortable weight.
There wasn't any proof or certainty, just a strong, nagging sense that the system was nudging him toward something.
'If the reward is a book, and my skill is a library…'
He didn't finish the thought because it sounded too neat when he phrased it fully; still, the connection was there nonetheless.
Soren exhaled, then looked around his room, as if the letter might be visible now that the quest had acknowledged it.
"…But where could it even be?"
He had been living in this dorm for over a month, he had opened every drawer out of boredom at least once, he had checked corners, he had cleaned, and he had even paced the same path from bed to desk so many times he could probably walk it with his eyes closed.
There weren't many hiding spots.
Which meant the letter was either cleverly hidden or hidden in plain sight, in a way no one would notice unless they were looking for it.
"If it was in an obvious place, the dorm staff would've found it already."
And they would've moved it, filed it, left it somewhere "appropriate."
So it had to be somewhere they didn't touch.
Or somewhere they had no reason to suspect.
Soren rolled his shoulders, stood, and walked to the desk first anyway, because method mattered, and he refused to let this turn into frantic rummaging on principle.
"Hahhh…" he sighed under his breath, "let's start with the desk, then work outward. I'll find it eventually."
An hour passed.
Not a dramatic hour, not the kind where he tore his room apart like a madman, more a slow, methodical hour where he checked the obvious places, then checked them again with the growing irritation of someone who hated being outsmarted by paper.
"Seriously, where could it be?" Soren muttered, leaning back in his chair.
He had started with the desk, every drawer, every slot, every thin gap between wood panels where a folded letter might have been wedged, then moved to the chest of drawers, then the space under the bed, then between mattress and frame.
Still nothing.
He stood, looked around, and for the first time properly registered how bare the room really was.
A desk.
A chest of drawers.
A wardrobe.
A mirror.
A bed.
A bookcase.
That was it.
No ornate decorations, no secret compartments, no ridiculous noble trinkets, just the basics.
He had already checked the desk and drawers.
He opened the wardrobe daily; there was nowhere to hide anything in there that he wouldn't have noticed.
The mirror was a simple reflective pane in a plain frame, and unless Soren wanted to start prying wood apart, there were no easy answers left.
His gaze drifted to the bookcase.
It was large for such a simple room, and filled to the brim, which had always struck him as faintly ironic, because Soren Arden apparently owned enough books to stock a small library, yet he had lived like someone who wasn't meant to stay.
Soren walked over, slid a few books out, and frowned.
He had already done this once, early on, out of idle curiosity, he had pulled books out and skimmed titles and found nothing hidden, no notes, no bookmarks, no letters tucked neatly where one might expect.
So why would it be there now?
He stared at the spines, then at the shelf itself, then back at the spines.
"If I were hiding a letter, where would I put it so no one else finds it?" he murmured, thinking it through.
The answer was annoyingly simple.
Somewhere people didn't touch.
The dorm staff cleaned surfaces, they didn't read students' books, and even if they dusted the shelves, they had no reason to pull every volume out and shake it like a thief searching for valuables.
Soren reached out, pulled a book free, then opened it and let the pages fan slightly, watching the paper flex.
Letters were thin.
Easy to hide.
Easy to miss, especially if they had been shoved into the middle and forgotten.
His grip tightened on the book.
"…Alright," he said, resigned. "That would explain it."
He didn't immediately start shaking books above his head like an idiot; instead, he took a more sensible approach, opening each book, running his fingers along the inner spine, checking for something stiff or foreign, flipping to the centre and looking for a different texture, a folded edge.
It was tedious.
It was also exactly the kind of task the system seemed to enjoy giving him, a quest that rewarded persistence more than skill, as if it wanted to watch him prove he could grind through annoyance without giving up.
————「❤︎」————